From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jun 1 07:25:33 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2010 08:25:33 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Doctors and DMCAs takedowns Message-ID: <0D0DD44F-C851-4FA0-8AB2-9C7828918F0A@infowarrior.org> Go to the doctor, lose the copyright to your writings http://www.jasonsanford.com/jason/2010/05/go-to-the-doctor-lose-the-copyright-to-your-writings.html Today's New York Times has an interesting article about people being sued for critiquing businesses online. Most of the article deals with those crap-filed strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), but what really caught my eye is an item on page 2 halfway down the article. To quote: "The group Medical Justice, which helps protect doctors from meritless malpractice suits, advises its members to have patients sign an agreement that gives the doctor copyright over a Web posting if the patient mentions the doctor or practice." (See update at bottom for more on this quote.) Are you freaking kidding me? As a writer, I have a good bit of interest in protecting the copyrights to my works. And now if I go to my doctor I might be asked to sign over my copyright to the M.D.! Hell no! According to a page on the Medical Justice website, it appears the NY Times article is correct. While the Medical Justice website doesn't publicly state that doctors should take the copyright from people, the site does say that their "solution" means that "Patients are free to post online. In the rare event the feedback is not constructive, doctors have a tool to address fictional or slanderous posts." That tool? Likely a DMCA takedown notice. If a patient has signed over the copyright to their online writings to their doctor, all the doctor has to do is flash that signed document to the offending website and the nasty words will be removed. No lawsuit and no fuss, at least for the doctor. Medical Justice and the doctors using this copyright grab will likely defend their actions by saying it only applies when someone mentions their doctor or practice in their online writings. But I doubt the legal document which transfers copyright is that specific. For example, the Medical Justice website states their "solution" gives doctors a way to "address fictional or slanderous posts." Fictional? Does this mean that if my novel includes a doctor as a character then my real doctor can claim that novel's copyright? Could be. After all, if the legal document addresses fictional posts, then the doctor could claim that the character is really him. Plenty of people have sued fiction writers for similar reasons, and if your doctor has a form giving him your copyright ... well, you get the idea. Perhaps that is far-fetched. But the simple truth is that signing over the copyright to your writings is a bad idea for any writer--especially when you are not being paid to do so and must do it to receive medical care. I hope writers raise a stink about this. Because if Medical Justice and doctors' groups succeed in making this copyright form the standard for receiving medical care, you better believe other professional groups and businesses will soon do the same. And if that happens, all bets are off for both freedom of speech and the ability of writers to own the copyrights to their works. UPDATE: Around 11:00 pm tonight I noticed the NY Times had changed the quote I referenced above. Their article now reads: "The group Medical Justice, which helps protect doctors from meritless malpractice suits, advises its members to have patients sign an agreement that gives doctors more control over what patients post online." Obviously that's a big difference. I looked for a correction notice but they haven't posted one. I'm kicking myself for not having copied the original article. However, others noticed this same quote, including The Legal Satyricon and this blog, which posted the original article. If the NY Times misquoted Medical Justice, they need to run a correction, not simply change the article without notice. I'm also wondering if the NY Times accidentally revealed the trade secret to Medical Justice's "tool" for dealing with online criticism. Either way, it is still disturbing that doctors would do this to limit their patients' free speech--whether or not copyright is involved. But until I hear why the NY Times changed their information, I'm sticking with my original reading of the article. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jun 1 07:28:32 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2010 08:28:32 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Yahoo: The next privacy concern? Message-ID: Yahoo to turn subscribers' e-mail contact lists into social networking base By Cecilia Kang Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, June 1, 2010; A08 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/01/AR2010060100577_pf.html Yahoo plans to announce Tuesday that it is jumping into social networking by using its massive population of e-mail subscribers as a base for sharing information on the Web. Over the next few weeks, its 280 million e-mail users will be able to exchange comments, pictures and news articles with others in their address books. The program won't expose a user's contact list to the public, as was done by Google through its social networking application, Buzz. But unless a user proactively opts out of the program, those Yahoo e-mail subscribers will automatically be part of a sweeping rollout of features that will incorporate the kinds of sharing done on sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The plan could spark criticism from Yahoo e-mail users, who signed up for the free service perhaps never imagining the people they e-mailed would become friends for sharing vacation videos, political causes and random thoughts throughout the day. And the move comes amid growing concern by federal lawmakers and regulators over how firms such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft have handled the privacy of Internet users. After backlash, Facebook last week announced new privacy tools to make it easier for users to block Web sites from tapping into their information, as well as a simpler way to configure who on the site can see personal data. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asked Facebook on Friday to explain what kind of user data it had shared with third-party sites. Conyers also asked Google to retain, for federal and state regulators, the data the company scooped off WiFi networks as it collected Street View mapping photos around the country. To allay privacy concerns, Yahoo said it would give users a week's notice before launching the new features and provide a single button on the site for opting out entirely. "We've been watching and trying to be thoughtful about our approach," said Anne Toth, head of privacy for Yahoo. Specifically, the company will launch a product called Yahoo Updates that allows e-mail users to see what other contacts on their lists are commenting about or sharing on sites like Yahoo Finance, Facebook and the photo sharing site Flickr. Updates will initially include 15 sites and partnerships and will eventually expand to include partners such as Twitter this summer. Yahoo has tiptoed into social media, launching a similar tool last year called Connections, which allowed each user to customize a list of contacts with whom to share information. The company also tried two years ago to build a competitive product to Facebook, where users sought "friends," or contacts, to join micro-networks within Yahoo in the same way Facebook users amass friends through requests. Yahoo abandoned that project and instead decided to tap into its captive audience of e-mail users. The move is part of a revamping of the once-rudderless Internet pioneer. Chief executive Carol Bartz, brought in last year to lead the firm, has stripped the company of unprofitable business units to focus on its greatest strengths -- its popular free e-mail and messaging programs, and its library of sports, news and finance sites -- to keep users in the Yahoo universe longer. The longer a user stays on the site, the more advertising dollars and e-commerce it generates. But it remains to be seen if users will view their contact lists as the kinds of people they choose to socialize with on the Web. When Google launched Buzz, some users complained that they used Gmail for business and to correspond with strangers and that they didn't want to share birthday videos with their plumbers or bosses. Yahoo will begin notifying users of the change on June 7, one week before the launch. Users who don't want to participate can click one button on the settings page to opt out. Or they can customize each piece of information -- a Facebook update or a comment on a Yahoo news story -- to either be shared with Yahoo e-mail contacts or Facebook. Eventually, Twitter and other partners with social-networking platforms will also be included. "What Yahoo has done is recognized that your e-mail or messenger network is a useful resource and that you may be interested in knowing what your contacts are interested in knowing about, and they stop there," said Jules Polonetsky, the director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a privacy think tank. "That's opposed to the idea that then, therefore, your relationship with them risks being exposed." From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jun 1 07:31:59 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2010 08:31:59 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Murdoch Trashes His Prime Brands With `Paywall' Message-ID: Murdoch Trashes His Prime Brands With `Paywall': Matthew Lynn By Matthew Lynn - May 31, 2010 http://preview.bloomberg.com/news/2010-05-31/murdoch-trashes-his-prime-brands-with-paywall-matthew-lynn.html There are a few simple rules that will stand you in good stead in the markets: Buy on the dips. Don?t trade too often. And never bet against Rupert Murdoch. The Australian-born media tycoon, 79, has railed against the conventional wisdom in a career that has lasted many decades. He has taken plenty of rulebooks, ripped them up and come out a winner. This month, he will make his most ambitious gamble yet: He will try to redesign the way the Internet and the media work by putting up a ?paywall? around the Times of London and the Sunday Times, two of his British newspapers. And this time he is doomed to fail. It?s too late to start charging for newspapers online now. The content isn?t good enough, and newspapers themselves are a product of technologies that simply don?t work in a digital economy. All Murdoch is going to achieve with this move is to kill off one of the most famous media brands in the world. It isn?t hard to see Murdoch?s motives. The economics of the newspaper business are in a terrible state. Circulations are in steady decline. Their websites don?t draw enough advertising to compensate for what they are losing from their print revenue. Many papers are now losing money. And businesses that don?t make money don?t survive over time. No matter what they try, most newspapers we are familiar with won?t exist in a decade. Bold Move Murdoch has decided not to simply stand by and watch the titles die slowly. Starting this month, News Corp., the owner of both the Times and the Sunday Times, will start charging to access the papers over the Web. It will cost 1 pound ($1.45) for a day, or 2 pounds for the whole week. It is a bold move. Certainly, anyone who cares about journalism should hope it succeeds. There is little sign that Internet advertising will ever be strong enough to replace the revenue that used to come from selling printed newspapers. One of Murdoch?s newspapers, the Wall Street Journal, already charges for access to parts of its online edition. But this is the first attempt by one of the big, international, general newspapers to put up a paywall around its whole website. Somebody has to try it, and if anyone could make it succeed, it would surely be Murdoch. The New York Times, one of Murdoch?s competitors, is planning to charge readers next year. There are several reasons why it won?t work. Price Is Zero First, if newspapers wanted to start charging for their websites, they should have started more than a decade ago, when the Internet was emerging as a medium. Once you set a price for any consumer product, it determines what people expect to pay for it. In this case, the price is zero. It will prove impossible to shift that perception now, particularly when there are lots of other news sites that don?t charge. Second, the product isn?t worth the price. That isn?t a criticism of the Times in particular. Even British highbrow newspapers have placed too little emphasis on substance, and too much on entertaining and exciting their readers. Sensationalism worked as a strategy in the print world, when you were trying to get people to buy copies in a shop, usually with eye-catching headlines. Online, newspapers aim to build relationships with their readership through subscriptions. That involves creating a higher degree of trust and credibility. Newspapers have spent too much time blaming new technology for their decline and not enough examining what they offer readers. Old Technologies Third, it is hard to see a future for traditional papers on the Web. The newspaper was a product of two old technologies: the printing press and the delivery truck. It provided a bundle of news, sport, business, crosswords, television guides and gardening tips, all organized by a single editor. That worked fine for old media, when our access to news was very limited, but is irrelevant now that we can get all kinds of stuff from around the world with just a few mouse clicks. Imagine if EMI Group Ltd. tried to sell us CDs with its selection of new music -- some classical, some jazz, some pop. It wouldn?t work. The customers would be baffled. Likewise, the package that newspaper editors put together doesn?t make sense anymore. Why not get soccer news from one source, television reviews from another, and political commentary from a third? People will pay for news and entertainment. They always have. But in a world that depends more and more on information, readers are much more selective and no longer rely on the one- stop shops that newspapers have always been. Charging for the Times won?t change that. All it will do is push the newspaper into a fast decline rather than a slow one. This is the one time it will be right to bet against Murdoch. (Matthew Lynn is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.) To contact the writer of this column: Matthew Lynn in London at matthewlynn at bloomberg.net From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jun 1 07:55:14 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2010 08:55:14 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - OT: Economic QOTDs Message-ID: Source: CNBC and other sources Steve Wynn, CEO of Wynn Resorts, offers this brilliant quote regarding the US socio-economic situation: "We are on our way to Greece in the hands of a confused and foolish Government that is living up to the predictions of Alexis de Toqueville who said "The American system of democracy will prevail until that moment when the politicians discover that they can bribe the electorate with their own money" and boy, it is in full bloom today, so extreme that it will probably have an end onto itself, the public is frightened, this Tea Party business is all about fear, there is a sense in the land of discomfort, there is a sense of fear that the politicians are ruining us and the people are right, it?s got to stop, its got to stop..." ....and regarding his moving his corporate headquarters to Macau: "Macau has been steady, the shocking unexpected Government is the one in Washington, that's where we get surprises every day; that's where taxes are changed every 5 minutes; that's where you don't know what to expect tomorrow; to compare political stability and predictability in China and Washington is like comparing Mt. Everest to an ant-hill." "So when you ask me to compare the unpredictability and uncertainty politically in China compared to Washington, I take China; Washington is unpredictable these days; No one in the Business community from one coast to the other has any idea what's next?...the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody and it is delaying the recovery..." http://www.cnbc.com/id/37392344 From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jun 1 20:38:25 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2010 21:38:25 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - National Defense Act Creates Cybersecurity Post Message-ID: <3DDA1F92-D8E4-4DC3-96AC-4FCBF5812DFD@infowarrior.org> www.esecurityplanet.com/features/article.php/3885316 House Passes National Defense Authorization Act By Kenneth Corbin June 1, 2010 http://www.esecurityplanet.com/features/article.php/3885316/House-Passes-National-Defense-Authorization-Act.htm House Democrats have secured passage of an amendment to the defense authorization bill that would establish a formal cybersecurity office in the White House and update federal compliance requirements for securing electronic data. On Friday, the House passed the National Defense Authorization Act by a vote of 229 to 186, which included an amendment co-authored by Reps. Diane Watson (D-Calif.) and Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) that achieved many of the provisions outlined in separate pieces of legislation introduced earlier by the lawmakers. "Not only does this amendment make necessary and wholesale improvements to our current cybersecurity policy and management framework, but it will also ensure that agencies have a strong leader within the Executive Office of the President to assist them in their efforts," Watson said in a statement. Watson and Langevin described the amendment as an extension of the broader effort to overhaul the federal cybersecurity apparatus underway in the White House and across the agencies. The creation of the National Office for Cyberspace within the Executive Office of the President would provide a statutory framework for the position of cybersecurity coordinator that President Obama created last year, drawing on the recommendations of the comprehensive cyberspace review he commissioned shortly after taking office. In December, Obama tapped Howard Schmidt to serve as his cybersecurity coordinator. Schmidt's current post won't be the only position getting some attention. The amendment would also codify the role of CTO, now held by Aneesh Chopra, within the White House as a permanent position to coordinate the IT activities and policies throughout the government. Additionally, the amendment would reshape the requirements for government IT staffs outlined in the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) of 2002, which has often come under criticism for placing more of a focus on compliance than achieving real security. The amendment would establish the Federal Cybersecurity Practice Board within the White House cyberspace office to establish uniform policies for FISMA compliance and coordinate the implementation of standards approved by the National Institute of Standards and Technologies. "These provisions will establish strong, centralized oversight to protect our nation's critical information infrastructure and update our comprehensive policy for operating in cyberspace," said Langevin, who serves as co-chairman of the House Cybersecurity Caucus. Other agencies would also be impacted by the amendment, which would establish new requirements for agencies to automate their security-monitoring procedures and run them continuously to identify weak spots in their systems. Agencies would also be required to enlist an outside entity to conduct an annual security assessment. It would also revise the federal procurement procedures to ensure that government IT personnel only purchase technology that meets a baseline security standard. The defense authorization bill now heads to the Senate, which is set to take up debate on the issue following the Memorial Day recess. Kenneth Corbin is an associate editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 2 07:54:47 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2010 08:54:47 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - ATT's new iPhone plans Message-ID: <6073B60F-FA6B-4222-9974-FCE0B00188F2@infowarrior.org> Remember the early days of cellphones when we were terrified of going over our plan minutes and the overage charges that resulted? Round 2 apparently is fear of going over your data allotments.....of course, will that stop vendors from enticing everyone to embrace 3/4G video over the air? Of course not. Unlike other countries (Japan, S. Korea) whose mobile networks are strong enough to handle such volume of users and data, the USA remains far behind in its mobile network capabilities despite the Madison Ave marketing to the contrary. 3G? 4G? Oh, gee. - Rick ...still using a Moto RAZR AT&T caps phone data usage with new wireless plans Peter Svensson, AP Technology Writer, On Wednesday June 2, 2010, 7:12 am EDT http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ATampT-caps-phone-data-usage-apf-499602515.html?x=0&.v=7 NEW YORK (AP) -- In time for the widely expected launch of a new iPhone model, carrier AT&T Inc. is pulling in the reins on data usage by its customers with smart phones and iPads. The sole U.S. carrier of the iPhone is introducing two new data plans, starting June 7, with limits on data consumption. They'll replace the $30 per month plan with unlimited usage that it has required for all smart phones, including the iPhone. With the change AT&T is adopting a carrot-and-stick approach to assuage the data congestion on its network, which has been a source of complaints, especially in cities such as New York and San Francisco that are thick with iPhone users. The new plans will take effect just as Apple is expected to unveil the next generation of its iPhone at an event Monday in San Francisco. Subscribers who use little data or learn to limit their consumption will pay slightly less every month than they do now, while heavy users will be dinged with extra consumption fees. One new plan will cost $25 per month and offer 2 gigabytes of data per month, which AT&T says will be enough for 98 percent of its smart phone customers. Additional gigabytes will cost $10 each. A second plan will cost $15 per month for 200 megabytes of data, which AT&T says is enough for 65 percent of its smart phone customers. If they go over, they'll pay another $15 for 200 megabytes. With that plan and voice service, a smart phone could cost as little as $55 per month before taxes and add-on fees, down from $70 per month. Ralph de la Vega, the head of AT&T's consumer business, said that means smart phones can become accessible to more people. "Customers are getting a good deal, and if they can understand their usage, they can save some money," de la Vega said in an interview. Current AT&T subscribers will be allowed to keep the unlimited plan, even if they renew their contracts. But all new subscribers will have to choose one of the two new plans. Figuring out which one to choose may not be easy, given that many people have only a hazy notion of the size of a gigabyte and how many they use now. A gigabyte is enough for hundreds of e-mails and Web pages, but it's quickly eaten up by Internet video and videoconferencing. De la Vega said AT&T is doing its part to educate consumers, by letting them track their usage online. The iPhone contains a data usage tracking tool. The carrier will also text-message subscribers to let them know they're getting close their limits. Data usage over Wi-Fi, including AT&T's public Wi-Fi hot spots, will not count toward the limits. The new $25-per-month plan will replace the current $30 plan with unlimited usage that is available for the iPad, the tablet computer Apple Inc. released just a few months ago, though iPad owners can keep the old plan as long as they keep paying $30 per month, AT&T said. Paradoxically, the data caps arrive at time when carriers have started to lift the limits on other forms of wireless use, by selling plans with unlimited calling and unlimited text messaging. That's not a big gamble, because not many people have the time to talk phone for eight hours a day or spend every waking minute sending text messages. But smart phones can draw a lot of data, depending one where and how they're used. With the new plans, de la Vega hopes to see high-consumption applications like Internet video being steered toward hot spots, where they don't clog up AT&T's cellular network. Consumers have rebelled against the idea of data usage caps on home broadband, at least when the limits are set low enough to make online video consumption expensive. Time Warner Cable Inc. was forced to back away from trials of data caps last year after consumer protests and threats of legislative action. In the wireless world, where data capacity is more constrained, usage caps are more common. Most wireless carriers, for instance, limit data cards for laptops to 5 gigabytes per month. But with intense competition for smart phone users, phone companies have been reluctant to impose similar limits on those devices, although Sprint Nextel Corp. reserves the right to slow down or disconnect users who exceed 5 gigabytes per month. It remains to be seen whether AT&T's rivals will join it in imposing caps or use their own "unlimited" plans as a marketing advantage. Online: AT&T's data calculator, for consumption estimates: http://www.att.com/standalone/data-calculator/index.html From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 2 20:43:20 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2010 21:43:20 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - "Canadian DMCA" defends DRM, legalizes DVRs Message-ID: <76359265-E695-4600-9B86-4B6ACAC4E23C@infowarrior.org> "Canadian DMCA" defends DRM, legalizes DVRs By Nate Anderson | Last updated about 3 hours ago http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/canadian-dmca-defends-drm-legalizes-dvrs.ars Canada's long-awaited copyright modernization bill appeared today. If passed, it would explicitly legalize DVRs, YouTube mashups, backups, and parodies?and it would slap strong, US-style restrictions on bypassing DRM. Forget fair dealing; as in the US, digital locks trump all. The good, the bad, the ugly Last time around, Canada's tough attempt at reforming its copyright laws fell apart over widespread public anger. The country learned its lesson, eventually embarking on a lengthy public consultation process before trying again. The product of those consultations dropped today in the form of Bill C-32 (read a leaked version). It provides a host of welcome changes to Canadian law and legalizes behavior that Canadians have been engaging in for years. The highlights: ? Time-shifting. It's finally legal, though with an odd caveat: "the individual keeps the recording no longer than is reasonably necessary in order to listen to or view the program at a more convenient time." In other words, no long-term archiving. Also, no giving recordings away. ? Format-shifting. Ripping CDs?finally, unambiguously legal! You need to own the original source material. ? Backups. They're now legal for all digital works, though you can't bypass DRM to make one and the source must be a legitimate copy. ? Statutory damage distinctions. Statutory damages now apply differently to non-commercial infringers and range from CAN$100 to CAN$5,000 in such cases. Commercial infringers can be hit with up to CAN$20,000 per infringement. Compare this to the US, where willful infringement can hit $150,000 even for noncommercial use. ? Mashups. C-32 contains a section on "Non-commercial User-generated content" that makes mashups legal, even when they use copyrighted content. So long as they are noncommercial, mention the original creator (when "reasonable in the circumstances to do so"), and don't have a "substantial adverse effect" on the market for the original work. ? Temporary copies. The bill would legalize most temporary copies made by technical processes, such as caches and fleeting copies existing only in RAM. ? Parody. Canada's limited fair dealing rights get a boost, with named copyright exceptions for "research, private study, education, parody, or satire." When it comes to ISP liability, the bill skips the US "notice-and-takedown" model found in the DMCA. Instead, it codifies a "notice-and-notice" regime. If a rightsholder sends a copyright infringement letter to an ISP, the ISP does not need to take down or block access to that content; instead, the ISP need only forward the notice to the subscriber in question. This keeps the dispute over infringement between the two main parties, and keeps ISPs from getting involved. The bill also ratchets up enforcement against P2P sites. "It is an infringement of copyright for a person to provide," says the bill, "by means of the Internet or another digital network, a service that the person knows or should have known is designed primarily to enable acts of copyright infringement if an actual infringement of copyright occurs by means of the Internet or another digital network as a result of the use of that service." But the big new enforcement piece is the DMCA-style DRM provisions. Bypassing DRM won't be allowed except in a few narrow cases. Just as in the US, the bill makes no exception for legal uses; DRM trumps fair dealing. Circumvention software and devices would also become illegal to sell or distribute. It's this provision that incenses copyright critics like law professor Michael Geist, who otherwise has a positive take on the bill. "In other words, in the battle between two sets of property rights - those of the intellectual property rights holder and those of the consumer who has purchased the tangible or intangible property - the IP rights holder always wins," he writes. "This represents market intervention for a particular business model by a government supposedly committed to the free market and it means that the existing fair dealing rights (including research, private study, news reporting, criticism, and review) and the proposed new rights (parody, satire, education, time shifting, format shifting, backup copies) all cease to function effectively so long as the rights holder places a digital lock on their content or device. " The bill remains open to amendment as it moves through the legislative sausage grinder. Canadians who care about these issues would be well-advised to contact their MPs quickly, perhaps noting that ratifying the 1996 WIPO Internet Treaties (one big goal of C-32) does not actually require this sort of approach to DRM. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 2 21:05:55 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2010 22:05:55 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - DC: Privacy Law Scholars Conference Message-ID: The 3rd Annual Privacy Law Scholars Conference June 3-4, 2010 Berkeley Law School and The George Washington University Law School will be holding the third annual Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC) on June 3-4, 2010. The PLSC aims to assemble a wide array of privacy law scholars and practitioners from around the world to discuss current issues and foster greater connections between academia and practice. It will bring together privacy law scholars, privacy scholars from other disciplines (economics, philosophy, political science, computer science), and practitioners (industry, legal, advocacy, and government). Our goal is to enhance ties within the privacy law community and to facilitate dialogue between the different parts of that community (academy, government, industry, and public interest). Papers @ http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dsolove/PLSC/#1 From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jun 3 07:25:11 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Introducing U.S. Cyber Command Message-ID: <27D0851E-1F5E-4E73-BD8C-A9037C099B3A@infowarrior.org> Wall Street Journal June 3, 2010 Pg. 15 Introducing U.S. Cyber Command By William J. Lynn III Mr. Lynn is the deputy secretary of defense. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704875604575280881128276448.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion The eye blinks in just over 300 milliseconds. In that time a computer message can travel twice around the world, transmitting a virus or malicious computer code across the Internet to disrupt or destroy crucial military networks. Military computers, just like your home computer, are subject to viruses and malware that can adversely affect their operation. Military networks are also vulnerable to intrusion and theft, but not only by identify thieves and credit card scammers. More than 100 intelligence agencies and foreign militaries are actively trying to penetrate our systems, and weapons-system blueprints are among the documents that have been compromised. Many countries are also developing offensive cyber capabilities. Cyberwarfare is especially attractive to our adversaries because the low cost of computing devices means you do not have to build an expensive weapons system, like a stealth fighter, to pose a significant threat. A dozen talented programmers could, if they find a vulnerability to exploit, cripple an entire information system. To prevent this from happening, the Defense Department is establishing the U.S. Cyber Command. It's mission is critical. The command and control of our forces, as well as our weapons and surveillance systems, depend upon secure and reliable networks to function. Protecting this digital infrastructure is an enormous task: Our military runs 15,000 networks and uses more than seven million computer devices. It takes 90,000 people and billions of dollars to maintain our global communications backbone. Establishing Cyber Command is just the latest in a series of steps the Pentagon has taken to protect our military networks through layered and robust cyber defenses. We have instituted strict standards to ensure that our firewalls are properly configured and antivirus software up-to-date. We have reduced the number of ports through which commercial Internet traffic enters and leaves military networks, and we have installed highly sophisticated defense systems that detect and repair network breaches in real time. But we cannot rely solely on a Maginot line of firewalls. It is not sufficient to react to intrusions after they occur. Waiting even milliseconds is too long. The National Security Agency has therefore pioneered systems that use our monitoring of foreign communications to detect intrusions before they reach our networks and to counter them with automated defenses once they arrive. These active defenses now protect all defense and intelligence networks in the .mil domain. Thanks to these active defenses, our networks are significantly more secure than they were just two years ago. Yet the cyber threat is so pervasive and pernicious that we must mount a broader and more permanent institutional response. Until recently, the military's cyber effort was run by a loose confederation of joint task forces spread too far and too wide, geographically and institutionally, to be effective. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recognized that the scale of the cyber enterprise had outgrown the military's existing structures. What is needed is a dedicated command to oversee cyber operations. U.S. Cyber Command will be led by a four-star general and be part of the military's Strategic Command. It will bring together a half dozen military organizations that each play a role in cyber operations. A single chain of command will run from the head of Cyber Command to units around the world. When this country was founded, enemy ships crossed the oceans in days. By World War II, aircraft crossed in hours. During the Cold War, missiles could do it in minutes. Now, cyber attacks can strike in less than the blink of an eye. In the face of this threat, the U.S. military must be ready to defend our country at network speed. Mr. Lynn is the deputy secretary of defense. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jun 3 12:22:10 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 13:22:10 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Fwd: Gizmodo post asks, "Are Cameras the New Guns?" References: Message-ID: <2A9DF75D-B8DE-4DB7-9CFA-37857C1136EE@infowarrior.org> Begin forwarded message: > From: Jonathan Abolins > Date: June 3, 2010 12:40:10 PM EDT > > Gizmodo post asks, "Are Cameras the New Guns?" > http://gizmodo.com/5553765/are-cameras-the-new-guns > > Are Cameras the New Guns? > In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict > police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In > at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police > officer. > > Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your > defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no > expectation of privacy exists. > > The legal justification for arresting the "shooter" rests on existing > wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing > law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland > are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a > recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to > all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the > camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also > include an exception for recording in public places where "no > expectation of privacy exists" (Illinois does not) but in practice > this exception is not being recognized. > > Massachusetts attorney June Jensen represented Simon Glik who was > arrested for such a recording. She explained, "[T]he statute has been > misconstrued by Boston police. You could go to the Boston Common and > snap pictures and record if you want." Legal scholar and professor > Jonathan Turley agrees, "The police are basing this claim on a > ridiculous reading of the two-party consent surveillance law - > requiring all parties to consent to being taped. I have written in the > area of surveillance law and can say that this is utter nonsense." > > The courts, however, disagree. A few weeks ago, an Illinois judge > rejected a motion to dismiss an eavesdropping charge against > Christopher Drew, who recorded his own arrest for selling one-dollar > artwork on the streets of Chicago. Although the misdemeanor charges of > not having a peddler's license and peddling in a prohibited area were > dropped, Drew is being prosecuted for illegal recording, a Class I > felony punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison. > > In 2001, when Michael Hyde was arrested for criminally violating the > state's electronic surveillance law - aka recording a police encounter > - the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld his conviction 4-2. > In dissent, Chief Justice Margaret Marshall stated, "Citizens have a > particularly important role to play when the official conduct at issue > is that of the police. Their role cannot be performed if citizens must > fear criminal reprisals?." (Note: In some states it is the audio alone > that makes the recording illegal.) > > The selection of "shooters" targeted for prosecution do, indeed, > suggest a pattern of either reprisal or an attempt to intimidate. > > Glik captured a police action on his cellphone to document what he > considered to be excessive force. He was not only arrested, his phone > was also seized. > > On his website Drew wrote, "Myself and three other artists who > documented my actions tried for two months to get the police to arrest > me for selling art downtown so we could test the Chicago peddlers > license law. The police hesitated for two months because they knew it > would mean a federal court case. With this felony charge they are > trying to avoid this test and ruin me financially and stain my > credibility." > > Hyde used his recording to file a harassment complaint against the > police. After doing so, he was criminally charged. > > In short, recordings that are flattering to the police - an officer > kissing a baby or rescuing a dog - will almost certainly not result in > prosecution even if they are done without all-party consent. The only > people who seem prone to prosecution are those who embarrass or > confront the police, or who somehow challenge the law. If true, then > the prosecutions are a form of social control to discourage criticism > of the police or simple dissent. > > A recent arrest in Maryland is both typical and disturbing. > > On March 5, 24-year-old Anthony John Graber III's motorcycle was > pulled over for speeding. He is currently facing criminal charges for > a video he recorded on his helmet-mounted camera during the traffic > stop. > > The case is disturbing because: > > 1) Graber was not arrested immediately. Ten days after the encounter, > he posted some of he material to YouTube, and it embarrassed Trooper > J. D. Uhler. The trooper, who was in plainclothes and an unmarked car, > jumped out waving a gun and screaming. Only later did Uhler identify > himself as a police officer. When the YouTube video was discovered the > police got a warrant against Graber, searched his parents' house > (where he presumably lives), seized equipment, and charged him with a > violation of wiretapping law. > > 2) Baltimore criminal defense attorney Steven D. Silverman said he had > never heard of the Maryland wiretap law being used in this manner. In > other words, Maryland has joined the expanding trend of criminalizing > the act of recording police abuse. Silverman surmises, "It's more > [about] ?contempt of cop' than the violation of the wiretapping law." > > 3) Police spokesman Gregory M. Shipley is defending the pursuit of > charges against Graber, denying that it is "some capricious > retribution" and citing as justification the particularly egregious > nature of Graber's traffic offenses. Oddly, however, the offenses were > not so egregious as to cause his arrest before the video appeared. > > Almost without exception, police officials have staunchly supported > the arresting officers. This argues strongly against the idea that > some rogue officers are overreacting or that a few cops have something > to hide. "Arrest those who record the police" appears to be official > policy, and it's backed by the courts. > > Carlos Miller at the Photography Is Not A Crime website offers an > explanation: "For the second time in less than a month, a police > officer was convicted from evidence obtained from a videotape. The > first officer to be convicted was New York City Police Officer Patrick > Pogan, who would never have stood trial had it not been for a video > posted on Youtube showing him body slamming a bicyclist before > charging him with assault on an officer. The second officer to be > convicted was Ottawa Hills (Ohio) Police Officer Thomas White, who > shot a motorcyclist in the back after a traffic stop, permanently > paralyzing the 24-year-old man." > > When the police act as though cameras were the equivalent of guns > pointed at them, there is a sense in which they are correct. Cameras > have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to > protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to > stop. > > Happily, even as the practice of arresting "shooters" expands, there > are signs of effective backlash. At least one Pennsylvania > jurisdiction has reaffirmed the right to video in public places. As > part of a settlement with ACLU attorneys who represented an arrested > "shooter," the police in Spring City and East Vincent Township adopted > a written policy allowing the recording of on-duty policemen. > > As journalist Radley Balko declares, "State legislatures should > consider passing laws explicitly making it legal to record on-duty law > enforcement officials." > > Wendy McElroy is the author of several books on anarchism and > feminism. She maintains the iconoclastic website ifeminists.net as > well as an active blog at wendymcelroy.com. > > The author of this post can be contacted at tips at gizmodo.com > From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jun 3 14:48:50 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 15:48:50 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - FTC: How to 'save' the news industry Message-ID: ....some of these ideas are totally unrealistic, if not illegal. -rf Bad gov't ideas for journalism By JEFF JARVIS Last Updated: 5:06 AM, June 3, 2010 Posted: 12:51 AM, June 3, 2010 http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/how_not_to_save_news_2g7IgzaZNuwuZU80CVcQ7M The Federal Trade Commis sion says it wants to save journalism. I'm not sure who asked it to. In a just-released "staff discussion draft" of "potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism," the agency only circles its wagons around old newspapers and their fading business models. If the FTC wants to reinvent journalism, perhaps it should align with news' disruptors. But there's none of that in this report. The word blog is used but once in 35 pages of text--and then only in a parenthetical mention of soccer blogs. Discussion of investing in technology comes on the last page in a suggestion about tools for "improved electronic note-taking." I testified before these untechnocrats and told them about my research at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism into the emerging ecosystem of news. We found profitable hyperlocal bloggers selling $200,000 in ads per year. And we built new, less expensive business models for news (at newsinnovation.com). But that's not mentioned, either. Instead, the FTC staff declares defeat in the search for business models so it may explore many government interventions, including: * Expanding copyright law and restricting the doctrine of fair comment to benefit legacy publishers. * Granting antitrust exemptions to allow publishers to collude on pricing to consumers and to business partners. * Giving news organizations tax exemptions. * Subsidizing news organizations by increasing government funding to public broadcasting; establishing an AmeriCorps to pay reporters; giving news companies tax credits for employing journalists; creating a national fund for local news, and giving the press an increased postal subsidy. To its credit, the FTC does ask how to pay for all this. So the staffers speculated about what I'll dub the iPad tax -- a 5 percent surcharge on consumer electronics to raise $4 billion for news. They also consider a tax on broadcast spectrum and even on advertising. Most dangerous of all, the FTC considers a doctrine of "proprietary facts," as if anyone should gain the right to restrict the flow of information just as the information is opening it up. Copyright law protects the presentation of news but no one owns facts -- and if anyone did, you could be forbidden from sharing them. How does that serve free speech? The FTC's one suggestion I can salute is more government transparency -- making agencies release information in standard formats, enabling us all to become watchdogs. But that's about responsible government, not saving journalism. The good news in all this is that the FTC's bureaucrats try hard to recommend little. They just discuss. And much of what the agency staff ponders are political impossibilities. If there was grumbling about bailing out General Motors, imagine the hailstorm about raising taxes to save newspapers. The report quotes my testimony to the FTC, where I said I'm "optimistic to a fault about the future of news and journalism." That's because the barrier to entry into the media business has never been lower -- and that means news can grow. The government should favor neither incumbents nor newcomers, but rather create a level playing field by helping every American get open, high-speed access to the Internet. That is the gateway to the real future of news and media. I believe that future is entrepreneurial, not institutional. The industry's institutions have had 15 years since the start of the commercial Web and we've seen how far they can come. What we need now are innovators -- like my entrepreneurial journalism students -- to invent new forms, structures, efficiencies and business models for news. But those entrepreneurs don't need government help. They need to be left alone with the assurance they won't be interfered with by the FTC -- or the FCC, which has its own hearings and reports on the future of journalism. "Get off our lawn," I testified to both agencies in Washington. That didn't make it into the report. Jeff Jarvis, author of "What Would Google Do?", teaches at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jun 3 21:17:03 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 22:17:03 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Transcript of Gen. Alexander @ CSIS Message-ID: Cybersecurity Discussion with General Keith B. Alexander, Director of the NSA, Commander of U.S. Cyber Command http://csis.org/files/attachments/100603_alexander_transcript.pdf The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) hosted an event with keynote speaker General Keith Alexander, Director of the NSA, Commander of U.S. Cyber Command. General Alexander spoke about cyber security and USCYBERCOM. http://csis.org/event/cybersecurity-discussion-general-keith-b-alexander-director-national-security-agency From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jun 3 22:53:00 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 23:53:00 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - WH Drafts Cyber Identity, Authentication Strategy Message-ID: White House Drafts Cyber Identity, Authentication Strategy National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace will recommend policy changes and create federal offices on digital identity. By J. Nicholas Hoover, InformationWeek June 3, 2010 URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225300298 The White House later this month plans to release a draft national identity and authentication strategy that will recommend changes to privacy laws, possible revisions to the liability of online identity providers, and the creation of new government offices leading the way on digital identity and authentication issues. The plan, which will be called the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, aims to improve and strengthen identity and authentication procedures for online transactions, according to Ely Kahn, director of cybersecurity policy at the National Security Staff in the White House, who spoke at an event Thursday morning in Washington, D.C. The effort also includes an action plan that will be delivered to President Obama, and the goal is for the final strategy and action plan to be approved later this year, Kahn said. Currently, the White House is gathering and actively seeking comments on a draft of the plan being passed around among key government and industry stakeholders, and a revised draft will be made available for public comment by the end of June. The strategy, which has its origins in the cyberspace policy review carried out by the White House last year and was developed with input from an interagency working group, was first discussed publicly in July 2009, and so has been almost a year in the making. According to Kahn, it will include "bold" recommendations that will carry budgetary and legislative implications as well as operational changes for government agencies. For example, one of the top recommendations will be to mandate adoption of IPv6 and DNSSEC in government, with an eye toward later efforts to motivate implementation of those technologies in private industry. Other recommendations will be made to limit how companies that manage identities can use private information, as well as to overhaul liability of identity and authentication providers -- which Kahn said has been holding back the development of interoperable identity schemes. The strategy will also include the creation of pilots, programs, and even new government offices intended to spur the adoption of "strong, interoperable" authentication schemes, which, Kahn said, should help catalyze the development and use of technologies like using smartphones to conduct transactions or enter secured buildings. Mike Mestrovich, president of the Federation of Identity and Cross-Credentialing Systems, which worked with the Department of Defense to develop a federated trust model for the DoD and defense contractors, said that he's yet to have had any engagement with the White House on its strategy, but has a meeting planned with cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt for next week. "It's one thing to espouse a policy, but it's another to get everyone to adopt it," Mestrovich said in an interview. The central challenges of any successful effort, he said, will be to ensure engagement with the right stakeholders and to work hard to cut through difficult cultural barriers. Of course, one of the key other challenges will be to adequately address privacy and civil liberties to gain the public's trust. Though Khan didn't stress the point today, the White House did note those concerns at a conference on identity last July. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 4 21:59:01 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2010 22:59:01 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - BP Regional Oil Spill Response Plan Message-ID: <1D10EDA4-1DE1-48A9-BCCF-1A87D166108F@infowarrior.org> BP Regional Oil Spill Response Plan http://www.neworleans.com/images/media/BP_Regional_OSRP_Redactedv2.pdf From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jun 5 14:49:16 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2010 15:49:16 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Einstein never Tweeted Message-ID: <8B6DCBB3-ED47-466F-B5A0-7F70BBC8A72B@infowarrior.org> The Stack June 3, 2010, 5:00PM EST text size: TT 'The Shallows': Nicholas Carr's new book faults Google for being "in the business of distraction" and Twitter for being neurological heroin The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains By Nicholas Carr Norton; 276 pp; $26.95 http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/10_24/b4182000596077.htm Have you ever worried about your annoying need to go to Google (GOOG) because you couldn't remember something? Have you wondered about your constant desire to check your e-mail, Twitter account, or favorite blog rather than read a great book or enjoy a beautiful day? If you haven't yet, you will after reading Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The book, an expansion of his 2008 article in The Atlantic, makes a compelling case that such fears are justified. Our constant inundation with electronic stimuli, he argues, is actually changing the brains's wiring. As we choose among all those enticing Web links, process blinking online ads, or get our Facebook fix, we are also sapping our neurological ability to remember facts or pay attention long enough to fully digest what we read. Those who didn't experience life before Google?or have already forgotten it?may even have a harder time generating the same empathy or interest in their fellow man. If that sounds like an apocalyptic anti-technology rant, give Carr a chance. A prolific blogger, tech pundit, and author, he cites enough academic research in The Shallows to give anyone pause about society's full embrace of the Internet as an unadulterated force for progress. One study he refers to shows that people watching a CNN news spot retained far more information without the headlines scrolling by at the bottom of the screen. Another shows that the more links there are in an article, the lower the comprehension of the reader. A third indicates that our brains automatically overvalue information simply because it's new. Carr quotes neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, who says we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap." Perhaps most scary, the Brain & Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California found that while the brain's response to physical pain shows up immediately on neurological scans, people must pay attention for a longer time before their brain shows telltale signs of caring about someone else's pain. Carr's takeaway: "The more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctly human forms of empathy, compassion, and emotion." Carr lays out, in engaging, accessible prose, the science that may explain these results. One key is the brain's shortage of so-called working memory, the mechanism that sifts through the avalanche of real-time information that swamps our senses and selects the important bits for incorporation into our long-term memories and insights. It turns out there's only room for two to four items at a time in this neural way station?not nearly enough to keep up with a website packed with links, videos, and RSS feeds. While the mind of the book reader considers what's important at its own pace, the Netizen's brain has to choose much more quickly and haphazardly. As a result, our ability to make the most of the input is diminished, and we become "mindless" consumers of data. This may also explain why sometimes it becomes harder to concentrate the longer you spend browsing the Web. Unsurprisingly, many of the Internet companies that we have come to live by don't fare well under Carr's gaze. While Twitter is a powerful tool for good in the hands of protesters in despotic lands, he writes that its very motto?"Discover what's happening right now"?might as well be an advertisement for a neurological heroin that trains your brain to be even more distracted. And while Google's geeky founders may truly believe in their stated objective "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Carr argues that Google is, "quite literally, in the business of distraction." After all, the more links you click on, the more money the company makes. While Carr believes the Internet is a revolutionary tool for finding information, he also suggests that it may be a dangerously powerful impetus to groupthink. As evidence, he suggests a study by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders & Stroke suggesting that multitasking makes people "more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought." And a University of Chicago study showed that academic papers began citing fewer sources, not more, after publications began going online. Taken to its extreme, Carr's arguments suggest the Internet Age is less likely than previous eras to produce Einsteins, Edisons, and Tolstoys. Such extraordinary people were not forever distracted from their work by 140-character bursts or incessant YouTube videos. Nor were they tempted to throw their semi-finished work out on the Web, safe in the knowledge that they could easily update it later. Indeed, Carr argues, they owe their mastery, in part, to the difficulty of achieving it. Absorbing entire hard-to-find texts?rather than forever Googling random facts?may have been a key to their development. Even though the book is only now hitting shelves, many Internet devotees will undoubtedly take its thesis as pure quackery. Presented with Carr's arguments, Theodore Gray, co-founder of search engine provider Wolfram Research, told me: "It's very easy to look back and point to Voltaire and Einstein and great literature and figure we're all just ignorant fools compared to the past. There are a lot of people who think deeply. Thanks to the Internet, they are able to think more deeply about more things." Ray Kurzweill, an author, entrepreneur, and futurist, also thinks Carr's argument is bunk. "We have many more people engaged in thinking and writing about issues than ever before. There are 200 million blogs in China alone?despite the censorship." These critics certainly have a point. The best of us will benefit hugely from the Internet. As with any form of new technology, how you use it dictates its usefulness. Regardless, Carr seems to understand that his arguments will not slow down the Netification of society. Nowhere in the book does he bother to offer any actual prescriptions for the problem he sees. Carr, however, fears the Internet will actually cause the brain to take its first step backward in centuries. Our cave-dwelling ancestors were consumed with immediate concerns?run from the lion, kill the mastodon, get out of the rain. Then various media provided an abstract way of thinking about the world. The map helped us explore other lands, establish trading routes, and draw up battle plans. The clock and calendar raised our productivity by enabling us to organize our time. Then came writing. Over time, especially after Gutenberg, the book turbocharged our ability to think conceptually and deeply about the world around us. Americans now spend 8.5 hours a day frenetically interacting with their PCs, TVs, or, increasingly, the smartphones that follow them everywhere. In the process, writes Carr, we are reverting to our roots as data processors. "What we're experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest." Whether Carr is right or not isn't really the point. Other than obvious problems such as child porn and online fraud, there's been very little hesitation or contemplation about the side effects of the Net as we race to take advantage of its bounties. At the very least, Carr will have done an important service by making people think just a bit differently the next time they find themselves Twittering their hours away. It may be more than a waste of time. It may also waste our brains. Stats 8.5 Number of hours per day Americans spend interacting with a PC, TV, or smartphone 30-40 Number of times per hour that American office workers check their e-mail 2,272 Average number of monthly texts sent and received by American teenagers, fourth quarter 2008 Data: Ball State University; The Shallows; Nielsen From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jun 7 12:18:30 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2010 13:18:30 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Prisoner of iTunes - the iPad file transfer horror Message-ID: (c/o MC) Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/07/ipad_file_transfer/ Prisoner of iTunes - the iPad file transfer horror The conflict between consumption and productivity By John Lettice Posted in Mobile, 7th June 2010 12:07 GMT http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/07/ipad_file_transfer/print.html First the good news - it's light, compact, reasonably capable for typing, and it has enough battery life for you not to be forever worrying about where your next power socket's coming from. These advantages alone are sufficient for me to take the iPad seriously for note-taking and for document viewing and manipulation, and to stop using the MacBook Air as the thing I carry around all the time. You can check out, but you can't leave But the bad news is that - in this iteration at least - the iPad is a conflicted machine. It's a media consumption device, and if it's just that it's an expensive one. Not that Steve Jobs is likely to go broke by selling expensive toys, as the sales figures remind us. But alongside this it has a capability as a productivity tool, and it's here that the problems start to tumble out. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a value there, but it does mean that it has considerable potential to become an infuriating device to use. So let's look at the infuriation: exchanging files, the iTunes tether, and the iPad's status as a big iPhone that can't make phone calls. These are all related. Apple won't let you anywhere near the iPad file system, and each app on the iPad has its own storage space. So if you've been using a file with one app, there's no way you can use it with another app without exporting it and then importing it into the other app. And how do you import and export? Big iPhone syndrome To import, you connect the iPad to your computer, go to the apps tab of your big iPhone iPad, and look down at the bottom to see which of your apps you want to open the file with. Then you click Add and get the file from your computer, then it trundles along the wire to the iPad. After all this you can open with the app you sent it to, but only with that app. Sending it in the other direction is possibly even more baroque. In the case of Apple's iWork applications, you go to My Documents, press the 'send' icon at the bottom of the page, and up come three options: send via email, share via iWork.com and export. Note that you can't save 'to' anywhere, you can't save at all because the iWork documents save themselves all the time, and as far as you're concerned there is no 'to'. The first options do what they say on the tin, while 'export' lets you export the file in a couple of different formats to... where? OK, back to iTunes, connect your iPad, go to the apps tab for your iPad, scroll to the bottom, click on the app you exported it from, highlight the file, then click on Save to, and save the file onto your computer. You can't do any of this while you're working on the document itself on the iPad; you need to switch over to the My Documents section. Nor can you name files on the iPad. Highlight a template and click on the plus sign underneath it, and you get an option to duplicate the document, in which case it'll open a file with 'copy' appended to the template's name. Edit directly from the template, and you'll find it creates a new file with '1' appended to the template's name. It gives itself two different ways to create non-relevant filenames, and won't let you have even one? The Air Sharing workaround It's possible to work around some of the iPad's insane file sharing restrictions using Avatron Software's Air Sharing HD [1], which is as essential from the point of view of sanity preservation as it is for getting stuff done. HD, the iPad version of the Air Sharing iPhone app, lets you mount the iPad as a drive and copy files back and forth wirelessly, and also via iTunes and the cable (which is a teensie bit faster if you're thinking of copying a movie). It doesn't give you access to the iPad's file system (it's forbidden, remember?), but it lets you organise your own folders within the Air Sharing sandbox. iTunes file transfer So you can use it to move a wide range of file formats (including audio and video) onto the iPad and then view them, but you can't use it for manipulating those files, nor can you transfer a file with Air Sharing and then manipulate it with another app - eg one of those in the iWork 'suite', which is actually rather more like three separate apps that don't talk to one another. I could - as you may have gathered - go on. The iPad's file sharing is laughably awful, and needs fixing. But will it get fixed? And how did it get like this in the first place? iTunes - walled garden or prison? There are a couple of possibilities. Apple might - working on the basis that this is intended to be a mass-market consumer device - have thought that customers needed to be shielded from filenames and file systems just as much as file systems needed to be shielded from customers. If this is the case, those of us wanting to use the iPad as a business tool have come to the wrong place, because Apple is not going to help us. Or maybe Apple just messed up - maybe it was focussing on the consumption device aspect, and didn't give adequate consideration to the productivity side. This seems to me to be at least possible, even understandable. There have been many unsuccessful productivity-focussed ultralight devices (I've used quite a few of them), and as Apple has demonstrated with iTunes, consumption is where the money is. But, if Apple isn't going to take iPad productivity seriously in the longer term, why is it selling iWork productivity apps for it? It seems to me that's grounds for hope. The third possibility that occurs to me is that the iTunes walled garden has reached the end of its usefulness. It worked pretty well with the iPod, and although it initially seemed bizarre (and it's still annoying) that the iPhone came with brainless Bluetooth and no Wi-fi iTunes capability, iTunes still kind of worked. But the more non-entertainment, non-copyright stuff you're trying to move around, the less credible iTunes becomes as the way to move it. Yes, somebody owns this music and it's probably not you, so you can grasp why Apple won't let you sync your phone or your iPad with more than one computer at a time. But you took these photos and you wrote these documents, so why is Apple messing you around, routing you through iTunes and threatening to wipe them? That message, incidentally, is a particular fail if Apple's trying to shield novice users from scary stuff. The difficulty here is that Apple's restrictive file transfer system is putting a brake on the ability of dual-purpose consumer/productivity devices like the iPhone and iPad to interact with other devices and computers. You can fiddle with the switches in iTunes in order to determine what syncs with what, which apps go with which device, but these are activities that have a lot in common with rearranging your CDs in alphabetical order, and they're certainly not about making life easier for you. Essentially, iTunes is over, and Apple surely knows that. But consider the sunlit uplands, and the possibilities. Like the iPhone, the iPad has some syncing capability with Apple's MobileMe. Wouldn't it be handy if it were able, like a Mac can, to back itself up there as well? And to have its own version of Back to my Mac, so you could link to your home or office computer from any Internet connection? Wouldn't it be great if it could sit on a wireless network and share files with computers, just like you'd expect a great productivity device to do? Ah, but how does Apple do all of that stuff without knocking great holes in the iTunes DRM wall? The solution is by no means straightforward, as this anonymous Android developer explains [2]. With Android, the ability to back up and restore apps also gives users the ability to steal apps, so how does Apple give more access to the file system without trashing the marketplace it's built with iTunes? Currently I understand the difficulties the company finds itself in, but I'm likely to get a lot less understanding if there's no sign of progress in the next update. And despite the current restrictions, as I said at the outset, there's enough good about the iPad as a productivity tool to make it a keeper. The on-screen keyboard works fine, even if you turn off the click in meetings (which you should - otherwise people will hit you), it's fairly light, and it has reasonable battery life. I've gone for a 3 Pay as You Go MiFi unit [3] rather than getting a 3G iPad, on the basis that I'm abroad frequently, and don't want to get hammered on international data roaming. I'll likely pick up the Verizon equivalent next time I'm in the San Francisco office, and see if I double up with a French SIM in the 3 MiFi unit for when I'm in France. And will I carry it around instead of carrying the Air around? Actually, it seems to me I haven't got a lot of choice, as the combined weight is too great to be practical. So a machine at either end it is, with the iPad in the middle and the Air for trips. And we'll see how we do on those file transfers? ? Links ? http://avatron.com/apps/air-sharing-hd/ ? http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/caq8f/iama_developer_who_sells_the_same_app_both_in_the/ ? http://threestore.three.co.uk/payg/dealsummary.aspx?offercode=DSLPP499&id=1402 From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jun 7 17:37:08 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2010 18:37:08 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Military Intelligence Taps Social Networking Skills Message-ID: <6E01F890-B065-46B2-B78A-4EECCDAF5B3A@infowarrior.org> June 7, 2010 Military Intelligence Taps Social Networking Skills By CHRISTOPHER DREW http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/technology/08homefront.html BEALE AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. ? As a teenager, Jamie Christopher would tap instant messages to make plans with friends, and later she became a Facebook regular. Now a freckle-faced 25 and an intelligence officer here, she is using her social networking skills to hunt insurgents and save American lives in Afghanistan. Hunched over monitors streaming live video from a drone, Lieutenant Christopher and a team of analysts recently popped in and out of several military chat rooms, reaching out more than 7,000 miles to warn Marines about roadside bombs and to track Taliban gunfire. ?2 poss children in fov,? the team flashed as Marines on the ground lined up an air strike, chat lingo for possible innocents within the drone?s field of view. The strike was aborted. ?fire coming from cmpnd,? another message warned, referring to a Taliban compound. The Marines responded by strafing the fighters, killing nine of them. Lieutenant Christopher and her crew might be fighting on distant keypads instead of ducking bullets, but they head into battle just the same every day. They and thousands of other young Air Force analysts are showing how the Facebook generation?s skills are being exploited ? and paying dividends ? in America?s wars. The Marines say the analysts, who are mostly in their early to mid-20s, paved the way for them to roll into Marja in southern Afghanistan earlier this year with minimal casualties. And as the analysts quickly pass on the latest data from drones and other spy planes, they are creating the fluid connections needed to hunt small groups of fighters and other fleeting targets, military officials say. But there can be difficulties in operating from so far away. Late last month, military authorities in Afghanistan released a report chastising a Predator drone crew in an incident involving a helicopter attack that killed 23 civilians in February. Military officials say analysts in Florida who were monitoring the drone?s video feed cautioned two or three times in a chat room that children were in the group, but the drone?s pilot failed to relay those warnings to the ground commander. For the most part, though, the networking has been so productive that senior commanders are sidestepping some of the traditional military hierarchy and giving the analysts leeway in deciding how to use some spy planes. ?If you want to act quickly, you?ve got to flatten things out and engage at the lowest possible levels,? said Lt. Col. Jason M. Brown, who runs the Air Force intelligence squadron at this base near Sacramento. The connections have been made possible by the growing fleet of remote-controlled planes, like the Predators and Reapers, which send a steady flow of battlefield video to intelligence centers across the globe. The Central Intelligence Agency and the military use drones to wage long-distance war against insurgents, with pilots in the United States pressing the missile-firing buttons. But as commanders in Afghanistan mass drones and U-2 spy planes over the hottest areas, the networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare. And the mechanics are simple in this age of satellite relays. Besides viewing video feeds, the analysts scan still images and enemy conversations. As they log the information into chat rooms, the analysts carry on a running dialogue with drone crews and commanders and intelligence specialists in the field, who receive the information on computers and then radio the most urgent bits to troops on patrol. Marine intelligence officers say that during the Marja offensive in February, the analysts managed to stay a step ahead of the advance, sending alerts about 300 or so possible roadside bombs. ?To be that tapped into the tactical fight from 7,000 to 8,000 miles away was pretty much unheard of before,? said Gunnery Sgt. Sean N. Smothers, a Marine who was stationed here as a liaison to the analysts. Sergeant Smothers saw how easily the distance could melt away when an analyst, peering at images from a U-2, suddenly stuck up his hand and yelled, ?Check!? ? the signal for a supervisor to verify a spotting. Sergeant Smothers said he and two Air Force officers rushed over and confirmed the existence of a roadside bomb. Nearby on a big screen map in the windowless room, they could see a Marine convoy approaching the site. The group started sending frantic chat messages to their Marine contacts in the area. As they watched the video feed from a drone, they could see that their messages had been heard: the convoy came to a sudden stop, 500 feet from the bomb. ?To me, this whole operation was like a template for what we should be doing in the future,? Sergeant Smothers said. Military officials said they are planning to repeat the operation around Kandahar. The effort is a major turnaround for the Air Force, which had been criticized for taking too long to adjust to different types of threats since 9/11. During the cold war, it focused mostly on fixed targets like Soviet bases. But commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq have often complained that it is hard to get help from spy planes before insurgents slipped away. Marine and Army officers say that that began to change as more planes were sent to Afghanistan in early 2009, and the Air Force got better at blending the various types of intelligence into a fuller picture. And the new analysts, who were practically weaned on computers and interactive video games, have also been crucial. While Air Force analysts were once backroom technicians, the latest generation works in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk. Large screens on the walls display the feeds from drones, and coffee and Red Bull help them get through the 12-hour shifts. The chat rooms are no-frills boxes on a computer screen with lines of rolling text, and crew leaders keep dozens of them open at once. They may look crude compared to Facebook, but Lieutenant Christopher said they were effective in building rapport. ?When it?s not busy, I?ll be like, ?Hey, how?s your day going?? ? she said. ?It?s not just, ?What do you need?? ? There is also some old-fashioned interaction. The Air Force, which has 4,000 analysts at bases like this and is hiring 2,100 more, has sent liaisons to Afghanistan to help understand the priorities on the ground. And some analysts pick up the phone to build closer bonds with soldiers they have never seen. Andres Morales, a senior airman, said he often talked to a 24-year-old Army lieutenant, helping his battalion find arms caches and track enemy fighters. But after four of his fellow soldiers were killed, ?he didn?t really want to talk about intelligence,? Airman Morales, 27, said. ?He wanted to talk, more or less, about how life is in California, and how when he comes back, we?re going to go surfing together.? Quentin Arnold, 22, another enlisted analyst, said he had been working so closely with the Marines that 15 to 20 had asked to be friends on Facebook. He just collected $1,500 from analysts here to send a care package, including a PlayStation 3 game system and an Xbox 360, to some Marines. Still, three-quarters of the 350 analysts here have never been to the war zones, so a cultural divide can pop up. Several said they were a bit intimidated when Sergeant Smothers, 36, who has had five tours in Iraq, strode onto the floor here in February. At the time, the analysts were blending data from the U-2s and the drones to watch the roads into Marja and fields where helicopters might land. But as Sergeant Smothers looked over their shoulders, encouraging them to warn the Marines about even the most tentative threats, the analysts warmed up. ?It was like the shy house cat that wouldn?t talk to you at first and now just won?t stay out of your lap,? he said. As the operation unfolded, the analysts passed on leads that enabled the Marines to kill at least 15 insurgents planting bombs. Lieutenant Christopher, who loves to chat on Facebook with her family in Ohio, was so exhausted from overnight shifts during that period that she skipped Facebook and went right to sleep. And sometimes, she said, she ended up dreaming about what she had just seen in the war. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jun 7 20:04:21 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2010 21:04:21 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price Message-ID: June 6, 2010 Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price By MATT RICHTEL http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html SAN FRANCISCO ? When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it. Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up. ?I stood up from my desk and said, ?Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,? ? Mr. Campbell said. ?It?s kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, but I did.? The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing. (View an interactive panorama of Mr. Campbell's workstation.) While he managed to salvage the $1.3 million deal after apologizing to his suitor, Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family. His wife, Brenda, complains, ?It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.? This is your brain on computers. Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information. These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement ? a dopamine squirt ? that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored. The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life. While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress. And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers. ?The technology is rewiring our brains,? said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world?s leading brain scientists. She and other researchers compare the lure of digital stimulation less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are essential but counterproductive in excess. Technology use can benefit the brain in some ways, researchers say. Imaging studies show the brains of Internet users become more efficient at finding information. And players of some video games develop better visual acuity. More broadly, cellphones and computers have transformed life. They let people escape their cubicles and work anywhere. They shrink distances and handle countless mundane tasks, freeing up time for more exciting pursuits. For better or worse, the consumption of media, as varied as e-mail and TV, has exploded. In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows. The nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in the human environment, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. ?We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren?t necessarily evolved to do,? he said. ?We know already there are consequences.? Mr. Campbell, 43, came of age with the personal computer, and he is a heavier user of technology than most. But researchers say the habits and struggles of Mr. Campbell and his family typify what many experience ? and what many more will, if trends continue. For him, the tensions feel increasingly acute, and the effects harder to shake. The Campbells recently moved to California from Oklahoma to start a software venture. Mr. Campbell?s life revolves around computers. (View a slide show on how the Campbells interact with technology.) He goes to sleep with a laptop or iPhone on his chest, and when he wakes, he goes online. He and Mrs. Campbell, 39, head to the tidy kitchen in their four-bedroom hillside rental in Orinda, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, where she makes breakfast and watches a TV news feed in the corner of the computer screen while he uses the rest of the monitor to check his e-mail. Major spats have arisen because Mr. Campbell escapes into video games during tough emotional stretches. On family vacations, he has trouble putting down his devices. When he rides the subway to San Francisco, he knows he will be offline 221 seconds as the train goes through a tunnel. Their 16-year-old son, Connor, tall and polite like his father, recently received his first C?s, which his family blames on distraction from his gadgets. Their 8-year-old daughter, Lily, like her mother, playfully tells her father that he favors technology over family. ?I would love for him to totally unplug, to be totally engaged,? says Mrs. Campbell, who adds that he becomes ?crotchety until he gets his fix.? But she would not try to force a change. ?He loves it. Technology is part of the fabric of who he is,? she says. ?If I hated technology, I?d be hating him, and a part of who my son is too.? Always On Mr. Campbell, whose given name is Thomas, had an early start with technology in Oklahoma City. When he was in third grade, his parents bought him Pong, a video game. Then came a string of game consoles and PCs, which he learned to program. In high school, he balanced computers, basketball and a romance with Brenda, a cheerleader with a gorgeous singing voice. He studied too, with focus, uninterrupted by e-mail. ?I did my homework because I needed to get it done,? he said. ?I didn?t have anything else to do.? He left college to help with a family business, then set up a lawn mowing service. At night he would read, play video games, hang out with Brenda and, as she remembers it, ?talk a lot more.? In 1996, he started a successful Internet provider. Then he built the start-up that he sold for $1.3 million in 2003 to LookSmart, a search engine. Mr. Campbell loves the rush of modern life and keeping up with the latest information. ?I want to be the first to hear when the aliens land,? he said, laughing. But other times, he fantasizes about living in pioneer days when things moved more slowly: ?I can?t keep everything in my head.? No wonder. As he came of age, so did a new era of data and communication. At home, people consume 12 hours of media a day on average, when an hour spent with, say, the Internet and TV simultaneously counts as two hours. That compares with five hours in 1960, say researchers at the University of California, San Diego. Computer users visit an average of 40 Web sites a day, according to research by RescueTime, which offers time-management tools. As computers have changed, so has the understanding of the human brain. Until 15 years ago, scientists thought the brain stopped developing after childhood. Now they understand that its neural networks continue to develop, influenced by things like learning skills. So not long after Eyal Ophir arrived at Stanford in 2004, he wondered whether heavy multitasking might be leading to changes in a characteristic of the brain long thought immutable: that humans can process only a single stream of information at a time. Going back a half-century, tests had shown that the brain could barely process two streams, and could not simultaneously make decisions about them. But Mr. Ophir, a student-turned-researcher, thought multitaskers might be rewiring themselves to handle the load. His passion was personal. He had spent seven years in Israeli intelligence after being weeded out of the air force ? partly, he felt, because he was not a good multitasker. Could his brain be retrained? Mr. Ophir, like others around the country studying how technology bent the brain, was startled by what he discovered. The Myth of Multitasking The test subjects were divided into two groups: those classified as heavy multitaskers based on their answers to questions about how they used technology, and those who were not. In a test created by Mr. Ophir and his colleagues, subjects at a computer were briefly shown an image of red rectangles. Then they saw a similar image and were asked whether any of the rectangles had moved. It was a simple task until the addition of a twist: blue rectangles were added, and the subjects were told to ignore them. (Play a game testing how well you filter out distractions.) The multitaskers then did a significantly worse job than the non-multitaskers at recognizing whether red rectangles had changed position. In other words, they had trouble filtering out the blue ones ? the irrelevant information. So, too, the multitaskers took longer than non-multitaskers to switch among tasks, like differentiating vowels from consonants and then odd from even numbers. The multitaskers were shown to be less efficient at juggling problems. (Play a game testing how well you switch between tasks.) Other tests at Stanford, an important center for research in this fast-growing field, showed multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work. Researchers say these findings point to an interesting dynamic: multitaskers seem more sensitive than non-multitaskers to incoming information. The results also illustrate an age-old conflict in the brain, one that technology may be intensifying. A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated. Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children. ?Throughout evolutionary history, a big surprise would get everyone?s brain thinking,? said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford. ?But we?ve got a large and growing group of people who think the slightest hint that something interesting might be going on is like catnip. They can?t ignore it.? Mr. Nass says the Stanford studies are important because they show multitasking?s lingering effects: ?The scary part for guys like Kord is, they can?t shut off their multitasking tendencies when they?re not multitasking.? Melina Uncapher, a neurobiologist on the Stanford team, said she and other researchers were unsure whether the muddied multitaskers were simply prone to distraction and would have had trouble focusing in any era. But she added that the idea that information overload causes distraction was supported by more and more research. A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that people interrupted by e-mail reported significantly increased stress compared with those left to focus. Stress hormones have been shown to reduce short-term memory, said Gary Small, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Preliminary research shows some people can more easily juggle multiple information streams. These ?supertaskers? represent less than 3 percent of the population, according to scientists at the University of Utah. Other research shows computer use has neurological advantages. In imaging studies, Dr. Small observed that Internet users showed greater brain activity than nonusers, suggesting they were growing their neural circuitry. At the University of Rochester, researchers found that players of some fast-paced video games can track the movement of a third more objects on a screen than nonplayers. They say the games can improve reaction and the ability to pick out details amid clutter. ?In a sense, those games have a very strong both rehabilitative and educational power,? said the lead researcher, Daphne Bavelier, who is working with others in the field to channel these changes into real-world benefits like safer driving. There is a vibrant debate among scientists over whether technology?s influence on behavior and the brain is good or bad, and how significant it is. ?The bottom line is, the brain is wired to adapt,? said Steven Yantis, a professor of brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. ?There?s no question that rewiring goes on all the time,? he added. But he said it was too early to say whether the changes caused by technology were materially different from others in the past. Mr. Ophir is loath to call the cognitive changes bad or good, though the impact on analysis and creativity worries him. He is not just worried about other people. Shortly after he came to Stanford, a professor thanked him for being the one student in class paying full attention and not using a computer or phone. But he recently began using an iPhone and noticed a change; he felt its pull, even when playing with his daughter. ?The media is changing me,? he said. ?I hear this internal ping that says: check e-mail and voice mail.? ?I have to work to suppress it.? Kord Campbell does not bother to suppress it, or no longer can. Interrupted by a Corpse It is a Wednesday in April, and in 10 minutes, Mr. Campbell has an online conference call that could determine the fate of his new venture, called Loggly. It makes software that helps companies understand the clicking and buying patterns of their online customers. Mr. Campbell and his colleagues, each working from a home office, are frantically trying to set up a program that will let them share images with executives at their prospective partner. But at the moment when Mr. Campbell most needs to focus on that urgent task, something else competes for his attention: ?Man Found Dead Inside His Business.? That is the tweet that appears on the left-most of Mr. Campbell?s array of monitors, which he has expanded to three screens, at times adding a laptop and an iPad. On the left screen, Mr. Campbell follows the tweets of 1,100 people, along with instant messages and group chats. The middle monitor displays a dark field filled with computer code, along with Skype, a service that allows Mr. Campbell to talk to his colleagues, sometimes using video. The monitor on the right keeps e-mail, a calendar, a Web browser and a music player. Even with the meeting fast approaching, Mr. Campbell cannot resist the tweet about the corpse. He clicks on the link in it, glances at the article and dismisses it. ?It?s some article about something somewhere,? he says, annoyed by the ads for jeans popping up. The program gets fixed, and the meeting turns out to be fruitful: the partners are ready to do business. A colleague says via instant message: ?YES.? Other times, Mr. Campbell?s information juggling has taken a more serious toll. A few weeks earlier, he once again overlooked an e-mail message from a prospective investor. Another time, Mr. Campbell signed the company up for the wrong type of business account on Amazon.com, costing $300 a month for six months before he got around to correcting it. He has burned hamburgers on the grill, forgotten to pick up the children and lingered in the bathroom playing video games on an iPhone. Mr. Campbell can be unaware of his own habits. In a two-and-a-half hour stretch one recent morning, he switched rapidly between e-mail and several other programs, according to data from RescueTime, which monitored his computer use with his permission. But when asked later what he was doing in that period, Mr. Campbell said he had been on a long Skype call, and ?may have pulled up an e-mail or two.? The kind of disconnection Mr. Campbell experiences is not an entirely new problem, of course. As they did in earlier eras, people can become so lost in work, hobbies or TV that they fail to pay attention to family. Mr. Campbell concedes that, even without technology, he may work or play obsessively, just as his father immersed himself in crossword puzzles. But he says this era is different because he can multitask anyplace, anytime. ?It?s a mixed blessing,? he said. ?If you?re not careful, your marriage can fall apart or your kids can be ready to play and you?ll get distracted.? The Toll on Children Father and son sit in armchairs. Controllers in hand, they engage in a fierce video game battle, displayed on the nearby flat-panel TV, as Lily watches. They are playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a cartoonish animated fight between characters that battle using anvils, explosives and other weapons. ?Kill him, Dad,? Lily screams. To no avail. Connor regularly beats his father, prompting expletives and, once, a thrown pillow. But there is bonding and mutual respect. ?He?s a lot more tactical,? says Connor. ?But I?m really good at quick reflexes.? Screens big and small are central to the Campbell family?s leisure time. Connor and his mother relax while watching TV shows like ?Heroes.? Lily has an iPod Touch, a portable DVD player and her own laptop, which she uses to watch videos, listen to music and play games. Lily, a second-grader, is allowed only an hour a day of unstructured time, which she often spends with her devices. The laptop can consume her. ?When she?s on it, you can holler her name all day and she won?t hear,? Mrs. Campbell said. Researchers worry that constant digital stimulation like this creates attention problems for children with brains that are still developing, who already struggle to set priorities and resist impulses. Connor?s troubles started late last year. He could not focus on homework. No wonder, perhaps. On his bedroom desk sit two monitors, one with his music collection, one with Facebook and Reddit, a social site with news links that he and his father love. His iPhone availed him to relentless texting with his girlfriend. When he studied, ?a little voice would be saying, ?Look up? at the computer, and I?d look up,? Connor said. ?Normally, I?d say I want to only read for a few minutes, but I?d search every corner of Reddit and then check Facebook.? His Web browsing informs him. ?He?s a fact hound,? Mr. Campbell brags. ?Connor is, other than programming, extremely technical. He?s 100 percent Internet savvy.? But the parents worry too. ?Connor is obsessed,? his mother said. ?Kord says we have to teach him balance.? So in January, they held a family meeting. Study time now takes place in a group setting at the dinner table after everyone has finished eating. It feels, Mr. Campbell says, like togetherness. No Vacations For spring break, the family rented a cottage in Carmel, Calif. Mrs. Campbell hoped everyone would unplug. But the day before they left, the iPad from Apple came out, and Mr. Campbell snapped one up. The next night, their first on vacation, ?We didn?t go out to dinner,? Mrs. Campbell mourned. ?We just sat there on our devices.? She rallied the troops the next day to the aquarium. Her husband joined them for a bit but then begged out to do e-mail on his phone. Later she found him playing video games. The trip came as Mr. Campbell was trying to raise several million dollars for his new venture, a goal that he achieved. Brenda said she understood that his pursuit required intensity but was less understanding of the accompanying surge in video game. His behavior brought about a discussion between them. Mrs. Campbell said he told her that he was capable of logging off, citing a trip to Hawaii several years ago that they called their second honeymoon. ?What trip are you thinking about?? she said she asked him. She recalled that he had spent two hours a day online in the hotel?s business center. On Thursday, their fourth day in Carmel, Mr. Campbell spent the day at the beach with his family. They flew a kite and played whiffle ball. Connor unplugged too. ?It changes the mood of everything when everybody is present,? Mrs. Campbell said. The next day, the family drove home, and Mr. Campbell disappeared into his office. Technology use is growing for Mrs. Campbell as well. She divides her time between keeping the books of her husband?s company, homemaking and working at the school library. She checks e-mail 25 times a day, sends texts and uses Facebook. Recently, she was baking peanut butter cookies for Teacher Appreciation Day when her phone chimed in the living room. She answered a text, then became lost in Facebook, forgot about the cookies and burned them. She started a new batch, but heard the phone again, got lost in messaging, and burned those too. Out of ingredients and shamed, she bought cookies at the store. She feels less focused and has trouble completing projects. Some days, she promises herself she will ignore her device. ?It?s like a diet ? you have good intentions in the morning and then you?re like, ?There went that,? ? she said. Mr. Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room. ?The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other,? he said. ?It shows how much you care.? That empathy, Mr. Nass said, is essential to the human condition. ?We are at an inflection point,? he said. ?A significant fraction of people?s experiences are now fragmented.? From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jun 8 07:31:07 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 2010 08:31:07 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - OT: Adidas does Star Wars Message-ID: <425A644A-C563-4AC2-B53B-FFB27C818F1E@infowarrior.org> A nifty mash-up of the Cantina scene starring some well-known folks..... http://g.sports.yahoo.com/soccer/world-cup/blog/dirty-tackle/post/Beckham-appears-in-Adidas-version-of-Star-Wars?urn=sow,246068 (c/o MC) From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jun 8 09:14:39 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 2010 10:14:39 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - New terrorist tactic: Suspicious bags? Message-ID: <0DA74298-DE20-4C43-B6D7-A35F8D19D33D@infowarrior.org> It's about time such tactics -- and moreso, the idiotic lunacy that ensues -- receives some MSM attention. In terms of 'homeland security' we remain our own worst enemy and the terrorist's best supporters in this area. :( So how's this New Normal working out for everyone? *grumble* -rick New terrorist tactic: Suspicious bags? Monday, June 07, 2010 Tim Fleischer http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local&id=7483747&rss=rss-wabc-article-7483747 NEW YORK (WABC) -- You've probably heard the slogan "See Something, Say Something." Now it appears potential terrorists hope that you do, just to see the response. Suspicious bags, some provoking a cautious response, were checked out in large numbers in the weeks after the failed Times Square bombing attempt. Now as large numbers of tourists flood into New York City and the nation's capital, the FBI is warning of a new terror tactic. Citing an FBI informational document, ABC News reports a so called "battle of suspicious bags" is being encouraged on a jihadist website. Bomb expert Kevin Barry with 20 years experience in the NYPD says the bags could be filled not with bombs, but with innocuous items like water bottles or socks. The potential terrorists would be watching the response. "How they evacuate. The standoff distances. How long it takes additional emergency services to come to the scene," Barry said. While not giving away details, police do have numerous ways of responding to these types of incidents. The report says no evidence of a suspicious bag campaign has been found so far in New York City or Washington. "After every major incident there will be a spike in calls because people become more nervous and there is more reporting of suspicious items," Barry said. Putting more emphasis, security experts say, on the slogan "see something, say something." "People are becoming more suspicious, more vigilant and that results in more calls. We understand that happens and we are prepared to respond," police commissioner Ray Kelly said. --- From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 9 08:25:09 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2010 09:25:09 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Common Painkillers Raise Heart Death Risk Message-ID: <85395C31-9AC5-4E8F-9D89-ACD4FA8AC635@infowarrior.org> Common Painkillers Raise Heart Death Risk Ibuprofen Increases Stroke Risk; Diclofenac as Risky as Vioxx, Study Finds Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD http://www.webmd.com/pain-management/news/20100608/common-painkillers-raise-heart-death-risk June 8, 2010 -- High doses of common painkillers raise the risk of heart death in healthy people, a huge Danish study finds. It's the first evidence that so-called NSAID (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug)pain relievers -- including some sold over the counter -- increase the risk of heart disease and death in people without underlying health conditions. The risks are dose related and are mostly associated with high doses of the drug. However, for most of the drugs, the deaths occurred in people who had been taking the drugs for only two weeks. "We found that most NSAIDs are associated with increased cardiovascular mortality and morbidity," says researcher Emil Loldrup Fosbol, MD, of Gentofte University Hospital in Hellerup, Denmark. The study's most disturbing finding: Diclofenac (brand names include Cataflam,Voltaren) is as risky as the now-banned Vioxx. Both diclofenac and Vioxx nearly doubled the risk of death from heart disease among healthy people in the Fosbol study. Although diclofenac is available in the U.S. only by prescription, it's sold over the counter in many nations. Ibuprofen Heart Risk Perhaps of concern to more Americans is the finding that ibuprofen (brand names include Advil and Motrin) increased risk of stroke by about 30% in the Fosbol study. Although low doses of ibuprofen seemed to lower the risk of heart attack, the study found a trend toward increased heart attack risk with high doses (more than 1,200 milligrams per day or more than two 200 milligram pills three times daily). Based on other evidence, an American Heart Association panel in 2007 warned that treating chronic pain with NSAIDs other than aspirin increases a person's risk of heart attack and stroke. The lead author of that AHA statement, Elliot M. Antman of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, says the Fosbol findings underscore the importance of those recommendations. "Doses examined in this new study were very similar to doses that patients are likely to encounter both at the over-the-counter level and the prescription level," Antman says in a news release. The silver lining to the Fosbol study is that naproxen (brand names include Aleve and Naprosyn) does not appear to carry any risk of heart disease or stroke. However, all NSAIDS, including naproxen, increase the risk of potentially fatal bleeding. Previous studies of NSAID risk examined people with underlying health conditions. The Fosbol study differs. Because detailed medical records are available for everyone in Denmark, the researchers were able to study NSAID risk in more than a million healthy people from 1997 to 2005. Although NSAIDs increased the risk of death from heart disease, the risk was small. Among the 1,028,437 people who took NSAIDs, there were 769 deaths from heart disease and stroke. Page 2 of 2 Ibuprofen Increases Stroke Risk; Diclofenac as Risky as Vioxx, Study Finds (continued) Ibuprofen Heart Risk continued... Even so, the finding that NSAIDs increase heart risk in relatively healthy people is important, says Howard S. Weintraub, MD, clinical director of the NYU Langone Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease. "This could have far-reaching implications, as many individuals rely on these drugs for pain relief," Weintraub says in a news release. "It is likely that sporadic, non-sustained use of NSAIDs in low doses for pain relief will remain safe, while more chronic use of higher doses may have to be questioned." What about people already taking NSAIDs for chronic pain? "For patients regularly taking an NSAID now -- whether it's prescription or OTC -- it is advisable to discuss with your physician why it was originally recommended or prescribed, whether you need to continue taking it, and at what dose," Antman says. The Fosbol study appears in the June 8 online edition of the AHA journalCirculation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 9 10:11:34 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2010 11:11:34 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Fallows: Sanity About Security: Kicking Off a Series Message-ID: <9E724BF4-4E64-4F1A-8EFE-8726F76F56D8@infowarrior.org> Sanity About Security: Kicking Off a Series JUN 8 2010, 10:32 AM ET HTTP://WWW.THEATLANTIC.COM/SCIENCE/ARCHIVE/2010/06/SANITY-ABOUT-SECURITY-KICKING-OFF-A-SERIES/56429/ I hate negativity! Therefore, as a counterweight to chronicles of "security theater" nuttiness onthis site and from Jeffrey Goldberg in the magazine and online, let's kick off a little hall-of-fame feature. It's time to honor people who manage to talk about real threats the nation faces, and ways to cope with them, without succumbing to threat-inflation, chicken-little-ism, fear-mongering, budget-boosting, and the general, cowering, "be very afraid" mentality summed up by the robotic reminders that the "current Threat Level is Orange." To start, a retrospective award for recent efforts to counter the idea that the United States is involved in a "cyberwar." James Lewis, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is one of the nation's real experts on all the bad things that can happen when governments, criminals, corporations, and other ominous-sounding groups misuse electronic information. I quoted him several times in my article on cyber-threats early this year. But as he pointed out in his speech last month in China, the idea that this constitutes electronic warfare between countries is intellectually lazy and politically and economically dangerous. It's lazy, because it confuses the theoretical capacity to do harm from actually inflicting harm. It's like saying: I'm carrying a pack of matches, so therefore I am actually an arsonist. (Now, the TSA might think that way, but...) It is dangerous not just because it hypes mutual suspicions but also because distracts attention from the real, ongoing source of cyber-menace: the unglamorous but serious reality of corporation-vs-corporation espionage and "normal" criminal fraud. Lewis has made this point before, but in a recent speech to the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (PDF here), he laid it out: Powerful misperceptions on both sides [US and China] shape these decisions but there is one misperception we can clear away immediately. We are not in a cyber war. War is the use of force to achieve political ends. It involves using force to attack, damage or destroy an opponent's capability and will to resist. A cyber attack would damage data and perhaps physical infrastructure, create uncertainty in the mind of an opposing commander, and be used for political effect.... Advanced militaries also have missiles and aircraft and plans to use them, but they will not use these weapons outside of a larger armed conflict. No one would launch a missile or an aircraft at the United States on a whim or as a test, as this would invite a devastating response.... [Similarly] outside of a larger armed conflict, cyber war is unlikely. That is: if the US and China are already shooting at each other, they might try to bring down the other's cyber networks too. Otherwise, "cyber war" just is not plausible. Naturally Lewis's argument is more nuanced than the way I'm summarizing it, and it concludes with an assessment of the things we should be worrying about more than we do. But if you read it you'll find yourself cringing the next time someone refers to the harsh new reality of "cyber war." Which is a start. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 9 10:25:29 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2010 11:25:29 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - WEIS 2010 Proceedings Message-ID: <68215F90-1E28-4B85-BAAA-841C345F70E6@infowarrior.org> (c/o AF) The Ninth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2010) Harvard University, USA June 7-8, 2010 Papers @ http://weis2010.econinfosec.org/program.html From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 9 18:59:23 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2010 19:59:23 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Apple's Worst Security Breach: 114, 000 iPad Owners Exposed References: Message-ID: <23302CB0-E616-4119-BBAE-C20E13A744B4@infowarrior.org> Apple's Worst Security Breach: 114,000 iPad Owners Exposed http://gawker.com/5559346/ Apple has suffered another embarrassment. A security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They?and every other buyer of the cellular-enabled tablet?could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking. The breach, which comes just weeks after an Apple employee lost an iPhone prototype in a bar, exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It even appears that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's information was compromised. It doesn't stop there. According to the data we were given by the web security group that exploited vulnerabilities on the AT&T network, we believe 114,000 user accounts have been compromised, although it's possible that confidential information about every iPad 3G owner in the U.S. has been exposed. We contacted Apple for comment but have yet to hear back. We also reached out to AT&T for comment. A call to Rahm Emanuel's office at the White House has not been returned. The specific information exposed in the breach included subscribers' email addresses, coupled with an associated ID used to authenticate the subscriber on AT&T's network, known as the ICC-ID. ICC-ID stands for integrated circuit card identifier and is used to identify the SIM cards that associate a mobile device with a particular subscriber. AT&T closed the security hole in recent days, but the victims have been unaware, until now. For a device that has been shipping for barely two months, and in its cellular configuration for barely one, the compromise is a rattling development. The slip up appears to be AT&T's fault at the moment, and it will complicate the company's already fraught relationship with Apple. Although the security vulnerability was confined to AT&T servers, Apple bears responsibility for ensuring the privacy of its users, who must provide the company with their email addresses to activate their iPads. This is particularly the case given that U.S. iPad 3G customers have no choice in mobile carriers ? AT&T has an exclusive lock, at least for now. Given the lock-in and the tight coupling of the iPad with AT&T's cellular data network, Apple has a pronounced responsibility to patrol the network vendors it chooses to align and share customer data with. In addition to complicating the AT&T-Apple relationship, the breach will also likely unnerve customers thinking of buying iPads that connect to AT&T's cellular network. And it will do so at a pivotal moment, with the iPad 3G early in its sales cycle. Brisk sales for the original wi-fi iPad had promised to turn the 3G model into a similar profit machine. But further questions about AT&T, already widely ridiculed for its bad service, are going to make people think twice about spending up to $830 and $25 per month on the iPad 3G. Breach details: Who did it, and how The subscriber data was obtained by a group calling itself Goatse Security. Though the group is steeped in off-the-wall, 4chan-style internet culture?its name is a reference to a famous gross-out Web picture?it has previously highlighted real security vulnerabilities in the Firefox and Safari Web browsers, and attracted media attention for finding what it said were flaws in Amazon's community ratings system. Goatse Security obtained its data through a script on AT&T's website, accessible to anyone on the internet. When provided with an ICC-ID as part of an HTTP request, the script would return the associated email address, in what was apparently intended to be an AJAX-style response within a Web application. The security researchers were able to guess a large swath of ICC IDs by looking at known iPad 3G ICC IDs, some of which are shown in pictures posted by gadget enthusiasts to Flickr and other internet sites, and which can also be obtained through friendly associates who own iPads and are willing to share their information, available within the iPad "Settings" application. To make AT&T's servers respond, the security group merely had to send an iPad-style "User agent" header in their Web request. Such headers identify users' browser types to websites. The group wrote a PHP script to automate the harvesting of data. Since a member of the group tells us the script was shared with third-parties prior to AT&T closing the security hole, it's not known exactly whose hands the exploit fell into and what those people did with the names they obtained. A member tells us it's likely many accounts beyond the 114,000 have been compromised. Goatse Security notified AT&T of the breach and the security hole was closed. We were able to establish the authenticity of Goatse Security's data through two people who were listed among the 114,000 names. We sent these people the ICC ID contained in the document?and associated with the person's iPad 3G account?and asked them to verify in an iPad control panel that this was the correct ICC ID. It was. Victims: Some big names Then we began poring through the 114,067 entries and were stunned at the names we found. The iPad 3G, released less than two months ago, has clearly been snapped up by an elite array of early adopters. Within the military, we saw several devices registered to the domain of DARPA, the advanced research division of the Department of Defense, along with the major service branches. To wit: One affected individual was William Eldredge, who "commands the largest operational B-1 [strategic bomber] group in the U.S. Air Force." In the media and entertainment industries, affected accounts belonged to top executives at the New York Times Company, Dow Jones, Cond? Nast, Viacom, Time Warner, News Corporation, HBO and Hearst. Within the tech industry, accounts were compromised at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and AOL, among others. In finance, accounts belonged to companies from Goldman Sachs to JP Morgan to Citigroup to Morgan Stanley, along with dozens of venture capital and private equity firms. In government, affected accounts included a GMail user who appears to be Rahm Emanuel and staffers in the Senate, House of Representatives, Department of Justice, NASA, Department of Homeland Security, FAA, FCC, and National Institute of Health, among others. Dozens of employees of the federal court system also appeared on the list. Ramifications There are no doubt other high-profile subscribers caught up in the security lapse, along with ordinary users who now have reason to worry that AT&T might expose more of their iPad data to hackers. At the very least, AT&T exposed a very large and valuable cache of email addresses, VIP and otherwise. This is going to hurt the telecommunications company's already poor image with iPhone and iPad customers, and complicate its very profitable relationship with Apple. Exacerbating the situation is that AT&T has not yet notified customers of the breach, judging from the subscribers we and the security group contacted, despite being itself notified at least two days ago. It's unclear if AT&T has notified Apple of the breach. Then there's the question of whether any damage can be done using the ICC IDs. The Goatse Security member who contacted us was concerned that recent holes discovered in the GSM cell phone standard mean that it might be possible to spoof a device on the network or even intercept traffic using the ICC ID. Two other security experts we contacted were less confident in that assessment. Mobile security consultant and Nokia veteran Emmanuel Gadaix told us that while there have been "vulnerabilities in GSM crypto discovered over the years, none of them involve the ICC ID... as far as I know, there are no vulnerability or exploit methods involving the ICC ID." Another expert, white hat GSM hacker and University of Virginia computer science PhD Karsten Nohl, told us that while text-message and voice security in mobile phones is weak "data connections are typically well encrypted... the disclosure of the ICC-ID has no direct security consequences." But that didn't mean he thinks AT&T is off the hook: It's horrendous how customer data, specifically e-mail addresses, are negligently leaked by a large telco provider. We suspect many AT&T customers will agree. Update: The New York Times has emailed all staff suggesting they "turn off your access to the 3G network on your iPad until further notice" while the newspaper's engineers and security staff investigate the issue. Update: AT&T sent us a statement apologizing for the breach and downplaying the impact: "AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC IDS. The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device. This issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses. The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T. We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC IDS may have been obtained. We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologize to our customers who were impacted." From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jun 10 09:54:48 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2010 10:54:48 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Microsoft Secretly Installs Firefox Extension Through WU Message-ID: <2F6AFFF0-969F-413C-9D49-50868F099A09@infowarrior.org> Microsoft Secretly Installs Firefox Extension Through WU posted by Thom Holwerda on Thu 10th Jun 2010 00:08 UTC http://www.osnews.com/story/23436/Microsoft_Secretly_Installs_Firefox_Extension_Through_WU It's late here, but we're having election night, and the two leading parties are currently tied seat-wise, with a 10000-vote difference. Anyway, it gives me some time to cover a major problem: Microsoft is at it again. The company has pushed an update through Windows Update which silently, without user consent, installs two browser extensions - one for Internet Explorer, and one for Firefox. Ars Technica has done the legwork here, and it's actually pretty bad. This Tuesday, Redmond pushed out its usual batch of updates, and one of them relates to the Windows Live Toolbar, MSN Toolbar, and Bing Bar. Without asking the user, and without any indications, the update in question, KB982217, installs two browser extensions - one for Internet Explorer, one for Firefox. Since the update is related to these search toolbars (the MSN and Live ones are superseded by the Bing Toolbar), it's safe to assume affected users have one of these toolbars installed. They are available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, so it makes sense that only these two are affected. Ars did some digging: Since we could not find any official documentation from Microsoft, we checked the actual IE add-on and Firefox extension. Unfortunately, they were not terribly helpful; all we discovered was that the IE add-on is at version 3.0.126.0, so it has been around for a while, and that the Firefox extension is at version 1.0, so it's likely it was only released now. Both seem to be installed in "C:Program FilesMicrosoftSearch Enhancement PackSearch Helper." Inside, there is a file called "SEPsearchhelperie.dll" that is responsible for the IE add-on and a "firefoxextension" folder responsible for Firefox. Ars installed the update on a test system where the Windows Live Toolbar was installed for Internet Explorer only - yet, the Firefox extension was installed as well. This is very troubling, and as you can imagine, Firefox users are not particularly amused, nor is Mozilla. "We're in contact with Microsoft, and are looking into it," a Mozilla spokesperson told Ars Technica, "As far as we know at this time, there are no security implications to this add-on's background installation." Security issue or no, this is troubling on so many levels. First, an update description should properly list what is being altered and/or added to the system. Second, Firefox is not a Microsoft product, and is not updated via Windows Update, and as such, should not be tampered with. Third, if any of the toolbars in question is not installed for Firefox, the extensions should not be installed. Fourth, this is my computer. Just as much as I dislike Apple for pretending my iPhone is actually theirs, I dislike Microsoft for thinking my computer is theirs (okay I'm actually not affected - I use Linux). Microsoft needs to act quickly on this one, because this is totally unacceptable. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jun 10 10:56:57 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:56:57 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Oz gov to stop supporting AUSCERT Message-ID: <2063D584-F28A-4BC0-942C-2C627F62AE20@infowarrior.org> Aus gov shakes up cyberdefence strategy AusCERT: Dead By John Leyden ? Get more from this author Posted in Enterprise Security, 10th June 2010 14:45 GMT http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/10/aus_cyberdefence_strategy/ The Australian government has decided to stop supporting AusCERT in favour of a new computer emergency response team more focused on providing an early warning system for utilities, banks and other critical infrastructure firms. CERT Australia will take over from AusCERT in running frontline cyber-defence protection following the breakdown of negotiations between AusCERT and the government that lasted almost a year, The Australian reports. CERT Australia (previously known as GovCERT before it was given a new name and wider responsibilities) will also become the main point of contact with its counterparts around the world. Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland was allocated a A$6.2m ($5.2m) budget to bring together AusCERT, GovCERT (now CERT Australia) along with the only months old Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) in the Australian Department of Defence to form an unified front against hacker, cyber-spies and malware. Efforts to knit these groups together has seemingly been abandoned in favour of a new strategy that promotes CERT Australia to a pre-eminent role. AusCERT, which is based in the University of Queensland, draws most of its budget from private sector firms. Although the Australian government's decision means it will lose out on $250,000 per annum from government agencies subscriptions its director remains confident of its ability to continue. Jeremy Crowley, director of AusCERT and IT Services at UQ, told the Australian that its members can expect to enjoy business as usual. "We believe there is room for both teams to operate as CERT Australia has indicated it is primarily interested in helping protect critical infrastructure,? Crowley said. ?We hope CERT Australia won?t use taxpayer funds to duplicate the services of a not-for-profit organisation with a proven track record of delivering these services effectively for many years." The Australian's government change of strategy in fighting cybercrime was announced at the launch of a National Cyber Security Information Exchange in Sydney earlier on Thursday. McClelland said CERT Australia would part of the Attorney-General's department he runs, before going on to explain its role. "It must be a trusted broker of information for both the private sector and international internet community, while also being integrated with our national security and intelligence agencies," the minister explained. CERT Australia will be responsible for providing early warnings of attacks such as the Operation Aurora cyber-espionage assaults on Google and other hi-tech firms that relied on IE-based exploits. It will also has the job of providing mitigation advice. Its role has little or no bearing on Australia's controversial plans to mandate ISP-level filtering of porn and other "objectionable" content. ? From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jun 10 19:08:40 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:08:40 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Judge limits DHS laptop border searches Message-ID: June 10, 2010 4:00 AM PDT Judge limits DHS laptop border searches by Declan McCullagh http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20007315-38.html A federal judge has ruled that border agents cannot seize a traveler's laptop, keep in locked up for months, and examine it for contraband files without a warrant half a year later. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in the Northern District of California rejected the Obama administration's argument that no warrant was necessary to look through the electronic files of an American citizen who was returning home from a trip to South Korea. "The court concludes that June search required a warrant," White ruled on June 2, referring to a search of Andrew Hanson's computer that took place a year ago. Hanson arrived San Francisco International Airport in January 2009. The Justice Department invoked a novel argument--which White dubbed "unpersuasive"--claiming that while Hanson was able to enter the country, his laptop remained in a kind of legal limbo where the Bill of Rights did not apply. (The Fourth Amendment generally requires a warrant for searches.) "Until merchandise has cleared customs, it may not enter the United States," assistant U.S. attorney Owen Martikan argued. "The laptop never cleared customs and was maintained in government custody until it was searched..." This is not exactly a new dispute: two years ago, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection announced that it reserves the right to seize for an indefinite period of time any laptops that are taken across the border. Last year, the department reiterated that claim, saying laptops and electronic gadgetry can still be seized and held indefinitely. There's no requirement that they be returned to their owners after even six months or a year has passed, though supervisory approval is required if they're held for more than 15 days. The complete contents of a hard drive or memory card can be perused at length for evidence of lawbreaking of any kind, even if it's underpaying taxes or not paying parking tickets. In response, Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, introduced a bill that would require border agents to obtain a warrant or court order to hold such a device for more than 24 hours. Customs agents say that after Hanson was randomly selected for a secondary baggage examination, he became nervous. That led Customs agent Sheryl Edwards to ask for an examination of Hanson's laptop, a digital camera with memory card, two CD-ROMs, and two DVDs. That examination, customs agents say, showed one incriminating photograph: an adolescent girl covered with mud, standing on a beach, and not wearing any clothes. Edwards concluded that the image was illegal; Hanson was charged with transportation and possession of child pornography in September 2009. He has pleaded not guilty. For his part, Eric Chase, an attorney representing Hanson, acknowledged that an immediate search conducted at the border without a warrant is permissible. But police perusal of a hard drive six months later definitely is not, he said when asking the court to toss out the results of the June 2009 search. "As applied to border searches generally, agents, after taking their permissible look while at the border crossing itself, would be free to 'detain' electronic devices and conduct further examinations whenever and wherever they pleased as justified solely because their 'peek' exposed the computer's contents to law enforcement," Chase wrote. Customs agents also searched Hanson's laptop three times in February 2009, with the first search taking place about a week after he entered the country and turning up no evidence of child pornography. The second and third searches allegedly did. White allowed the results of those searches to be used as evidence, saying they were "justified as an extended border search supported by reasonable suspicion." A 2006 Police Blotter article reported that the Ninth Circuit, which sets precedents that are binding on San Francisco federal courts, ruled that random searches of laptops at the border without a search warrant is permissible. But the Ninth Circuit did not address what happens if the search takes place a month or half a year later. Excerpt from court ruling: The government argues that the February search was justified as an extended border search supported by reasonable suspicion...In contrast to a search conducted at the border, or its functional equivalent, an extended border search must be supported by "'reasonable suspicion' that the subject of the search was involved in criminal activity, rather than simply mere suspicion or no suspicion." In order to determine whether the search was supported by reasonable suspicion, the court examines the totality of the circumstances, such as the time and distance elapsed, whether there was a lapse in surveillance, and the diligence of law enforcement. Because the agents did not find contraband while the laptop was located at the border and, in light of the time and distance that elapsed before the search continued, the court concluded that the search should be analyzed as an extended border search. Given the passage of time between the January and February searches and the fact that the February search was not conduct(ed) at the border, or its functional equivalent, the court concludes that the February search should be analyzed under the extended border search doctrine and must be justified by reasonable suspicion. When the court examines the totality of the circumstances, including Officer Edwards' description of the Image, her observations that Hanson appeared nervous, the discovery of the condoms and the male-enhancement pills, and Hanson's statement that he had been working with children, the court concludes that the government has met its burden to show the February search was supported by reasonable suspicion. Accordingly, Hanson's motion is DENIED IN PART on this basis... The government also argues that because Officer Edwards properly seized the laptop, and because the laptop remained in law enforcement custody, she was entitled to conduct a more thorough search at a later time. However, the cases on which the government relies for this argument address the right to conduct a more thorough search of a container as a search incident to a valid arrest, another recognized exception to the warrant requirement... Hanson was not arrested on January 27, 2009, and for that reason the court finds the government's reliance on the "search incident to a valid arrest" line of cases to be inapposite. Accordingly, because the court concludes that June search required a warrant, and because it is undisputed that the search was conducted without a warrant, Hanson's motion is GRANTED IN PART on this basis. Declan McCullagh has covered the intersection of politics and technology for over a decade. E-mail Declan. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 11 08:58:08 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:58:08 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - OT: Abby Sunderland found and safe Message-ID: <72DF234B-51F7-46BE-B20A-D33F3A04729D@infowarrior.org> US teenage sailor Abby Sunderland found in Indian Ocean Page last updated at 09:51 GMT, Friday, 11 June 2010 10:51 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10291246.stm A 16-year-old US sailor who went missing while sailing solo around the world has been found safe and well. Abby Sunderland's yacht was spotted by an aerial search team in the southern Indian Ocean, midway between Australia and Africa. Three ships are on their way to pick her up - the first is expected to be with her in 24 hours. The teenager's family lost contact with her for some 20 hours, after she said she was caught in 30ft (9m) high waves. Shortly after contact was lost, at around 1300 GMT on Thursday, the yacht's emergency beacons were manually activated, more than 3,220km (2,000 miles) from the coasts of both Africa and Australia. A Qantas Airbus A330 search plane - scrambled from Perth early on Friday - spotted the teenager's boat, called Wild Eyes, and made contact with her. Team Abby spokesman William Bennett: Family "overjoyed that their daughter has been found" "Wild Eyes is upright but her rigging is down," her parents posted on her blog. "The weather conditions are abating. Radio communication was made and Abby reports that she is fine!" The authorities in Reunion Island, near Mauritius off eastern Africa, said they had also been in contact with the yacht, and had sent three boats in her direction - the first of which should reach her by Saturday. Record attempt Laurence Sunderland said his daughter would not be resuming her round-the-world attempt once she has been rescued, the AFP news agency reports. "We've got our Abigail back and the quest will be over," he said. "Knowing that she's alive and well means so much more to me than any sailing record. It's just a huge, huge relief." He and his wife had rejected criticism from some over their decision to allow her to make the attempt, saying she was prepared and mentally well-equipped to deal with the challenge. But veteran Australian sailor Ian Kiernan echoed the concerns of others that she would be sailing through the Indian Ocean when weather conditions would be at their most treacherous. "I don't know what she's doing in the Southern Ocean as a 16-year-old in the middle of winter," said Mr Kiernan, who himself has sailed solo around the world. "It's just foolhardy". Abby Sunderland, from Thousand Oaks, California, has been following in the footsteps of her brother Zac, who completed his own solo voyage around the globe in 2009 at the age of 17. She set sail from California in January, attempting to beat her brother's record and become the youngest person to complete the journey. She had to give up the goal of setting the record after stopping in April at Cape Town, South Africa, for repairs to her boat, although she later decided to continue the voyage. On Wednesday, the teenager had written in her blog that she had experienced several days of rough weather in which her boat "was rolling around like crazy". From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 11 09:47:39 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 10:47:39 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Oz gov may record *all* Internet user activity Message-ID: <880E5577-5161-439C-826E-86D464F56750@infowarrior.org> Govt may record users? web history, email data http://delimiter.com.au/2010/06/11/govt-may-record-users-web-history-email-data/ The Federal Government has confirmed it is considering a policy requiring Australian internet providers to retain precise data on how their users are using the internet, with the potential to include information on emails sent and ? reportedly ? their web browsing history. ?The Attorney-General?s Department has been looking at the European Directive on Data Retention, to consider whether such a regime is appropriate within Australia?s law enforcement and security context,? a spokesperson for the department confirmed via email today. ?It has consulted broadly with the telecommunications industry.? The spokesperson?s confirmation was also contained in a report by ZDNet.com.au (which broke this story), which stated that ISP industry sources had flagged the potential for the new regime to require ISPs to record each internet address (also known as URL) that an internet user visited. Delimiter has contacted spokespeople from major ISPs such as Telstra, Optus, iiNet, Internode and Adam Internet to ask for a response on the matter, as well as the Internet Industry Association, a group which represents the ISPs. The office Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and the office of Attorney-General Robert McLelland have also been contacted for comment on the matter. The European Directive on Data Retention (2006) requires communications providers to retain a number of categories of data relating to their users. Broadly speaking, they must retain data necessary to trace and identify the source, destination, date, type, time and duration of communications ? and even what communication equipment is being used by customers and the location of mobile transmissions. According to the directive, where internet access is concerned, this means the ISPs must retain the user ID of users, email addresses of senders and recipients of email, the date and time that users logged on and off from a service, and their IP address ? whether dynamic or static applied to their user ID. For telephone conversations, this means the number from which calls were placed and the number that received the call, the owner of the telephone service and similar data such as the time and date of the call?s commencement and completion. For mobile phone numbers, geographic location data would also be included. The EU directive requires that no data regarding the content of communications be included, however, and it has directives regarding privacy, including the fact that data would be retained for periods of not less than six months and not more than two years from the date of the communication. Any data collected is to be destroyed at the end of that period. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 11 20:07:30 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:07:30 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The Rise And Fall Of The RIAA Message-ID: The Rise And Fall Of The RIAA from the predicting-the-end dept We recently had a post questioning whether the RIAA's legal campaign was a success or not. It seemed like there was plenty of evidence that it has been an incredible failure. Separately, we had a post about Radiohead's Thom Yorke, suggesting that the major record labels were going out of business in a matter of months. While we felt that was a bit of an exaggeration, one of our commenters, Ccomp5950 compiled data on RIAA label sales, along with some helpful notes about what other factors were going on at the time... < -- > http://techdirt.com/articles/20100611/0203309776.shtml From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jun 12 06:26:01 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 07:26:01 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - WH Takes a Hard Line Against Leaks to Press Message-ID: Obama Takes a Hard Line Against Leaks to Press By SCOTT SHANE http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/us/politics/12leak.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print WASHINGTON ? Hired in 2001 by the National Security Agency to help it catch up with the e-mail and cellphone revolution, Thomas A. Drake became convinced that the government?s eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on failed programs while ignoring a promising alternative. He took his concerns everywhere inside the secret world: to his bosses, to the agency?s inspector general, to the Defense Department?s inspector general and to the Congressional intelligence committees. But he felt his message was not getting through. So he contacted a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. Today, because of that decision, Mr. Drake, 53, a veteran intelligence bureaucrat who collected early computers, faces years in prison on 10 felony charges involving the mishandling of classified information and obstruction of justice. The indictment of Mr. Drake was the latest evidence that the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks. In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions. His administration has taken actions that might have provoked sharp political criticism for his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was often in public fights with the press. Mr. Drake was charged in April; in May, an F.B.I. translator was sentenced to 20 months in prison for providing classified documents to a blogger; this week, the Pentagon confirmed the arrest of a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of passing a classified video of an American military helicopter shooting Baghdad civilians to the Web site Wikileaks.org. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has renewed a subpoena in a case involving an alleged leak of classified information on a bungled attempt to disrupt Iran?s nuclear program that was described in ?State of War,? a 2006 book by James Risen. The author is a reporter for The New York Times. And several press disclosures since Mr. Obama took office have been referred to the Justice Department for investigation, officials said, though it is uncertain whether they will result in criminal cases. As secret programs proliferated after the 2001 terrorist attacks, Bush administration officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, were outspoken in denouncing press disclosures about the C.I.A.?s secret prisons and brutal interrogation techniques, and the security agency?s eavesdropping inside the United States without warrants. In fact, Mr. Drake initially drew the attention of investigators because the government believed he might have been a source for the December 2005 article in The Times that revealed the wiretapping program. Describing for the first time the scale of the Bush administration?s hunt for the sources of The Times article, former officials say 5 prosecutors and 25 F.B.I. agents were assigned to the case. The homes of three other security agency employees and a Congressional aide were searched before investigators raided Mr. Drake?s suburban house in November 2007. By then, a series of articles by Siobhan Gorman in The Baltimore Sun had quoted N.S.A. insiders about the agency?s billion-dollar struggles to remake its lagging technology, and panicky intelligence bosses spoke of a ?culture of leaking.? Though the inquiries began under President Bush, it has fallen to Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to decide whether to prosecute. They have shown no hesitation, even though Mr. Drake is not accused of disclosing the N.S.A.?s most contentious program, that of eavesdropping without warrants. The Drake case epitomizes the politically charged debate over secrecy and democracy in a capital where the watchdog press is an institution even older than the spy bureaucracy, and where every White House makes its own calculated disclosures of classified information to reporters. Steven Aftergood, head of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, who has long tracked the uneasy commerce in secrets between government officials and the press, said Mr. Drake might have fallen afoul of a bipartisan sense in recent years that leaks have gotten out of hand and need to be deterred. By several accounts, Mr. Obama has been outraged by some leaks, too. ?I think this administration, like every other administration, is driven to distraction by leaking,? Mr. Aftergood said. ?And Congress wants a few scalps, too. On a bipartisan basis, they want these prosecutions to proceed.? Though he is charged under the Espionage Act, Mr. Drake appears to be a classic whistle-blower whose goal was to strengthen the N.S.A.?s ability to catch terrorists, not undermine it. His alleged revelations to Ms. Gorman focused not on the highly secret intelligence the security agency gathers but on what he viewed as its mistaken decisions on costly technology programs called Trailblazer, Turbulence and ThinThread. ?The Baltimore Sun stories simply confirmed that the agency was ineptly managed in some respects,? said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and author of ?The Secret Sentry,? a history of the N.S.A. Such revelations hardly damaged national security, Mr. Aid said. Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that defends whistle-blowers, said the Espionage Act, written in 1917 for the pursuit of spies, should not be used to punish those who expose government missteps. ?What gets lost in the calculus is that there?s a huge public interest in the disclosure of waste, fraud and abuse,? Ms. Radack said. ?Hiding it behind alleged classification is not acceptable.? Yet the government asserts that Mr. Drake was brazen in mishandling and sharing the classified information he had sworn to protect. He is accused of taking secret N.S.A. reports home, setting up an encrypted e-mail account to send tips to Ms. Gorman, collecting more data for her from unwitting agency colleagues, and then obstructing justice by deleting and shredding documents. Gabriel Schoenfeld, author of ?Necessary Secrets,? a book proposing criminal penalties not just for leakers but for journalists who print classified material, said that whatever his intentions, Mr. Drake must be punished. ?The system is plagued by leaks,? said Mr. Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative research organization. ?When you catch someone, you should make an example of them.? A spokesman for the Justice Department, Matthew A. Miller, said the Drake case was not intended to deter government employees from reporting problems. ?Whistle-blowers are the key to many, many department investigations ? we don?t retaliate against them, we encourage them,? Mr. Miller said. ?This indictment was brought on the merits, and nothing else.? Though Mr. Obama began his presidency with a pledge of transparency, his aides have warned of a crackdown on leakers. In a November speech, the top lawyer for the intelligence agencies, Robert S. Litt, decried ?leaks of classified information that have caused specific and identifiable losses of intelligence capabilities.? He promised action ?in the coming months.? Prosecutions like those of Mr. Drake; the F.B.I. translator, Shamai Leibowitz; and potentially Specialist Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst, who has not yet been charged, have only a handful of precedents in American history. Among them are the cases of Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department consultant who gave the Pentagon Papers to The Times in 1971, and Samuel L. Morison, a Navy analyst who passed satellite photographs to Jane?s Defense Weekly in 1984. Under President Bush, no one was convicted for disclosing secrets directly to the press. But Lawrence A. Franklin, a Defense Department official, served 10 months of home detention for sharing classified information with officials of a pro-Israel lobbying group, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., a top aide to Mr. Cheney, was convicted of perjury for lying about his statements to journalists about an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame Wilson. The F.B.I. has opened about a dozen investigations a year in recent years of unauthorized disclosures of classified information, according to a bureau accounting to Congress in 2007. But most such inquiries are swiftly dropped, usually because hundreds of government employees had access to the leaked information and identifying the source seems impossible. Often even a determined hunt fails to find the source, and agencies sometimes oppose prosecution for fear that even more secrets will be disclosed at a trial. By Justice Department rules, investigators may seek to question a journalist about his sources only after exhausting other options and with the approval of the attorney general. Subpoenas have been issued for reporters roughly once a year over the last two decades, according to Justice Department statistics, but such actions are invariably fought by news organizations and spark political debate over the First Amendment. The reporter in the Drake case, Ms. Gorman, who now works at The Wall Street Journal, was never contacted by the Justice Department, according to two people briefed on the investigation. With Mr. Drake?s own statements to the F.B.I. in five initial months of cooperation, along with his confiscated computers and documents, investigators believed they could prove their case without her. Prosecutors further simplified their task by choosing to charge Mr. Drake not with transferring classified material to Ms. Gorman but with a different part of the espionage statute: illegal ?retention? of classified information. An Air Force veteran who drove an electric car, Mr. Drake has long worked on the boundary between technology and management. After years as an N.S.A. contractor, he was hired as an employee and turned up for his first day of work on Sept. 11, 2001. His title at the time hints at the baffling layers of N.S.A. bureaucracy, with more than 30,000 employees at the Fort Meade, Md., headquarters alone: ?Senior Change Leader/Chief, Change Leadership & Communications Office, Signals Intelligence Directorate.? Chris Frappier, a close friend since high school in Vermont, described Mr. Drake then as fascinated by technology and international affairs, socially awkward, with ?an incredible sense of duty and honor.? When he read the indictment, said Mr. Frappier, now a legal investigator in Vermont, he recognized his old friend. ?It?s just so Tom,? Mr. Frappier said. ?He saw something he thought was wrong, and he thought it had to be stopped.? According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Drake became a champion of ThinThread, a pilot technology program designed to filter the flood of telephone, e-mail and Web traffic that the N.S.A. collects. He believed it offered effective privacy protections for Americans, too. But agency leaders rejected ThinThread and chose instead a rival program called Trailblazer, which was later judged an expensive failure and abandoned. Mr. Drake and some allies kept pressing the case for ThinThread but were rebuffed, according to former agency officials. ?It was a pretty sharp battle within the agency,? said a former senior intelligence official. ?The ThinThread guys were a very vocal minority.? One former N.S.A. consultant recalled ?alarmist memos and e-mails? from Mr. Drake, including one that declared of the agency: ?The place is almost completely corrupted.? Mr. Drake, whom friends describe as a dogged, sometimes obsessive man, took his complaints about ThinThread and other matters to a series of internal watchdogs. He developed a close relationship with intelligence committee staff members, including Diane S. Roark, who tracked the security agency for the House Intelligence Committee. She discussed with Mr. Drake the possibility of contacting Ms. Gorman, according to people who know Ms. Roark. The subsequent investigation, which included a search of Ms. Roark?s house, devastated Mr. Drake, his wife ? herself an N.S.A. contractor ? and their teenage son. ?For Tom Drake, a man who loves his country and has devoted most of his life to serving it, this is particularly painful,? said his lawyer, James Wyda, the federal public defender for Maryland. ?We feel that the government is wrong on both the facts alleged and the principles at stake in such a prosecution.? Forced in 2008 out of his job at the National Defense University, where the security agency had assigned him, Mr. Drake took a teaching job at Strayer University. He lost that job after the indictment and now works at an Apple computer store. He spends his evenings, friends say, preparing his defense and pondering the problems of N.S.A., which still preoccupy him. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jun 12 14:58:25 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:58:25 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - PrivacyCampTO: Privacy for everyone! Message-ID: <5A047ABF-CEAB-4724-BCBD-5AA34BD7D7CC@infowarrior.org> PrivacyCampTO: Privacy for everyone! Ryerson University, June 19, 2010 PrivacyCampTO will convene participants from all walks of life, including educators, techies, policymakers, students, academics, librarians, and casual users to talk about privacy issues and solutions in the age of social media ubiquity. We will look at privacy issues relating to everyday users and everyday situations both practically and theoretically. In other words, privacy for everyone. So, come to discuss privacy policy, learn how to protect yourself on Facebook or share your online privacy experiences (positive or negative). We're aiming to have a friendly, informal and accessible event. Everyone is invited to participate or present and we encourage those presenting to do a more informal led- conversation or speed geek in lieu of a PowerPoint. Registration: http://privacycampto.eventbrite.org more info: http://privacycampto.org interested in presenting/leading a conversation? add your topic here: http://barcamp.org/PrivacyCampTOTopics contact: kate raynes-goldie kate at atmosphereindustries.com PrivacyCampTO thanks the the EDGE Lab at Ryerson, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and GRAND NCE for their generous support/sponsorship. Jason Nolan, PhD Director - Experiential Design and Gaming Environments (EDGE) Lab Assistant Professor - School of Early Childhood Education Ryerson University 350 Victoria Street, Room KHS 350 Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5B 2K3 ph: +1-416-979-5000 x7030 fax: +1-416-979-5239 From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jun 12 19:14:55 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:14:55 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Crypto in the Cloud Message-ID: <1F361EEB-6873-4A7E-B4AB-18194E37AECF@infowarrior.org> Friday, June 11, 2010 Computing with Secrets, but Keeping them Safe A cryptographic method could see cloud services work with sensitive data without ever decrypting it. By Tom Simonite http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=25537 A novel technique could see future Web services work with sensitive data without ever being able to read it. Several implementations of a mathematical proof unveiled just last year will allow cryptographers to start making the proposal more practical. In 2009 Craig Gentry of IBM published a cryptographic proof that was that rare thing: a true breakthrough. He showed that it was possible to add and multiply encrypted data to produce a result that--when decrypted--reveals the result of performing the same operations on the original, unencrypted data. It's like being able to answer a question without knowing what the question is. Called "fully homomorphic encryption," it has been dubbed the holy grail of cryptography. Addition and multiplication are the building blocks of computation, and being able to compute data without decrypting it would allow new levels of security. For example, someone could send an encrypted database of medical records to a cloud computing provider, secure in the knowledge that they could use the service to work on the data as usual without ever decrypting it. The results of a search could be sent to the data's owner, who could decode it on his own system. The same approach could secure webmail or online office suites. Nigel Smart, professor of cryptology at Bristol University, in the U.K., and collaborator Frederik Vercauteren, a researcher at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Belgium, have now reworked the original proposal into a version that can be implemented and tested. "We've taken Gentry's scheme and we made it simpler," says Smart. While Gentry's original scheme encoded everything in matrices and vectors, Smart and Vercauteren instead use integers and polynomials. "That makes it both easier to understand, and to work with," says Smart, "you can actually compute with it and do real calculations." The original scheme's reliance on large matrices and vectors made it impractical because of the complexity of working with every element of the matrices at each step, and the fact that their complexity grows significantly with each extra operation on the data. Smart and Vercauteren's rewrite of the scheme sidesteps that enough to allow testing of actual implementations of Gentry's idea on a desktop computer. "We do implement it, and we can actually encrypt bits and add and multiple a little bit," says Smart. "We can do about thirty sequential operations." The usefulness of the scheme is still limited by the fact that, as more operations are performed, successive encrypted answers degrade, becoming "dirty," as Smart puts it. That means the current version isn't truly fully homomorphic, since it can't perform any arbitrary calculation. Gentry has developed a way to periodically clean the data to enable such a system to self-correct and be fully homomorphic. However, using it requires the system to be capable of a certain number of operations, currently beyond Smart's implementation. Gentry and his IBM colleague Shai Helevi have been experimenting with their own variant of Smart's approach, he says, and should announce results of their improvements to it later in the summer. At the moment, Smart is adjusting the system's parameters to find out what works best. "For example, generating the keys was very slow; now we can do that better," he says. "It's like tuning a racing car; you tweak the engine and discover the tires need adjusting." Predicting when that tuning will result in a technique ready for practical use is still impossible, says Smart, "but it will now run, and for people to be actually playing with a completely new method within one year of it first being presented is incredibly fast for cryptography." By contrast, he points out, a technique known as elliptic curve cryptography that is now used to secure mobile devices like the BlackBerry was first presented in 1985 but not implemented practically until around five years later. Eleanor Rieffel, a senior research scientist at FX Palo Alto Laboratory, a research center at Fuji Xerox, agrees. "It has progressed fast, but because it's such a new area nobody really knows what route to take," she says. "These early implementations will let people experiment and try out ideas." Meanwhile, despite the uncertainty over the idea's future development, interest from the IT world in any progress will remain high, says Rieffel. "There's more and more interest in being able to store data offsite with another company, or at a different site within a company, so this has a lot of attractions." It may even be that more powerful, but still limited implementations find use for specific applications, she adds. Copyright Technology Review 2010. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jun 13 16:08:19 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:08:19 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Keystroke 'sounds' can be interpreted Message-ID: (So does this mean we can consider iTunes to be a security tool now? *g* --rick) Loose clicks sink ships Computer security: The sounds of individual keystrokes can be distinguished, making it possible to eavesdrop on computer users Jun 10th 2010 http://www.economist.com/node/16295574 CLATTERING keyboards may seem the white noise of the modern age, but they betray more information than unwary typists realise. Simply by analysing audio recordings of keyboard clatter, computer scientists can now reconstruct an accurate transcript of what was typed?including passwords. And in contrast with many types of computer espionage, the process is simple, requiring only a cheap microphone and a desktop computer. Such snooping is possible because each key produces a characteristic click, shaped by its position on the keyboard, the vigour and hand position of the typist, and the type of keyboard used. But past attempts to decipher keyboard sounds were only modestly successful, requiring a training session in which the computer matched a known transcript to an audio recording of each key being struck. Thus schooled, the software could still identify only 80% of the characters in a different transcript of the same typist on the same machine. Furthermore, each new typist or keyboard required a fresh transcript and training session, limiting the method?s appeal to would-be hackers. Now, in a blow to acoustic security, Doug Tygar and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have published details of an approach that reaches 96% accuracy, even without a labelled training transcript. The new approach employs methods developed for speech-recognition software to group together all the similar-sounding keystrokes in a recording, generating an alphabet of clicks. The software tentatively assigns each click a letter based on its frequency, then tests the message created by this assignment using statistical models of the English language. For example, certain letters or words are more likely to occur together?if an unknown keystroke follows a ?t?, it is much more likely to be an ?h? than an ?x?. Similarly, the words ?for example? make likelier bedfellows than ?fur example?. In a final refinement, the researchers employed a method many students would do well to deploy on term papers: automated spellchecking. By repeatedly revising unlikely or incorrect letter assignments, Dr Tygar?s software extracts sense from sonic chaos. That said, the method does have one limitation: in order to apply the language model, at least five minutes of the recorded typing had to be in standard English (though in principle any systematic language or alphabet would work). But once those requirements are met, the program can decode anything from epic prose to randomised, ten-character passwords. This sort of acoustic analysis might sound like the exclusive province of spies and spooks, but according to Dr Tygar, such attacks are not as esoteric as you might expect. He says it is quite simple to find the instructions needed to build a parabolic or laser microphone on the internet. You could just point one from outside towards an office window to make a recording. And as he points out, would-be eavesdroppers might not even need their own recording equipment, as laptop computers increasingly come equipped with built-in microphones that could be hijacked. To protect against these sonic incursions, Dr Tygar suggests a simple remedy: turn up the radio. His computers were less successful at parsing recordings made in noisy rooms. Ultimately, though, more sophisticated recording gear could overcome even background noise, rendering any typed text vulnerable. Dr Tygar therefore recommends that typed passwords be phased out, to be replaced with biometric scans or multiple types of authorisation that combine a password with some form of silent verification (clicking on a pre-chosen picture in a selection of images, for example). Loose lips may still sink ships, but his research demonstrates that an indiscreet keystroke could do just as much damage. The Economist Technology Quarterly | Technology Quarterly From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jun 14 13:43:56 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:43:56 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - ISP Attempt To Block File-Sharing Ends in Epic Failure Message-ID: ISP Attempt To Block File-Sharing Ends in Epic Failure Written by enigmax on June 14, 2010 http://torrentfreak.com/isp-attempts-to-block-file-sharing-ends-results-in-epic-failure-100614/ In response to the country?s ?3 strikes? Hadopi legislation, last week a French ISP began offering a service to block file-sharing on customer connections for ?just? 2 euros per month. It didn?t take long for awful vulnerabilities in the system to be found which breached not only the privacy of subscribers, but exposed them to new security threats. France?s big, bad, scary Hadopi legislation and the systematic tracing, monitoring, reporting and disconnecting of file-sharers is all but here, so it seems there?s no better time for other companies to start making money from it. Last week saw French ISP Orange take the opportunity to start providing a service which, at least on the surface, is designed to put the minds of subscribers at rest. For a 2 euro per month payment, Orange is offering a service which ?allows you to control the activity of computers connected to your internet line, from downloading ?illegally? using peer-to-peer networks. You can protect up to three computers connected to the same internet line.? The software, which is Windows-only, runs in the background and utilizes a blacklist maintained and updated by Orange. Precisely what is on that blacklist remains a secret. ?Our solution is intended primarily for parents who want to make sure their children do nothing illegal on P2P networks,? the company said in a statement to French media last week while adding that just because the software is running, it doesn?t mean that users are fully protected against legal action under Hadopi. History tells us that whenever a company gets involved in anti-piracy action, they leave themselves open to being probed. Several anti-piracy companies and groups have seen their systems examined and even hacked over the years, and Orange is no different. Bluetouff has documented his findings on the Orange system and they are pretty surprising. Using WireShark to sniff the output of the software on his location network, Bluetouff was able to identify an IP address used by the software to obtain its updates. ?The software communicates with a remote server, a Java servlet actually located on the ip 195.146.235.67,? he explains. Nothing too out of the ordinary there ? except that all information is not only being transmitted in the clear but all information on that server is public (via http://195.146.235.67/status), meaning that every user had their IP addresses exposed to the public. But it doesn?t stop there. Whoever set up the security on the server admin panel didn?t do a very good job. The username was set to ?admin? and the password set to ?admin? too. This morning that gaping hole was still open. TorrentFreak is informed that people have accessed the server and have discovered that it?s possible to send malware to anyone using the software which makes a bit of a joke out of Orange when it claims: ?The software runs in the background to ensure your safety without disrupting the important tasks that you perform? ?People don?t know whether to laugh or cry,? Astrid Girardeau from TheInternets.fr told TorrentFreak. ?Because it is a new Hadopi fail. And because, Christine Albanel, the ex-Minister of Culture, is now the executive of communication, for? Orange.? From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jun 14 19:57:37 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:57:37 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - More Cyberwar Hype: Gov't Fear Mongering To Get More Control Over The Network Message-ID: <3525EC13-CEC7-4444-8BCC-892DBB1BC5EE@infowarrior.org> More Cyberwar Hype: Gov't Fear Mongering To Get More Control Over The Network from the where's-the-evidence? dept http://techdirt.com/articles/20100611/1818399791.shtml We've been discussing the nature of the hype around the concept of a "cyberwar." There still has been no credible evidence presented that any such thing exists. There certainly has been computer based espionage. And there have been various vandalism attempts. But that's hardly a "war" and doesn't amount to all that much. But politicians and defense contractors have been playing up a few stories of vandalism to make it sound like foreign hackers are going to shut down critical services. And journalists are eating it up. Take, for example, a recent MSNBC blog post, that describes the following "scenario": Imagine this scenario: Estonia, a NATO member, is cut off from the Internet by cyber attackers who besiege the country's bandwidth with a devastating denial of service attack. Then, the nation's power grid is attacked, threatening economic disruption and even causing loss of life as emergency services are overwhelmed. As international outcry swells, outside researchers determine the attack is being sponsored by a foreign government and being directed from a military base. Desperate and outgunned in tech resources, Estonia invokes Article 5 of the NATO Treaty -- an attack against one member nation is an attack against all. It requests an immediate response from its military allies: Bomb the attacker's command-and-control headquarters to stop the punishing cyber attack. Now, the U.S. government is faced with a chilling question: Should it get dragged into a shooting war by a cyber attack on an ally? Or should it decline and threaten the fiber of the NATO alliance? About half this fictional scenario occurred in 2007, when Estonian government and financial Web sites were crippled by a cyber attack during a dispute with Russia. That incident never escalated to this hypothetic level, however: The source of the attack was unclear, physical harm did not occur and Estonia never invoked Article 5. I'd say that's a lot less than "half" of the scenario. Basically, there was a denial of service attack. It's not good, but it happens, and it's hardly a "war." No power grid was attacked. No one was harmed. People and businesses were certainly inconvenienced, but that's not the same thing. It's not war. But, adding in the hypotheticals, suddenly the "reality" that never happened seems so much closer. And then there's NPR. It recently ran a whole long article about cyberwar that repeatedly suggests that the way to deal with this is to solve the "attribution problem" so that everyone online can be identified. Privacy? Anonymity? Not important, because of this threat -- even though no one can provide any proof actually exists. The NPR piece uses Mike McConnell as a key source, highlighting (as everyone does) his former public service positions: former director of the National Security Agency and later the director of national intelligence. What NPR leaves out? Oh, that McConnell is now a Vice President at defense contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton -- a firm that recently scored contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars around this whole bogus cyber war threat. Wouldn't you think that a news organization like NPR would at least mention that whopping conflict of interest? It doesn't. Instead, it lets McConnell go on and on about his favorite idea: re-architecting the internet to get rid of anonymity: Security experts focus on the "attribution problem" -- the challenge of identifying and tracking down the source of a cyberattack. Under current conditions, cybercrime, cyber-espionage, and cyberattacks can be directed remotely, with the perpetrator's identity and location a secret. This totally overhypes how much of a problem "attribution" really is. If people want to figure out a way to be anonymous, they'll do so. Worst case, they hijack someone else's line and attack that way. Attribution is not the issue. Having reasonable security is. And that doesn't require taking away anonymity or changing the nature of the internet. "One side couldn't attack the other side without the side being attacked knowing who it is and from where it came," says retired Vice Adm. Mike McConnell, a former director of the National Security Agency and later the director of national intelligence. McConnell argues that deterrence is needed to prevent countries today from waging cyberwar on each other. An attack on U.S. computer networks could knock out power grids, telecommunications, transportation and banking systems in a matter of seconds. Note, yet again, the lack of a mention of his current job. Note also no explanation of why any critical infrastructure would be connected to the internet? Also, there's no mention of how serious this threat really is. After all, we currently do have this so-called "attribution" problem, and based on other fear mongering reports, there are tens of thousands of "cyberwarriors" conducting attacks around the globe. And we haven't heard of a single case of such an attack knocking any of those things offline. Yes, there have been temporary denial of service attacks that blocked some internet sites. But that's not the same thing. Such an attack could be deterred if the attacking country knew it would bring immediate retaliation. But first it would be necessary to attribute the attack to someone. "Some level of confidence that you know from where a transaction originated is a requirement," McConnell says. Except that's not true. In pretty much every case of such hacking/DDoS attempts, people have been pretty quick to figure out where they're really originating from. No one actually seems confused by that -- and, again, if the lack of such attribution means more attacks, why aren't there more attacks now? McConnell highlighted the "attribution problem" in a recent interview with NPR. He advocates "re-engineering the Internet" to make more transactions there traceable. "There is a need for investment in technology that would allow you to achieve a level of attribution," McConnell says, "[so you could know] who's engaged in this transaction." Why? He doesn't say. He just tells NPR so, and NPR says ok. At least NPR quotes a few people are are skeptical of the fix, but no one who questions either the actual size of the problem or why NPR is letting McConnell spin the story for his employer's benefit, without even the most basic level of disclosure. And, of course, with all this fear mongering going on in the press -- a very high percentage of which you can trace back to McConnell -- Congress is eager to act. It's put together a new "cybersecurity" bill that will give the White House the power to declare a "cyber emergency" and step in and take control over certain "assets." It will also involve creating an "Office of Cyberspace Policy." Yes, we'll soon have a Cyber Czar. I thought we already had an Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House. We need a separate Cyberspace office too? From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jun 14 21:52:17 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:52:17 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - FTC approves box office futures trading Message-ID: (Of course, MPAA was against it.....-rick) latimes.com/business/la-fi-0615-ct-futures-20100615,0,6162556.story latimes.com Federal regulators approve investment vehicle to allow box-office futures trading The move comes despite the movie industry's strong opposition to the idea of letting investors bet on how films will perform in theaters. By Nathaniel Popper and Ben Fritz, Los Angeles Times June 15, 2010 Reporting from New York and Los Angeles Despite opposition from the major Hollywood studios, federal regulators voted 3 to 2 on Monday to approve an investment vehicle that will allow professional traders to bet on the ticket sales that a movie generates during its opening weekend. The company that proposed the vehicle, Veriana, already won approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for the exchange on which these contracts will be traded ? the Trend Exchange ? but it needed the commission to sign off on a contract to allow traders to begin placing positions. The idea of betting on future box-office receipts has faced vociferous opposition from the movie industry, led by the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which has said the contracts would be vulnerable to manipulation and could even hurt how movies perform in theaters. The MPAA has supported pending legislation that could ban any trading in box-office futures as part of Congress' financial reform bill. The Senate has approved such legislation, but it will need to be approved by the House to make it into the final financial reform package. After the Trend Exchange contract was approved, Veriana Chief Executive Rob Swagger harshly criticized both the MPAA and Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), who proposed the legislation banning box-office futures. "This is probably the best handout that members of Congress have given to Hollywood in years," Swagger said in a conference call. "It reeks of special interest." Swagger said he would go to Washington on Thursday to begin lobbying against the legislation, but he was also confident that an exclusion for his company could be grandfathered in if the bill is passed. Swagger said Veriana hoped to launch the first contract this summer. In its application to the commission, Veriana proposed a contract for "Takers," a thriller from Sony Pictures set to be released Aug. 20 starring Zoe Saldana and Hayden Christensen. A contract on the Trend Exchange would begin trading four weeks before opening day and would close out after the opening weekend based on the box-office returns reported by Rentrak. Veriana and its supporters have argued that a box-office futures contract could allow movie industry participants to hedge their investment in case a movie doesn't perform up to expectations. "Maybe a star will say, 'If a movie doesn't perform the way I want it to perform, I want to make sure I can protect my downside,' " Swagger said. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission in its decision wrote that a movie could be considered a commodity, and thus was eligible for a futures contract. "A right or interest in movie revenue events is little different from a right or interest in a company's earnings per share, a merger and acquisition between two companies, the release of major economic indicators or other events with economic or commercial significance," the commission wrote. But two of the five commissioners wrote dissenting opinions, based in large part on their definition of a commodity. Opening weekend box-office sales, they argued, simply don't fit the bill. "Unless some sensible judgment is exercised, we could approve terrorism contracts ? or contracts on the likelihood of UFOs hitting the White House," one of the commissioners, Bart Chilton, wrote in his dissent. "Each of these events could have economic consequences, but it is hardly appropriate under the [Commodity Exchange] Act to deem them 'commodities.' " In a follow-up interview, Chilton added that he was particularly concerned about the ability of studios to manipulate the price of a future through marketing and other decisions, which he said was very different from existing futures contracts related to agriculture and other products. "It's the first time in the [commission's] history where one entity controls the product," he said, referring to the studio that releases a film. "If you're a corn producer, it doesn't matter what you do on your farm, it won't affect all U.S. corn production." This echoed the opposition that the MPAA and other industry groups have expressed in recent weeks. After the contract was approved, the MPAA, which represent the six major movie studios, expressed its dismay and said it hoped that legislation would overrule the decision. "These proposed contracts fail to demonstrate that they serve the public purpose futures contracts should serve," MPAA Interim Chief Executive Bob Pisano said. "We support banning them as the Senate bill does and hope that the final bill approved by Congress and signed by President Obama retains the prohibition." The MPAA has worked with other groups including the Independent Film and Television Alliance, the National Assn. of Theater Owners and the Directors Guild of America. If the legislation is approved, it would be only the second type of product for which futures contract are legally prohibited, along with onions. Another company that wants to market box-office futures, the Cantor Exchange, is awaiting approval of its own contracts. The commission is set to rule on those contracts within the next month. Whereas the Trend Exchange will be available only to professional traders, with a minimum trade of $5,000, the Cantor Exchange is marketing itself toward retail investors. Chilton said he expected that the commission would also approve Cantor Fitzgerald's proposed box-office futures, despite slight differences in how they would work. "I think if things are going to change," he said, "it's going to come from Congress." nathaniel.popper at latimes.com ben.fritz at latimes.com From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jun 15 12:15:49 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:15:49 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - FCC releases nationwide PSBN capacity analysis Message-ID: <6D061545-479F-431F-84C9-734ACE87206F@infowarrior.org> Endorsing this paper are Dave Farber, Dale Hatfield, Stagg Newman, Ed Thomas, and Bob Powers, all former FCC Chief Technologists or FCC OET Chiefs. The paper is at http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-298799A1.pdf FCC RELEASES COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS ON NETWORK CAPACITY FOR NATIONWIDE MOBILE PUBLIC SAFETY BROADBAND NETWORK Washington, D.C. -- The Federal Communications Commission today released a comprehensive white paper which provides the capacity analysis behind the National Broadband Plan recommendations for the deployment and operation of a nationwide 4G wireless public safety network that allows first responders to seamlessly communicate across geographies and agencies, regardless of devices. The white paper, titled: ?The Public Safety Nationwide Interoperable Broadband Network, A New Model For Capacity, Performance and Cost?, shows that the 10 MHz of dedicated spectrum currently allocated to public safety will provide the capacity and performance necessary for day-to-day communications and serious emergency situations. One study cited in the white paper shows that 10 MHz of spectrum can yield the same capacity as over 160 MHz if the correct technology, architecture, and devices are used. As part of this analysis, the FCC examined two real life events, the Minneapolis Bridge Collapse and Hurricane Ike hitting Houston, and additional empirical data which supports this conclusion. ?Our goal is to bring true interoperable mobile broadband communications to America?s first responders,? said Jamie Barnett, Chief of the FCC?s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (PSHSB). ?The FCC study shows how we can maximize capacity, performance, reliability and resiliency of public safety broadband communications even in the most extraordinary emergencies when life-saving response efforts are underway and communications demands are at their peak.? For the worst emergencies, the FCC has devised an innovative concept of priority access and roaming across the commercial broadband wireless spectrum that will make at least 50 or 60 MHz of additional spectrum immediately available to public safety. The white paper describes how 10, 20 or even 30 MHz of additional dedicated spectrum may not be sufficient to support public safety broadband communications in a major emergency, and how the priority access and roaming exceeds the public safety spectrum that would otherwise be available. Moreover, it provides public safety with dependability and back up support, which does not exist with a purely dedicated network. Barnett noted, ?The key is capacity. Spectrum is only one factor. This plan provides extraordinary capacity to public safety, first with a dedicated network, backed with first-in-line privileges for public safety. This plan is like providing public safety with its own expandable, high speed lane, and it is a cost- effective investment in a national asset. Merely allocating an additional 10 MHz to public safety would be like building a separate, stand-alone highway system, and one so expensive that it would not even reach every community in America for years.? From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jun 15 12:40:34 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:40:34 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - USCYBERCOM: The Need for a Combatant Command versus a Subunified Command Message-ID: <0AC58972-6A62-4434-847D-32BA37B4C54D@infowarrior.org> (PDF @ the URL below) USCYBERCOM: The Need for a Combatant Command versus a Subunified Command By David M. Hollis Lieutenant Colonel David M. Hollis, USAR, is a Joint Plans Officer with U.S. Strategic Command and a Senior Policy Analyst with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) is a subunified command under United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM). It was scheduled for an October/ November 2009 initial operating capability (currently delayed) and an October 2010 full operational capability. There are some excellent reasons why the Secretary of Defense chose to initiate a subunified warfighting command for the cyberspace domain, but the situation facing the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Federal Government will require USCYBERCOM to develop into a full combatant command (COCOM) in the next 5 years. < -- > http://www.ndu.edu/press/USCYBERCOM.html From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jun 15 12:42:41 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:42:41 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The Social Sciences and Innovations in Gaming Message-ID: <73AC1D50-9531-49EF-A73B-89F8E21D3736@infowarrior.org> The Social Sciences and Innovations in Gaming By Margaret M. McCown Dr. Margaret M. McCown is an Associate Research Fellow in the Center for Applied Strategic Learning at the National Defense University. http://www.ndu.edu/press/innovations-in-gaming.html This is a fascinating time to be a gamer, particularly one developing policy games. The types of problems to be gamed, the technical support available to do so, and the importance of exercises? findings all seem imbued with unusual potential and urgency. The security challenges that we capture and present in strategic games are increasingly characterized by transnational, networked, and multilevel domestic, national, and international factors, all of which require new or, at least, sharpened tools to represent and assess. At the same time, a range of new tools, from distributed computer gaming systems to virtual reality, has become available. This article argues, however, that for practitioners writing virtually any game, the social sciences?economics, political science, and sociology?constitute the single most important source of both substantive theory and methodological insight. The simple explanation behind this assertion is that almost all strategic level policy problems are also social science problems; they concern how actors, whether individuals, groups, bureaucracies, social movements, or nations, make calculated decisions with respect to their interests and environment, construct social institutions and rules to further those goals, and compete for goods allocated in ways influenced by all of the above. This article briefly highlights some ways in which social scientists have theorized and tested hypotheses about how and why actors make and break rules, and the relevance of these efforts to gaming. Game Theory Is Not a Theory of Gaming Game theory is, of course, the social science tool mostly widely associated with gaming. Game theory is not a theory of wargaming, policy gaming, or strategic gaming, but rather a tool of applied mathematics used widely across the social sciences. If one is writing and executing tabletop exercises, one is, in fact, doing almost the opposite of game theory?but it is useful to review the discipline nonetheless, for its approach yields concepts useful to gamers in both their parsimony and generalizability. Game theorists create mathematical models of interdependent decisionmaking. These models represent how rational players make calculated decisions, anticipating other players? reactions on the basis of their preferences that yield certain outcomes. In other words, a game is some set of rules, giving a group of players choices that result in different payoffs. The ?game? is for players to determine the choice that gets them the biggest payoff, taking into account the ways that they anticipate other players responding to them.1 Taken together, these concepts?rational actors, rules presenting players with some set of choices, and outcomes with some payoffs? define the game. In tabletop exercises, designers do not express these factors in diagrams or equations but rather in detailed scenarios rich in contextual detail. Even though the ?rules? may be no more elaborate than a description of the state of the world within the game and the instruction that players should describe their best response to it, these key elements are embedded within every good scenario: some set of rules that shape the players? options?options that will have different potential payoffs and can be assumed to elicit some reaction from other players. Games may hold some factors constant (such as a game with only a blue team, in which the reactions of ?opponents? are not explicitly projected) or just describe them cursorily (a scene-setting scenario that tells participants which sandbox they are playing in and the context that shapes their decisions but that may not restrict their decision options beyond that). But it is useful for gamers to keep in mind that an effective exercise will have all of these components explicitly or implicitly and, just as important, the postexercise analysis should address them and explain why they were instantiated as they were. Game theory, then, gives analysts a means of thinking systematically about complex, multistage, interdependent decisionmaking and the factors that go into it. The different constituent parts of games? rationality and individual decisionmaking, the rules of the game, and the incentives they create?have stimulated further empirical social science research of relevance to exercise designers. Homo Economicus Game theory assumes players are rational, which is to say they will be able to identify and select the outcome most beneficial to them from the options and tradeoffs available to them. Since we know that most individuals do not pause with every choice they make in a day to contemplate all possible decisions, calculate the relative benefit they might get from each, and then order these choices in terms of benefits, this assumption has prompted a great deal of research on how individuals and groups do actually make decisions if they do not act like game theorists? homo economicus. In fact, the assumption works pretty well at predicting behavior, on aggregate. But experimental research shows there are some interesting ways in which people consistently deviate from the assumption in what is often called ?boundedly rational behavior.? Several well-known examples have to do with how people make calculations with respect to risk. For instance, people tend to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome of their decision is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes. And their decisions can be changed simply by reframing the descriptions of the outcomes without changing the actual benefit they get from them. This is called the ?pseudo-certainty effect.? People also frequently fall prey to the ?sunk costs fallacy?? continuing an endeavor once an irretrievable investment has been made, despite knowing that it does not change the probability of an ideal outcome. The literature examining the ways in which people do and do not deviate from perfect rationality is interesting and relevant for a whole range of policy games, such as those that investigate the dynamics of bargaining processes or the impact of perceived risk on decisionmaking in crisis simulations. Institutions A second social science literature of great relevance to gamers is that on institutionalism. Institutions are understood by social scientists as formal and informal norms, from social conventions to contracts to laws and constitutions that shape (and are created by) human interaction. In the game of politics, for instance, the constitution sets the rules of the game, defining who can play, when, and how. The structure of rules guides outcomes in pervasive ways. For example, an electoral system relying on proportionate representation, assigning seats in a legislature proportionate to the number of votes won nationwide, will tend to create the more direct link between voters and parties?as well as a large number of parties and greater likelihood of coalition governments. Institutions create incentives for behavior, and depending on how complex they are, anticipating the way outcomes are shaped by these incentives may be difficult. The Israeli electoral changes of 2002 are a now famous example of the potential for unintended consequences to institutional change. There was gathering concern in Israel throughout the 1980s and 1990s about coalition politics and a perception that small parties, and particularly religious parties, had gained disproportionate influence, weakening the discretion of the prime minister in forming coalition governments. The constitution was changed, requiring, among other things, that the prime minister be directly elected rather than the leader of the largest party to successfully form a coalition. Although the goal of these reforms was to strengthen the power of the prime minister in forming a coalition, in the first election after the law was changed, the power of the two largest parties was weakened. Direct election of the prime minister had the effect of electing heads of government who were separate from the largest parties in parliament, severing the link between party size and executive influence. It gave small parties more leverage to bargain with large parties and extract concessions in exchange for support, and it created a disincentive for constituents to vote strategically, casting a vote for a larger party they might prefer less but that they anticipate having greater power. Institutions shape the incentives, payoffs, and winning strategies of all players in all games. The social sciences have extensively explored the consequences of different institutional arrangements, their impact on power distributions, the processes that undergird changes in them, and their microfoundational roots in human decisionmaking. This work presents a rich set of hypotheses and empirical findings that could easily be explored in games examining issues as varied as the effect of different Iraqi constitutional arrangements to the efficacy of different stability and reconstruction measures in far less developed countries. The impacts of changes in the norms, formal and informal, that govern international relations or the structure of international organizations are also issues that seminar games are ideal for investigating. Incentives Matter One of the basic and most fundamental takeaways of the social science literature is that incentives matter and that they are shaped by the institutional rules of the game. These rules matter so much that they can easily induce players, anticipating retaliation from others, to make rational choices that are suboptimal relative to those that could be achieved through cooperation. An entire thread of game theory is devoted to using models to suggest these counterintuitive findings. Tabletop exercises are not as parsimonious as mathematical models and not as specific about the rules and payoffs that shape outcomes, but this can be an advantage. A seminar game could constitute an excellent opportunity to weigh the incentive problems inhibiting, for example, cooperation in matters such as governance of the global commons. If one of the things that qualitatively specified games do well is collate expert knowledge, then they could be particularly effective at eliciting discussion about the ways in which certain institutions described in the scenario may create perverse incentives, giving policymakers a head start on identifying unintended consequences of decisions. The social sciences and associated analytical tools, even game theory, do not provide theories of gaming per se. However, because much discourse and research revolves around questions and structures that have direct parallels and applicability to gaming, their insights have great relevance to exercise designers. Many social scientists have long been accustomed to thinking more rigorously about how the factors that are also the constituent parts of games work as well as the implications of different specifications of them. Moreover, problems attacked by both social scientists and gamers are essentially the same. For all of these reasons, extant work in economics, political science, and sociology should be the first point of departure for gaming practitioners looking for theory, methods, and ideas.JFQ Notes 1 Although securities studies professionals often think of ?strategic? as referring to the level of analysis above the tactical and operational level, in the context of a game theoretic model (and of the social sciences generally), it simply means the decision a player makes, taking into account what he anticipates opposing players doing in response to his choices. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jun 15 18:42:01 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:42:01 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - OSX 10.6.4 breaks GPG Mail plugin Message-ID: <7E1AD8C5-E126-405C-9BE5-6983A8BB4153@infowarrior.org> FYI the OSX 10.6.4 update today updates Apple Mail and disables the GPG plug-in. Reinstalling it doesn't help, either. Grrr, argh. Good thing I did the update on my laptop first. ;( Hope the author does a fix soon! -rick From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 16 06:50:37 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 07:50:37 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Microsoft explains mystery Firefox extension, "fixes" update Message-ID: (c/o MS) Microsoft explains mystery Firefox extension, "fixes" update By Emil Protalinski Ars Technica Microsoft has fixed the distribution scope of a toolbar update that, without the user's knowledge, installed an add-on in Internet Explorer and an extension in Firefox called Search Helper Extension. Microsoft told us that the new update is actually the same as the old one; the only difference is the distribution settings. In other words, the update will no longer be distributed to toolbars that it shouldn't be added to. End users won't see the tweak, Microsoft told Ars, and also offered an explanation on what the mystery add-on actually does. ... http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/06/microsoft-explains-mystery-firefox-extension-fixes-update-1.ars From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 16 06:54:49 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 07:54:49 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - more...Re: OSX 10.6.4 breaks GPG Mail plugin In-Reply-To: <7E1AD8C5-E126-405C-9BE5-6983A8BB4153@infowarrior.org> References: <7E1AD8C5-E126-405C-9BE5-6983A8BB4153@infowarrior.org> Message-ID: According to a trusted securitygeek friend, this should fix things. >> After the upgrade to 10.6.4, do not start Mail.app. Instead, first get the new UUIDs by executing >> >> cat /System/Library/Frameworks/Message.framework/Resources/Info.plist | grep UUID -A 1 >> cat /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/Info.plist |grep UUID -A 1 | grep UUID -A 1 >> >> and then add the two resulting strings at the end of the "SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs" node in the Info.plist file in $HOME/Library/Mail/Bundles/GPGMail.mailbundle/Contents. Save Info.plist with the new values added, and you can continue to use your existing GPGmail plugin without problems. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 16 07:43:49 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 08:43:49 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - US raises objections over ICQ sale plans Message-ID: US raises objections over ICQ sale plans By Joseph Menn in San Francisco Published: June 15 2010 20:25 | Last updated: June 15 2010 20:25 cyb http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3333e36e-78a7-11df-a312-00144feabdc0.html Senior US law enforcement officials have objected to AOL?s pending sale of one of the largest instant-messaging services to a Russian investment firm, fearing it will put some of the world?s top criminals further from their reach. Investigators at federal agencies charged with scrutinising cyber crime are concerned about the $187.5m acquisition of ICQ by Moscow-based Digital Sky Technologies, which has been rapidly expanding its holding of internet companies. Digital Sky, led by physicist-turned-banker Yuri Milner, the 47-year-old chief executive, already owns Russia?s largest e-mail provider and three of the country?s leading social networking sites. In 2009, it bought stakes in Facebook, the world?s largest social network, and Zynga, the online games developer. ICQ is the leading instant messaging service in Russia, Germany and the Czech Republic and, according to law enforcement investigators, is one of the main avenues of communication for criminal groups in eastern Europe, some of whom never meet in person. ICQ?s headquarters remained in Israel after AOL acquired it for $400m in 1998. Israel and the US are close allies and in some cases US investigators have gained access to the chat transcripts on ICQ of criminal suspects. The situation highlights how the line between law enforcement and national security has blurred with the rise of cyber warfare. The current fear is that ICQ?s computers might move to Russia, where co-operation with western law enforcement is far more difficult to obtain. ?Every bad guy known to man [is on] ICQ,? one investigator said in an interview. The objections have reached the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, a secretive panel known as CFIUS and led by the US Treasury. The committee can recommend that transactions be blocked or modified on the grounds of national security, people familiar with the matter said. The panel also has representatives from the departments of defence, justice and homeland security. ?We?ve raised the concerns,? said another law enforcement official. But CFIUS insiders said they did not expect the panel to stop the sale. It has 30 days after the companies formally notify CFIUS of the transaction to warn them that it plans to investigate further. More than 30 days have passed since the transaction?s announcement on April 28 without any such warning being issued, said Alexander Tamas, a Digital Sky partner in London. It is possible that the formal deadline triggered by a filing has not yet elapsed, but law enforcement concerns rarely rise to the level that prompts CFIUS to intervene, according to those who have worked for the body. AOL, the US Treasury and the homeland security department all declined to comment. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 16 16:53:18 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:53:18 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - USG Told Piracy Losses Are Exaggerated Message-ID: US Government Told Piracy Losses Are Exaggerated Written by Ben Jones on June 16, 2010 http://torrentfreak.com/us-government-told-piracy-losses-are-exaggerated-100616/ At a hearing yesterday, several experts told the US International Trade Commission that many of the estimates of piracy losses touted by the entertainment industries were inflated or misleading. Others claimed that current enforcement methods aren?t working and suggested they try something else. The US International Trade Commission (USITC) describes itself as ?an independent, quasijudicial Federal agency with broad investigative responsibilities on matters of trade?. It has been asked by the US Senate?s Finance Committee to investigate the effect of China?s ineffective intellectual property protection and enforcement on the US economy. At a hearing on the topic yesterday, many of the witnesses were sceptical of the claims and assumptions made by the affected US industries, including the MPAA and RIAA-commissioned reports. Harvard Business School Professor Fritz Foley called the basic assumption behind the industry loss figures into doubt. ?It seems a bit crazy to me,? PC World quotes him telling the Commission on the first day of the hearing. ?To assume that someone who would pay some low amount for a pirated product would be the type of customer who?d pay some amount that?s six or 10 [times] that amount for a real one.? While some companies, such as EA (at times), don?t follow this ?a copy equals a lost sale? system, the majority do. ?Be careful about using information the multinational [companies] provide you,? cautioned Foley. ?I would imagine they have an incentive to make the losses seem very, very large.? Professor Foley?s comments reiterate what the Government Accountability Office told US congress earlier this year. There is virtually no evidence for the claimed million dollar losses. ?Lack of data hinders efforts to quantify impacts of counterfeiting and piracy,? was one of the main conclusions from their report. In fact, copyright infringements may also benefit the entertainment industries and third parties, it argued. An Intellectual Properly law professor at Drake University had another perspective. Pointing out there are two sides to economics, Professor Peter Yu noted that companies counterfeiting products in China may employ US workers, and consume US-sourced raw materials, so it?s not a straight loss. It?s similar to how VHS tapes were not the straight loss the movie industry predicted and claimed in the late 70s and early 80s. Yu also noted that it?s useful in spreading Western ideas to China, although how well lobbying will go down is anyone?s guess. One of the best suggestions so far, however, came from Ohio State University law professor Daniel Chow. When asked how the size of the problem can be identified and quantified, he suggested that the agency should push the affected industries for more data, presumably data that backs up their claims (there is little-to-none available at present). Professor Chow also noted that current enforcement efforts are not working (as we have previously reported), and that companies should start thinking about the long-term. It?s advice that the industries would be wise to follow, as every past copyright conflict has, despite a short-term loss, provided massive long-term benefits and growth for the affected industries. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 16 17:52:33 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:52:33 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - DHS Geek Squad: No Power, No Plan, Lots of Vacancies Message-ID: <8F0AEB0C-30A8-4833-92D1-5947069A18E9@infowarrior.org> Next post DHS Geek Squad: No Power, No Plan, Lots of Vacancies ? By Noah Shachtman ? June 16, 2010 | ? 2:46 pm | ? Categories: Crime and Homeland Security http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/dhs-geek-squad-understaffed-with-no-juice-and-no-plan/ The federal government still sucks at protecting its networks. One big reason why: The agency that?s supposed to tighten up Washington?s information security has neither the authority nor the manpower to respond effectively to the threat of electronic attacks. Back in 2003, the Department of Homeland Security set up with U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) to spot vulnerabilities in the government?s networks, and coordinate responses when those flaws are exploited. But seven years later, US-CERT is still ?without a strategic plan,? DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner tells the House Homeland Security Committee. The group is working at less than half-strength, with 45 of 98 positions filled. And when US-CERT finds holes in the networks, all it can do is gently suggest recommendations to other federal agencies. Those other groups don?t have to listen. In theory, DHS is in charge of dot-gov network defenses. Under a new bill proposed by Senator Joe Lieberman, the department would also assume control of certain civilian networks? security in the event of an ?imminent cyber threat.? In reality, DHS? geek squads are not nearly as big or as well-equipped as the ones in the Pentagon and in the intelligence agencies. Functionally, that puts the secretive National Security Agency and the military?s new Cyber Command in charge when cyber attacks get serious. ?That is the structure of the cyber policy plan that the president announced, so we absolutely intend to use the technical resources, the substantial ones that NSA has,? Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano told Danger Room last year. Richard Bejtlich, a former Air Force cybersecurity officer now with General Electric, puts it a little more pithily: ?When you?re in trouble, you go to the guys who actually have a clue.? Even Napolitano?s most technically adroit troops are having trouble keeping tabs on the traffic inside government networks. ?US-CERT does not have an automated correlation tool to identify trends and anomalies,? Skinner observed. So it takes them a long time before they can spot vulnerabilities. DHS recent bought ?an automated correlation tool to analyze the vast amount of data?. However, US-CERT is currently experiencing problems with reconfiguring the tool to collect data and understand the overall data flow. US-CERT management stated that it may be six months before the problems are corrected and the benefits of the system can be seen.? Photo: Department of Homeland Security From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jun 17 06:37:08 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 07:37:08 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - DOJ fails to deliver mandated wiretap report again Message-ID: <6D884BF5-F90D-42DD-A07F-13D5F329B972@infowarrior.org> Once Again, The Justice Department Fails To Tell Congress About Its Wiretapping Activities, As Required By Law from the who-watches-this-stuff dept The Justice Department sure doesn't like oversight -- even when it's required by law. Julian Sanchez points us to the disturbing news that, despite being required by law to report to Congress each year on "the number of pen register orders and orders for trap and trace devices applied for by law enforcement agencies of the Department of Justice," it appears that for many years the Attorney General has delivered no such report. This has happened before as well. In 2004, the Justice Department dumped five years worth of reports on Congress, and it appears it did so again in 2009. Meaning that Congress did not get the interim annual reports. That would mean that for five year periods, Congress -- who is supposed to be overseeing such surveillance activity -- has not been doing its job, effectively allowing the Justice Department to do what it wants with such surveillance efforts. And, remember, this is a Justice Department that has already been found to have massively abused surveillance activity beyond what the law allows. Doesn't that make you feel safer? http://techdirt.com/articles/20100616/0200059845.shtml From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jun 17 06:38:22 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 07:38:22 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Browser privacy issue with DROID Incredible and HTC Sense UI widget? Message-ID: Browser privacy issue with DROID Incredible and HTC Sense UI widget? An astute reader stumbled upon an interesting bug with the HTC Incredible. The Incredible, with Sense UI, will periodically store screenshots of the contents of your web browser. The screen captures are a function of the HTC Sense UI bookmark widget and are not the main issue; temporary screen grabs are understandable. The problem is these JPEG files are extremely hard to get rid of. They remain when the current browser session is closed, they remain after you clear the browser history, and they remain after a full factory reset. The JPEG files are saved to a folder named .bookmark_thumb1 which is located within the emmc folder of the phones internal storage (so you would expect a full factory reset to delete them). We found some screenshots of us logged into Facebook, logged into our online banking website, and viewing several other mundane websites (see picture above) even after having completed a factory reset. We tested this on more than one stock, un-rooted HTC DROID Incredible and replicated it several times. While you can delete these images manually, information like this information should be nuked with a factory reset, no? To be honest, seeing a screenshot of our logged-in banking session after a reset was a bit unnerving. Any DROID Incredible owners out there seeing the same thing? http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/06/16/browser-privacy-htc-senseui/ From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jun 17 20:40:46 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:40:46 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The "Disclose Act" Doesn't Message-ID: <5C23EB8F-7CA8-4D02-AA70-E191E8BA38BF@infowarrior.org> NRA exemption shows campaign disclosure bill's cynical, fatal flaws http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/16/AR2010061604221.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 By Cleta Mitchell Thursday, June 17, 2010 The writer is a member of the NRA's board of directors. The cynical decision this week by House Democrats to exempt the National Rifle Association from the latest campaign finance regulatory scheme is itself a public disclosure. It reveals the true purpose of the perversely named Disclose Act (H.R. 5175): namely, to silence congressional critics in the 2010 elections. The NRA "carve-out" reaffirms the wisdom of the First Amendment's precise language: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." Congress can't help itself. Since 1798, with the Alien and Sedition Acts, incumbent politicians have yearned for legal duct tape for their opponents' mouths. The Disclose Act is a doozy of a muzzle. For its part, the NRA -- on whose board of directors I serve -- rather than holding steadfastly to its historic principles of defending the Constitution and continuing its noble fight against government regulation of political speech instead opted for a political deal borne of self-interest in exchange for "neutrality" from the legislation's requirements. In doing so, the NRA has, sadly, affirmed the notion held by congressional Democrats (and some Republicans), liberal activists, the media establishment and, at least for now, a minority on the Supreme Court that First Amendment protections are subject to negotiation. The Second Amendment surely cannot be far behind. Since the court's January decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations cannot be constitutionally prohibited from making independent candidate-related expenditures, Democrats have been hyperventilating at the notion that corporations might spend millions of dollars criticizing them. To foreclose that possibility, the Disclose Act would impose onerous and complicated "disclosure" restrictions on organizations that dare to engage in constitutionally protected political speech and on corporations that dare to contribute to such organizations. Democrats would effectively neuter the court's decision by requiring the names of multiple donors to be recited in ads (thus shrinking the time spent on actual speech), requiring the CEO of a corporate donor to personally appear in campaign-related ads, expanding the coverage period to virtually the entire election year, and including myriad other rules that the NRA described last month as "byzantine" and an "arbitrary patchwork of reporting and disclosure requirements." The NRA's wheel-squeaking bought it an exemption from those requirements. Tea Party organizations arising spontaneously since 2009? Out of luck. Online organizations with large e-mail followings but perhaps no formal dues structure? Forget it. Receiving less attention than the NRA "carve-out" but no less cynical is the bill's sop to organized labor: Aggregate contributions of $600 or more would be disclosed. Why start at $600? Why not $200 or, say, $500? Because most union members' dues aggregate less than $600 in a calendar year and thus members' contributions to labor's campaign-related spending wouldn't need to be disclosed . . . even to the union members whose dues are spent for political purposes. In Citizens United, the court held that the First Amendment doesn't permit Congress to treat different corporations differently; that the protections afforded political speech arise from the Constitution, not Congress. Otherwise, it would be tantamount to a congressional power to license the speech of some while denying it to others. The NRA carve-out is a clear example of a congressional speech license. The ostensible purpose of the legislation is benign "disclosure," upheld in Citizens United as permissible under the First Amendment. Even conservative Justice Antonin Scalia has expressed skepticism about the constitutional infirmity of disclosure requirements in another case argued this term; Scalia intoned in oral argument that "running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage." That's true. Indeed, the law upheld in Citizens United requires all donors to candidate-related expenditures to be publicly disclosed to the FEC in a timely manner. But the Disclose Act isn't really intended to elicit information not currently required by law. The act serves notice on certain speakers that their involvement in the political process will exact a high price of regulation, penalty and notoriety, using disclosure and reporting as a subterfuge to chill their political speech and association. It is only disclosure, say the authors. And box-cutters are only handy household tools . . . until they are used by terrorists to crash airplanes. This is not just "disclosure." It is a scheme hatched by political insiders to eradicate disfavored speech. There is no room under the First Amendment for Congress to make deals on political speech, whether with the NRA or anyone else. The writer is a partner at Foley & Lardner who works in campaign finance law and is a member of the NRA's board of directors. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 18 07:10:47 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:10:47 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - HTTPS Everywhere Encrypts Connections Whenever It's Possible Message-ID: HTTPS Everywhere Encrypts Connections Whenever It's Possible http://lifehacker.com/5566839/https-everywhere-encrypts-connections-to-almost-any-site-that-allows-it Firefox: Inspired by Google's offering of an encrypted, HTTPS-connected search, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the TOR anonymous router network have teamed up to create an add-on that encrypts your connection to Facebook, Wikipedia, other Google Services, news sites, and more. Install the add-on, and by default, everything's checked, and any time you hit one of the sites covered by HTTPS Everywhere, your browser automatically goes for the HTTPS/SSL connection option, or uses TOR's resources to make it encrypted. The add-on covers the New York Times, Washington Post, Twitter and Facebook, and a good many popular and semi-obscure sites. If there's a site with an encryption offering you'd like to see included, you don't have to wait for an add-on update?write your own ruleset and add it to the simple XML config file. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 18 15:58:17 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:58:17 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Phantom data sent from sleeping iPhones Message-ID: <9738CD6F-ED72-472E-A9A6-86A8BC85AFB0@infowarrior.org> Phantom data sent from sleeping iPhones Conspiracy theories abound 18 June, 2010 http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/6/18/phantom-data-sent-sleeping-iphones/ Now that just about every airtime provider is rethinking its mobile data plans, with most putting an end to unlimited contracts, it looks like iPhone users are paying more attention to their bills, and in particular how much data they are using. A large number of users in the USA and here in the UK have discovered that their iPhones are apparently sending large chunks of data during the wee small hours using the 3G network. A lively thread on Mac Rumours is brimming with theories, both conspiratorial and otherwise, as to why an apparently inoperative iPhone would mysteriously transfer as much as 60MB of data while its user was tucked up in bed. The simple fact of the matter is - as far as we can tell - that the iPhone's push notifications and other small transfers of data are totted up throughout the day and the total for all of those notifications is added up after dark and sent to your airtime provider while your phone is sleeping. If these tiny amounts of data were individually listed your bill would probably be the size of a telephone directory. The reason it is using the 3G network rather than Wi-Fi is that all iPhones up to and including the 3Gs turn off Wi-Fi push functionality while the phone is in sleep mode, in order to preserve battery life. The iPhone 4, incidentally, has better power management so will not need to do this. Of the hundreds of posts currently on this and other forums, there are a few unexplained anomalies, and AT&T has even refunded a small number of users who have seen unusual an unexplained activity on their data accounts. But telecoms providers send out millions of automatically-generated bills every month and to expect their never to be a mistake is hopeful to say the least. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 18 15:59:42 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:59:42 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - FEMA, DHS Back 'Disaster Hero' Game Message-ID: FEMA, DHS Back Disaster Hero Game June 17, 2010 http://www.gamepolitics.com/2010/06/17/fema-dhs-back-disaster-hero-game Legacy Interactive has announced plans to create a web-based game designed to teach kids how to prepare for hazards and emergencies. Disaster Hero is being developed in conjunction with the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), with funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and, in turn, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), under which FEMA operates. Due out sometime in 2011, the game promises to ?focus on what to do before, during and after a disaster,? with an emphasis on ?getting an emergency kit, having an emergency plan and being informed.? ACEP President Dr. Angela Gardner added, "This project to develop an educational program for children using a game platform will be a unique approach to teaching kids to have an active role in home disaster planning.? FEMA claimed to have research which showed that ?despite imminent threats and increased media attention, Americans today are no better prepared for a natural disaster or terrorist attack than they were in 2003.? Research figures indicating the government?s preparedness for such disasters were not provided. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jun 19 20:21:15 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2010 21:21:15 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - DHS: Net monitoring for homeland terror Message-ID: I'm sure the USG will pledge this will be done ONLY for 'terrorism' yet how long before it is extended to other crimes? Remember that's what happened with the so-called USA PATRIOT act.....how many extensions/abuses of that 'terrorism' law have been discovered? This will be a First Amendment nightmare, IMHO. -rick Napolitano: Internet Monitoring Needed to Fight Homegrown Terrorism Published June 18, 2010 | Associated Press http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/06/18/napolitano-internet-monitoring-needed-fight-homegrown-terrorism/ WASHINGTON -- Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation's homeland security chief said Friday. As terrorists increasingly recruit U.S. citizens, the government needs to constantly balance Americans' civil rights and privacy with the need to keep people safe, said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. But finding that balance has become more complex as homegrown terrorists have used the Internet to reach out to extremists abroad for inspiration and training. Those contacts have spurred a recent rash of U.S.-based terror plots and incidents. "The First Amendment protects radical opinions, but we need the legal tools to do things like monitor the recruitment of terrorists via the Internet," Napolitano told a gathering of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy. Napolitano's comments suggest an effort by the Obama administration to reach out to its more liberal, Democratic constituencies to assuage fears that terrorist worries will lead to the erosion of civil rights. The administration has faced a number of civil liberties and privacy challenges in recent months as it has tried to increase airport security by adding full-body scanners, or track suspected terrorists traveling into the United States from other countries. "Her speech is sign of the maturing of the administration on this issue," said Stewart Baker, former undersecretary for policy with the Department of Homeland Security. "They now appreciate the risks and the trade-offs much more clearly than when they first arrived, and to their credit, they've adjusted their preconceptions." Underscoring her comments are a number of recent terror attacks over the past year where legal U.S. residents such as Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad and accused Fort Hood, Texas, shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan, are believed to have been inspired by the Internet postings of violent Islamic extremists. And the fact that these are U.S. citizens or legal residents raises many legal and constitutional questions. Napolitano said it is wrong to believe that if security is embraced, liberty is sacrificed. She added, "We can significantly advance security without having a deleterious impact on individual rights in most instances. At the same time, there are situations where trade-offs are inevitable." As an example, she noted the struggle to use full-body scanners at airports caused worries that they would invade people's privacy. The scanners are useful in identifying explosives or other nonmetal weapons that ordinary metal-detectors might miss -- such as the explosives that authorities said were successfully brought on board the Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He is accused of trying to detonate a bomb hidden in his underwear, but the explosives failed, and only burned Abdulmutallab. U.S. officials, said Napolitano, have worked to institute a number of restrictions on the scanners' use in order to minimize that. The scans cannot be saved or stored on the machines by the operator, and Transportation Security Agency workers can't have phones or cameras that could capture the scan when near the machine. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jun 20 08:05:30 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 09:05:30 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Pending House/Senate Cybersecurity legislation Message-ID: <4382349B-2CFF-447C-AC74-748585517749@infowarrior.org> H. R. 5548 "To amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and other laws to enhance the security and resiliency of the cyber and communications infrastructure of the United States." http://cryptome.org/isp-spy/hr5548.htm PROTECTING CYBERSPACE AS A NATIONAL ASSET ACT OF 2010 Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman Ranking Member Susan Collins Senator Thomas Carper http://cryptome.org/isp-spy/s3480.htm From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jun 20 09:38:29 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:38:29 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Official Twilight T-Shirt Contest Won't Let You Use Anything From Twilight Message-ID: Official Twilight T-Shirt Contest Won't Let You Use Anything From Twilight from the good-luck dept http://techdirt.com/articles/20100618/1008539876.shtml David writes in to alert us to the rather hilarious situation where Cafe Press is running an official Twilight t-shirt design contest, where you can try to design a t-shirt for the upcoming release of the latest installment (didn't the last one come out like 3 weeks ago?) in the series, called Eclipse. You're supposed to design a t-shirt related to the movie, and you can win a $500 gift card. That, of course, is not very interesting. Where it gets amusing is when you look at the restrictions in the fine print (I've bolded my favorites): ? No use of the official Twilight movie logo e.g. ? All images must be tagged with "twilight movie" ? No use of images or depictions of the actors in the movie ? No use of profanity, vulgar or hate language ? No use of explicit sexual language or graphics ? No use of copyrighted material from the movie or its promotional materials (e.g. no use of images of the movie, movie posters or from the movie website) ? No political party associations (e.g. republican, democrat, or candidates) ? No blood ? No fangs ? No stakes thru the heart ? No coffins ? No bats ? No use of Twilight book cover images ? No pictures of apples ? No journals (you cannot create Twilight journal products) ? No calendars (you cannot create Twilight calendar products) ? No Cards (you cannot create Twilight postcards, greeting cards and note cards) ? No Undergarments (you cannot create Twilight thongs or boxer shorts) So, yes, go ahead and make an official Twilight movie shirt (but certainly not any other Cafepress product), but don't use anything from the actual movies or books or anything normally associated with vampires. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 23 17:20:59 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:20:59 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Judge Throws Out Viacom Case Against YouTube Message-ID: <9299F248-DC5A-487D-92CB-BCC9C7384270@infowarrior.org> Judge Throws Out Viacom Case Against YouTube (Court Document) by Erick Schonfeld on Jun 23, 2010 http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/23/youtube-declares-victory-in-viacom-case/ The long-standing, $1 billion copyright infringement case against YouTube by Viacom is now pretty much over. The judge incredibly threw out the case in a summary judgement (his final order is embedded below) and YouTube has declared victory. Viacom first filed its lawsuit in 2007. And plenty of juicy tidbits have come out over the years from unsealed documents. An appeal is pretty much certain, but the fact that Viacom could not even get to trial sets a bad precedent. From YouTube?s blog post: Today, the court granted our motion for summary judgment in Viacom?s lawsuit with YouTube. This means that the court has decided that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement. The decision follows established judicial consensus that online services like YouTube are protected when they work cooperatively with copyright holders to help them manage their rights online. The fact that the judge granted YouTube?s summary motion to dismiss the case sends a clear message to media companies: Live by the DMCA, Die by the DMCA. The ?safe harbor? provision in that Act is what protects YouTube and other Websites from being sued for the copyright infringement of their users as long as they take down infringing material. The judge found that while there were a huge number of infringing videos on YouTube, the site did take them down when notified. In fact, he points out one instance in 2007 when Viacom gave YouTube a single takedown notices for 100,000 videos. By the next day they were down. Unless Viacom can find a judge who interprets the DMCA more liberally, this lawsuit is going nowhere. YouTube is here to stay, as long as Google has billions of dollars of cash in its war chest. You?ve got to wonder whether Viacom could have made more money putting ads on all of those infringing videos by now than they?ve spent on legal fees. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 23 17:23:27 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:23:27 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - limited list traffic next few weeks Message-ID: Due to assorted upcoming travel in the next few weeks traffic to infowarrior-l will be light. Of course, as I can post, I will post. ;) -rick From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 23 17:25:55 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:25:55 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Sign the ACTA Communique Message-ID: (yes, I did....-rick) Sign the ACTA Communique http://www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/go/acta-communique From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 25 09:49:55 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:49:55 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Senate Homeland Security Committee approves cybersecurity legislation Message-ID: <053E25BF-A18D-4A3A-BDCE-30553EB915C6@infowarrior.org> Senate Homeland Security Committee approves cybersecurity legislation By Gautham Nagesh - 06/24/10 05:49 PM ET http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/105377-senate-homeland-security-committee-approves-cybersecurity-bill- The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs approved a comprehensive cybersecurity bill on Thursday after amending it to limit the president's authority in the event of a cyber emergency. The bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) would make the Department of Homeland Security responsible for protecting civilian networks in the government and private sector. The bill will now head to the full Senate for a vote, where it will likely be merged with other competing pieces of cybersecurity legislation. "These cyber attacks are increasingly more sophisticated, more persistent and more successful," Carper said. "In short ? the status quo is simply not enough." The original bill gave the president indefinite emergency authority to shut down private sector or government networks in the event of a cyber attack capable of causing massive damage or loss of life. An amendment passed Thursday limits that authority further, requiring the president to get Congressional approval after controlling a network for 120 days. Collins said she was disappointed to read reports that the bill gives the White House a "kill switch" for the Internet, an authority she says the president already has under a little-known clause in the Communications Act passed one month after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. "It's been frustrating to read some of the misrepresentations of our bill in the cybersphere," Collins said, arguing the new bill actually circumscribes the president's existing authority and puts controls on its use. "I believe the substitute amendment we?re offering strengthens those protections even more." During the markup Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) repeated his concerns about the Department of Homeland Security being in charge of civilian cybersecurity, claiming the department's response to recent attempted terrorist attacks have shaken his confidence in its ability to effectively carry out the mission. McCain also expressed trepidation about passing legislation that would result in the expansion of the federal workforce and budget. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 25 13:44:16 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:44:16 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - LV police taze 86 y/o bedridden granny Message-ID: <5AFBE293-4FE6-4833-8006-482F5402377C@infowarrior.org> http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/06/24/28330.htm (CN) - Police Tasered an 86-year-old disabled grandma in her bed and stepped on her oxygen hose until she couldn't breathe, after her grandson called 911 seeking medical assistance, the woman and her grandson claim in Oklahoma City Federal Court. Though the grandson said, "Don't Taze my granny!" an El Reno police officer told another cop to "Taser her!" and wrote in his police report that he did so because the old woman "took a more aggressive posture in her bed," according to the complaint. Lonnie Tinsley claims that he called 911 after he went to check on his grandmother, whom he found in her bed, "connected to a portable oxygen concentrator with a long hose." She is "in marginal health, [and] takes several prescribed medications daily," and "was unable to tell him exactly when she had taken her meds," so, Tinsley says, he called 911 "to ask for an emergency medical technician to come to her apartment to evaluate her." In response, "as many as ten El Reno police" officers "pushed their way through the door," according to the complaint. The grandma, Lona Varner, "told them to get out of her apartment." The remarkable complaint continues: "Instead, the apparent leader of the police [defendant Thomas Duran] instructed another policeman to 'Taser her!' He stated in his report that the 86 year-old plaintiff 'took a more aggressive posture in her bed,' and that he was fearful for his safety and the safety of others. "Lonnie Tinsley told them, 'Don't taze my Granny!' to which they responded that they would Taser him; instead, they pulled him out of her apartment, took him down to the floor, handcuffed him and placed him in the back of a police car. "The police then proceeded to approach Ms. Varner in her bed and stepped on her oxygen hose until she began to suffer oxygen deprivation. "The police then fired a Taser at her and only one wire struck her, in the left arm; the police then fired a second Taser, striking her to the right and left of the midline of her upper chest and applied high voltage, causing burns to her chest, extreme pain and to pass out. "The police then grabbed Ms. Varner by her forearms and jerked hands together, causing her soft flesh to tear and bleed on her bed; they then handcuffed her. "The police freed Lonnie Tinsley from his incarceration in the back of the police car and permitted him to accompany the ambulance with his grandmother." Tinsley says the cops capped it all off by having his grandmother "placed in the psychiatric ward at the direction of the El Reno police; she was held there for six days and released." "As a result of the wrongful arrest and detention, the plaintiff Lona M. Varner suffered the unlawful restraint of her freedom, bodily injury, assault, battery, the trashing of her apartment, humiliation, loss of personal dignity, infliction of emotional distress and medical bills." They seek punitive damages for constitutional violations, from the City of El Reno, Duran, Officers Frank Tinga and Joseph Sandberg, and 10 Officers Does. They are represented by Brian Dell of Oklahoma City. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 25 18:48:53 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:48:53 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - "Think Different" meets "Hold Different" Message-ID: You cannot make this stuff up. -rick Apple: Hold New IPhone Differently to Fix Reception By Adam Satariano and Crayton Harrison - Jun 25, 2010 Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., demonstrates the iPhone 4. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg Apple Inc. responded to complaints about reception on its new iPhone 4 by telling customers they should hold the device differently. ?Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas,? Apple said today in an e-mailed statement. ?If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.? < -- > http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-25/apple-tells-users-to-hold-new-iphone-4-differently-to-improve-reception.html From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 25 19:03:50 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:03:50 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - White House Seeks Comment on Trusted ID Plan Message-ID: <1C93BF45-70EE-491B-A049-37BC8917D354@infowarrior.org> White House Seeks Comment on Trusted ID Plan Grant Gross Grant Gross ? Fri Jun 25, 4:20 pm ET http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20100625/tc_pcworld/whitehouseseekscommentontrustedidplan The White House is seeking comment on a draft plan for establishing a trusted identity system online, with the goal of making Internet transactions more secure and convenient. Howard Schmidt, the White House cybersecurity coordinator and special assistant to President Barack Obama, released a draft version of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace on Friday. The plan calls for the U.S. government to work with private companies to create an Identity Ecosystem, an online environment "where individuals, organizations, services, and devices can trust each other because authoritative sources establish and authenticate their digital identities." The Identity Ecosystem would allow Internet users to complete transactions with confidence, Schmidt said in a blog post on WhiteHouse.gov. "No longer should individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to login into various online services," he wrote. "Through the strategy we seek to enable a future where individuals can voluntarily choose to obtain a secure, interoperable, and privacy-enhancing credential ... from a variety of service providers -- both public and private -- to authenticate themselves online for different types of transactions." The White House is seeking comments on the draft plan on a Web page at ideascale.com. A handful of people had already commented on the plan by Friday afternoon. One person suggested the White House take advantage of existing open-source trusted ID efforts, including OpenID. Schmidt's office developed the draft of the trusted ID plan by working with other government agencies, business leaders and privacy advocates, he said. A second poster called on the government to "leave privacy to the private sector." "The current executive has been smothering the privacy and liberty of Americans even more than his predecessor, and evading criticism by employing secrecy and rainbows," that poster wrote. "Americans should not trust the federal government to have any goal other than the expansion of federal power." A third poster suggested that "you all go get a real job at McDonalds." The trusted ID plan is part of the Obama administrations Cyberspace Policy Review, released in May 2009. Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantusG. Grant's e-mail address is grant_gross at idg.com. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 25 19:08:32 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:08:32 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - National Strategy for Trusted Identities (PDF) Message-ID: <81F7022C-BACD-4D1E-87DB-1CE4219D717A@infowarrior.org> Draft version of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace ... released tonight http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/ns_tic.pdf From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 25 21:05:29 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:05:29 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - OT: The IBM Muppet Show Message-ID: <8E33B57F-1C4B-41F8-91E2-A3E8192C3E8D@infowarrior.org> Vintage gek vids ... OM NOM NOM!! ;) The IBM Muppet Show Before Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, Jim Henson made short films for Big Blue. The tech may be archaic, but the entertainment is timeless. http://technologizer.com/2010/05/31/ibm-muppets/ From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jun 25 21:07:28 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:07:28 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Congress bans boxoffice trading Message-ID: <033072C4-C528-48F9-90A2-438D42B5A00D@infowarrior.org> Congress includes ban on boxoffice trading Trend Exchange threatens lawsuit to overturn ban By Alex Ben Block http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/business/news/e3ic397be35157675db3c19f0ef900927ee June 25, 2010, 01:16 AM ET Congress has driven a stake through the heart of movie boxoffice futures trading. An amendment banning the trading of derivatives based on boxoffice results was approved just before 1 a.m. EST on Friday morning by a House-Senate conference committee for inclusion in the Wall Street reform bill (the Restoring American Financial Stability Act). It came after an entire day and night of discussion on the complex legislation. Committee chair Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said during a short discussion that while there had been controversy about movie futures, the House conferees were not going to exercise their option to alter the amendment banning movie futures trading. He said they were agreeing to the amendment as written by Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) for the Senate bill. ?By not addressing it, we have acquiesced in that,? said Frank. Both chambers of Congress will almost certainly pass the conference committee's version of the bill with strong support from Democrats prior to summer recess on July 2. President Obama has indicated he will sign it into law. The amendment was strongly supported by the MPAA, representing major studios, as well as Hollywood talent guilds, major movie exhibitors and others, who lobbied for it. It has been vigorously opposed by Veriana, an Arizona company that operates Media Derivatives, which wants to launch the Trend Exchange (MDEX); as well as Cantor Fitzgerald, owner of the Hollywood Stock Exchange, which wants to market a similar product through the Cantor Exchange; and some others, including Michael Burns, vice chairman of Lionsgate. Derivatives are contracts whose value is based on stocks, bonds, loans, currencies or commodities linked to a specific event such as changes in weather, or in this instance, boxoffice results. Media Derivatives had won approval from the Commodities Futures Trading Commission on June 15 to offer its first contracts to investors. The new law would appear to cancel that plan, although Veriana/Trend Exchange CEO Robert Swagger said earlier this week they will likely file a legal challenge based on their view that they are victims of antitrust activity by the MPAA and its allies. Swagger has also said Trend Exchange should be "grandfathered in" and allowed to offer their product since they won their approval before the new law's approval. That is likely to be opposed by the same groups that have fought this entire idea and will probably be decided ultimately in a court of law. Veriana has spent $10 million, and Cantor millions more, developing a futures market they argued would increase investment in movies and provide a hedge to those who finance films, just as markets in such things as orange juice, precious metals and pork bellies allow businesses to lay off financial risk. The Trend Exchange products were aimed at large and institutional investors, with a minimum investment of $5,000, and would be in play from a month before a movie opens until its premiere. The Cantor products were to be aimed at both large and small investors and would have run from before opening until one month after the movie hits theaters. The CFTC had a deadline of June 28 to approve or disapprove the first Cantor contracts. The MPAA, led by interim CEO Bob Pisano, has said that a futures market could encourage rival studios or speculators to bet against a movie's success. They said they were subject to market manipulation and might encourage spreading of negative information. They said major movie companies don't want and won't use this hedge, which they consider nothing but a form of gambling. They insist it would create intolerable pressures on movie companies, drive down the value of a movie and dissuade moviegoers from buying tickets. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jun 26 10:36:32 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2010 11:36:32 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Timeline: How Hollywood Hurt Itself Message-ID: <835CFF9D-FA53-4E60-98F1-317B1563DFC9@infowarrior.org> A Timeline Of How The Entertainment Industry Made The File Sharing Issue Much Worse For Itself from the keep-whac-whac-whacing dept http://techdirt.com/articles/20100625/1209539960.shtml A bunch of folks have sent over the various stories about how Paramount's COO, Fred Huntsberry, recently started claiming that the "new piracy threat" facing Hollywood is "digital lockers." The whole article is a bit silly in a variety of ways, not the least of which is that it's an implicit admission that Hollywood's own tactics have been a complete failure. The funny thing is that even as they're admitting it, you get the feeling they don't realize it. Let's follow the "path" which many people warned about as soon as Napster was sued: ? Napster was a Silicon Valley, venture capital-funded startup that tried to bend over backwards to figure out a way for the industry to embrace it and work with it legitimately. The entertainment industry had every opportunity to work out a reasonable deal, and instead took a hardline position, suing the company effectively out of business (though the brand later lived on). ? After Napster, just as many people warned, the file sharing market began to fragment and shifted to slightly more distributed operations, such as Grokster, Kazaa and Morpheus. These were a bit more difficult to work with, but all still involved company entities that had an interest in working with the entertainment industry. Once again, they were sued out of business. ? After Grokster, again the market fragmented even more, and a lot of the interest shifted to BitTorrent and tracker sites. These sites were often outside of the US, and not particularly interested in working with the entertainment industry to actually set up any kind of business relationship. And, still, the industry sued to get them shut down (a process that is still ongoing), while also seeking to pass specific laws against them. ? So here we are, and the market has fragmented even more and people have been driven even further underground to things like private cyberlocker sites. Hollywood is claiming that many of these sites are run by organized crime groups, though, we've yet to see any evidence to support that. So look at the progression here. There was really one company initially, which was entirely aboveboard and open to working with the entertainment industry. At every step down the ladder -- each one pushed forward by the entertainment industry's own lawsuits and regulatory efforts -- the market becomes more fragmented and more underground, with less and less of an ability for the entertainment industry to embrace and work with them. "Sometimes these sites look better than the legitimate sites," Huntsberry said. "That's the irony." That's not irony, Fred, that's your company and your colleagues failing for over a decade to come up with a way to properly satisfy consumer demand. All in all, you actually start to wonder if Hollywood has this need to make up some big scary bogeyman to keep pushing its legislative agenda of granting more and more control and taking away more and more user rights. At first it was "file sharing sites." Then those were sued out of existence. So then it was BitTorrent trackers. And now its lockers. In fact, it's amusing that as part of Huntsberry's talk he basically admitted that three strikes laws aren't enough because they don't do anything to stop these file lockers. In other words, "we fought, and are still fighting, for three strikes laws that we know are useless." It's as if the entertainment industry has to just keep pointing out some huge new threat so that the government keeps paying attention to them. Along those lines, techflaws.org points us to a German publication's coverage of the same Huntsberry talk, and it's interesting that The Hollywood Reporter version of the story appears to have conveniently left out the part where Huntsberry blames Google for all of this (that's a Google translation of the original). In that one, he calls Google the "biggest leech." Of course, the courts recently shot down that claim, but it looks like Viacom and its subsidiaries are sticking to the claim. What's amazing, of course, is that if the folks at Paramount and other studios and record labels stopped looking for enemies everywhere, they would have realized there were tons of opportunities to adapt and embrace these things a decade ago. But each step of the way they've made things more difficult for themselves. It's a living case study in how not to respond to a disruptive market change. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jun 26 21:40:40 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2010 22:40:40 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - 6-Year-Old Northeast Ohio Girl on 'No Fly' List Message-ID: Yep, I feel much safer now!!! -rick 6-Year-Old Northeast Ohio Girl on 'No Fly' List Mark Zinni Fox 8 News Reporter 10:30 AM EDT, June 25, 2010 http://www.fox8.com/news/wjw-news-westlake-ohio-six-year-old-no-fly-list,0,1122601.story WESTLAKE, Ohio - Alyssa Thomas, 6, is a little girl who is already under the spotlight of the federal government. Her family recently discovered that Alyssa is on the "no fly" list maintained by U.S. Homeland Security. "We were, like, puzzled," said Dr. Santhosh Thomas. "I'm like, well, she's kinda six-years-old and this is not something that should be typical." Dr. Thomas and his wife were made aware of the listing during a recent trip from Cleveland to Minneapolis. The ticket agent at the Continental counter at Hopkins Airport notified the family. "They said, well, she's on the list. We're like, okay, what's the story? What do we have to do to get off the list? This isn't exactly the list we want to be on," said Dr. Thomas. The Federal Bureau of Investigations in Cleveland will confirm that a list exists, but for national security reasons, no one will discuss who is on the list or why. The Thomas family was allowed to make their trip but they were told to contact Homeland Security to clear-up the matter. Alyssa just received a letter from the government, notifying the six-year-old that nothing will be changed and they won't confirm nor deny any information they have about her or someone else with the same name. "She's been flying since she was two-months old, so that has not been an issue," said Alyssa's dad. "In fact, we had traveled to Mexico in February and there were no issues at that time." According to the Transportation Security Administration, Alyssa never had any problems before because the Secure Flight Program just began in June for all domestic flights. A spokesperson will only say, "the watch lists are an important layer of security to prevent individuals with known or suspected ties to terrorism from flying." Right now, Alyssa has other priorities. "My Barbies, my magic mirror and jumping on my bed!" But her name will likely stay on the list and as for the next time she flies, the FBI says they'll rely on the common sense of the security agents. "She may have threatened her sister, but I don't think that constitutes Homeland Security triggers," said Dr. Thomas. The Thomas family can still fly, but the check-in process will likely take much longer. They plan on making another appeal to U.S. Homeland Security. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jun 27 14:15:08 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2010 15:15:08 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Endless war, a recipe for four-star arrogance Message-ID: Endless war, a recipe for four-star arrogance By Andrew J. Bacevich Sunday, June 27, 2010; B01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/25/AR2010062502160_pf.html Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government. Not least among those values is a code of military conduct that honors the principle of civilian control while keeping the officer corps free from the taint of politics. Events of the past week -- notably the Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's dismissal -- hint at the toll that nearly a decade of continuous conflict has exacted on the U.S. armed forces. The fate of any one general qualifies as small beer: Wearing four stars does not signify indispensability. But indications that the military's professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms. Earlier generations of American leaders, military as well as civilian, instinctively understood the danger posed by long wars. "A democracy cannot fight a Seven Years War," Gen. George C. Marshall once remarked. The people who provided the lifeblood of the citizen army raised to wage World War II had plenty of determination but limited patience. They wanted victory won and normalcy restored. The wisdom of Marshall's axiom soon became clear. In Vietnam, Lyndon B. Johnson plunged the United States into what became its Seven Years War. The citizen army that was sent to Southeast Asia fought valiantly for a time and then fell to pieces. As the conflict dragged on, Americans in large numbers turned against the war -- and also against the troops who fought it. After Vietnam, the United States abandoned its citizen army tradition, oblivious to the consequences. In its place, it opted for what the Founders once called a "standing army" -- a force consisting of long-serving career professionals. For a time, the creation of this so-called all-volunteer force, only tenuously linked to American society, appeared to be a master stroke. Washington got superbly trained soldiers and Republicans and Democrats took turns putting them to work. The result, once the Cold War ended, was greater willingness to intervene abroad. As Americans followed news reports of U.S. troops going into action everywhere from the Persian Gulf to the Balkans, from the Caribbean to the Horn of Africa, they found little to complain about: The costs appeared negligible. Their role was simply to cheer. This happy arrangement now shows signs of unraveling, a victim of what the Pentagon has all too appropriately been calling its Long War. The Long War is not America's war. It belongs exclusively to "the troops," lashed to a treadmill that finds soldiers and Marines either serving in a combat zone or preparing to deploy. To be an American soldier today is to serve a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of armed conflict without end. Once begun, wars continue, persisting regardless of whether they receive public support. President Obama's insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, this nation is not even remotely "at" war. In explaining his decision to change commanders without changing course in Afghanistan, the president offered this rhetorical flourish: "Americans don't flinch in the face of difficult truths." In fact, when it comes to war, the American people avert their eyes from difficult truths. Largely unaffected by events in Afghanistan and Iraq and preoccupied with problems much closer to home, they have demonstrated a fine ability to tune out war. Soldiers (and their families) are left holding the bag. Throughout history, circumstances such as these have bred praetorianism, warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend. The smug disdain for high-ranking civilians casually expressed by McChrystal and his chief lieutenants -- along with the conviction that "Team America," as these officers style themselves, was bravely holding out against a sea of stupidity and corruption -- suggests that the officer corps of the United States is not immune to this affliction. To imagine that replacing McChrystal with Gen. David H. Petraeus will fix the problem is wishful thinking. To put it mildly, Petraeus is no simple soldier. He is a highly skilled political operator, whose name appears on Republican wish lists as a potential presidential candidate in 2012. Far more significant, the views cultivated within Team America are shared elsewhere. The day the McChrystal story broke, an active-duty soldier who has served multiple combat tours offered me his perspective on the unfolding spectacle. The dismissive attitude expressed by Team America, he wrote, "has really become a pandemic in the Army." Among his peers, a belief that "it is OK to condescend to civilian leaders" has become common, ranking officers permitting or even endorsing "a culture of contempt" for those not in uniform. Once the previously forbidden becomes acceptable, it soon becomes the norm. "Pretty soon you have an entire organization believing that their leader is the 'Savior' and that everyone else is stupid and incompetent, or not committed to victory." In this soldier's view, things are likely to get worse before they get better. "Senior officers who condone this kind of behavior and allow this to continue and fester," he concluded, "create generation after generation of officers like themselves -- but they're generally so arrogant that they think everyone needs to be just like them anyway." By itself, Team America poses no threat to the constitutional order. Gen. McChrystal is not Gen. MacArthur. When presenting himself at the White House on Wednesday, McChrystal arrived not as a man on horseback but as a supplicant, hat (and resignation) in hand. Still, even with his departure, it would be a mistake to consider the matter closed. During Vietnam, the United States military cracked from the bottom up. The damage took decades to repair. In the seemingly endless wars of the post-Sept. 11 era, a military that has demonstrated remarkable durability now shows signs of coming undone at the top. The officer corps is losing its bearings. Americans might do well to contemplate a famous warning issued by another frustrated commander from a much earlier age. "We had been told, on leaving our native soil," wrote the centurion Marcus Flavius to a cousin back in Rome, "that we were going to defend the sacred rights conferred on us by so many of our citizens [and to aid] populations in need of our assistance and our civilization." For such a cause, he and his comrades had willingly offered to "shed our quota of blood, to sacrifice our youth and our hopes." Yet the news from the homeland was disconcerting: The capital was seemingly rife with factions, treachery and petty politics. "Make haste," Marcus Flavius continued, "and tell me that our fellow citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we ourselves are protecting the glory of the empire." "If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on these desert sands in vain, then beware of the anger of the legions!" Stanley McChrystal is no Marcus Flavius, lacking the Roman's eloquence, among other things. Yet in ending his military career on such an ignominious note, he has, however clumsily, issued a warning that deserves our attention. The responsibility facing the American people is clear. They need to reclaim ownership of their army. They need to give their soldiers respite, by insisting that Washington abandon its de facto policy of perpetual war. Or, alternatively, the United States should become a nation truly "at" war, with all that implies in terms of civic obligation, fiscal policies and domestic priorities. Should the people choose neither course -- and thereby subject their troops to continuing abuse -- the damage to the army and to American democracy will be severe. Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His book "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War" will be published in August. He will be online at 11 a.m. on Monday, June 28, to chat. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jun 28 06:58:35 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 07:58:35 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Sen Robert Byrd dead at 92 Message-ID: <2ABD6769-B90E-4ABE-92A8-2AB9FAF4711B@infowarrior.org> (Say what you will about his past or party affiliation, but up to the end, he was a pleasure to watch on the Senate floor during debates, and had a phenomenal knowledge of the Constitution and Senate procedure. -rick) Sen. Robert Byrd dead at 92; West Virginia lawmaker was the longest serving member of Congress in history By Joe Holley Special to The Washington Post Monday, June 28, 2010; 7:20 AM \ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/28/AR2010062801241_pf.html Robert C. Byrd, 92, a conservative West Virginia Democrat who became the longest-serving member of Congress in history and used his masterful knowledge of the institution to shape the federal budget, protect the procedural rules of the Senate and, above all else, tend to the interests of his state, died at 3 a.m. Monday at Inova Fairfax Hospital, his office said. Mr. Byrd had been hospitalized last week with what was thought to be heat exhaustion, but more serious issues were discovered, aides said Sunday. No formal cause of death was given. Starting in 1958, Mr. Byrd was elected to the Senate an unprecedented nine times. He wrote a four-volume history of the body, was majority leader twice and chaired the powerful Appropriations Committee, controlling the nation's purse strings, and yet the positions of influence he held did not convey the astonishing arc of his life. A child of the West Virginia coal fields, Mr. Byrd rose from the grinding poverty that has plagued his state since before the Great Depression, overcame an early and ugly association with the Ku Klux Klan, worked his way through night school and by force of will, determination and iron discipline made himself a person of authority and influence in Washington. Although he mined extraordinary amounts of federal largesse for his perennially impoverished state, his reach extended beyond the bounds of the Mountain State. As chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the District from 1961 to 1969, he reveled in his role as scourge, grilling city officials at marathon hearings and railing against unemployed black men and unwed mothers on welfare. He was known for his stentorian orations seasoned with biblical and classical allusions and took pride in being the Senate's resident constitutional scholar, keeping a copy of the Constitution in his breast pocket. He saw himself both as institutional memory and as guardian of the Senate's prerogatives. Most West Virginians had more immediate concerns, and Mr. Byrd strove to address them. On the Appropriations Committee, he pumped billions of dollars worth of jobs, programs and projects into a state that ranked near the bottom of nearly every economic indicator when he began his political career as a state legislator in the late 1940s. Countless congressional earmarks later, West Virginia is home to prisons, technology center, laboratories and Navy and Coast Guard offices (despite being a landlocked state). Critics mocked him as the "prince of pork," but West Virginians expressed their gratitude by naming countless roads and buildings after him. He also was the only West Virginian to be elected to both houses of the state legislature and both houses of Congress. As a young man, Mr. Byrd was an "exalted cyclops" of the Ku Klux Klan. Although he apologized numerous times for what he considered a youthful indiscretion, his early votes in Congress -- notably a filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act -- reflected racially separatist views. As those views moderated, Mr. Byrd rose in the party hierarchy. A lifelong autodidact and a firm believer in continuing education -- vocational schools, community colleges, adult education -- Mr. Byrd practiced what he preached. While in the U.S. House from 1953 to 1959, he took night classes at law schools. He received a law degree from American University in 1963 and is the only member of Congress to put himself through law school while in office. "Senator Byrd came from humble beginnings in the southern coalfields, was raised by hard-working West Virginians, and triumphantly rose to the heights of power in America," Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said in a statement. "But he never forgot where he came from nor who he represented, and he never abused that power for his own gain." In addition to his multivolume history of the Senate, Mr. Byrd was author of a 770-page memoir as well as "Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency" (2004), a well-received and stinging critique of what he considered President George W. Bush's rush to war with Iraq. Part of the book's power, reviewers noted, was that he was one of the few senators in office during the Vietnam War, of which he had been a staunch supporter. "He played a unique role as a prime defender of the Senate during decades of increasing power of the presidency," said Thomas E. Mann, a congressional scholar and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In his book and on the Senate floor, he was scathing in his contempt for the Bush administration's doctrine of "preemptive war" and "regime change." He castigated his fellow lawmakers for swiftly delegating to the president the decision to go to war. On March 19, 2003, Mr. Byrd delivered the first of what became regular attacks on the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. "Today I weep for my country," he said in a speech on the Senate floor. "I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of strong yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed." Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), minority leader of the Senate, said Mr. Byrd will be remembered for "his fighter's spirit, his abiding faith, and for the many times he recalled the Senate to its purposes. Generations of Americans will read the masterful history of the Senate he leaves behind." Dour and aloof, a socially awkward outsider in the clubby confines of the Senate, Mr. Byrd relied not on personality but on dogged attention to detail to succeed on Capitol Hill. "The more people in Washington questioned his skills, the harder he worked," Lawrence J. Haas wrote in National Journal magazine in 1991. "The more they laughed behind his back -- because of the pompadour he sported, or because of his halting speaking style -- the more he dug in, determined to succeed." Mr. Byrd chaired the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the District from 1961 to 1969 and took it upon himself to rid the majority-black city of ineligible welfare recipients. Protesters picketed his McLean home and held anti-Byrd rallies in city parks. The Washington Afro-American newspaper proposed a "Negro boycott" of products manufactured in West Virginia. The Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy, who in 1971 became the District's first congressional representative, described Mr. Byrd as "a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde personality -- his tongue was smoother than butter, but war was in his heart." "Some senators, in the course of their careers, make their reputations as authorities on the armed service, on taxation, on foreign relations, on housing, on science and technology, on medical care," journalist and author Milton Viorst wrote in 1967 in Washingtonian magazine. "Sen. Robert C. Byrd has made his reputation as an authority on the mating habits of Washington's underprivileged." Mr. Byrd drastically cut the welfare rolls, even as he supported a higher federal contribution to the city and championed public schools, playgrounds, swimming pools and libraries. He doubled the number of social workers and increased payments to foster parents. In his 2005 memoir, "Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields," he said his efforts directed at Washington were meant "toward supporting programs aimed at stabilizing community life in the city." In April 1968, when riots erupted on the streets of downtown Washington after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- a man who should be barred from the city, Mr. Byrd once insisted -- the senator recommended calling up federal troops. "If it requires the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, we should put the troublemakers in their places," he said. Looters should be shot, "swiftly and mercilessly." Although he initially opposed District home rule, he eventually changed his mind. "In the years when I was looking at the District so closely, I realized that there was a lack of responsibility at the local government level," he told The Washington Post in 1971. Self-government, he came to believe, would "place the responsibility right where it ought to be, and there would be no further passing of the buck to Congress." Robert Carlyle Byrd was in fact born Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr. on Nov. 20, 1917, in North Wilkesboro, N.C. When his mother died in the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, his father sent the 10-month-old youngster to live with an aunt and uncle, Vlurma and Titus Dalton Byrd, in Stotesbury, a coal-mining community in the hills of West Virginia. Despite living relatively close by, Mr. Byrd's true father, who spent much of his time trying to build a perpetual motion machine, never made an effort to see his son, who was 16 before he learned his real name. He didn't learn his real birth date until 1971, when an older brother told him. Mr. Byrd discovered he was nearly two months older than he thought. As his foster father drifted from job to job, Mr. Byrd grew up in a succession of hardscrabble company towns. His first job was collecting garbage scraps for 10 or 12 hogs his "Pap" kept on coal company property between the railroad tracks and a creek. He was the valedictorian of the 1934 graduating class of Stotesbury's Mark Twain High School, but the Depression kept him out of college. He worked as a gas station attendant briefly and then in the produce department of a grocery store. In 1937, he married Erma Ora James. Both were 19 and had known each other since grade school. She died after 68 years of marriage, while her husband was campaigning for reelection in 2006. Their two daughters, Mona Carol Fatemi of McLean and Marjorie Ellen Moore of Leesburg survive him, as do five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. As a young married man with two daughters, Mr. Byrd was eager to get ahead. He studied a meat cutter's manual in his spare time and by the end of the 1930s was earning $85 a month as head butcher at a grocery store in Crab Orchard, W.Va. He kept the job for 12 years. After working as a shipyard welder in Baltimore during World War II, he returned to West Virginia and opened a grocery store in Sophia. A born-again Christian, he taught an adult Bible class at Crab Orchard Baptist Church that grew from six people to 636 in a year. When the radio station in nearby Beckley began to broadcast his fiery fundamentalist lessons, he became a local celebrity. In 1946, he ran for the West Virginia House of Delegates. He met nearly every voter in the district while campaigning alone throughout the little coal-mining towns and backwoods hollows. When he made public appearances, he laid out his positions on the issues and then took out his fiddle. He read music and could play classical pieces, but on the campaign trail he played the mountain tunes his neighbors knew and loved, the same songs he had played for years at coal camp square dances and Saturday night frolics. Because he didn't know how to drive at the time, he'd have a miner ferry him around the district, and he'd invite the men to come out and sit in the car with him while he sawed away at "Ida Red," "Old Joe Clark," "Bile Them Cabbage Down" and other Appalachian tunes. "The back seat of an automobile is a rather odd place to play a violin, considering the bowing room that is needed, but apparently Byrd could pull it off," Sherrill wrote in the 1971 New York Times article. Voters elected the 28-year-old grocer to the state House with an overwhelming majority. In 1950, he won a state Senate seat by a similar margin. "I worked hard," he wrote in his memoir. "I never spent time at after-hours joints around Charleston, as was the habit of some members of the legislature." In 1952, Mr. Byrd announced his candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives from West Virginia's 6th Congressional District. During the Democratic primary, his principal opponent revealed that Mr. Byrd had been a Klan member in 1942-43. Mr. Byrd bought radio and television time to acknowledge his Klan affiliation, characterizing it as a "mistake of youth." He apologized repeatedly over the years, describing it as "the greatest mistake of my life." However, at the time of his membership, he was apparently an enthusiastic participant. He once persuaded 150 of his neighbors to join -- membership fee, $10; robe and hood, $3 -- prompting the grand dragon of mid-Atlantic states, Joel L. Baskin of Arlington County, to drive to Crab Orchard to help Mr. Byrd organize a local chapter. The fledgling congressional candidate won the 1952 primary, but shortly before the general election, his Republican opponent released a letter that Mr. Byrd had written to the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in 1946, three years after he had allegedly left the Klan. In the letter, Mr. Byrd wrote, "The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia" and "in every state in the Union." The governor demanded that Mr. Byrd withdraw from the Democratic ticket, as did most of the state's newspapers, but friends and neighbors donated 50 cents here and a dollar there so he could keep his campaign going. He won with 57.4 percent of the vote and was reelected by larger margins in 1954 and 1956. With both of West Virginia's Senate seats up for election in 1958, the 40-year-old congressman decided to make his move. Mr. Byrd lambasted President Dwight D. Eisenhower for his "lack of strong leadership" on foreign policy, his weak response to the Soviet scientific threat symbolized by the Sputnik satellite launch and his inability to stem the tide of recession. Mr. Byrd won handily, even though the United Mine Workers initially opposed him and the coal companies worked to beat him. In the Senate, Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Tex.), became Mr. Byrd's mentor, rewarding the freshman with a seat on the Appropriations Committee. In the House, Mr. Byrd had voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first significant effort to guarantee voting rights since Reconstruction. He also voted, at Johnson's behest, for the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which established federal inspection of local voter registration rolls. Eisenhower signed the bill into law. But in 1961, when Johnson became vice president, Mr. Byrd allied himself with Richard B. Russell, the powerful Democratic senator from Georgia and architect of the filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He joined Southern Democrats in opposition to the landmark legislation, which outlawed racial segregation in schools, public places and employment. Relying on licorice pellets and sips of milk for energy, Mr. Byrd filibustered for more than 14 hours in an effort to bury the legislation. "Men are not created equal today, and they were not created equal in 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was written," Mr. Byrd proclaimed during the filibuster. "Men and races of men differ in appearance, ways, physical power, mental capacity, creativity and vision." He opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and most of Johnson's "war on poverty" programs. "We can take the people out of the slums, but we cannot take the slums out of the people," he said. "Wherever some people go the slums will follow. People first have to clean up inside themselves." His detractors labeled him a racist hillbilly, but quietly over the years he worked to shed that image. When he arrived in the Senate in 1959, he had hired one of the Capitol's first black congressional aides. When a vote on making King's birthday a federal holiday came up on the floor of the Senate in 1983, Mr. Byrd told an aide, "I'm the only one who must vote for this bill." In 2008, Mr. Byrd endorsed Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for president. Known for his detailed knowledge of bills under consideration and his familiarity with the arcane rules of parliamentary procedure, Mr. Byrd was elected secretary of the Senate Democratic Conference in 1967. Taking on tedious and seemingly insignificant tasks, paying close attention to minor legislative and scheduling details and making himself available virtually around the clock, he became what The Washington Post called "the indispensable man." In 1971, he ran for the position of Democratic whip and defeated the incumbent, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, at a time when the Massachusetts senator was distracted by a personal scandal. In 1969, Kennedy had driven a car off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Mass., and a young female passenger drowned. Mr. Byrd relied on votes from Southern and border-state senators, including a deathbed proxy from his old mentor Russell. When he became majority whip, Mr. Byrd was the third most conservative senator outside the South, but within weeks of assuming whip duties, his voting record began to moderate. Although he never relinquished his conservative, moralistic demeanor, he began to support most civil rights legislation, including the Equal Rights Amendment. He also continued to vote with Senate liberals on housing, unemployment benefits, Social Security and public works projects. "A leadership role is different," he said, "and one does represent a broader constituency." He was elected majority leader by acclamation in 1977, at a time of new legislative and investigative opportunities for the Democrats, thanks to the Watergate political scandal that led to President Richard M. Nixon's resignation. Mr. Byrd had the legislative, leadership and management skills to take advantage. Although he supported the legislative program of the new Democrat in the White House, Jimmy Carter, Mr. Byrd and Carter occasionally clashed. He chastised the president for failing to consult with Senate leadership on key appointments and legislative policies and refused to waste time on bills that, as far as he was concerned, had little chance of passing. He used his legislative skills to save Carter's foreign policy initiatives from certain defeat. He broadened support for the administration's proposal to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea by introducing a compromise amendment that ensured congressional participation in the final plan. He also smoothed passage of the controversial Panama Canal treaties. He continued as minority leader from 1981 to 1987 and served a second term as majority leader in 1987-88. "Once the Democrats lost their majority, they were looking for something else, someone who could put together an agenda and speak effectively for what they wanted to do," said Mann of the Brookings Institution. "They didn't want him [Byrd] being their public representative." In 1989, Mr. Byrd became chairman of the Appropriations Committee and soon proclaimed, "I want to be West Virginia's billion-dollar industry." He succeeded. The economically distressed state became home to an FBI fingerprint center in Clarksburg, Treasury and IRS offices in Parkersburg, a Fish and Wildlife Service training center in Harpers Ferry, a federal prison in Beckley, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives office in Martinsburg and a NASA research center in Wheeling. He made an unsuccessful effort to move the CIA to West Virginia. West Virginia is dotted with more than 30 federal projects named after Mr. Byrd, including two Robert C. Byrd U.S. courthouses, four Robert C. Byrd stretches of roadway, a Robert C. Byrd Bridge, two Robert C. Byrd interchanges, a Robert C. Byrd Locks and Dam project and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. Mr. Byrd was reelected in 2000 with 78 percent of the vote, compared with 20 percent for his closest rival, the largest margin in his long career. "West Virginia has always had four friends," he said that election night, "God Almighty, Sears Roebuck, Carter's Liver Pills and Robert C. Byrd." ? 2010 The Washington Post Company From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jun 28 07:09:06 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:09:06 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Oklahoma granny sues cops over tasering Message-ID: <601FD2EB-9FF5-4B67-9555-7CC1B1807CF2@infowarrior.org> Oklahoma granny sues cops over tasering By Lester Haines ? Get more from this author Posted in Bootnotes, 28th June 2010 08:29 GMT http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/28/taser_lawsuit/ An 86-year-old Oklahoma woman is suing the El Reno police department for tasering her in her sick bed, local koco.com reports. Lona M Varner's grandson, Lonnie D Tinsley, was visiting granny's apartment on 22 December last year, and claims he called 911 "to request emergency medical technicians to stop by to help her with medication". According to the pair's version of events, instead of medical operatives, 10 officers turned up and "pushed their way through the door". Varner "told them to leave", at which point they became "needlessly aggressive", then "stepped on her oxygen hose until Varner began to suffer oxygen deprivation" before hitting her twice with a taser. The first shot didn't connect, but the second "hit her in the chest, burning Varner and causing her to pass out". Varner was taken by paramedics to El Reno's Parkview Hospital, and from there to a psychiatric ward in St Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City "at the direction of El Reno police", where she was held for six days. In their lawsuit filed in federal court last Monday, Varner and Tinsley are claiming "more than $75,000" for the former's "great pain, mental suffering, fear and humiliation and being deprived of her physical liberty". The police report, however, paints a very different picture. Officer Duran explains that he attended the scene where "a suicidal subject" had "taken unknown medication". He claims Varner pulled a kitchen knife from under her pillow and said: "I want to die. I did not call you so get the fuck out of my house." Varner refused to hand over the knife, threatened to kill Duran and two other officers who arrived as back-up and was then tasered, rendering her "incapable of any further aggresive action". During transportation to Parkview Hospital, Varner persisted in making death threats against the police, prompting Duran to "complete an officer's affadavit for emergency detention". Police and the city of El Reno have "declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying it is still pending". ? From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jun 28 15:07:17 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:07:17 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Wikileaks_Fails_=93Due_Diligence?