ZNAK SAGITE — više od fantastike — edicija, časopis, knjižara...

Hilerijs. MPAA i RIAA su, um, pomogle u razvoju školskog programa koji uskoro kreće u test fazu u Kaliforniji (a kasnije, zna se, diljem univerzuma i Amerike), počinjući od obdaništa (dakle od uzrasta od šest godina) a koji podučava decu da je piraterija loša.  Potpuno je genijalno (i zastrašujuće) do koje mere korporacije imaju uticaja na oblikovanje javnog mnenja u tom kletom kapitalističkom svetu.... Članak je iz Wireda:

Downloading Is Mean! Content Industry Drafts Anti-Piracy Curriculum for Elementary Schools



Edit: Da ne bude zabune, ja uopšte ne mislim da je negativno decu poučiti o idejama vlasništva nad intelektualnom svojinom, produktima kreativnog rada, efektima koje proizvodi neovlašćeno kopiranje i deljenje itd. samo mi je smešno da ovo ulazi u školski programa a da u njemu nema drugih stvari poput recimo obavezne poduke iz prve pomoći, domaćinstva ili već nečeg sličnog...

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Listen up children: Cheating on your homework or cribbing notes from another student is bad, but not as bad as sharing a music track with a friend, or otherwise depriving the content-industry of its well-earned profits. That's one of the messages in a new-school curriculum being developed with the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the nation's top ISPs, in a pilot project to be tested in California elementary schools later this year.
A near-final draft of the curriculum, obtained by WIRED, shows that it comes in different flavors for every grade from kindergarten through sixth, to keep pace with your developing child's ability to understand that copying is theft, period.
"This thinly disguised corporate propaganda is inaccurate and inappropriate," says Mitch Stoltz, an intellectual property attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who reviewed the material at WIRED's request.
"It suggests, falsely, that ideas are property and that building on others' ideas always requires permission," Stoltz says. "The overriding message of this curriculum is that students' time should be consumed not in creating but in worrying about their impact on corporate profits."
The material was prepared by the California School Library Association and the Internet Keep Safe Coalition in conjunction with the Center For Copyright Infringement, whose board members include executives from the MPAA, RIAA, Verizon, Comcast and AT&T.
Each grade's material includes a short video, and comes with a worksheet for teachers to use that's packed with talking points to share with students.


In the sixth-grade version, (.pdf) teachers are asked to engage students with the question: "In school, if we copy a friend's answers on a test or homework assignment, what happens?"
The answer is, you can be suspended from school or flunk the test. The teachers are directed to tell their students that there are worse consequences if they commit a copyright violation.
"In the digital world, it's harder to see the effects of copying, even though the effects can be more serious," the teacher worksheet says.
The material is silent on the concept of fair use, a legal doctrine that allows for the reproduction of copyrighted works without the rights holder's permission. Instead, students are told that using works without permission is "stealing."
"Justin Bieber got started singing other people's songs, without permission, on YouTube. If he had been subjected to this curriculum, he would have been told that what he did was 'bad, 'stealing,' and could have landed him in jail," says Stoltz.
"We've got some editing to do," concedes Glen Warren, vice president of the California School Library Association, the non-profit that helped produce the material with the Internet Keep Safe Coalition and industry.
The Internet Keep Safe Coalition is a non-profit partnering with various governments and some of the nation's biggest corporate names like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Target, Xerox, HP and others.
Its president, Marsali Hancock, says fair use is not a part of the teaching material because K-6 graders don't have the ability to grasp it.
The curriculum, she said in a telephone interview, "is developmentally consistent with what children can learn at specific ages."
She said the group will later develop material for older kids that will discuss fair use.
A 45-second video for second graders, for example, shows a boy snapping pictures and deciding whether to sell, keep or share them.
"You're not old enough yet to be selling your pictures online, but pretty soon you will be," reads the accompanying text in the teacher's lesson plan. (.pdf) "And you'll appreciate if the rest of us respect your work by not copying it and doing whatever we want with it."
Hancock said the lessons were developed with "literacy experts," and that some of the wording and kinks may still need to be ironed out.
She said the material has not yet been approved by the Center For Copyright Information, the group that commissioned the curriculum.
The Center for Copyright Information is best known for working with the White House and rights holders to forge an internet monitoring program with some of the nation's biggest ISPs. That program provides for extrajudicial punishment of internet users who download copyrighted works without permission. Commenced earlier this year, the program's punishment for repeat violators includes temporary internet termination and throttling connection speeds.
Hancock said the center is expected to be briefed on the proposed curriculum — dubbed "Be a Creator" — perhaps as early as this week.
The center's executive director, Jill Lesser, told a House subcommittee Wednesday that she hoped the program would be integrated in "schools across the country."
She testified that it's best to attack piracy through youth education.
"Based on our research, we believe one of the most important audiences for our educational efforts is young people. As a result, we have developed a new copyright curriculum that is being piloted during this academic year in California," according to her testimony.
"The curriculum introduces concepts about creative content in innovative and age-appropriate ways. The curriculum is designed to help children understand that they can be both creators and consumers of artistic content, and that concepts of copyright protection are important in both cases," Lesser testified.
She said the CCI's board is expected to sign off on the program soon, although she cautioned that it currently is in "draft" form.
"We are just about to post those materials in the next week or two on our web site," Lesser said in a telephone interview.
Gigi Sohn, the president of Public Knowledge and an adviser to the CCI, declined to comment because she said she hasn't seen the curriculum.
Overall, the curriculum's message is anything but "sharing is caring."
"We all love to create new things—art, music, movies, paper creations, structures, even buildings! It's great to create — as long as we aren't stealing other people's work. We show respect for other artists and their work when we get permission before we use their work," according to the message to first graders. (.pdf) "This is an important part of copyright. Sharing can be exciting and helpful and nice. But taking something without asking is mean."
The fifth-grade lesson introduces the Creative Commons license, in which rights holders grant limited permission on re-use. But even in explaining the Creative Commons, the lesson says that it's illegal to make any copies of copyrighted works. That's a message that essentially says it's even unlawful to rip CDs to your iPod.
"If a song or movie is copyrighted, you can't copy it, download it, or use it in your own work without permission," according to the fifth-grade worksheet. (.pdf) "However, Creative Commons allows artists to tell users how and if their work can be used by others. For example, if a musician is okay with their music being downloaded for free — they will offer it on their website as a 'Free download.' An artist can also let you know how you can use their work by using a Creative Commons license."
Warren, of the library association, agreed that it's incorrect to tell students they can never use copyrighted works without permission, as the fifth-grade worksheet says. He said some of the package's language has been influenced by the rights holders on the Center for Copyright Information.
"We're moving along trying to get things a little closer to sanity," Warren said in a telephone interview. "That tone and language, that came from that side of the fence, so to speak."

Evo, i Cracked se oglasio ovim povodom: http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/7-moronic-ways-hollywood-wants-to-teach-kids-about-piracy/

Silk Road, najpoznatiji i najveći sajt za nelicenciranu prodaju narkotika (koji se oslanjao na bitcoin za transakcije) je zatvoren od strane FBIja a njegov vlasnik utamničen.

FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests owner

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Oct 2 (Reuters) - U.S. law enforcement authorities raided an Internet site that served as a marketplace for illegal drugs, including heroin and cocaine, and arrested its owner, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Wednesday.
The FBI arrested Ross William Ulbricht, known as "Dread Pirate Roberts," in San Francisco on Tuesday, according to court filings. Federal prosecutors charged Ulbricht with one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, according to a court filing.

Zaplenjeno je oko 3,6 milijuna dolara u bitcoinima

http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/fbi-shuts-down-silk-road-online-black-market/

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It was an online black market that had achieved mainstream notoriety: Silk Road, where anyone with enough Bitcoin could anonymously purchase drugs and other contraband. Since its inception in early 2011, the Website reportedly made millions per year off hundreds of thousands of transactions.
That notoriety brought Silk Road a whole lot of attention from law enforcement, and the FBI finally shut the site down Oct. 2. In the process they arrested a man named Ross Ulbricht, whom they accuse of running Silk Road under the online moniker Dread Pirate Roberts.
In addition to money laundering and drug trafficking, the government is also accusing Ulbricht of attempting to arrange the murder of a Silk Road user who was "threatening to release the identities of thousands of users of the site," according to the criminal complaint filed before the Southern District of New York (PDF).
That same complaint described Silk Road as the "most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today," used to distribute "hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services to well over a hundred thousand buyers." The FBI estimates Silk Road's sales revenue at 9.5 million Bitcoins, with commissions from sales totaling 600,000 Bitcoins—the equivalent (depending on Bitcoin's fluctuating value) of $1.2 billion in sales and roughly $80 million in commissions.
The complaint alleges that Ulbricht maintained a small staff to manage the Website's IT operations, while he handled the money sloshing through the system. Silk Road depended on Tor, a network that relies on relays that make it difficult to trace individual Internet activity. In addition to narcotics, other black-market goods available through the forum included firearms and ammunition, stolen personal info, counterfeit currency, pirated media content such as movies, hacking tools such as keyloggers and Trojans, fake driver's licenses and social security cards, and so much more.
In order to protect this massive network, Dread Pirate Roberts allegedly wanted to hire a hitman to kill FriendlyChemist, a Silk Road user who threatened to release a portion of the network's identities unless he received a hefty sum of cash. Ulbricht was eventually tracked down via a combination of online clues, including subscriber records obtained from Google. He was arrested Oct. 1 at a library in San Francisco.

Lavabit je bio mejl provajder koga je koristio Snouden, ali su pre jedno mesec-dva objavili da prestaju sa radom jer su u situaciji da biraju: ili da kompromituju privatnost svojih korisnika ili da zatvaraju dućan. Njihov vlasnik se odlučio za zatvaranje, jer, principi. Nije se znalo šta je tačno u pitanju, mada su svi slutili da im neka od TLA agencija traži pristup meta i/ ili drugim podacima korisnika a bez sudskog naloga. Sad su uspeli da u sudskom sporu dobiju mogućnost da otkriju o čemu se radilo: FBI je tražio da im Lavabit preda ključeve za SSL en/dekripciju što, čak i laiku je jasno, bi omogućilo FBIju potpun uvid u aktivnosti svih Lavabit klijenata. Pošto je SSL naširoko prihvaćen metod enkripcije, koga koriste najveći sajtovi na Internetu, između ostalog za zaštitu novčanih transakcija, ima logike poverovati da, zaista, FBI ima pristup (ako želi) svemu što ljudi rade u okviru takve zaštite.

Wired izveštava:
Edward Snowden's E-Mail Provider Defied FBI Demands to Turn Over Crypto Keys, Documents Show

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The U.S. government in July obtained a search warrant demanding that Edward Snowden's e-mail provider, Lavabit, turn over the private SSL keys that protected all web traffic to the site, according to to newly unsealed documents.

The July 16 order came after Texas-based Lavabit refused to circumvent its own security systems to comply with earlier orders intended to monitor a particular Lavabit user's metadata, defined as "information about each communication sent or received by the account, including the date and time of the communication, the method of communication, and the source and destination of the communication."

The name of the target is redacted from the unsealed records, but the offenses under investigation are listed as violations of the Espionage Act and theft of government property — the exact charges that have been filed against NSA whistleblower Snowden in the same Virginia court.

The records in the case, which is now being argued at the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, were unsealed today by a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia. They confirm much of what had been suspected about the conflict between the pro-privacy e-mail company and the federal government, which led to Lavabit voluntarily closing in August rather than compromise the security it promised users.

