Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2011

Belgian newspapers win appeal against Google

Filed under: Europe, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:45

Apparently, even a short summary and a hyperlink are considered to be a violation of copyright in Belgium:

A Belgian appeals court has upheld an earlier ruling that Google infringes on newspapers’ copyright when its services display and link to content from newspaper websites, according to press reports.

The search engine giant is responsible for infringing the copyrights of the papers when it links to the sites or copies sections of stories on its Google News service, the Belgian Court of Appeals said, according to a report in PC World.

Google must not link to material from Belgian newspapers, the court said, according to the report (in French). No translation of the ruling is yet available.

[. . .]

The newspapers argued that they were losing online subscriptions and advertising revenue because Google was posting free snippets of the stories and links to the full article on Google News.

Google’s search engine offers links to the websites it indexes but also to “cached” copies of those pages. The copies are stored on Google’s own servers.

May 10, 2011

IPv6 day is coming

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:45

There’s been a short cycle of “we’re running out of internet addresses” articles over the last few months, as the available free blocks of IPv4 addresses are allocated. By now, we were all theoretically supposed to have moved on to the successor addressing scheme, IPv6:

On the 8 June, it’ll be World IPv6 Day — a coordinated effort by major services on the internet, including Google and Facebook, to provide their services using the new version of the Internet Protocol. It’s part of the plans to cope with internet addresses ‘running out’. But just what is IPv6 — and what does it mean for most users?

At its most simple, IPv6 is the successor to IPv4 which has become the de facto standard for both local and global connectivity. It includes many extra features, including processing speed-ups, and enhancements to security and to quality of service, but the one that’s really driving the need to change is that there are many more internet addresses available with IPv6.

Most Reg Hardware readers will be familiar with the look of an IPv4 address: it’s 32 bits long, and typically written as a series of four eight-bit decimal numbers, separated by full stops, like 10.0.0.1.

An IPv6 address is 128 bits long, and usually represented by groups of four hexadecimal digits, separated by colons. Each of those four digits represents 16 bits, so there are up to eight groups, giving IPv6 addresses that look like 2001:0470:1f09:1890:021f:f3ff:fe51:43f8.

It won’t be a simple case of turning on IPv6 and turning off IPv4, however, as there’s still huge numbers of devices that depend on IPv4. Over time, more and more devices (not just computers, or not only what we tend to think of as “computers”) will work natively with IPv6 addresses.

You won’t just get a single IPv4 address from your ISP anymore: you’ll get a huge block of addresses (“you’ll receive more addresses for your home network [than the] whole of the IPv4 internet”).

Typically, a broadband customer will be given a set of IPv6 addresses for their network, and the router will also provide an IPv4 address and NAT (Network Address Translation) for devices that can’t use the new protocol. The big change for many people is that all their IPv6 devices will be publicly available to the net. That will make setting up many devices much simpler, but also reinforces the need for a proper firewall in the router.

May 6, 2011

CRTC: broadband decision now in government’s hands

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:16

Michael Geist sums up the CRTC’s universal service decision:

The CRTC issued its universal service decision this week, which included analysis of funding mechanisms for broadband access, broadband speed targets, and whether there should be a requirement to provide broadband access as part of any basic service objective. Consumers groups and many observers were left disappointed. The CRTC declined to establish new funding mechanisms (relying on market forces) or changes to basic service and hit on a target of 5 Mbps download speed (actual not advertised) to be universally available by the end of 2015. Critics argued this left consumers on their own and suggested that the targets were underwhelming, particularly when contrasted with other countries.

While I sympathize with the frustration over the CRTC’s decision to essentially make broadband a “watching brief,” I wonder why Canadians should expect the CRTC to lead on broadband targets and funding. Universal access to globally competitive broadband (in terms of speed, pricing, and consumer choice) is a perhaps the most important digital policy issue Canada faces and it should not be viewed through a narrow telecom regulatory lens.