= =?windows-1252?q?=94_Review?= Message-ID: Wikileaks Fails ?Due Diligence? Review June 28th, 2010 by Steven Aftergood http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2010/06/wikileaks_review.html In the past week, both the Washington Post and the New York Times have referred to WikiLeaks.org, the web site that publishes confidential records, as a ?whistleblower? site. This conforms to WikiLeaks? own instructions to journalists that ?WikiLeaks should be described, depending on context, as the ?open government group?, ?anti-corruption group?, ?transparency group? or ?whistleblower?s site?.? But calling WikiLeaks a whistleblower site does not accurately reflect the character of the project. It also does not explain why others who are engaged in open government, anti-corruption and whistleblower protection activities are wary of WikiLeaks or disdainful of it. And it does not provide any clue why the Knight Foundation, the preeminent foundation funder of innovative First Amendment and free press initiatives, might have rejected WikiLeaks? request for financial support, as it recently did. From one perspective, WikiLeaks is a creative response to a real problem afflicting the U.S. and many other countries, namely the over-control of government information to the detriment of public policy. WikiLeaks has published a considerable number of valuable official records that had been kept unnecessarily secret and were otherwise unavailable, including some that I had attempted and failed to obtain myself. Its most spectacular disclosure was the formerly classified videotape showing an attack by a U.S. Army helicopter crew in Baghdad in 2007 which led to the deaths of several non-combatants. Before mostly going dormant late last year, it also published numerous documents that have no particular policy significance or that were already placed in the public domain by others (including a few that were taken from the FAS web site). WikiLeaks says that it is dedicated to fighting censorship, so a casual observer might assume that it is more or less a conventional liberal enterprise committed to enlightened democratic policies. But on closer inspection that is not quite the case. In fact, WikiLeaks must be counted among the enemies of open society because it does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals. Last year, for example, WikiLeaks published the ?secret ritual? of a college women?s sorority called Alpha Sigma Tau. Now Alpha Sigma Tau (like several other sororities ?exposed? by WikiLeaks) is not known to have engaged in any form of misconduct, and WikiLeaks does not allege that it has. Rather, WikiLeaks chose to publish the group?s confidential ritual just because it could. This is not whistleblowing and it is not journalism. It is a kind of information vandalism. In fact, WikiLeaks routinely tramples on the privacy of non-governmental, non-corporate groups for no valid public policy reason. It has published private rites of Masons, Mormons and other groups that cultivate confidential relations among their members. Most or all of these groups are defenseless against WikiLeaks? intrusions. The only weapon they have is public contempt for WikiLeaks? ruthless violation of their freedom of association, and even that has mostly been swept away in a wave of uncritical and even adulatory reporting about the brave ?open government,? ?whistleblower? site. On occasion, WikiLeaks has engaged in overtly unethical behavior. Last year, without permission, it published the full text of the highly regarded 2009 book about corruption in Kenya called ?It?s Our Turn to Eat? by investigative reporter Michela Wrong (as first reported by Chris McGreal in The Guardian on April 9). By posting a pirated version of the book and making it freely available, WikiLeaks almost certainly disrupted sales of the book and made it harder for Ms. Wrong and other anti-corruption reporters to perform their important work and to get it published. Repeated protests and pleas from the author were required before WikiLeaks (to its credit) finally took the book offline. ?Soon enough,? observed Raffi Khatchadourian in a long profile of WikiLeaks? Julian Assange in The New Yorker (June 7), ?Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most?power without accountability?is encoded in the site?s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.? Much could be forgiven to WikiLeaks if it were true that its activities were succeeding in transforming government information policy in favor of increased openness and accountability ? as opposed to merely generating reams of publicity for itself. WikiLeaks supporter Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com wrote that when it comes to combating government secrecy, ?nobody is doing that as effectively as WikiLeaks.? But he neglected to spell out exactly what effect WikiLeaks has had. Which U.S. government programs have been cancelled as a result of Wikileaks? activities? Which government policies have been revised? How has public discourse shifted? (And, by the way, who has been injured by its work?) A less sympathetic observer might conclude that WikiLeaks has squandered much of the impact that it might have had. A telling comparison can be made between WikiLeaks? publication of the Iraq Apache helicopter attack video last April and The New Yorker?s publication of the Abu Ghraib abuse photographs in an article by Seymour Hersh in May 2004. Both disclosures involved extremely graphic and disturbing images. Both involved unreleased or classified government records. And both generated a public sensation. But there the similarity ends. The Abu Ghraib photos prompted lawsuits, congressional hearings, courts martial, prison sentences, declassification initiatives, and at least indirectly a revision of U.S. policy on torture and interrogation. By contrast, the WikiLeaks video tendentiously packaged under the title ?Collateral Murder? produced none of that? no investigation (other than a leak investigation), no congressional hearings, no lawsuits, no tightening of the rules of engagement. Just a mild scolding from the Secretary of Defense, and an avalanche of publicity for WikiLeaks. Of course, it?s hard for anyone to produce a specific desired outcome from the national security bureaucracy, and maybe WikiLeaks can?t be faulted for failing to have done so. But with the whole world?s attention at its command for a few days last April, it could have done more to place the focus on the victims of the incident that it had documented, perhaps even establishing a charitable fund to assist their families. But that?s not what it chose to do. Instead, the focus remained firmly fixed on WikiLeaks itself and its own ambitious fundraising efforts. In perhaps the first independent review of the WikiLeaks project, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation considered and rejected an application from WikiLeaks for financial support. The Knight Foundation was actively looking for grantees who could promote innovative uses of digital technology in support of the future development of journalism. At the end of the process, more than $2.7 million was awarded to 12 promising recipients. WikiLeaks was not among them. ?Every year some applications that are popular among advisors don?t make the cut after Knight staff conducts due diligence,? said Knight Foundation spokesman Marc Fest in response to an inquiry from Yahoo news. ?WikiLeaks was not recommended by Knight staff to the board.? From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jun 28 17:36:40 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:36:40 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - U.S. intelligence community debates China's bond holdings Message-ID: U.S. intelligence community debates China's bond holdings Wed Jun 23, 2010 3:19pm EDT By Emily Flitter http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2214670220100623 NEW YORK, June 23 (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence officials and top academics last week debated the risk China could wield its massive U.S. debt holdings as a weapon aimed at influencing U.S. foreign policy, according to a person who attended the meeting. At a National Intelligence Council meeting last week, held at a Washington, D.C. hotel, members of U.S. intelligence agencies and China watchers discussed potential outcomes if China chose to sell its $900 billion of U.S. Treasury bond holdings, pushing up interest rates and making life much tougher for U.S. businesses and consumers. While considered a remote possibility, China's tremendous economic stranglehold over the United States remains much-debated as the world's third largest economy grows in leaps and bounds and the number one economy struggles to break free from a deep recession. The meeting took place as the United States prepares to issue a report that could label China a currency manipulator. U.S. lawmakers are also arguing over a bill that would penalize China for any protectionist policies. "The best offense is often a good defense and you must be prepared. This is something that allows the U.S. to consider what policy alternatives they might have when facing threats from the outside," said Paul Markowski, president of the Global Strategies-Analysis Group in New York. "This is one of the government bodies that considers the risks to the United States, economically, geopolitically and militarily," he added. The NIC is a think tank made up of academics and members of the U.S. intelligence community. Its website describes itself as an advisory council to senior policymakers and the President. Some policymakers think China could exercise this power over the United States without mobilizing any military force to influence U.S. policy in areas -- from Taiwan to climate change -- where is has deep interests. "This is obviously considered important," said the person who attended the meeting. "It's been an ongoing topic of conversation since the Chinese started amassing large sums of dollars." A banker at a primary dealer, one of the 18 financial firms authorized to deal directly with the Treasury Department to buy and sell U.S. government debt, said the timing of the discussion seemed practical. "I'm guessing the following: Maybe the U.S. is preparing itself that in the event the Treasury, for example, were to name China as a currency manipulator or Congress were to pass legislation that viewed China as protectionist, this could be how China would respond," said the banker, who did not wish to be named. "So as a way of brainstorming you would want to come up with what you would do." The Chinese government on Saturday announced it would make its currency more flexible, loosening its peg to the U.S. dollar. But financial analysts and lawmakers alike said the change might be too gradual--or it might not occur at all. U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York who has proposed legislation that would impose trade tariffs on Chinese goods as punishment for China's undervaluation of its currency, vowed on Sunday to move ahead with the legislation, despite China's announcement. China's Treasury holdings rose to $900.2 billion in April according to the Treasury Department reported on June 15. Since it is the biggest player in the Treasury market, any visible move by the Chinese government to buy or sell large quantities of Treasuries could have profound effects on the rest of the market. It would either depress or drive up yields and impact the cost of borrowing for houses, cars and businesses. "In doing that, what options does the Federal Reserve have; what options does the Treasury have?" said Markowski, a China expert. "If China were to be a large, large seller, then they would have to do something more significant." Some China analysts have referred to China using its debt holdings as political leverage as a 'nuclear option,' because quickly selling Treasuries would not only hurt the United States; it would also depress the value of China's reserve holdings and impact its domestic economy. At least one strong advocate for the view that China could indeed influence U.S. politics though Treasury purchasing or selling is Brad Setser, a member of the National Economic Council and the National Security Council. Before joining the Obama Administration in 2009, Setser argued this view on his blog, Follow the Money, and in papers he wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations. Those arguments were discussed at the conference, with no clear resolution, the person said. The NIC meeting was held a month after top U.S. and Chinese government officials met for an annual conference on economic cooperation, the Strategic & Economic Dialogue, held this year in Beijing in late May. (Editing by Andrew Hay) From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jun 28 19:44:45 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:44:45 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - SCOTUS: Business ideas may be patentable Message-ID: Business ideas may be patentable, US Supreme Court says 1 hr 39 mins ago http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100628/tc_afp/uscourtpatentcommoditiesit/print WASHINGTON (AFP) ? The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that a business method can be patented, a significant ruling for software and biomedical industries, though the court did not issue a definition of which types of processes qualify. Ruling on a case called Bilski v. Kappos, the high court rejected the notion of a single standard suggested by a lower court, and allowed that business processes may be patentable but opted not to define within what scope. The high court also said the specific example before it was too abstract to be patented. Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw had brought their case to the Supreme Court after the Washington Appeals Court ruled their business process could not be patented because it was not tied to a machine or apparatus. The federal court's decision had required that a patentable process had to "involve a transformation of one thing into something else." Biomedical processes were likely to benefit widely from the ruling; it was not immediately clear if the breadth of the ruling might include pharmaceuticals. Justice Anthony Kennedy highlighted basic patent eligibility of "inventions in the Information Age," naming specifically "software, advanced diagnostic medicine techniques, and inventions based on linear programming, data compression and manipulation of digital signals." From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jun 28 20:43:17 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:43:17 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Android App Aims to Allow Wiretap-Proof Cell Phone Calls Message-ID: <38129512-2BDB-480A-99A6-5A51C19DB247@infowarrior.org> Android App Aims to Allow Wiretap-Proof Cell Phone Calls May 25, 2010 - 5:15 pm Andy Greenberg is a technology writer for Forbes. http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/2010/05/25/android-app-aims-to-allow-wiretap-proof-cell-phone-calls/ Worried about the NSA, the FBI, criminals or cyberspies electronically eavedropping on your private phone calls? There may be an untappable app for that. On Tuesday, an independent hacker and security researcher who goes by the handle Moxie Marlinspike and his Pittsburgh-based startup Whisper Systems launched free public betas for two new privacy-focused programs on Google's Android mobile platform: RedPhone, a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) program that encrypts phone calls, and TextSecure, an app for sending and receiving encrypted text messages and scrambling the messages stored in their inbox. Marlinspike says the apps will interface with users' contact lists and other functions on the phone to take the hassle out of making calls and sending texts that can't be eavesdropped by third parties. "Our main aim is to make this as easy as possible," he says. "We want it to be a secure and anonymous drop-in replacement for the normal dialing system on your phone." RedPhone uses ZRTP, an open source Internet voice cryptography scheme created by Phil Zimmermann, inventor of the widely-used Pretty Good Privacy or PGP encryption. When a caller dials another RedPhone user, the app uses the two users' keys to create a simple passphrase ("flatfoot eskimo" or "slingshot millionaire," for example) and display it on each phone, allowing the speakers to verify that the codes match, and that there's no man-in-the-middle intercepting the call. TextSecure uses a similar scheme developed by cryptographers Ian Goldberg and Nikita Borisov known as "Off The Record" to exchange scrambled text messages. Both apps automatically generate a new key and delete the old one with every communication so that even if a user's key is stolen, none of his or her past calls or texts can be deciphered. The two apps will likely remain free even once they leave beta, Marlinspike says, though he also plans to offer a premium, paid version of the programs. Whisper Systems' apps aren't the first to bring encrypted VoIP to smartphones. But apps like Skype and Vonage don't publish their source code, leaving the rigor of their security largely a matter of speculation. Marlinspike argues that because those apps interface with the traditional telephone network, they may also be subject to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, (CALEA) which requires companies to build backdoors into their technologies for law enforcement wiretaps. Since the passage of CALEA in 1994, the number of those law enforcement wiretaps has exploded. There were 2,376 wiretaps by law enforcement agencies in 2009, 26% more than the year before, and 76% more than 1999. Marlinspike, whose past work has focused on SSL vulnerabilities and thwarting Google's data collection, says his apps are meant to offer privacy in an age of overzealous legal wiretaps, as well as those that may be using vulnerabilities created by CALEA for illegal surveillance. He points, for instance, to the Athen Affairs, a situation in 2005 when legal intercept capabilities in Ericsson equipment were used to spy on Greek politicians including the country's prime minister. "We've entered this really problematic situation where we have insecure infrastructure everywhere, communications being broadcast in the air around us, and anyone with a bit of radio equipment can reach out and intercept communications," says Marlinspike. "Individuals need to start taking steps to protect their privacy and the confidence of their communications." If the new apps see widespread adoption, the usual criticisms of wiretap-defeating encryption may follow. Since the 1990s, opponents of encrypted communication technologies have argued that scrambling messages would give free rein to criminals and terrorists. FBI director Louis Freeh argued in 1997, for instance, that "uncrackable encryption will allow drug lords, spies, terrorists and even violent gangs to communicate about their crimes and their conspiracies with impunity." But Marlinspike points out that criminals today can use other means to avoid wiretaps, such as anonymous, prepaid "burner" phones, like the one used by the Times Square attempted bomber. "This matters much less to criminals than it does for everyone else," he says. Of more concern to Marlinspike may be another statistic published by the judicial system last month. Last year, law enforcement officials only encountered encryption in one case, and in that case, the technology "did not prevent officials from obtaining the plain text of the communications," according to the courts' report, raising questions of why encryption has failed to stop the expansion and success of wiretaps. Better encryption technology like Marlinspike's could change the technology's seeming ineffectiveness. But University of Pennsylvania Computer Science professor Matt Blaze says that the report may also demonstrate that law enforcement can find its way around even strong encryption by planting spyware on the target's phone. "If I were law enforcement, intelligence, or a bad guy, I would waste very little time trying to defeat the encryption and instead install my software on your phone to simply see the key," says Blaze. He points to the trial of alleged mafia member Nicky Scarfo, whose computer was revealed to have been bugged by the FBI with spyware to log his keystrokes. In Whisper Systems' defense, Android malware is hardly widespread, and planting spyware on a target's phone is still far more work than traditional wiretaps, which involve simply asking the user's carrier to bug the phone. One way to reduce that remaining vulnerability, however, may be moving the apps to Apple's more tightly controlled iPhone platform. Whisper plans to submit RedPhone and TextSecure to Apple for review, though Marlinspike admits he has doubts about the company's review process. "Getting this approved by Apple," he says, "might be challenging." In the mean time, Android users can download both apps here. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jun 28 20:48:56 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:48:56 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?You_Don=92t_Want_ISPs_to_Innovat?= =?windows-1252?q?e?= Message-ID: You Don?t Want ISPs to Innovate ? By Ryan Singel ? June 24, 2010 | ? 5:38 pm | http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/06/you-dont-want-isps-to-innovate/ There?s a complicated fight in D.C. right now over how the FCC classifies broadband services, so it can regain the power to impose some basic rules on the industry. Free-market groups and the industry are banging the table, arguing against the consequences ? saying that the FCC is trying to regulate the internet and will kill innovation. Here?s the simple truth: You don?t want your ISP to innovate. At least not in the way, they want to ?innovate.? The net has seen an explosion of cool services in the last decade ? Google created a search engine that works, Facebook created a social network that helps people stay more connected, webmail became a viable replacement for desktop software, you can collaborate online through wikis and online word processors, and everyone in the world can now have their own online printing press, thanks to blogging software. YouTube became the world?s online video repository, while Netflix and Hulu are demonstrating the future of online video rentals, and sites like Wikipedia, Yelp and IMDB put encyclopedias of knowledge at the disposal of anyone with a net connection and a bit of curiousity. Where are the major players in the U.S. broadband industry in all of this innovation? Basically, nowhere. The U.S. is 26th in the world in terms of online access. The industry?s investment in deployment of fiber optics ? the transport medium of the future ? is laughable (with the noted exception of Verizon, which has devoted significant money to its FiOS buildout ? despite being punished by Wall Street for doing so.) Instead, they are jealous of online services that make money from ads. AT&T?s former CEO Ed Whitacre famously declared that Yahoo and Google couldn?t use his pipes for free, failing to mention that it was the company?s paying customers who were requesting pages from those sites. Now the industry?s paid pundit Scott Cleland, who runs a faux grassroots group called NETCompetition.org, is arguing that the government is trying to ?shift the burden of Google-YouTube?s gigantic video distribution costs completely onto the backs of broadband consumers? by forcing ISPs to follow some fair play rules. Cleland?s laughable argument depends on the idea that Google has some secret backdoor to the internet where they don?t pay to send YouTube videos or search results to its customers. In fact, Google has paid for or built huge swaths of internet fiber, builds massive data centers around the world to reduce the distance content has to travel to users and pays for bandwidth like any other company on the net. Still, ISPs would love to find a way to be paid for both sides of their networks ? from their users and from online services. And they want to get paid from the packets flowing inside their networks, too. When ISPs Innovate In the last couple of years, ISPs ?innovated? by changing how they handle users who type in a URL that doesn?t exist. Under net protocols, the ISP?s DNS servers are supposed to report an error code to your browser in those circumstances. Instead, ISPs are now serving up pages with ads, sometimes in ways that introduce huge security risks. As a reaction, Google set up a fast, ad-free DNS service. And if you want to see what real innovation in DNS looks like, take a look at OpenDNS, which has built fraud protection, security measures and optional web content filtering into its robust DNS service. ISPs have also long insisted on customers using ?installation? software that did nothing but drive customers onto ISPs? web properties to get ad dollars; tried to sell ? for a monthly fee ? wireless home network capability you could set up easily with a $50 router (and then blame service problems on any home wireless networks you didn?t buy from them); and even hijack address-bar searches that might otherwise, per the browser settings, use an actually useful search engine like Google. ISPs also recently dipped their toes into another innovation: Selling access to everything their customers do online in order to build profiles on them and secretly insert targeted ads into other company?s web pages. That idea came from a company called NebuAd, which drew attention after Charter Communications ? the nation?s fourth largest cable operator ? announced in 2008 it would start letting the company spy on its users. A firestorm ensued ? smaller ISPs admitted they had secretly let NebuAd spy on their customers ? and ISPs soon dropped their interest after Congressman Ed Markey made it clear that any ISP participating would come under very close scrutiny from his telecom committee. At about the same time, Comcast was found to be using the tactics of Chinese government net censors to clamp down on peer-to-peer services. The company was sending fake signals to users? computers, ostensibly to reduce congestion on its networks. While peer-to-peer services are often used for illicit sharing of copyrighted material, the company had no way to differentiate that from legitimate uses ? getting updates from online games, downloading open-source software and sharing music and movies that aren?t copyrighted. That practice didn?t stop until the FCC stepped in with a series of hearings and an order to cut it out and disclose to its customers how it manages its network. This is the kind of innovation that free-market groups like the Progress and Freedom Foundation and paid shills like Scott Cleland want to protect. But that?s not the kind innovation that Americans want or need. Why Your Broadbrand Crawls, Not Sings What we want and need is fast, reliable and affordable internet access. The dirty secret of ISPs is that even as broadband usage on their networks continues to increase 30 to 40 percent a year, their annual costs for shipping data onto and off the net?s main pipes continues to fall. The problem isn?t the cost of shipping data. The problem is that the large ISPs answer to Wall Street and instead of planning and investing for abundance, they prefer to spend their time thinking of ways to extract more money from customers without having to invest significantly in future-proof infrastructure. Thankfully, Americans instinctively know better. When Time Warner Cable tried to introduce laughably low broadband usage caps, Americans howled with outrage and the company was forced to beat a hasty retreat. The biggest public excitement over broadband in the last few years came not from any of the ISPs, but oddly from Google, which announced it would choose a lucky few communities to get ultra-fast, fiber optic broadband, free from ISP interference. Communities ? 1,100 of them ? created detailed plans, including ones that went so far as to ?rename? their towns and create embarrassingly corny YouTube videos. The message was clear: Americans hunger for better broadband. Meanwhile, in reality, if you want fast broadband in the United States, hope you are somewhere in Verizon?s core territory or surprisingly, move to the sticks. There are 18.2 million homes in North America that have fiber connections ending at their doorstep and more than 5.8 million subscribe, according to a recent report from the North American Fiber to the Home council. While most of those are Verizon, the surprising story is that many small, rural telecoms ? some of them co-ops or family businesses deeply invested in their community ? have decided to invest in all-fiber networks. And their communities love it ? in these non-Verizon networks, more than half of the people who could subscribe, actually do, and in some projects more than 70 percent do. But the large telecoms would rather spend their money and time fighting the FCC over some basic regulations ? the right for Americans to use the software, services and hardware of their choosing, without unfair discrimination by ISPs ? than build world-class networks. They?d rather plot to get themselves some of that sweet money flowing to online services, instead of concentrating on what the country really wants and needs, which is fast, cheap and open internet access. The ISPs would rather be in a world where certain online services are locked only to certain ISPs ? like ESPN?s streaming video is now ? so that they can have a lock on customers that isn?t dependent on them actually building out the best infrastructure they can. Building out infrastructure means redirecting stock-dividend dollars and putting them back into the company, which Wall Street punishes companies for ? and which hurts the massive stock packages of telecom executives. It?s literally not in telecom executives? best interest to invest in broadband and solid networks. That?s why you get companies like Time Warner trying to squeeze customers into limits on the amount of data they can use ? not because bandwidth is expensive ? but because building a real network is. It?s far better, in their minds and for the stock price, to focus on bleeding as much from their current customers using self-serving policies instead of gaining loyalty by making networks that are generous, quick and reliable. When towns get tired of begging for fast internet ? only to be told it doesn?t make financial sense for telecoms, they sometimes decide to build their own fiber networks. And then telecoms sue the cities ? as they did in the case of Monticello, Minnesota, and run to state legislators to write laws outlawing citizens from organizing their own networks as Time Warner Cable did in the case of Wilson, North Carolina, which set up its own fiber network known as Greenlight. That?s why AT&T is more interested in trying to figure out how to divide their network into fast and slow lanes so it can levy a speed tax on video services like Google?s YouTube, than it is in creating a network that?s fast and reliable. Even now in San Francisco, one of the springs of innovation on the net, a standalone DSL line from AT&T costs $35 a month for a top speed of 1.5 Mbps down and 384 up, with reliability that?s simply embarrassing. There?s no real argument being made that the FCC?s attempt to re-reclassify broadband legally wrong. By the letter of the law, broadband providers are clearly ?telecom services? and the FCC is now simply undoing an intellectually dishonest move by the Bush FCC. Moreover, the FCC is being reasonable in its attempt to impose several small obligations (including making broadband accessible for the disabled and possibly adding some privacy requirements), while exempting internet providers from the bevy of regulations that applied to the phone network to deal with its monopolistic nature. In fact, the FCC is permanently passing up the opportunity to do one thing that might actually spur some ISP competition Instead, the telecoms, their fake grassroots organization and their libertarian supporters are making false claims that the FCC wants to regulate the internet. It?s a sideshow. The FCC?s proposal is simple and makes sense. The proposed rules don?t apply to online services and never will. The rules are focused on the transport layer and will help curb the worst excesses of an industry that actually hates itself. The broadband barons don?t want to provide you fast internet. It?s too close to being a utility for their tastes (that?s boring and lacks huge profit margins) and requires too much investment. They want their own flashy video competitors to YouTube and advertising systems that target ads to you based on what zipcode you live in. That?s not innovation. It?s time to put the FCC sideshow aside and put the focus where it ought to be ? on why the nation?s telecoms are putting Wall Street ahead of American citizens and a truly modern infrastructure. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jun 29 20:08:19 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:08:19 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - 'Please Remove Your Shoes' pans TSA, FAA Message-ID: <787F10BC-E047-416E-9E9E-D3214428C8F1@infowarrior.org> 'Please Remove Your Shoes' pans TSA, FAA http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/06/though_most_disgruntled_worker.html Clip courtesy of Boston Aviation Services, Inc. in association with Black Pearl Productions Many disgruntled workers file grievances with their union or write a letter to the editor, but a half dozen federal employees have turned to the big screen to raise concerns with the nation's airport security. "Please Remove Your Shoes" uses the experiences of current and former employees of the Federal Air Marshals, Federal Aviation Administration and Transportation Security Administration to argue that FAA officials frequently turned a blind eye to significant security threats in the years before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The workers argue that lawmakers later compounded existing problems by reflexively establishing TSA. "We took the same organizational template and same counterterrorist template verbatim and reapplied it under a new label and new people and threw some more money at it," said Fred Gevalt, the film's producer and a long time aviation industry observer. "But there are still some fundamental errors." Gevalt and his team spent almost two years and ?six figures? exploring the topic. The film debuts Wednesday evening at the Landmark E Street Cinema in Washington, less than a week after the Senate confirmed FBI Deputy Director John Pistole as TSA administrator. Brian Sullivan, a retired FAA special agent who narrates the film, said Pistole?s experience with intelligence and counterterrorism will lend well to his new role. And the documentary, though slanted, could help balance his early perceptions of TSA. "He?s going to come on board and TSA management will give him in briefings, but their presentations will be equally slanted in terms of putting the best foot forward," Sullivan said. The FAA declined to comment, and TSA declined Gevalt's invitation to participate in the documentary. "TSA is a young agency and many of the allegations raised in the film are past issues that have been long since addressed," said agency spokesman Greg Soule. "TSA has significantly improved aviation security following the tragic events of 9-11." The film's central focus in airport security, but it also chronicles the struggles commonly faced by federal whistleblowers, including threats, demotions and reassignments to the graveyard shift for speaking out. "Raising issues and challenging management?s position on security issues, it sidetracks your career," said Sullivan, who spent years alerting FAA officials and lawmakers of potential threats. He's irked by suggestions that the film is a televised airing of his grievances. ?When I saw the two planes flying into the World Trade Center, I knew what it was instantly," Sullivan said. "I cried, I felt like throwing up. I criticized myself, I said, 'What the hell is the matter with me? Am I so inarticulate? Do I not know how to write or speak? Why couldn?t I have prevented this? I?ve gotten over that, I know I did what I could." From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jun 30 18:35:34 2010 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:35:34 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Homeland Security Works For Disney Now? Message-ID: Homeland Security Works For Disney Now? Announces Shut Down Of Movie Sites At Disney from the civil-vs.-criminal? dept http://techdirt.com/articles/20100630/14391410029.shtml Well, here we go. Remember how, a few months back, we noted how odd it was that the Justice Department (which, of course, employs many former RIAA/MPAA/BSA lawyers) was designating a special task force to fight copyright infringement? After all, copyright infringement is mostly a civil issue, between two private parties. For years, however, the entertainment industry has been working hard to convince the government to act as it's own private police force, and following a totally one-sided "summit" with Joe Biden (who recently claimed that infringement is no different than doing a smash and grab at Tiffany's), suddenly the feds had a special IP task force... at the same time that it was downgrading the priority of crimes that cause actual harm, such as identity fraud. Now, it looks like law enforcement isn't even trying to hide the fact that they're taking orders from Hollywood. Dark Helmet points us to the news that Homeland Security proudly announced raids on nine different movie sites, which they accuse of infringing on copyrights. But what's most interesting is where the announcements about these raids happened: at Disney. And who else was there on stage? Execs from other studios. Yup, Homeland Security isn't even trying to make the slightest effort to hide the fact that it now works for corporate interests. It will announce legal activity from the companies, which stand to benefit the most from such activity. Imagine if the FTC announced plans to charge Google with antitrust from Microsoft's offices? With execs from Yahoo and Apple on stage. Wouldn't people cry foul? Not only that, but the guy in charge of the raids blatantly admits that it's now a homeland security priority to protect movie studio interests: The head of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], John Morton, says that the number of illegal movie sites is dramatically rising both in the U.S. and abroad, and organized crime is behind some of them. ICE is putting movie piracy front and center in this new initiative, by making its first actions to protect the movie studios' intellectual property. What does customs have to do with a domestic dispute over civil copyright infringement? And why are Homeland Security officials so closely involved with a few Hollywood Studios that they're not just protecting their business models, but also announcing these efforts from the studios' own offices? I don't know anything about these sites that were shut down. I've never heard of any of them, but they're nine out of hundreds, if not thousands. It won't do anything to actually help Disney or these other studios. Users will quickly shift elsewhere. The content will still get released just as quickly. The claims that these sites were run by "organized crime" could very well be true, but I'd like to see some actual evidence on that. It's a common refrain from the industry, but no actual proof has been presented. At best they've shown that some DVD counterfeiting operations have some mob ties, but that's not the same thing. Note that in the announcement no actual evidence of organized crime links were provided. In a separate article, US Attorney Preet Bharara is quoted as saying that the government took these actions because "copyright infringement translates into lost jobs." Never mind the fact that the GAO just pointed out that such claims are highly questionable (especially the ones from the MPAA -- who won't provide their methodology), this raises a really serious question about government interference into private markets. The government's role is not to protect industry's from losing jobs. It never has been. Otherwise it would have "raided" car companies for making horse buggies obsolete. Using that as justification has no legal basis whatsoever, and is really a very disturbing claim. The whole thing appears to be a gross misuse of government resources to protect a few movie studios, which are unwilling to adapt to a changing market place. People should be outraged over such a misuse of government powers, but because these are "pirate" sites, everyone will look the other way.