The filings show that Lavabit was served on June 28 with a so-called "pen register" order requiring it to record, and provide the government with, the e-mail "from" and "to" lines on every e-mail, as well as the IP address used to access the mailbox. Because they provide only metadata, pen register orders can be obtained without "probable cause" that the target has committed a crime.

In the standard language for such an order, it required Lavabit to provide all "technical assistance necessary to accomplish the installation and use of the pen/trap device"

A conventional e-mail provider can easily funnel email headers to the government in response to such a request. But Lavabit offered paying customers a secure email service that stores incoming messages encrypted to a key known only to that user. Lavabit itself did not have access.

Lavabit founder Ladar Levison balked at the demand, and the government filed a motion to compel Lavabit to comply. Lavabit told the feds that the user had "enabled Lavabit's encryption services, and thus Lavabit would not provide the requested information," the government wrote.

"The representative of Lavabit indicated that Lavabit had the technical capability to decrypt the information, but that Lavabit did not want to 'defeat [its] own system,'" the government complained.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan immediately ordered Lavabit to comply, threatening Levison with criminal contempt — which could have potentially put him in jail.

By July 9, Lavabit still hadn't defeated its security for the government, and prosecutors asked for a summons to be served for Lavabit, and founder Ladar Levison, to be held in contempt "for its disobedience and resistance to these lawful orders."

A week later, prosecutors upped the ante and obtained the search warrant demanding "all information necessary to decrypt communications sent to or from the Lavabit e-mail account [redacted] including encryption keys and SSL keys."

With the SSL keys, and a wiretap, the FBI could have decrypted all web sessions between Lavabit users and the site, though the documents indicate the bureau still trying only to capture metadata on one user.

Levison went to court to fight the demand on August 1, in a closed-door hearing before Claude M. Hilton, Senior U. S. District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia.

"The privacy of ... Lavabit's users are at stake," Lavabit attorney Jesse Binnall told Hilton. "We're not simply speaking of the target of this investigation. We're talking about over 400,000 individuals and entities that are users of Lavabit who use this service because they believe their communications are secure. By handing over the keys, the encryption keys in this case, they necessarily become less secure."

By this point, Levison was evidently willing to comply with the original order, and modify his code to intercept the metadata on one user. But the government was no longer interested.

"Anything done by Mr. Levison in terms of writing code or whatever, we have to trust Mr. Levison that we have gotten the information that we were entitled to get since June 28th," prosecutor James Trump told the judge. "He's had every opportunity to propose solutions to come up with ways to address his concerns and he simply hasn't."

"We can assure the court that the way that this would operate, while the metadata stream would be captured by a device, the device does not download, does not store, no one looks at it," Trump said. "It filters everything, and at the back end of the filter, we get what we're required to get under the order."

"So there's no agents looking through the 400,000 other bits of information, customers, whatever," Trump added. "No one looks at that, no one stores it, no one has access to it."

"All right," said Hilton. "Well, I think that's reasonable."

Hilton ruled for the government. "[The] government's clearly entitled to the information that they're seeking, and just because you-all have set up a system that makes that difficult, that doesn't in any way lessen the government's right to receive that
information just as they could from any telephone company or any other e-mail source that could provide it easily," said Hilton.

The judge also rejected Lavabit's motion to unseal the record. "This is an ongoing criminal investigation, and there's no leeway to disclose any information about it."

In an interesting work-around, Levison complied the next day by turning over the private SSL keys as an 11 page printout in 4-point type. The government, not unreasonably, called the printout "illegible."

"To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2,560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data," prosecutors wrote.

The court ordered Levison to provide a more useful electronic copy. By August 5, Lavabit was still resisting the order, and the judge ordered that Levison would be fined $5,000 a day beginning August 6 until he handed over electronic copies of the keys.

On August 8, Levison shuttered Lavabit, making any attempt at surveillance moot. Still under a gag order, he posted an oblique message saying he'd been left with little choice in the matter.

"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit," Levison wrote at the time. "After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations."

Lavabit has raised approximately $30,000 in an online fundraising drive to finance its appeal to the 4th Circuit. Today the appeals court extended the deadline for opening briefs to October 10.

The complete document set follows.

Nažalost, korak smo bliže tome da HTML 5.1 stigne  na ovaj svet sa ugrađenom podrškom za nativni DRM.
Lowering Your Standards: DRM and the Future of the W3C

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  On Monday, the W3C announced that its Director, Tim Berners-Lee, had determined that the "playback of protected content" was in scope for the W3C HTML Working Group's new charter, overriding EFF's formal objection against its inclusion. This means the controversial Encrypted Media Extension (EME) proposal will continue to be part of that group's work product, and may be included in the W3C's HTML5.1 standard. If EME goes through to become part of a W3C recommendation, you can expect to hear DRM vendors, DRM-locked content providers like Netflix, and browser makers like Microsoft, Opera, and Google stating that they can now offer W3C standards compliant "content protection" for Web video.
We're deeply disappointed. We've argued before as to why EME and other protected media proposals are different from other standards . By approving this idea, the W3C has ceded control of the "user agent" (the term for a Web browser in W3C parlance) to a third-party, the content distributor. That breaks a—perhaps until now unspoken—assurance about who has the final say in your Web experience, and indeed who has ultimate control over your computing device.
EFF believes that's a dangerous step for an organization that is seen by many as the guardian of the open Web to take. We have rehashed this argument many times before, in person with Tim Berners-Lee, with staff members and, along with hundreds of others, in online interactions with the W3C's other participants.
But there's another argument that we've made more privately. It's an argument that is less about the damage that sanctioning restricted media does to users, and more about the damage it will do to the W3C.
At the W3C's advisory council meeting in Tokyo, EFF spoke to many technologists working on Web standards. It's clear to us that the engineering consensus at the consortium is the same as within the Web community, which is the same almost anywhere else: that DRM is a pain to design, does little to prevent piracy, and is by its nature, user-unfriendly. Nonetheless, many technologists have resigned themselves to believing that until the dominant rightsholders in Hollywood finally give up on it (as the much of the software and music industry already has), we're stuck with implementing it.
The EME, they said, was a reasonable compromise between what these contracts demand, and the reality of the Web. A Web where movies are fenced away in EME's DRM-ridden binary blobs is, the W3C's pragmatists say, no worse than the current environment where Silverlight and Flash serve the purpose of preventing unauthorized behavior.
We pointed out that EME would by no means be the last "protected content" proposal to be put forward for the W3C's consideration. EME is exclusively concerned with video content, because EME's primary advocate, Netflix, is still required to wrap some of its film and TV offerings in DRM as part of its legacy contracts with Hollywood. But there are plenty of other rightsholders beyond Hollywood who would like to impose controls on how their content is consumed.
Just five years ago, font companies tried to demand DRM-like standards for embedded Web fonts. These Web typography wars fizzled out without the adoption of these restrictions, but now that such technical restrictions are clearly "in scope," why wouldn't typographers come back with an argument for new limits on what browsers can do?
Indeed, within a few weeks of EME hitting the headlines, a community group within W3C formed around the idea of locking away Web code, so that Web applications could only be executed but not examined online. Static image creators such as photographers are eager for the W3C to help lock down embedded images. Shortly after our Tokyo discussions, another group proposed their new W3C use-case: "protecting" content that had been saved locally from a Web page from being accessed without further restrictions. Meanwhile, publishers have advocated that HTML textual content should have DRM features for many years.
In our conversations with the W3C, we argued that the W3C needed to develop a clearly defined line against the wave of DRM systems it will now be encouraged to adopt.
A Web where you cannot cut and paste text; where your browser can't "Save As..." an image; where the "allowed" uses of saved files are monitored beyond the browser; where JavaScript is sealed away in opaque tombs; and maybe even where we can no longer effectively "View Source" on some sites, is a very different Web from the one we have today. It's a Web where user agents—browsers—must navigate a nest of enforced duties every time they visit a page. It's a place where the next Tim Berners-Lee or Mozilla, if they were building a new browser from scratch, couldn't just look up the details of all the "Web" technologies. They'd have to negotiate and sign compliance agreements with a raft of DRM providers just to be fully standards-compliant and interoperable.
To be clear, we don't think all of these proposals will come to fruition. We appreciate that there's no great hunger for DRM at the W3C. Many W3C participants held their nose to accept even the EME draft, which was carefully drafted to position itself as far away from the taint of DRM as was possible for a standard solely intended to be used for DRM systems.
But the W3C has now accepted "content protection". By discarding the principle that users should be in charge of user agents, as well as the principle that all the information needed to interoperate with a standard should be open to all prospective implementers, they've opened the door for the many rightsholders who would like the same control for themselves.
The W3C is now in an unenviable position. It can either limit its "content protection" efforts to the aims of a privileged few, like Hollywood. Or it can let a thousand "content protection systems" bloom, and allow any rightsholder group to chip away at software interoperability and users' control.
EFF is still a W3C member, and we'll do our best to work with other organizations within and without the consortium to help it fight off the worse consequences of accepting DRM. But it's not easy to defend a king who has already invited its attackers across his moat.
Still, even if the W3C has made the wrong decision, that doesn't mean the Web will. The W3C has parted ways with the wider Web before: in the early 2000s, its choice to promote XHTML (an unpopular and restrictive variant of HTML) as the future led to Mozilla, Apple and Opera forming the independent WHATWG. It was WHATWG's vision of a dynamic, application-oriented Web that won—so decisively, in fact, that the W3C later re-adopted it and made it the W3C's own HTML5 deliverable.
Recently, WHATWG has diplomatically parted with the W3C again. Its "HTML Living Standard" continues to be developed in tandem with the W3C's version of the HTML standard, and does not contain EME or any other such DRM-enabling proposals.
By contrast, W3C has now put its weight behind a restrictive future: let's call it "DRM-HTML". Others have certainly bet against open, interoperable standards and user control before. It's just surprising and disappointing to see the W3C and its Director gamble against the precedent of their own success, as well as the fears and consciences of so many of their colleagues.
     

Quote from: Meho Krljic on 04-10-2013, 10:36:33
Silk Road, najpoznatiji i najveći sajt za nelicenciranu prodaju narkotika (koji se oslanjao na bitcoin za transakcije) je zatvoren od strane FBIja a njegov vlasnik utamničen.

Novi detalji. Zvuči.... ludački:

Silk Road owner charged in second assassination plot

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Less than a day after the FBI seizure of Silk Road and the arrest of alleged founder Ross William Ulbricht, a Maryland indictment has been released charging Ulbricht with 1) conspiracy to commit murder of a witness; 2) use of interstate commerce in murder-for-hire; and, of course, 3) conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance.

This morning's criminal complaint alleged that Ulbricht sought to murder a user named FriendlyChemist in March 2013 because of apparent extortion. The FBI says that Ulbricht, using the screenname Dread Pirate Roberts, paid $500,000 to have the man killed in Canada, but no records of such a murder have been found so far.

This indictment brings new charges into the fray.

In December 2012, an undercover federal agent began to ask Dread Pirate Roberts about smuggling large quantities of drugs over borders. According to the indictment, the agent asked for DPR's help in finding customers because, he said, "Silk Road sellers only want very small amounts."

DPR helped find the agent a buyer for one kilogram of cocaine for $27,000 in bitcoins. A paid employee of Silk Road set up a deal with a Silk Road vendor who would later sell the drugs on the site. The drugs were soon delivered.