May 3, 2011

The lawfare threat to bloggers (and anyone else who posts on the web)

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 18:15

Box Turtle Bulletin lays out the details of a very disturbing development:

By providing blockquotes, we let the source material speak for itself without any inadvertent inaccuracies or biases which may creep in if we were to paraphrase it. And by providing links, we allow you, the reader, to click through for more information. Of course, we cannot copy the source material in its entirety, nor can we copy major portions of it. That would violate copyright laws, which is a very serious issue. But copyright laws do allow us to copy small portions of source material for commentary and discussion purposes.

As I said, copyright laws — or more specifically, copyright lawsuits — are serious business. And now, three newspaper chains have discovered that filing copyright lawsuits can become yet another profit center. The problem is, their definition of copyright infringement not only contradicts copyright law, but also poses a serious threat to bloggers and other online outlets everywhere.

Righthaven LLC is a copyright holding company which acquires “rights” to newspaper content after finding the content published on other web sites without permission, and files lawsuits against those web site. Righthaven was created as a partnership with Stephens Media, publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and their business model rests entirely on suing web site owners and operators for extravagant “damages” as a shakedown exercise. (“Rights” are in quotes, because, contrary to what is required under copyright law, Righthaven doesn’t actually acquire any legitimate copyright “rights,” which is yet another problem with their business model.) Two other newspaper chains, WEHCO Media and Media News Group have entered into agreements with Righthaven to split the profits from lawsuits stemming from their respective newspapers’ contents.

The three newspaper chains partnering with Righthaven represent some very important voices in the newspaper industry, including the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Denver Post, Salt Lake Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Detroit News, El Paso Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and Charleston Daily Mail.

I had already heard that the Las Vegas Review-Journal had some unusual views on quoting from their website, so I’ve avoided using that site for years. I didn’t know that the St. Paul Pioneer Press had also adopted that highly restrictive view of copyright, and they were one of the newspapers I read regularly for Minnesota Vikings information. I’m going to have to avoid quoting from them, however. Here is how Box Turtle Bulletin will be handling the situation in future:

And so to protect ourselves and this web site, we will no longer cite any content from Denver Post, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Salt Lake Tribune, or any of the other news sources listed no linkhere. There will be no links, no blockquotes, nothing. For the most part, it will be as if these sources simply don’t exist.

But if it happens that, for example, the Denver Post has an exclusive story that no one else has, we will do what the Associated Press does whenever the New York Times breaks a story. We will write about the story by paraphrasing the Post’s article, but we will not quote from it or provide a link to it — just like the Associated Press does. There will be however one tweak from standard AP practice: we will provide a link, but it will be to an explanation as to why there is no link. It will look something like this:

     “The Denver Post (no link) reports blah, blah, blah…”

H/T to Walter Olson for the link.

Michael Geist on what the Conservative majority means for digital policies

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:29

In short, he sees it as a mixed bag:

For example, a majority may pave the way for opening up the Canadian telecom market, which would be a welcome change. The Conservatives have focused consistently on improving Canadian competition and opening the market is the right place to start to address both Internet access (including UBB) and wireless services. The Conservatives have a chance to jump on some other issues such as following through on the digital economy strategy and ending the Election Act rules that resulted in the Twitter ban last night. They are also solidly against a number of really bad proposals — an iPod tax, new regulation of Internet video providers such as Netflix — and their majority government should put an end to those issues for the foreseeable future.

On copyright and privacy, it is more of a mixed bag.

The copyright bill is — as I described at its introduction last June — flawed but fixable. I realize that it may be reintroduced unchanged (the Wikileaks cables are not encouraging), but with the strength of a majority, there is also the strength to modify some of the provisions including the digital lock rules. Clement spoke regularly about the willingness to consider amendments and the Conservative MPs on the Bill C-32 committee were very strong. If the U.S. has exceptions for unlocking DVDs and a full fair use provision, surely Canada can too.

The Conservatives are a good news, bad news story on privacy. A fairly good privacy bill died on the order paper that will hopefully be reintroduced as it included mandatory security breach notification requirements. There will be a PIPEDA review this year and the prospect of tougher penalties for privacy violations is certainly possible. Much more troubling is the lawful access package which raises major civil liberties concerns and could be placed on the fast track.

