Archive for August, 2012

Filesonic, previously listed among the top 10 largest file-sharing sites in the world, was badly affected by the Megaupload shutdown and lost huge amounts of traffic in 2012. During the last 48 hours it simply ceased to function.

In the wake of the January shutdown of Megaupload, many of the Internet’s leading cyberlocker services changed their business models in the hope they could avoid a similar fate.

One such site, Hong Kong-based Filesonic, took the drastic measures of discontinuing both their rewards program and all third-party sharing. In the file-hosting world their decisions were a pretty big deal. At the time Filesonic was one of the top 10 file-sharing sites on the Internet, with a quarter billion page views a month.

Despite the efforts of Filesonic to stay out of the copyright infringement spotlight (in December 2011 the company had partnered with anti-piracy company Vobile), in February 2012 the International Intellectual Property Alliance reported Filesonic to the USTR. IIPA, who count the MPAA and RIAA as members, described Filesonic as an “infringing distribution hub.”

But today, six months on, it appears something is seriously amiss with this former giant of the file-sharing world. For two days Filesonic has been completely unreachable via its .com domain after changes were made to its DNS settings.

The disappearance of both Oron and now Filesonic raises plenty of questions, but perhaps what is most unusual is the complete lack of communication with their customers. A simple message on the sites’ homepages would suffice, but neither filehost has obliged. Exactly why is anyone’s guess.

More:
http://torrentfreak.com/major-cyberlocker-filesonic-goes-offline-after-traffic-plummets-120831/

Yonjo Quiroa of Comstock Park is the 28-year-old now-former owner of nine of the domains (not the Firstrow ones) seized in Operation Fake Sweep . ICE say that during January 2012 they were able to access unauthorized NBA, NHL and WWE streams via links on his websites.

Quiroa left a number of trails to his door, not least when he offered to sell some WWE-related domains to an undercover ICE agent posing as an employee of the WWE. On February 2 he was arrested by police in Michigan.

Known online as Ronaldo Solano, Quiroa has been held in custody without bail ever since, a total of almost seven months without trial. On August 1, 2012, Quiroa entered a guilty plea for a copyright misdemeanor on the understanding that he will receive a sentence of between 6 and 12 months.

“Mr. Quiroa has waived any rights to a presentence investigation and report,” writes Quiroa’s attorney in a letter filed in the docket this week and addressed to the judge handling the case.

On September 4 Quiroa will be sentenced, but even on release his punishment will continue.

“Mr. Quiroa will be removed from the United States following his service of his sentence in this case,” Quiroa’s attorney writes. “In light of these facts the guidelines do not recommend a term of supervised release [..]”

More:
http://torrentfreak.com/streaming-site-admin-detained-7-months-without-bail-faces-deportation-120830/

The hacker claims to be a sympathiser of Julian Assange, who is holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, and the digital break-in is seen as a protest against efforts by UK police to arrest the Wikileaker-in-chief.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/31/herts_police_website_hack/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-29/spyware-matching-finfisher-can-take-over-iphone-and-blackberry.html

Dutch language news article:
http://www.security.nl/artikel/42898/1/Financieel_adviseur_berooft_klant_na_nepmail.html

Dutch language news article:
http://www.security.nl/artikel/42904/1/%22Philips_weer_gehackt_door_Anonymous%22.html

ConveyAPI is a simple-to-use REST web service that brings text analytics to social media

More:
http://www.zdnet.com/how-do-people-really-feel-about-your-brand-conveyapi-delivers-sentiment-analysis-7000003455/

Ensures that only real users and brands can authentically connect to the Pages they care about

More:
http://www.zdnet.com/facebook-to-delete-page-likes-and-improve-site-integrity-7000003576/

http://rt.com/news/manning-february-2013-embassy-048/

Transnational Libertarianism can never be too perverse…

More:
http://rt.com/news/assange-interview-transnational-totalitarianism-021/

The German cabinet backed a draft law requiring Google and other news aggregators to pay for summarized information they display before linking to a source – a move that has outraged the Internet giant, politicians and bloggers alike.

­The move, backed by publishing giants like the Axel Springer group, was originally proposed by the Federation of German News Publishers – who were very upset with lost advertising revenue.

The law is about piracy and stealing content on the Internet, said federation spokeswoman Anja Pasquay. Search engines are pirating content by publishing the snippets, “and they don’t even ask, they simply take it,” she said.

More:
http://rt.com/news/germany-law-google-copyright-973/

Previously:

Internet 2 will enable new innovative services to analyze, copy and monetize much higher volumes of other people’s information and data in a much faster way
http://vrritti.com/2012/07/15/internet-2-will-enable-new-innovative-services-to-analyze-copy-and-monetize-much-higher-volumes-of-other-peoples-information-and-data-in-a-much-faster-way/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/30/us-australia-science-bioniceye-idUSBRE87T08C20120830

The reporter, Mark Mazzetti, forwarded an advance copy of a Maureen Dowd column to a CIA spokesperson a full two days before it was set to be published. The article, published August 7th 2011, discussed the upcoming Kathryn Bigelow-Mark Boal film “Zero Dark Thirty”, and criticized the Obama administration for having “outsourced the job of manning up the president’s image to Hollywood.”

More:
http://www.infowars.com/operation-mockingbird-2012-nyt-writer-leaked-story-critical-of-obama-to-cia/

I waited nearly a full year to watch Game of Thrones, because that’s how long it took to get from HBO to iTunes. If I had any interest in purchasing a Avatar 3D Blu-ray, I would have either had to buy a Panasonic 3DTV or wait three years just for the right to spend thirty bucks on FernGully with giant blue cat-people having tail sex.