In January, DPR contacted the undercover agent. The employee had been arrested, he said, and he'd stolen funds from other Silk Road users by abusing his staff ability to see all private messages on the site. DPR was afraid that the employee would give up valuable information to the police and so, within a day, he asked the undercover agent to murder the man.

The employee "was on the inside for a while, and now that he's been arrested, I'm afraid he'll give up info." DPR added that he'd "never killed a man or had one killed before, but it is the right move in this case."

DPR agreed to and paid $80,000 for the murder of the employee, half before the job and half upon completion. On February 4, 2013, DPR transferred $40,000 from Technocash Limited in Australia to a Capital One bank account in Washington, D.C.

The next day, he asked for "proof of death" in the form of video or pictures. "They should probably just give him a note, let him use his computer to transfer the coins back, and then kill him," DPR wrote to the agent. DPR was most concerned about "silencing him" rather than "getting my money back."

"Considering his arrest, I have to assume he will sing."

On February 12, the agent told DPR that the assassins were in place, only waiting because the employee lived with a wife and daughter. The agent said that once his family had gone, assassins would torture the employee to get stolen money back, take him out of the house, and then kill him.

The agent communicated to DPR that the employee was being tortured and broken for several days. On February 16, staged photos were sent to DPR as proof of torture. DPR admitted to being "a little disturbed" but "OK." "I'm just new to this kind of thing is all," he said.

Contemplating his actions, DPR wrote, "I don't think I've done the wrong thing. I'm sure I will call on you again at some point, though I hope I don't have to."

On February 19, the agent told DPR that the employee had been killed by "asphyxiation/heart rupture" while being tortured. Another staged photo was sent to DPR as "proof of death."

In response, another $40,000 was wired to the Capital One bank account.

Since the recent release of the indictment, the Daily Dot has spoken to several Silk Road vendors who confirmed they've been hearing stories about this attempted murder for many months now.

According to two anonymous sources, the employee handled many front-end technical issues for Dread Pirate Roberts. He apparently stole bitcoins from Silk Road by redirecting the address at which commissions from the marketplace were sent.

It's not clear what has become of the employee, but one particularly interesting theory has become popular among several Silk Road Vendors: Law enforcement positioned themselves as trustworthy and able to help DPR out of tight situations such as these. DPR, knowing many of his staff's identities, handed over all of his information to the undercover agent. The agent co-opted the mod, made him a police puppet and then a gruesome star of fake death photos.

Of course, that's just a theory. But in this bizarre drama, straight out of an AMC plot, it's as good a theory as any.

H/T Techdirt | Illustration by Jason Reed

Whatever Happened to "Due Process" ?



Iz nekog razloga pejstovanje mi je ovde postalo nemoguća misija, pa pročitajte sami o novim svinjarijama vezanim za kršenje autorskih prava i borbu protiv istog.
   Whatever Happened to "Due Process" ?   Whatever Happened to "Due Process" ?   Whatever Happened to "Due Process" ?   Whatever Happened to "Due Process" ?

Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful

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The ad blocking paradox As web ads get more and more closely targeted to the user, more and more users are choosing ad blockers, "Do Not Track" and other privacy technology. According to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, most US users "are not okay with online targeted advertising." The industry tells us that ads are getting more personalized and relevant, so why isn't blocking going down instead? Why aren't users saying, There's a magic machine in a data center that will only show me ads for stuff I really want to buy? Better turn off the ad blocker!
For a long time, web ad blocking was a nerdy Internet hobby. It was easy and effective, but few users did it. I once wrote an ad blocker myself, and got just one other user—another Linux freak, who rewrote it. Today, though, mass media attention to tracking, such as the Wall Street Journal's What They Know series, is finally helping to make ad blocking mainstream. One startup, ClarityRay, reports that 9.26 percent of all ad impressions on 100 popular sites are being blocked.
The conventional wisdom about online advertising is that increasingly better-targeted ads result in more revenue for the medium. However, Mary Meeker's Internet Trends 2012 presentation tells a different story. What is going on with with "print"? It consumed seven percent of people's media time in 2011, but 25% of ad budgets! The trend continues in Internet Trends 2013. Print has 6% of the time and 23% of the money. Even as individual online campaigns get higher response rates because of targeting to the user, the value of the web as an advertising medium is staying unnaturally low relative to time spent.
Web advertising's blocking and pricing problems have a common source: targeting. Conventional advertising takes some of your time but "pays its way" by revealing information about the advertiser's intentions. Targeted advertising, however, reveals less information, so it's less valuable and users have an greater incentive to block it.
What does print have that online doesn't? Print advertising has the sweet spot of awesome: it's easy to place an ad based on content, but hard to track individuals.
Hard to track individuals? How is that a good thing?
We've got a few steps to work through here. So let's start with some Nobel-Prize-winning economics research.
How can markets survive information asymmetry? Here it is: Akerlof, George A. (1970). "The Market for 'Lemons': Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism". (There's a summary on Wikipedia.)
Let's say you have a car that runs fine for now, but that you know won't last long because of the time with the attempted oil change and the drain plug you found in a pool of oil in the driveway and you cleaned up all the oil with kitty litter but...anyway, you know bad things about the car that a buyer couldn't. You're looking to sell. Meanwhile, a seller of a perfectly good, but indistinguishable, car is also trying to sell, but since he's competing with you, he can't charge a price any higher than what you're willing to accept for your "lemon." Prices tend to get set by what people will pay for the worst possible car, so the market tends to break down.
If sellers have so much more information about the product being sold than buyers do, how does anybody manage to get any business done at all? Dr. Akerlof wrote later, "Indeed, I soon saw that asymmetric information was potentially an issue in any market where the quality of goods would be difficult to see by anything other than casual inspection. Rather than being a handful of markets, the exception rather than the rule, that seemed to me to include most markets."
If you don't like the used car example, the job market for computer programmers is another tough one. How do you find someone who doesn't just interview well and blitz through programming puzzles, but can actually add value to a complex project?
Anybody who buys or sells anything has to spend a lot of time getting around the asymmetric information problem.
And deceptive sellers learn new tricks too. Buyers and honest sellers get one thing figured out, and the deceptive sellers come up with something else. The CIO signing up for a site license faces the same problem as the tourist buying a "genuine Rolex" from a street vendor.
Why does any buyer trust any seller? The prophet Jeremiah asked,

"Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? Wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?"

But the question we're still trying to figure out is: wherefore do the honest prosper? Akerlof writes, "Dishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market." How can a market even exist? How can legit sellers earn anything?
Many institutions, norms, laws, and habits have popped up over thousands of years to deal with this problem.

   
• Let's require licenses for food vendors, and take away the license of anyone who sells tainted food.
• Let's only buy from sellers who offer a guarantee. Or let's force all sellers to offer some kind of guarantee.
• Let's protect trademark rights for sellers, to give sellers a mechanism for building reputation and repeat business.

Advertising is another one.
Is advertising rational? How can advertising help make it possible for honest buyers and sellers to work together?
Davis et. al. ask the question, "Is advertising rational?" and come up with:
"It is not so much the claims made by advertisers that are helpful, but the fact that they are willing to spend extravagant amounts of money on a product that is informative."
That seems wasteful at first, but let's work through the logic of it.

   
• Buyers are ignorant about the quality of products from which they are choosing.
• Buyers become better informed after buying and using a product.
• Sellers have a good idea of product quality, and for what kinds of users the product is a good choice.
• Sellers have an incentive to misrepresent products.

"What is needed, therefore, is some means of extracting truthful information from producers a means of distinguishing those producers who genuinely believe their product to be of high quality from those who do not."
So what is a "screening mechanism" that will separate the sellers who believe their products to be of high quality from the deceptive sellers? The idea is to come up with some activity that is costly enough for low quality sellers that they won't do it, but still affordable for high quality sellers. Advertising shows that a seller has the money to advertise (which they presumably got from customers, or from investors who thought the product was worth investing in), and believes that the product will earn enough repeat sales to justify the ad spending.
Richard E. Kihlstrom and Michael H. Riordan explained the signaling logic behind advertising in a 1984 paper: When a firm signals by advertising, it demonstrates to consumers that its production costs and the demand for its product are such that advertising costs can be recovered. In order for advertising to be an effective signal, high-quality firms must be able to recover advertising costs while low-quality firms cannot.
Evidence for the signaling model Davis et al. predict that "products whose main attributes are either easily ascertained or impossible to verify will be less advertised than those whose main features are ascertainable with more difficulty, and verifiable in the medium term." They divide goods into four categories:

   
• Search goods: easy to check out at the time of purchase, such as fruit or curtains.
• Short-term experience goods: hard to evaluate before buying, but easy to try once, such as canned food.
• Long-term experience goods: need more experience to judge the quality of an item, such as hair conditioner or batteries.
• "Experience is of little value": Dishwashers and cars.