April 27, 2011

High computer use linked to “smoking, drunkenness, non-use of seatbelts, cannabis and illicit drug use, and unprotected sex”

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:20

Talk about upsetting the stereotype of basement dwelling, dateless nerds:

The revelations come in research conducted lately in Canada among 10 to 16-year-olds by epidemiology PhD candidate Valerie Carson.

“This research is based on social cognitive theory, which suggests that seeing people engaged in a behaviour is a way of learning that behaviour,” explains Carson. “Since adolescents are exposed to considerable screen time — over 4.5 hours on average each day — they’re constantly seeing images of behaviours they can then potentially adopt.”

Apparently the study found that high computer use was associated with approximately 50 per cent increased engagement with “smoking, drunkenness, non-use of seatbelts, cannabis and illicit drug use, and unprotected sex”. High television use was also associated with a modestly increased engagement in these activities.

According to Ms Carson this is because TV is much more effectively controlled and censored in order to prevent impressionable youths seeing people puffing tabs or jazz cigarettes while indulging in unprotected sex etc. The driving without seatbelts thing seems a bit odd until one reflects that old episodes of the The Professionals, the Rockford Files etc are no doubt torrent favourites.

April 24, 2011

Unhappy tax day for online poker players

Filed under: Gaming, Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Well, tax day generally isn’t a happy day, but online poker players were especially unhappy:

Last week, while many people reported their income to the Internal Revenue Service, others suddenly found their source of income shut off. On a day now known among online poker players as “Black Friday,” the Department of Justice did us Americans the favor of saving us from ourselves by shutting down the three most popular and trusted online poker platforms.

Not only did the department seize the three domain names, it also froze 77 accounts around the world and charged the founders of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker, among others. What’s there crime? While the charges very carefully center on bank fraud, the heart of the department’s clampdown on Internet gambling stems from the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). Passed during a midnight vote in 2006, the UIGEA doesn’t actually prohibit online gambling but rather bans credit-processing companies from processing payments from “unlawful” online gambling activities. However, the bill never clarifies what it means by “unlawful” activities.

After the law’s passage, several online poker companies continued to operate in the United States, and Justice has turned the prosecution of those entities into a very lucrative endeavor. United Kingdom-based SportingBet, an online betting platform, signed a non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. government last year in return for a payment of $33 million, and in 2008, the co-founder of PartyGaming.com paid authorities $300 million in a settlement. In last week’s indictment, Justice announced that it was seeking a total of $3 billion from the poker companies. Compare this with the $105 million fine that Wachovia, which was found to be laundering billions of dollars in drug money, paid to the U.S. government, and one must wonder what kind of metric Justice uses when deciding which injustices to pursue.

April 14, 2011

DANE to address weaknesses in internet security?

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:05

The Economist looks at a possible way to address the known weaknesses of the current internet security defaults:

[A] comprehensive solution would let domain owners confirm that the names and machine numbers issued by a given CA are kosher. Under DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE), a standard being developed by Mr Schultze and others at the Internet Engineering Task Force, a browser retrieves a certificate from a web server, but checks with the DNS whether the certificate is in fact the one that was issued to a given domain owner. So, though a CA will still provide a validation step, the domain owner will have had to give it the thumbs up first. To prevent malevolent fiddling the DNS infrastructure itself needs to be secured, too. A long-running effort to do this, known as DNSSEC, hit a key milestone in 2010 and may have enough pieces in place soon to be usable. This is important because DANE would be incomplete without it.

Whilst all current browsers must be updated to take advantage of DANE, the new system can coexist with the old, and a gradual transition can be made. Browser plug-ins could bridge the gap before browser makers build in DANE, too. Those that want the added robustness of the new system — whether individuals, companies, or governments — may accelerate the adoption of updated browsers as DANE becomes available.

These moves do not provide total assurance that what your browser is told about an internet site’s identity and security is true. Trust, but verify — and verify again.