Even content that’s accessible doesn’t often make much financial sense. Amazon’s the most reasonably priced e-retailer in the world (seriously, it’s got 1,000 albums for five bucks each right now), but even it can be fraught with peril and annoyance. Ebooks that cost more than their paperback equivalents. The specter of DRM haunting every click. A layout so unnavigable you feel like you’re being punished.

Want to comparison shop? Forget about it. Ecosystems aren’t just apps and software anymore, they’re movies and TV shows and everything you’d ever want to watch, read, or listen to. On any given day the best price might be on Amazon or iTunes or Google Play or Xbox, but if you want the simple comfort of knowing everything you paid for with your own American dollars lives in one place? Expect to pay full freight for most of it.

More:
http://gizmodo.com/5939580/why-i-pay-for-content-and-why-that-makes-me-feel-like-a-sucker

Well, if you match a lot of source material long enough…

More:
http://gizmodo.com/5939479/the-annoying-thing-facebook-is-about-to-do-with-your-phone-numbers-and-emails

http://gizmodo.com/5939359/wolfram-alpha-will-tell-you-everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-your-facebook-page

http://gizmodo.com/5939295/stanford-is-building-a-body+cooling-glove-that-might-work-better-than-steroids-for-athletes

http://gizmodo.com/5939213/did-scientists-just-find-a-cure-for-malaria

http://www.futureofcopyright.com/home/blog-post/2012/08/31/election-campaigns-address-internet-governance-policy.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57503417-93/amazons-appstore-expands-to-five-european-countries/

http://reviews.cnet.com/2300-12982_7-10013564.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57504160-93/grooveshark-app-yanked-from-google-play-yet-again/

http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57504193-285/get-more-out-of-spotify-with-swarm.fm/

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/robot-cars-on-public-roads-california-says-yes/

The three major publishing houses charged with e-book price-fixing have reached a settlement collectively worth $69 million with nearly all state attorneys general, the District of Columbia, and some American territories. Under the agreement, which was announced late Wednesday and still must be approved by the court, the Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster will award consumers monetary compensation if they purchased e-books from those publishing companies between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012.

The three publishing giants also agree for the next two years to terminate their existing “agency model” deals in which publishers set the retail price (and distributors take a percentage), rather than allowing distributors to buy the books at a set price and then charge whatever they want. That likely means that e-book prices should fall; Amazon, in particular, had subsidized e-book prices to help drive sales of Kindles, and publishers feared having consumer price expectations set too low.

Various state attorneys general have released statements outlining exactly how much those residents will receive in compensation: Illinoisans will get $2.7 million, Utahns $630,000, and Floridians will cash in to the tune of $4.4 million.

“Unlawful collusion and price-fixing not only violates antitrust laws, it is anti-competitive and inconsistent with the free market approach that is critical to our economy,” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said in a statement. “Today’s settlements provide refunds to customers who paid artificially inflated prices for e-books.”

More:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/own-e-books-publishers-to-pay-back-millions-over-price-fixing-charges/

E-book publishers propose 2-year deal that could aid Amazon.

Apple and four publishers are reportedly trying to come up with an agreement that would make both Amazon and European regulators happy, as a way to settle an e-book price-fixing investigation. According to a source speaking to Reuters, Apple and the publishers are proposing a plan under which other e-book retailers—namely, Amazon—could sell e-books at a discount, rather than at the price set by publishers. The European Commission has not yet accepted the offer, according to Reuters, but is informally “market testing the commitments” to see whether such a solution would be workable.

More:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/08/the-return-of-cheap-e-books-apple-e-book-publishers-bend-in-europe-too/

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/08/hbo-cuts-the-cord-brings-streaming-only-service-to-europe/

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/frys-pays-2-3m-to-settle-sex-text-claims/

Last month, a letter to Congress noted that “on at least one occasion” a secretive US court ruled that National Security Agency surveillance carried out under a 2008 act of Congress violated the Fourth Amendment’s restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures. But the actual ruling remains secret. Decisions handed down by the US’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) are classified “because of the sensitive intelligence matters they concern,” the letter from the Office of the National Intelligence Director to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) states.

The explanation wasn’t good enough for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for details on the FISC ruling or rulings. Today, the EFF followed that up with a lawsuit against the Department of Justice in US District Court in Washington, D.C., saying its July 26 FOIA request has not been processed within the 20-day deadline.

Details on a government ruling that the NSA violated the Constitution could help the EFF in its broader fight against warrantless wiretapping authority granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008.

More:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/court-ruling-that-nsa-spying-violated-4th-amendment-remains-secret/

Previously:
http://vrritti.com/?s=electronic+frontier+foundation&submit=Search

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/japan-court-samsung-did-not-infringe-apples-media-sync-patent/

Well done. Now back to work Nick ;-)

Dutch language news article:
http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/12864836/__ING-baas_gaat_diep_door_stof__.html

Previously:

ING’s Nick Jue Mocking An ING Post Office Employee Who Had Been Fired And Complained To Him About That
http://vrritti.com/2012/08/30/ings-nick-jue-mocking-an-ing-post-office-employee-who-had-been-fired-and-complained-to-him-about-that/

Jeramiah B. Perkins, 39, of Portsmouth, VA, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. The plea was entered before U.S. Magistrate Judge Tommy E. Miller in the Eastern District of Virginia. At sentencing, scheduled for Jan. 3, 2013, Perkins faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison, a fine of $250,000 and three years of supervised release.

Perkins was indicted on April 18, 2012, along with three other leading members of the IMAGiNE Group, an organized online piracy group seeking to become the premier group to first release Internet copies of new movies only showing in theaters.

More:
http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/53005/

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/08/exclusive-clip-branded-mind-altering-marketing/

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/brainwave-hacking/

http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/111622/twitter-account-minister-verhagen-gekaapt.html