Products that fall into the category of long-term experience goods have the highest ratio of advertising to sales. Determining product quality is hard enough that the buyer can't do it at the store or bringing one purchase home, but it is possible, so the buyer can eventually check the seller's claims.
The conclusions of the paper suggest a positive role for advertising: the fact that a seller is willing to advertise is a useful piece of information for the buyer.
"Advertising enhances the buying opportunities of consumers by alerting them to products about which they know little, and by signalling to them the seriousness of intent of the producer. It is more about informing them than acting as the persuasive door to door salesman. The salesman will persuade them to buy things they don't need, but he won't do that for very long."
Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group, said, To a good decision scientist, a consumer preference for buying advertised brands is perfectly rational. The manufacturer knows more about his product than you do, almost by definition. Therefore the expensive act of advertising his own product is a reliable sign of his own confidence in it. It is like a racehorse owner betting heavily on his own horse. Why would it be rational to disregard valuable information of that kind?
A great paper on the signaling model as it applies to advertising is The Waste in Advertising Is the Part That Works by Tim Ambler and E. Ann Hollier. People are surprisingly good at picking out a signal from perceived advertising expense.
How signaling breaks down Advertising is one support member in the structure of a market. It bears some of the load of holding up the fragile tent under which honest people can do business with each other. Markets tend to fall apart because of information asymmetries, but advertising can help inform would-be buyers by revealing a seller's beliefs about a product.
What happens, though, if sellers try to reduce the load that advertising carries, by "efficiently" targeting some users and not others? As a member of the audience, the more likely it is that the ad you're seeing is custom-targeted to you, the less information the advertiser is able to convey. With good enough targeting, you could be the one poor loser who they're trying to stick with the last obsolete unit in the warehouse.
Advertising can break down as a signaling method when the medium gets noisy enough. Mark N. Hertzendorf explains, in "I'm not a high-quality firm, but I play one on TV" (RAND Journal of Economics, vol. 24, number 2, summer 1991.) On the subject of the signaling model: This result, however, is sensitive to the assumption that consumers can perfectly observe the firm's advertising expenditure. This assumption is somewhat unreasonable in light of the fact that much advertising takes place over various electronic media to which not everyone is 'tuned in.'
Hertzendorf writes, Furthermore, the noise complicates the process of customer inference. This enables a low-quality firm to take advantage of consumer ignorance by partially mimicking the strategy of the high-quality firm. That's in an environment where the presence of many TV channels makes it harder for the audience to figure out who's really trying to signal. Noise helps deceptive sellers.
Now what happens when we introduce targeting? Let's give the low-quality seller the ability to split the audience, without the audience members knowing, into marks and bystanders, with marks receiving the ad at higher probability. In that case, marks can end up receiving a signal that they can't distinguish from that of a high-quality seller.
It's not about the data Rebecca Lieb, at iMediaConnection, points out that her BlueKai profile is largely false, and writes, If ad platforms aren't delivering the targeting that advertisers are paying for, the emperor has no clothes. And Adam Tanner at Forbes finds that people's Acxiom profiles are also full of bizarre errors.
But the emperor is fully clothed, just headed in the wrong direction. Targeting serves its intended purpose whether or not it's accurate, as long as it can split the audience reasonably consistently. It just has to make a user who falls into a targeted group once fall into the same group again on future visits. Even the most basic cookie scheme will do that. An ad network can randomly call some users left-handed and others right-handed, and get it wrong. The targeting system can even mix up two users with the same name, and it still works. Targeting only has to split the audience persistently, so that some have a higher probability of receiving an inaccurate "high-quality" signal.
The result of splitting the audience, though, is that high-quality sellers lose some rewards of advertising, because they become harder to distinguish from low-quality sellers. Where low-quality sellers in Hertzendorf's scenario must rely on increasing noise in the medium in order to deceive, targeting lets sellers make the first move.
Advertisers who choose targeting are usually not deliberately deceptive. But by choosing to maximize the response rate of a campaign, they end up sending a deceptive signal, reducing the information that the ad provides to the audience.
Awareness of targeting is still growing If an individual is aware that targeting is possible but doesn't know if he or she is mark or bystander, the signal is lost. As users learn about targeting, the value of the entire medium is going down, even for advertisers who do not target.
However, some buyers are still unaware of the extent of targeting. One politician saw an ad for a dating site on a political party press release and attributed it to the party, not to the Google ad service used on the site where he read it. From inside the IT business, a lot of tracking and targeting schemes look old and obvious, but some of the audience is still figuring it out.
And the faster they figure it out, the faster the signaling power of targeted ads is going away.
Targeting failure: the email spam problem All of this isn't just hypothetical—it has happened before. We can get some hints about the future of targeted web advertising from the history of email spam. Remember CAN-SPAM? This was the US Federal law that overruled state spam laws, some of which were strict, and cleared the way for advertisers to send all the spam they wanted, as long as they followed a few basic rules. It was a huge victory for pro-spam lobbyists at the Direct Marketing Association.
Today, the data, the tools, and even the law are all there for advertisers to take full advantage of email spam. The CAN-SPAM debate is over. The Internet privacy nerds lost, and database marketing won.
So where is all the CAN-SPAM-compliant spam?
Web ads promise targeting, but spam has been able to deliver it for a long time. Why aren't advertisers using it?
User targeting promises a way to reach users without paying for expensive content. In Ad Age, Adam Lehman, COO and General Manager at Lotame, writes, With the enormous variety of information available through the Internet, I am able to do research on running shoes across diverse sources. Based on the interests I express through my research, I may be presented with downstream advertising offers, which I can take or leave.
The key word here is "downstream." Lehman goes to a running site and somehow expresses interest in shoes. Later, while he's browsing some other, possibly unrelated, site, an advertiser "retargets" him with a shoe ad. The "downstream" site can be running whatever is the cheapest content that Lehman is willing to look at at all. Instead of having to place ads on relevant content, an advertiser can chase the user onto cheaper and cheaper sites.
What if you took everything that web ad targeting promises, and actually delivered it? Deliver ads to the exact right user? Sure. Go by email addresses which are in marketing databases already. Save money on content? Try free. Take every ad targeting concept and max it out, and you get email spam.
But what's wrong with that? John Battelle writes, It's actually a good thing that we as consumers are waking up to the fact that marketers know a lot about us—because we also know a lot about ourselves, and about what we want. Only when we can exchange value for value will advertising move to a new level, and begin to drive commercial experiences that begin to feel right. That will take an informed public that isn't "creeped out" or dismissive of marketing, but rather engaged and expectant—soon, we will demand that marketers pay for our attention and our data—by providing us better deals, better experiences, and better service. This can only be done via a marketing ecosystem that leverages data, algorithms, and insight at scale.
As they say on the Internet, dØØd wtf? The first step in me getting a better deal is for the other side to have more information about me, and for me to be engaged and expectant about that?
A cold call is not advertising Email spam is the digital version of direct mail, which is the paper version of a cold call. The problem with that whole kind of communication is that it's based on extremely fine-grained data on the seller's side, and none on the buyer's.
An advertisement that's tied to content, in a clearly expensive way, sends a signal from the advertiser to the buyer. The extreme example here is an ad in a glossy magazine. It'll still be on that magazine years later, and every subscriber gets the same one. Almost ideal from a signaling point of view. The other extreme is a cold call, which carries no "proof of work" or signaling value. All the information is on the seller's side, so the cold call is of no value to the recipient.
Which is why users block email spam. It's worthless. Even spam that complies with CAN-SPAM is worthless. As web ads steadily move further and further away from magazine-style, with signaling value, toward spam-style, with no signaling value, they're losing value as well.
Targeting failure: legit sites lose, intermediaries win Ricardo Bilton asks, While behavioral advertising may be vital to the current makeup of the web, the question worth answering now is this: Is that really the kind of Internet that we want to use in the first place?
Good question. Is it really a good investment for an advertiser to throw money at intermediaries who know lots of math, so that the advertiser doesn't have to spend money on content to attach the ads to? According to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, only 25% - 45% of online ad spending makes it as far as the publisher.
Alexis C. Madrigal writes, The ad market, on which we all depend, started going haywire. Advertisers didn't have to buy The Atlantic. They could buy ads on networks that had dropped a cookie on people visiting The Atlantic. They could snatch our audience right out from underneath us.
So where do the ads end up? In a lot of cases, on pirate sites. Chris Castle points out that McDonald's ads are running on sites that carry infringing song lyrics.
Another example is BMW's Response to Ads for Its Brands on Pirate Sites. Somehow, BMW advertising ended up running on an unlicensed album download page, on a site called mp3crank. Ad networks do respond to pressure from copyright holders and remove ads from known infringing sites, but snatching revenue from original content sites is still a major effect of tracking.
How targeted ads fail brand advertisers Brand advertisers, who Doc Searls splits out from direct response advertisers, are developing an understanding of the targeting problem and looking for alternatives. John Hegarty, founder of the ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, said, I'm not sure I want people to know who I am. I find that slightly Orwellian and I object to it. I don't want people to know what I drink in the morning and what I drink at night. I think there's a great problem here - throughout history we have fought for our freedom to be an individual, and you're taking it away from us. I think there'll be a huge backlash to that and Nike will have to be very careful.
And Richard Stacy writes, The great thing about advertising is that no-one takes it personally.
Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy Group also comments, A very intelligent British adman makes the distinction between ads which create sales and ads which create saleability. The kind of adspend-as-signalling Don refers to is very much about creating saleability rather than sales. Conventional media do a better job of this signalling, which may be complementary to—and not replaceable by—money spent online.
Am I right? Testable predictions Print advertising will keep its premium in spending per user minute. (The harder it is to do targeting in a medium, the more valuable the medium is.)
Higher awareness of the extent to which online ads are customized to the user will be correlated with higher use of privacy tech. (Users want to see "who's advertising on example.com", not ads with "relevance".)
The more privacy tech that a user runs, the more money he or she spends online, even when controlling for demographics, time spent online, and Internet skill. (Avoiding information asymmetry is an important motivation for using privacy tech.)
Some product and service categories (cars, insurance) are still mostly sold offline. The users of privacy tech will be overrepresented in the early adopter group who are buying these categories online, even when controlling for demographics, time spent online, and Internet skill. (Signaling matters more than matching.)
What next? Solutions Solution: privacy tech It's possible for both of these to be true:
This individual ad will have a higher click-through rate if we personalize it to the user.
and
Online advertising as a whole will be less profitable if we personalize ads to users.
Advertisers and legit content sites would do better if nobody used creepy tracking on users, but if some advertisers track and others don't, the ones who do can have an advantage. As long as users believe that online advertisers target ads, any non-targeters won't get the credibility benefit they deserve.
Statistics about performance of individual ads feeds into dangerous self-deception about the industry-wide effects of targeting. However, as the audience begins to understand targeting, the rate of ad blocking increases, the value of web ads decreases, and increasingly crappy ads drive more user demand for ad blocking.
Fortunately, better privacy tech, such as stricter treatment of third-party cookies, makes targeting more difficult and less accurate. The value of advertising across the entire medium rises, it's harder for ad networks to "snatch" audience from high-reputation sites, and those sites will be able to get more ad revenue and control, at the expense of middlemen.
Just as targeting didn't have to work with total accuracy to give an advantage to deceptive signalers, privacy tech doesn't have to be 100% to push things back in the other direction.
Solution: give brand advertising a seat at the table The current policy debate on web privacy is going much the same way that the debate on email spam did. Responsible users of email for marketing abandoned the debate and let the lobbyists at the DMA got CAN-SPAM passed. That only helped the bottom-feeders (who probably don't pay for DMA memberships anyway) and made it a never-ending challenge for legit DMA members to get a legit email newsletter through.
There are a lot of details to work out about how the norms and protocols for online ads have to change to support brand advertising, and not just direct response.
But starting with the assumption that the industry will go broke without unacceptable levels of user tracking will get us to the wrong place. Brand advertisers need to send a credible signal, and privacy tech helps reinforce that signal. The less targetable that web advertising is, the more valuable that brand advertisers will find it.
Solution: respect Peter Klein of MediaWhiz, writing in Ad Age, explains Why Do Not Track Will Make Online Advertising Better (Seriously). Anti-tracking legislation will make online advertising more focused and relevant to consumers. It will set into motion a more innovative and prosperous era of digital marketing, dominated by a healthy respect for consumers' wishes about how their data are collected and used, and innovative advertising that meets their needs.
Making creepy tracking harder is just what advertising needs. Klein writes, Do Not Track will force marketers to be more creative in their campaigns, tapping into legally available data—users' expressed interests. This will foster deeper and more relevant connections between brands and consumers and benefit online advertisers in the long run.
And better privacy tech isn't just good for advertising, it's good for the content creators. When advertisers have to target by interest, they have to look for relevant content, instead of falling down the ad network rat hole and chasing the desired user onto the cheapest possible page. All but the bottom-feeder content sites are likely to do better under an improved privacy regime.
Conclusion: don't panic I once worked on a web site for a client who showed me another marketing project at the company. It was an animated Christmas card, delivered by email. The file type of the attachment: Microsoft Windows .EXE. Naturally, I pointed out that (1) In those days, when Windows 95 and 98 were the most common client platforms, the .EXE can basically do anything—read the user's files, trash other programs, whatever. And (2) Internet email is forgeable. The "From:" address can be totally fake. So who's going to open a .EXE that comes in via email?
Naturally, I was wrong. "Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time." The customers loved the Christmas card.
Today, though, we have different norms and technologies around security. A .EXE in email will get quarantined, filtered, or buried under layers of warnings.
The same thing is happening with privacy problems. Browser developers are steadily closing the bugs that make creepy tracking possible. And yes, that makes some advertising techniques obsolete, the same way that corporate virus checkers killed off the animated .EXE Christmas card business.
But if you want to send customers a holiday greeting, you still can. And after the web fixes its privacy bugs, you'll still be able to advertise. It will just work better.