April 13, 2011

Never seen this before

Filed under: Randomness, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:28

My Rogers email account appears to have a nasty case of rot-13 encoding in the address book. I’d include a screen capture, but now that I’ve told you the trick of decoding it, it’d expose folks’ email addresses, which would be a bit unethical of me. At first, I thought it was just a garble, but I noticed that a lot of the addresses ended in “.pbz” and “.pn” (that’d be “.com” and “.ca” rotated 13 characters).

It’s not crippling, as I can just copy and paste from existing email messages, but it is annoying.

Update, 14 April: It appears to be fixed now.

April 11, 2011

SSL is “just an illusion of security”

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is critically important to safe communications on the internet. It may also be “hopelessly broken“:

SSL made its debut in 1994 as a way to cryptographically secure e-commerce and other sensitive internet communications. A private key at the heart of the system allows website operators to prove that they are the rightful owners of the domains visitors are accessing, rather than impostors who have hacked the users’ connections. Countless websites also use SSL to encrypt passwords, emails and other data to thwart anyone who may be monitoring the traffic passing between the two parties.

It’s hard to overstate the reliance that websites operated by Google, PayPal, Microsoft, Bank of America and millions of other companies place in SSL. And yet, the repeated failures suggest that the system in its current state is hopelessly broken.

“Right now, it’s just an illusion of security,” said Moxie Marlinspike, a security researcher who has repeatedly poked holes in the technical underpinnings of SSL. “Depending on what you think your threat is, you can trust it on varying levels, but fundamentally, it has some pretty serious problems.”

Although SSL’s vulnerabilities are worrying, critics have reserved their most biting assessments for the business practices of Comodo, VeriSign, GoDaddy and the other so-called certificate authorities, known as CAs for short. Once their root certificates are included in Internet Explorer, Firefox and other major browsers, they can’t be removed without creating disruptions on huge swaths of the internet.

April 9, 2011

Upheaval in Finnish politics?

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Ilkka is enjoying the spectacle of the “right-thinking” (i.e., left-thinking) folks in Finland who are horrified at the rise of a new party:

Canada will have yet another federal election that will bring yet another minority government, and back in the old country, the parliamentary elections have begun with the first early voting days, and the right-wing protest party True Finns is predicted to grab a significant chunk of the parliamentary seats. The impotent tantrum of the SWPL greens and leftists, along with the media that they still mostly control, reacting to the cognitive dissonance of the working class abandoning them has certainly been a laugh riot. Besides, this whole surge illustrates how just one voice of just the right pitch can smash a sufficiently ossified, smug and complacent echo chamber to little shards of glass by its mere existence. One can only imagine what the Finland of the 1970’s would have been like, had the Internet existed back then to give these voices a voice, as all leftism and progressivism can keep the reality at bay only if they get to have a totalitarian control of all media to constrain the parameters of debate.

April 4, 2011

Totally underground band loses millions to illegal downloads…or do they?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

An interesting article looks at a claim by an obscure band that their debut CD had been pirated over 100,000 times:

Late last week, TorrentFreak was contacted by a guy called Wayne Borean who alerted to us to a somewhat heated debate he’d been participating in on the ‘Balanced Copyright For Canada’ Facebook page.

“There’s a Rock Band called One Soul Thrust. They have a debut album, which I like (bought it off iTunes). However the first I heard of the band was when there were complaints that the band had gone Platinum — because of illegal Torrent downloads!” Borean explained.

Indeed, according to a press release from the band’s manager, Cameron Tilbury, the situation is very serious.

“The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) states that, to achieve Platinum status, an album must achieve sales of 100,000 copies/downloads of an album. Sales…that’s the key. A random polling of several torrent site’s downloads — ILLEGAL downloads — has shown that 1ST, the debut cd by ONE SOUL THRUST has been downloaded over 100,000 times,” he wrote.

That’s really terrible, isn’t it? An obscure band, hoping to make it big by selling their CD have an illegal audience more than 300 times their number of Facebook fans? How did all these illegal downloaders even find out about the band? Well, perhaps they didn’t:

At this point, since we couldn’t find any torrents on any site (Borean tried everywhere too), we have to admit we were beginning to wonder if this 100K download claim was some kind of publicity stunt. Furthermore, since Wayne Borean and Tilbury were starting to publicly tear each other apart (and getting pretty personal at times) it seemed sensible to get to the bottom of this, particularly since the band’s manager claimed that the all-powerful CRIA is supporting the band’s stance.