Don Marti <dmarti@zgp.org>

Ako ste se brinuli gde ćete kupovati narkotike nakon što je FBI zatvorio Silk Road, ne brinite, Silk Road 2.0 radi, a novi Dread Pirate Roberts (za koga se šuška da je to možda originalni DPR) veli da ako ga FBI obori, on može da ga ributuje za 15 minuta...
If Silk Road Gets Shut Down, It Will Be Back Online in 15 Minutes

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It only took a month for the Silk Road 2.0 to go live after the now infamous Silk Road marketplace shuttered. One month. Should the budding deep-web bazaar experience the same fate as its predecessor, and be knocked out by authorities still whack-a-moling their way through the online front of the war on drugs, the Silk Road 3.0 would be up and running in 15 minutes, tops.
That's according to the Dread Pirate Roberts, the pseudonymous head of SR 2.0. In what are arguably his most breathy public remarks to date the "new" DPR, who either cribbed his handle from the DPR of SR 1.0 fame or who is indeed the original DPR, opened up to Mike Power on his long-term vision for the site.
The exchange mostly finds DPR speaking of the need for such a peer-reviewed, quality-controlled service; if authorities come to their senses and start going after "real criminals", DPR says, maybe then will his philanthropic intentions come to full bore. But if you were hoping for a glimpse at SR 2.0's backend, for some word on how the site's nuts and bolts have fallen into place, sorry. DPR is decidedly close-lipped.
And yet he does offer Power an illuminating hint at the regenerative nature of what stands to be the next Tor market kingpin (more on this in a moment). "You will hunt me  —but first ask yourselves is it worth it?" DPR asks. "Taking me down will not affect Silk Road ", the administrator adds, as:

...back-ups have already been distributed and this entire infrastructure can be redeployed elsewhere in under 15 minutes, and you will gain nothing from our database.

That's not much to go off of—DPR doesn't offer anything more by way of the site's backend. Which is not surprising.
Still, to think SR 3.0—and if it comes to it, SR 4.0 and 5.0 and 6.0, and on and on into the future—could pop up elsewhere, each an infrastructural clone of its predecessor, pokes a gaping hole in law enforcement's scheme to blot out illegal darknet commerce. On the heels of Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), who chairs the Senate's Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee, calling for a more "nimble" approach to dealing with all today's Silk Road-like services, DPR alluding to a quarter-hour reboot is prehaps yet another reminder that all is pointless in the online front of the war on drugs.
It also serves to distance both himself and his fellow admins, many of whom are believed to have been global admins on the original SR, from some of the sketchy goings on and scambaggers of the Wild West that is the post SR 1.0 dark web. If he hadn't stepped up and built out this sort of failsafe, DPR asks, "who would have? Another MettaDPR?"
He's referring to the swindling head of the now defunct Project Black Flag, which until recently was billed as a contender for becoming the next Tor market kingpin. Earlier this month, MettaDPR upped and made off with all its users' money. Scamming doesn't take long. Beaming up an exact replica of everyone's favorite dark-web bazaar apparently won't, either.

Trade deal could be bitter medicine

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WikiLeaks has exposed details of secret trade negotiations that could leave Australians paying more for drugs and medicines, movies, computer games and software, and be placed under surveillance as part of a US-led crackdown on internet piracy.
A leaked draft of a controversial chapter of the Trans Pacific Partnership free trade agreement reveals the negotiating positions of 12 countries – including Australia – on copyright, patents and other intellectual property issues, with a heavy focus on enforcement measures against internet piracy.
Intellectual property experts are critical of the draft treaty, which they say would help the multinational movie and music industries, software giants and pharmaceutical manufacturers to maintain and increase prices by reinforcing the rights of copyright and patent owners, clamping down on online piracy and raising obstacles to the introduction of generic drugs and medicines.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has indicated that he is keen to see the trade talks pushed to a conclusion next month, saying "there's always horse-trading in these negotiations, but in the end ... everyone is better off"'.
An expert in intellectual property law, Matthew Rimmer, said the draft was "very prescriptive" and strongly reflected US trade objectives and multinational corporate interests "with little focus on the rights and interests of consumers, let alone broader community interests".
"One could see the TPP as a Christmas wish-list for major corporations, and the copyright parts of the text support such a view," Dr Rimmer said.
"Hollywood, the music industry, big IT companies such as Microsoft and the pharmaceutical sector would all be very happy with this."
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade recently excluded journalists from TPP industry briefings held in anticipation of the next round of negotiations, which begins in Salt Lake City, Utah, next week.
Dr Rimmer said that Australia appeared "generally supportive" of the US or otherwise "quite passive" in the negotiations.
The leaked draft shows that the US and Japan oppose wording, supported by most of the other countries, that highlights the importance of "maintain[ing] a balance between the rights of intellectual property holders and the legitimate interests of users and the community".
In April, the then US ambassador to Australia, Jeffrey Bleich, accused Australian consumers of habitually stealing copyrighted content and of being "some of the worst offenders with amongst the highest piracy rates ... in the world".
New federal Attorney-General George Brandis has signalled his intention to introduce more stringent copyright laws to crack down on online piracy.
The leaked treaty text also reveals new American and Japanese proposals designed to enhance the ability of pharmaceutical manufacturers to extend and widen their patents on drugs and medicines.
Proposals with the potential to impact significantly on Australia's Pharmaceuticals Benefits Scheme include a requirement that patents be available for new uses of existing drugs, effectively allowing for the "ever-greening" of existing patents.
The proposals also include compensation to companies for delays in the granting or extension of patents, and measures to ensure data exclusivity.
This would enable companies to prevent competitors, specifically manufacturers of generic medicines, from using past clinical safety data to support approval of new products.
Australia is recorded as having indicated opposition to these proposals, but the strength of this is unclear as neither the former Labor government nor the new Coalition government has publicly challenged the US position.
The draft text also shows that Australian negotiators have not sought any specific exemption to protect Australia's tobacco plain-packaging laws from the treaty's strong protection for the rights of trademark owners.   
The Australian Greens spokesman on communications and the digital economy,  Scott Ludlam, described the treaty as "hugely dangerous" and said people should be "deeply concerned about what is being negotiated".
Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson on Wednesday moved a motion that calls on Trade and Investment Minister Andrew Robb to table the draft text of the TPP agreement in the Senate.
However, a spokesman for Mr Robb said the treaty negotiations would remain confidential but insisted there had been "a lot of consultation across all industry sectors that could be impacted by the agreement".
WikiLeaks has condemned the TPP negotiations as a "corporatist trade deal". 
Donation pledges to WikiLeaks exceeding $US73,000 ($A78,000)  have been crowdsourced to support the publication of the TPP negotiating text.
The full text of the leaked negotiating text can by found at www.wikileaks.org.

Mejdn!!!!!!!!!!!!


Heavy metal shows piracy is not killing music, offers new business model

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The music industry — and the television and movie industries — appears to be in free-fall. After years of having an exclusive means of delivery, its market hold has been fragmented by the internet and increasing distrust of big media. Looking over the past decade, the picture adds up to a slow and steady decline with downloaded forms of media failing to replace the profits of their physical counterparts.
Although the industries responded with initiatives to stop piracy, many observers disagree that piracy is the root of industry's woes and think instead that there is a need for a new business plan in the media industries because the old profit model has failed. However, no one is sure what that plan will be, since media is no longer a high margin industry with tons of excess profit between cost and sales price, but a low margin industry where people aren't willing to pay much for media. Think of the difference between a 1990s-era $150/month cable bill and today's $15/month Netflix bill.
The new holy grail is to find a business model that allows bands to have more promotion than being independent can provide, but does not lead to the excess and inefficiency of the big record labels of the past. Right now, the industry is all ears to anyone who can demonstrate a working business model that shows a profit. As of recently, one of the possibilities is offered by a heavy metal band you'll all recognize: Iron Maiden.

"Iron Maiden's BitTorrent data suggests Brazil is a huge driver of fans – and given Brazil is one of the biggest file sharing nations on the planet, this is a strong indicator of popularity," said Greg Mead, CEO and co-founder of Musicmetric.
"With their constant touring, [the] report suggests Maiden have been rather successful in turning free file-sharing into fee-paying fans. This is clear proof that taking a global approach to live touring can pay off, and that having the data to track where your fan bases lie will become ever more vital."

Despite being extensively pirated worldwide, Iron Maiden have managed to put themselves in the £10-20m for 2012. This means that despite the growing popularity of the band on social media, and the extensive and pervasive torrent downloading of the band's music, books and movies, the band is turning a profit. This is in defiance of the past business model, and the idea that piracy is killing music. In fact, piracy seems to be saving music in Iron Maiden's case.
One reason for this may be metal itself. It has a fiercely loyal fanbase and a clear brand and identity, even down to the uniform-style black tshirts that fans wear that differ only in band logo and art. The audience identifies with the genre, which stands in contrast to genericized genres like pop, rock and rap. It doggedly maintains its own identity and shuns outsiders. As a result, fans tend to identify more with their music, and place a higher value on purchasing it.
The music industry should listen up. Piracy may or may not be evil, but it's a way of life for many people. High margins, such as found by selling a $0.25 CD for $18, are now gone. But heavy metal shows us a different business model in which although much of the product is pirated or given away, bands are still able to thrive and in fact do better than they did under the old model. Perhaps the future isn't so dark after all for the music industry, at least in heavy metal.

high margines su gone, for sure, ali isto tako for sure je da su temelji novog business plana in the media industries postavljeni vec prije nekoliko godina, a ne da je no one sure. tv-pretplata postaje multimedialna-pretplata i legalno ce se 'skidati' sve.

vecina pirata svjesna je razvoja, te se, svaki u svojoj domeni, bore za primat, t.j. potencijal da u casu x budu ukljuceni u legalni sistem. a odradili su odlican posao kao destruktivni inovatori, em su urusili bezobrazne marze, em ce svi 'slojevi' drustva imati na raspolaganju doslovno sve, uz cinjenicu da su domacinstva slabije platezne moci oslobodjena multimedijalne pretplate, te 'brockhaus' vise nece biti samo za privilegirane. podrzimo pirate.

Spotify Royalties: Still Iffy, Especially for Indies

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Despite its popularity among listeners, it's questionable whether the streaming-music model is good for the businesses that rely on it, much less the artists who contribute the actual songs. Pandora is struggling to become profitable, while Rhapsody slashed its workforce earlier this year; Grooveshark managed to survive multiple copyright lawsuits but faces a crowded marketplace that may kill it even more efficiently than hordes of enemy attorneys. Meanwhile, Spotify races to grow revenues in the face of significant expenses.
If that wasn't complicated enough, Apple and Google have both introduced their own streaming-music platforms—and unlike the Pandoras and Spotifys of the world, those tech behemoths can subsidize their streaming efforts with cash from other, immensely profitable business operations. Despite their brand recognition, however, it's questionable whether Apple or Google can squeeze significant profits from their respective streaming platforms (and neither company is likely to break out that financial data anytime soon).
These corporate money woes, though, are nothing compared to what the actual musicians face when it comes to streaming-music royalties. "By my calculation it would take songwriting royalties for roughly 312,000 plays on Pandora to earn us the profit of one—one—LP sale," Damon Krukowski of the band Galaxie 500 wrote in a much-circulated Pitchfork article in November 2012. "On Spotify, one LP is equivalent to 47,680 plays." That same year, the band Grizzly Bear Tweeted that 10,000 plays on Spotify netted them around $10 in hard currency.
Spotify wants to change the perception that it's killing artists' ability to make a living off music. "We have succeeded in growing revenues for artists and labels in every country where we operate, and have now paid out over $1 Billion USD in royalties to-date ($500 million of which we paid in 2013 alone)," the company wrote in a recent posting on its Website. "We have proudly achieved these payouts despite having relatively few users compared to radio, iTunes or Pandora, and as we continue to grow we expect that we will generate many billions more in royalties."
By switching users from "poorly monetized" channels such as piracy to somewhat-more-monetized ones such as legal streaming, Spotify argues, it's doing the music industry as a whole a huge favor. "The average amount of money spent by US adults on music is $25, whereas the average Spotify user is worth $41 (our total revenue divided by our total # of users)," that posting continued. "Simply put, a Spotify customer is 1.6x more financially valuable than the average adult non-Spotify US music consumer."
How much of that cash actually reaches the rights-holders? Spotify insists they earn between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream, on average, and that a niche indie album on the service could earn an artist roughly $3,300 per month (a global hit album, on the other hand, would rack up $425,000 per month). It believes those numbers will only grow along with Spotify's user base. (Side note: Spotify claims it factors in how much artists actually earn after label or publisher deductions.)
But let's say an artist earns $0.0084 per stream; it would still take 400,000 "plays" per month in order to reach that indie-album threshold of approximately $3,300. (At $0.006 per stream, it would take 550,000 streams to reach that baseline.) If Spotify's "specific payment figures" with regard to albums are correct, that means either a.) its subscribers are listening to a lot of music on repeat or b.) a lot of subscribers are sampling lots and lots of new bands and musicians every week.
Those calculations are rough, of course, but even if they're relatively ballpark, they end up supporting artists' grousing that streaming music doesn't pay them nearly enough. But squeezed between labels and publishers that demand lots of money for licensing rights, and in-house expenses such as salaries and infrastructure, companies such as Spotify may have little choice but to keep the current payment model for the time being.

I, da se nadovežemo, evo editoriala koji tvrdi da su striming servisi pred odumiranjem jer se biznis model pokazuje kao neodrživ (ispada da su  muzičari koje sam intervjuisao poslednjih godina bili na pravom tragu kad su gunđali da kad muziku građani percipiraju kao besplatnu, to se brzo premetne u to da je percipiraju kao bezvrednu):
Get Ready For The Streaming-Music Die-Off

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Streaming music gets one thing right. Services like Pandora, Rdio and Spotify are amazing for the consumer, and in that singular way, the music industry hasn't been better in ... probably ever.

At long last, we have the celestial jukebox we dreamed of a decade and a half ago. Nearly any song is at our fingertips in seconds and that privilege costs far less than what an album used to, if it costs anything at all.

This bubble of end-user bliss comes at the expense of almost everyone else, from artists right down to the people who pioneered the idea of renting music over the Web to begin with. How long can it last?
License To Ail
Streaming services are ailing. Pandora, the giant of its class and the survivor at 13 years old, is waging an ugly war to pay artists and labels less in order to stay afloat. Spotify, in spite of 6 million paid users and 18 million subscribers who humor some ads in their stream, has yet to turn a profit. Rhapsody axed 15% of its workforce right as Apple's iTunes Radio hit the scene. On-demand competitor Rdio just opted for layoffs too, in order to move into a "scalable business model." Hmm... no one wondered about that business-model bit in the beginning?

Meanwhile, Turntable.fm, a comparatively tiny competitor with what should have been viral DNA, just pulled the plug on its virtual jam sessions this week—and it just might be the canary in the coal mine.
Not-So Disruptive Disruptors
Streaming services rely on a weird conceit, but it's not a new one. Like record labels, these companies can't exist—they literally have no product—without musicians. Yet hardly any musicians are pleased with the advent of digital streaming, and understandably so—they were already screwed by greedy record labels back when people went into actual brick-and-mortar stores and walked out with albums; so screwed in fact, that it's entirely possible to sell four million albums and not make a cent. Meanwhile, record labels are happy to throw their weight behind anything that isn't the old iTunes model, even if it's Apple's own Pandora copycat.

In our already thoroughly broken pre-digital music system, many, many people got paid before the artist themselves. Digital music services elbowed their way into a crowded room, cut what seemed like a good deal with the major labels and started handing music out. And now there's not enough money to go around. Who's surprised? Everyone except the record labels. Huh.



A Broken Model

These companies just aren't bringing enough cash in compared to what they pour out in royalties. Ironically, approximately no one thinks that streaming services pay enough to license the music that they rent out to listeners, except the companies themselves, of course.

Poor them, shouldn't they pay less? But for every Rihanna-level talent that gets paid out $3 million annually (that's to her label, not the artist herself as Spotify might like you to think), there are a thousand artists furious at music's brave new business model. And even Rihanna is pissed, though that anger is arguably misdirected.

Beyond their broken business model, these companies share a lot of dubious promises to investors, shareholders and artists. Rdio hopes to get in the black by luring in more ad-supported subscribers. Spotify promises that when it scales up to 40 million paid users—it's currently at 6 million—that artists will get paid five times what they make from the service today (the math works out, but that 40 million figure is a big "if"). Pandora, unprofitable and crippled by royalty fees as its user base grows, promises that mobile ad revenue can offset the revenue it's hemorrhaging.
The Cockroach Lives On
For digital music to really be disruptive, it needs to change something—not just add another cook to the kitchen.

Considering how artists have suffered under the thumb of the major labels (now down to Sony, Warner and Universal), they're rightfully suspicious of anyone willing to hop into bed with their trifecta of sonic overlords. As an avid music listener, I have to believe that music-distribution platforms like Pandora, Spotify and their ilk are less evil than the stalwarts of the recording industry. But as they continue to spiral, it seems that these would-be digital disruptors might have underestimated the business savvy of the guys who've been running the show for decades.

The label lords have seen the likes of Napster come and go. As soon as streaming services start becoming more trouble to deal with than they're worth—or a bigger player comes along and cuts a better deal—they're happy to starve you out.

Ultimately, the record labels are still calling the shots. And upstarts like Spotify, Rdio and the rest are learning that lesson the hard way, calling for sympathy while the shot-callers wring them out. In this old game, the dealer always wins. That is, unless you're a company with an excellent poker face and deep pockets to boot—and only Apple, Google and Amazon spring to mind as that kind of player.

After the rest of the hands are dealt? Winner takes all. Game over.

I kad smo već kod gomana, njemački sud presudio da je firma Appwork - koju znamo po predivnom JDownloaderu - kriva za kreiranje tehnologije koja zaobilazi DRM i da je valja oglobiti sa 250k evra. Problem? JDownloader je open source i inkriminisani plagin (koji omogućava ripovanje RTMPE strimova sa mrže) je napisao neko sa strane. Sud ovde uspostavlja opasan primer spram tretmana open source softvera.


http://torrentfreak.com/court-open-source-project-liable-for-3rd-party-drm-busting-coding-131205/

QuoteA judgment handed down by a German court against an open source software project is being described as "worrisome" by the company at the heart of the case. Appwork, the outfit behind the hugely popular JDownloader software, can be held liable for coding carried out by third-party contributors, even when they have no knowledge of its functionality. Appwork informs TorrentFreak that the judgment will be a burden on the open source creative process.

One of the most popular multi-purpose downloading tools on the web today is JDownloader, a Java-based tool compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac. The software is able to download video files, files from file-hosting sites, and extract them all once completed.

Back in June the software became embroiled in court proceedings over a specific feature present in an unofficial beta of JDownloader2 which enabled the downloading of RTMPE video streams on top of existing RTMP. It wasn't created by AppWork themselves but was a contribution from an open source developer who had worked on the project before.

Since the plug-in handled encrypted streams the Hamburg Regional Court decided that this represented a circumvention of an "effective technological measure" under Section 95a of Germany's Copyright Act. As a result the Court issued a preliminary injunction against JDownloader2 and threatened its makers, Appwork, with a 250,000 euro fine for "production, distribution and possession" of an 'illegal' piece of software.

Appwork found out about the functionality of the plug-in months before the court case and had already disabled it, but the judgment had the potential to have a chilling effect on open source development.

"Are developers really liable if another developer in the community commits code that might be protected somewhere in a software patent? How are Open Source communities supposed to check? What if a program that is included in another Open Source program makes an update that adds illegal functionality?" the company told TorrentFreak at the time.

To find out, Appwork filed an appeal and this week the project received the decision of the court. It was bad news not only for the company but also the open source community in general.

"In the eyes of the judges, our company 'made the open source contributions our own' mostly by having a copyright sign in the info dialogue," Appworks' Alex informs TorrentFreak.

"Therefore we are liable and must actively screen every code contribution and/or have protective mechanisms in place against someone committing something that might be illegal."

Alex says that the decision is "worrisome" for the open source community and has the potential to deter people from getting involved in such projects when they discover they must take responsibility for the work of others.

"It doesn't matter if the project owner did not do anything (i.e. write any line of code) or even if the project owner knows about anything illegal being committed," Alex says.

"In our case, even when we didn't even know about the functionality, which was part of an open source binary one of our open source developers used (rtmpdump), we were held liable anyway. Not from the moment on that we got notified about it, but even before," he explains.

"This means that if any company or individual wants to use an open (or closed) source binary (commercial or not), they are liable for it if it contains any illegal functions. This practically means they are obligated to check every single line of code, which is almost impossible for smaller projects."

Appwork are looking into the details of the judgment and are currently considering their options for appeal.

Pirate Bay Founder Held in Solitary Confinement Without a Warrant

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Since his arrival in Denmark to face hacking charges Gottfrid Svartholm has sat in solitary confinement, denied free access to mail and denied access to his books. The situation has outraged Wikileaks' Julian Assange who says Gottfrid is now a political prisoner. Meanwhile Gottfrid's mother Kristina has written to Amnesty hoping that they will take notice of her son's plight.


Following a failed last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court in Sweden, Gottfrid Svartholm was extradited to Denmark last month.
The Pirate Bay founder stands accused of hacking into the mainframe computers of IT company CSC. In an earlier case in Sweden he was acquitted of similar charges.
Previously in Sweden and within the natural parameters of his detainment, Gottfrid had been granted various freedoms, including socializing with other inmates and the ability to receive mail. He also enjoyed access to books for his studies, an absolute must for someone with such an active mind but no computer or Internet. However, since arriving in Denmark things have been very different.
In a recent letter sent to Amnesty and shared with TorrentFreak, Gottfrid's mother Kristina explains her son's plight. She says that Gottfrid is being kept in solitary and treated as if he were a "dangerous, violent and aggressive criminal" even though his only crime – if any – is hacking.
Gottfrid's lawyer Luise Høi says the terms of his confinement are unacceptable and are being executed without the correct legal process.
"It is the case that Danish authorities are holding my client in solitary confinement without a warrant," Høi explains, noting that if the authorities wish to exclude Gottfrid from access to anyone except his lawyer and prison staff, they need to apply for a special order.
The theory is that the special terms of Gottfrid's confinement are in place so that he is unable to interfere with the investigation, but Kristina doesn't buy that excuse.
"[In Sweden] I visited him every week, unsupervised, sometimes with an additional person. He rang me daily throughout the fall and his letters etc were not checked. For a long time he has had every opportunity in the world to complicate investigations for the Danish police if he had wanted," Kristina says.
The extradition by Sweden and current situation in Denmark has outraged Wikileaks' Julian Assange, a staunch supporter of Gottfrid who he describes as a 'Wikileaks Consultant'.
"It is time someone says it like it is: Gottfrid Svartholm Warg is a political prisoner and Sweden has fallen off the map of decent nations in its treatment of him. Gottfrid has always been ideologically driven to inform the world; he worked tirelessly to help WikiLeaks expose the slaughter of civilians in Iraq by a US helicopter gunship and was responsible for an important part of our infrastructure," Assange says.
"There are thousands of alleged cyber criminals, but instead of dealing with these cases, we see vast resources diverted yet again by the Swedish state into smashing Gottfrid. These attempts include the first trial of Gottfrid after US pressure (extensively documented in US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks), his subsequent rendering from Cambodia by the Swedish intelligence service SAPO, his months of incommunicado detention in Sweden, and now his irregular extradition to Denmark – for a charge he was just acquitted of."
Today, Kristina will travel to see Gottfrid in Denmark, hopefully with more encouraging news to report on her departure.
Meanwhile in Russia, authorities there have ordered local ISPs to initiate a block on RuTor.org, a site whose domain is registered to the Swede. The site stands accused of distributing copyrighted material including the 2013 film 'Stalingrad'.
Anyone who would like to write to Gottfrid is certainly welcome to try. For any chance of this mail eventually getting through people should ensure that letters contain only text, are not written in any kind of code or suggestion of that, and do not contain any discussion of the case.Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 171084
Att: Jens Jørgensen
Politigården
1567 København V
Denmark