[. . .]

As many readers will now be aware, there is a huge problem. These results are completely fake and are generated from user input to draw traffic to site advertisers. You can type anything in the search boxes on some of these torrent sites (these apparently came from LimeTorrents) and anyone can appear to be pirated into oblivion [. . .]

We wrote back to Tilbury and explained our findings. We also asked him to comment on how he feels now that he realizes that people aren’t downloading the band’s music at all. He hasn’t responded to that question which is a real shame, because personally I think this is the most important part of the whole story.

I’m absolutely confident that there was no attempt to mislead with the band’s ‘piracy problem’ press release and that the band and their manager sincerely believed that 100K people had downloaded their album without paying for it. However, it would be intriguing to know what happened, when emotions of supposedly being ripped off by 100,000 pirates were replaced by other, perhaps more confused feelings.

Update, 5 April: Apparently you have two choices in a situation like this. 1) Own up to being mistaken and apologize for making a stink about a non-issue. 2) Double-down on stupid:

A day after One Soul Thrust’s manager had the entire Internet explain to him that his band’s music wasn’t being downloaded 100,000 times on BitTorrent sites, he’s still in deep denial. Today’s post is all about how the pirates attacked him “[b]ecause a debut album by an independent Canadian band is listed on torrent sites around the world and we had the audacity to point that out.” Um, no it’s not. It’s not listed on any torrent sites. As far as anyone can tell, not one human being on this planet has torrented this band’s CD. Dude, you made a mistake, you freaked out, you looked a little naive. Now you’re looking like an ass. Quit while you’re ahead, maybe?

Creative comments to that last post include 1) someone, somewhere actually upload the album to a torrent site, just so the band doesn’t look quite as pathetic, and 2) replace each track with varying length versions of a certain Rick Astley tune.

April 3, 2011

Richard Glover: “the internet may bring about the death of human civilisation”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:26

Mr. Glover, a professional broadcaster and columnist, has determined that the collapse of civilization will come from internet trolling denialists:

It’s increasingly apparent that the internet may bring about the death of human civilisation, beating out previous contenders such as nuclear holocaust and the election of George W. Bush.

The agents of this planetary death will be the climate-change deniers who, it’s now clear, owe much of their existence to the internet. Would the climate-change deniers be this sure of themselves without the internet?

Somehow I doubt it. They are so damn confident.

They don’t just bury their heads in the sand, they fiercely drive their own heads energetically into the nearest beachfront, their bums defiantly aquiver as they fart their toxic message to the world. How can they be so confident, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary?

It’s the internet, of course, and the way it has given climate-change deniers the perfect forum — one in which groups of quite dim people can swap spurious information, reassuring each other there’s no evidence on the other side, right up to the point they’ve derailed all efforts to save the planet. Call it ”mutually reassured destruction”.

April 1, 2011

Google introduces “Gmail Motion”

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

Erasing your (digital) past

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google said: “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable, and recorded by everyone all the time.” Privacy is dying, if not already clinically dead, in the online world. If you really want (or need) to airbrush yourself out of the picture, here are some suggestions on how to go about doing it.

The Internet has made our world a lot smaller. It has also made our histories a lot better-catalogued and more-searchable, and those developments — coupled with the weird phenomenon that people’s common sense tends to fly out the window when it comes to posting information and pictures — aren’t always beneficial to us.

[. . .]

Instead of popping you into a Witness Protection program — or changing your name — let us show you five steps on how to disappear from the Internet.

Step 1: Know Thine Enemy

Before you take any action, you need to know what you’re trying to get rid of. So first, do a search for your name — don’t just search Google, though, search online people search aggregation sites such as ZabaSearch, Intelius, Pipl, and Spokeo.

Here’s how to run an online background check (on yourself) for free.

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