Hiljade Nemaca primile su pisma u kojima se od njih traži da plate naknadu za pornografiju koju su navodno ilegalno gledali na internetu.

http://www.b92.net/zivot/vesti.php?yyyy=2013&mm=12&dd=16&nav_id=789593

A je l' smeju da se gledaju spotovi sa golišavim tetama na Youtubetu?

nista novo u drzavi danskoj, skoro. novo je da se ne radi o p2p vec streamingu. a odvjetnik koji potrazuje dobio je sudsku dozvolu da zatrazi osobne podatke u njemackog telekoma putem zahtijeva u kojem se pozvao na presude glede p2p-a, bez da spominje streaming. sto opet ne rusi potraznju.
toliko o streamingu, usput, tko jos uvijek rabi torente, njemu nije za pomoci.
inace, slicne akcije popularne su u nj. vec skoro deset godina; jedno vrijeme su odvjetnici divljali po ebayu. o svemu se da napisati pozamasna knjiga.
ispod crte je uz pravilan pristup prica zabavnog karaktera, ako ih covjek ignorira, ili, kad prodaju 'slucaj' drugoj odvjetnickoj agenciji, sporadicno odgovori pisuci kao desnjak lijevom rukom.

jedino je zalosno sto se uvijek nadje ljudi koji se uplase i plate.
da zagrebemo malo dublje: odavno je urusen realan odnos izmedju produktivnosti i prihoda 'malih ljudi', ali se rusi i sistem šišanja ovaca tako da nastancas tonu medija po nekoliko centa u nekom kineskom zatvorenom radnom gradu i to uvaljujes ljudima po nekoliko desetina eura. produktivnost nejednaka prihodima jednako novi kompenzacijski trzisni sistemi; u prelaznom periodu piratluk uvodi red. sve na bazi prirodnog logaritma.

Ahahah, Dizni. Dakle, Dizni je preko Amazona nekoliko godina unazad prodavao ekskluzivne kratke božićne filmove za strimovanje. Ljudi su kupovali. Ove godine, Dizni je odlučio da to radi preko sopstvenog striming servisa tako da je Amazon onda morao da ukloni rečene filmove sa svog servisa. Uklonjeni su tako da i ljudi koji su ih kupili prethodnih godina sad ne mogu da im pristupe pa, ako im se gleda, moraju da ih ponovo kupe od Diznija...

Amazon accidentally removes Disney Christmas special from owners' accounts

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Prep & Landing has been removed from sale on Amazon so that Disney can show the film exclusively on its own channel – but the company also removed it from the accounts of users who had paid for the show

Users who bought a festive cartoon from Amazon found themselves unable to watch it in the runup to Christmas after the company removed access to digital copies from their account.
Disney's Prep & Landing, a Christmas special first aired in 2009, has been available for customers to rent and buy on Amazon's Instant Video service since Christmas 2011, when its sequel was aired and also uploaded.
For $2.99, customers could purchase the video, which Amazon's site says lets them: "watch and re-watch it as often as you like... You may stream a purchased video while connected to the internet and access the video from Your Video Library on any other compatible device. You may also download the video."
This week, though, the company temporarily removed access to both episodes of Prep & Landing, preventing new customers buying or renting the show. At the same time, customers who had already paid – under the promise that they could "re-watch it as often" as they like – found themselves locked out as well.
Amazon blamed the removal on "a temporary issue with some of our catalog data" which it says has been fixed, adding that "customers should never lose access to their Amazon Instant Video purchases." It says the database error was unrelated to Disney's request.
One customer told the blog Boing Boing that the company gave him a different reason: "Amazon has explained to me that Disney can pull their content at any time and 'at this time they've pulled that show for exclusivity on their own channel.'"
It worries some that the company has the power to prevent users from accessing media they have bought and paid for. Boing Boing writer Cory Doctorow, a digital rights campaigner and Guardian columnist, says that "Amazon stuck the gun on the mantelpiece in Act One, and they don't get to act all surprised now that it went off in Act Three. Anyone who didn't see this coming failed to do so because it was their job not to see it coming."
Peter Bradwell of the UK-based Open Rights Group says that "online service providers or rights holders often can remove access to products like this - it will be in their terms and conditions."
"It's one way that online digital products are being built to be less useful than physical copies. Nobody would come to your house and take your DVDs just because they later decide they want those films playing exclusively on their TV channel."
In 2009, Amazon surprised Kindle owners by deleting copies of George Orwell's 1984 without prior notice. The company refunded users, but told them that the book was "no longer available".
However, Orwell's dystopian classic was only on sale in the first place due to an oversight on Amazon's part, after a publisher which did not have the rights to the books began selling digital copies without permission. The removal of Prep & Landing appears to be the first time Amazon has removed access to content which users legitimately purchased.
Disney was contacted for comment, hadn't responded at time of publication.

Britanski filter za pornografiju filtrira i stvari koje... nisu pornografija.



The UK "Porn" Filter Blocks Kids' Access To Tech, Civil Liberties Websites

Quote

It fell to the UK Tories to actually implement the Nanny State. Too bad Nanny Tory does not want kinds to read up on tech web sites, or civil liberties ones. Read on for a small sample of what the filter blocks, from a blocked-by-default tech writer.
  Regular readers (at least those of you who also follow me on twitter) will know that I'm more than a little skeptical of censorship in general. And you may have seen, as evidenced by this tweet that I found the decision to implement a nationwide, on-by-default-but-possible-to-opt-out-of web filtering scheme in the UK to be a seriously stupid idea.

But then I was never very likely to become a UK resident or anything more than a very temporary customer of any UK ISP during visits to the country, so I did not give the matter another thought until today, when this tweet announced that you could indeed check whether your web site was blocked. The tweet points you to http://urlchecker.o2.co.uk/urlcheck.aspx, which appears to be a checking engine for UK ISP O2, which is among the ISPs to implement the blocking regime.

I used that URL checker to find the blocking status of various sites where I'm either part or the content-generating team or sites that I find interesting enough to visit every now and then. The sites appear in the semi-random order that I visited them on December 22, 2013, starting a little after 16:00 CET:

bsdly.net: I checked my own personal web site first, www.bsdly.net. I was a bit surprised to find that it was blocked in the default Parental control regime. Users of the archive.org Internet Wayback Machine may be able to find one page that contained a reference to a picture of "a blonde chick with a cute pussy", but the intrepid searcher will find that the picture in question in fact was of juvenile poultry and felines, respectively. The site is mainly tech content, with some resources such as the hourly updated list of greytrapped spam senders (see eg this blog post for some explanation of that list and its purpose).

nuug.no: Next up I tried the national Norwegian Unix Users' group web site www.nuug.no, with a somewhat odd result - "The URL has not yet been classified. If you would like it to be classified please press Reclassify URL". There was no Reclassify URL option visible in the web interface, but I would assume that in a default to block regime, the site would be blocked anyway. It would be nice to have confirmation of this from actual O2 customers or other people in the UK.

But NUUG hosts a few specific items I care about, such as my NUUG home page with links to slides from my talks and other resources I've produced over the years. Entering http://home.nuug.no and http://home.nuug.no/~peter/pf/ (the path to my PF tutorial material) both produced an "Invalid URL" message. This looks like bug in the URL checker code, but once again it would be nice to have confirmation from persons who are UK residents and/or O2 customers about the blocking status for those URLs.

usenix.org:Next I tried www.usenix.org, the main site for USENIX, the US-based but actually quite international Unix user group. This also turned out to be apparently blocked in the Parental control regime.

ukuug.org and flossuk.org: But if you're a UK resident, your first port of call for finding out about Unix-like systems is likely to be UK Unix User Group instead, so I checked both www.ukuug.org and flossuk.org, and both showed up as blocked in the Parental control regime (ukuug.org, flossuk.org).

So it appears that it's the official line that kids under 12 in the UK should not be taught about free or open source software, according to the default filtering settings.

eff.org: You will have guessed by now that I'm a civil liberties man, so the next site URL I tried was www.eff.org, which was also blocked by the Parental Control regime.  So UK kids need protection from learning about civil liberties and privacy online.

amnesty.org.uk: A little closer to home for UK kids, I thought perhaps a thoroughly benign organization such as Amnesty International would somehow be pre-approved. But no go: I tried the UK web site, amnesty.org.uk, and it, to was blocked by the Parental Control regime. UK kids apparently need to be shielded from the sly propaganda of an organization that has worked, among other things for releasing political prisoners and against cruel and unusual punishment such as the death penalty everywhere.

slashdot.org: Next up in my quasi-random sequence was the tech new site slashdot.org, which may at times be informal in tone, but still so popular that I was somewhat surprised to find that it, too was blocked by the Parental Control regime.

linuxtoday.com: Another popular tech news site is linuxtoday.com, with, as the name says, has a free and open source software slant. Like slashdot, this one was also blocked by the Parental Control regime.

bsdly.blogspot.com: Circling back to my own turf, I decided to check the site where I publish the most often, bsdly.blogspot.com. By this time I wasn't terribly surprised to find that my writing too has fallen afould of something or other and is by default blocked by the Parental Control regime.

nostarch.com: Blocking an individual writer most people probably haven't heard about in a default to block regime isn't very surprising, but would they not at least pre-approve well known publishers? I tried nostarch.com (home of among others a series of LEGO-themed tech/science books for kids as well as Manga guides to various sciences, as well as various BSD and Linux books).  No matter, they too were blocked by the Parental Control regime.

blogspot.com: Along the same lines as in the nostarch.com case, if they default to block they may well have an unknown scribe blocked, but would they block an entire blogging site's domain? So I tried blogspot.com. The result is that it's apparently registered that the site has "dynamic content" so even the "default safety" settings may end up blocking. But of course, another one that's  blocked by the Parental Control regime.

arstechnica.com: I still couldn't see any clear logic besides a probable default to block, so I tried another popular tech news site, arstechnica.com.  I was a bit annoyed, but not too surprised that this too was blocked by the Parental Control regime.

The last four I tried mainly to get confirmation of what I already suspected:

www.openbsd.org: What could possibly be offensive or subversive about the most secure free operating systems website? I don't know, but the site is apparently too risky for minors, blocked by the Parental Control regime as it is.

undeadly.org: The site undeadly.org is possibly marginally better known under the name OpenBSD Journal. It exists to collect and publish news relevant to the OpenBSD operating system, its developers and users. For Nanny only knows what reason, this site was also blocked by the Parental Control regime.

www.freebsd.org: www.freebsd.org is the home site of FreeBSD, another fairly popular free BSD operating system (which among others Apple has found useful as a source of code that works better in a public maintenance regime).  I thought perhaps the incrementally larger community size would have put this site on Nanny's horizon, but apparently not: FreeBSD.org remains blocked by the Parental Control regime.

www.geekculture.com: How about a little geek humor, then? www.geekculture.com is home to several web comics, and The Joy of Tech remains a favorite, even with the marked Apple slant. But apparently that too, is too much for the children of the United Kingdom: Geekculture.com is blocked by the Parental Control regime.

www.linux.com: And finally, the penguins: By now it should not surprise anyone that www.linux.com, a common starting point for anyone looking for information about that operating system, like the others is blocked by the Parental Control regime.

So summing up, checking a semi-random collection of mainly fairly mainstream and some rather obscure tech URLs shows that far from focusing on its stated main objective, keeping innocent children away from online porn, the UK Internet filter shuts the UK's children out of a number of valuable IT resources, was well as several important civil liberties resources.

And if this is the true face of Parental Controls, I for one would take using controls like these as a sufficient indicator that the parents in question are in fact not qualified to do their parenting without proper supervision.

If this is an indicator of how the collective of United Kingdom Internet Nannies is to maintain their filtering regime, they are most certainly part of a bigger problem than the one they claim to be working to solve.

ovo me podsetilo na moje "služenje vojnog roka" u pošti. probam ja da vidim vikend ture za Budimpeštu, kad ono filter za pornografiju mi neda da pristupim nijednoj agenciji pitam se ja učem je štos, probam od kuće, sve radi. provalim posle da je tog meseca bio sajam erotike u budimpešti, i da je svaka agencija nudila i posetu toj manifestaciji, pa je filter poludeo.

Dalje o britanskom porno-filteru:
David Cameron's internet porn filter is the start of censorship creep

Quote
The question of who is allowed access to what data is a defining one of our age – and Edward Snowden has taught us to be wary
  Picture the scene. You're pottering about on the internet, perhaps idly looking up cake recipes, or videos of puppies learning to howl. Then the phone rings. It's your internet service provider. Actually, it's a nice lady in a telesales warehouse somewhere, employed on behalf of your service provider; let's call her Linda. Linda is calling because, thanks to David Cameron's "porn filter", you now have an "unavoidable choice", as one of 20 million British households with a broadband connection, over whether to opt in to view certain content. Linda wants to know – do you want to be able to see hardcore pornography?
How about information on illegal drugs? Or gay sex, or abortion? Your call may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes. How about obscene and tasteless material? Would you like to see that? Speak up, Linda can't hear you.
The government's filter, which comes into full effect this month after a year of lobbying, will block far more than dirty pictures. That was always the intention, and in recent weeks it has become clear that the mission creep of internet censorship is even creepier than campaigners had feared. In the name of protecting children from a rotten tide of raunchy videos, a terrifying precedent is being set for state control of the digital commons.
Pious arguments about protecting innocence are invariably marshalled in the service of public ignorance. When the first opt-in filtering began, it was discovered that non-pornographic "gay and lesbian" sites and "sex education" content would be blocked by BT. After an outcry, the company quickly changed the wording on its website, but it is not clear that more than the wording has been changed. The internet is a lifeline for young LGBT people looking for information and support – and parents are now able to stop them finding that support at the click of a mouse.
Sexual control and social control are usually co-occurring. Sites that were found to be inaccessible when the new filtering system was launched last year included in some cases helplines like Childline and the NSPCC, domestic violence and suicide prevention services – and the thought of what an unscrupulous parent or abusive spouse could do with the ability to block such sites is chilling. The head of TalkTalk, one of Britain's biggest internet providers, claimed that the internet has no "social or moral framework". Well, neither does a library. Nobody would dream of insisting a local book exchange deployed morality robots to protect children from discovering something their parents might not want them to see. Online, that's just what's happening, except that in this case, every person who uses the internet is being treated like a child.

Every argument we have heard from politicians in favour of this internet filter has been about pornography, and its harmful effect on young people, evidence of which, despite years of public pearl-clutching, remains scant. It is curious, then, that so many categories included in BT's list of blocked content appear to be neither pornographic nor directly related to young children.
The category of "obscene content", for instance, which is blocked even on the lowest setting of BT's opt-in filtering system, covers "sites with information about illegal manipulation of electronic devices [and] distribution of software" – in other words, filesharing and music downloads, debate over which has been going on in parliament for years. It looks as if that debate has just been bypassed entirely, by way of scare stories about five-year-olds and fisting videos. Whatever your opinion on downloading music and cartoons for free, doing so is neither obscene nor pornographic.
Cameron's porn filter looks less like an attempt to protect kids than a convenient way to block a lot of content the British government doesn't want its citizens to see, with no public consultation whatsoever.
The worst thing about the porn filter, though, is not that it accidentally blocks a lot of useful information but that it blocks information at all. With minimal argument, a Conservative-led government has given private firms permission to decide what websites we may and may not access. This sets a precedent for state censorship on an enormous scale – all outsourced to the private sector, of course, so that the coalition does not have to hold up its hands to direct responsibility for shutting down freedom of speech.
More worrying still is the inclusion of material relating to "extremism", however the state and its proxies are choosing to define that term. Bearing in mind that simple protest groups like tax justice organisation UK Uncut have been labelled extremist by some, there is every chance that the categories for what constitutes "inappropriate" online content will be conveniently broad – and there's always room to extend them. The public gets no say over what political content will now be blocked, just as we had no say over whether we wanted such content blocked at all.
Records of opt-in software will, furthermore, make it simpler for national and international surveillance programmes to track who is looking at what sort of website. Just because they can doesn't mean they will, of course, but seven months of revelations about the extent of data capturing by GCHQ and the NSA – including the collection of information on the porn habits of political actors in order to discredit them – does make for reasonable suspicion. Do you still feel comfortable about ticking that box that says you want to see "obscene and tasteless content"? Are you sure?
The question of who should be allowed to access what information has become a defining cultural debate of the age. Following the Edward Snowden revelations, that question will be asked of all of us in 2014, and we must understand attempts by any state to place blocks and filters on online content in that context.
Policies designed for controlling adults have long been implemented in the name of protecting children, but if we really want to give children their best chance, we can start by denying private companies and conservative politicians the power to determine the minutiae of what they may and may not know. Instant access to centuries of information and learning is a provision without peer in the history of human civilisation. For the sake of the generations to come, we must protect it.
 

scary shit!!!

Najgore od svega je što se ovim ignoriše da je pornografija ipak driving force of the internet, seku se krila poštenom biznisu koji je istovremeno poslednje pribežište sirotinje u potrazi za poštenom zaradom i mirnim snom.

Quotesajt je lansirao PirateBrowser i to sa popriličnim uspehom. Ovaj brauzer, koji dozvoljava korisnicima da premišćavaju ISP blokade, stigao je do 2.5 miliona preuzimanja.

Međutim, Pirate Bay radi na još većem projektu koji bi trebalo da ovaj i druge sajtove učini još otpornijim na cenzuru i blokadu.

B92: Pirate Bay ima plan kako da se reši cenzure zauvek

Kim Dotcom: The Man Behind Megaupload

Чуди ме да му нису убили или тејзовали носорога.

Ја бих плакао да су му убили носорога.
Али, барем је жирафа на сигурном.

U Evropskoj Uniji trenutno je u toku rad na reformi zakonodavstva koje se tiče autorskih prava i njihove zaštite, a u skladu sa shvatanjem da se mnogo toga promenilo poslednjih deceniju i kusur i da zakon valja da prepozna novu realnost itd. Evropska komisija je u tom smislu došla na časnu ideju da se obrati javnosti, to jest da omogući samim građanima da se izjasne. Izjašnjavanje se da obaviti putem osamdesetopitnog upitnika koji se, uz korisne dodatne informacije da daunloudovati sa ove stranice i popunjen poslati mejlom (pomislimo na trenutak na brojne interne koji će mladost izgubiti analizirajući i sistematizujući odgovore). Nigde ne piše da je učešće ograničeno samo na građane EU (pošto kopirajt ionako prelazi granice, jelte), mada slutim da implicitno jeste, ali s druge strane, pošto je dopušteno i anonimno se oglasiti, to, opet implicitno znači da se podrazumeva da može bilo ko da učestvuje.

Pošto je jasno da mnogi neće razumeti terminologiju i brojne implikacije određenih pretpostavki, ovde ima jednostavan onlajn formular koji pomaže da odgovorite na pitanja (odnosno pojašnjava vam probleme koje možda ne znate sami da formulišete), a ovde i sugestije kako bi mogli da odgovorite na pojedinačna pitanja, a od strane predstavnice švedske Piratske partije u evropskom parlamentu.

Pa, tako, du jor bit ako želite.

Ovde možete potpisati peeticiju kojom se traži od danskih vlasti da Wargu, osnivaču Piratebayja omogući makar da čita knjige dok sedi u pritvoru:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Helle_ThorningSchmidt_Prime_minister_of_Danish_Government_Pardon_and_release_Anakata_but_even_more_urgently_provide_him_/?cKzcIgb



Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Prime minister of Danish Government: Pardon and release Anakata, but even more urgently, provide him with books.
Why this is important  Dear signers!
While this petition is addressed to Helle Thorning-Schmidt, we hope that it would also get the deserved attention of Barack Obama, Carl Bildt, Karen Hækkerup (Danish Minister of Justice) and Morten Bødskov (former Minister of Justice) among others.


Our previous petition at Avaaz Community Petition to Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, has gathered over 400 signatories, but has not lead to any kind of response. Anakata is still held captive in unbearable conditions, without even charges been pressed against him.

So what is our need and motivation to launch another petition campaign?






While the Swedish upper level court dropped charges related to the Nordea hacking, and reduced his overall sentence to half on 25th of September 2013, so that Anakata should be freed by now, he was nevertheless extradited to Denmark, and is now locked up in high security prison under constant surveillance, while reduced to bare minimum, almost no outside contact. Even his Mother cannot visit him during the Holiday Season, since there are not enough guards for that. His total contact with other inmates cannot exceed 9 hours a week.
During his incarceration in Sweden Anakata began to take some advanced mathematical courses in order to increase his education and to give him something to do during his detention there.
As of now, prison authorities have left him without access to any type of reading material. He is not allowed have newspapers, magazines, books that are in the prison library, or his books that were brought from Sweden with him during extradition. Since his arrival he has received no letters, only a handful of postcards.

The prison services excuse all of this by saying that they are worried about anakata ruining the evidence that they have not even found yet, that he could find out sensitive information through reading the paper/magazines or letters.

With only 9 hours a week of contact outside of his isolation cell, reading and educational materials are important for anakata. He is a computer genius and it is important for not only mental but physical health to keep a mind active.

Please sign the petition asking the Ministry of Justice in Denmark to override the restriction for reading/educational materials on inmate #171084, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, aka anakata.
Clip from Russia Today: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFH_VwssfsM

Thank you, but that is not the End.

Do More!
Sign and share our previous petition to Carl Bildt:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Free_Anakata_Swedish_computer_genius_behind_Pirate_Bay_and_Wikileaks/?fJableb&pv=2
Check out and Join the online Movement:
http://www.facebook.com/FreeAnakata
http://freeanakata.tumblr.com
Follow us in Twitter @free_anakata or @freepiracy.


Also, follow the cases of other incarcerated hacktivists,
incl.
https://www.facebook.com/FreeJeremyHammond
https://www.facebook.com/freebarrettbrown
https://www.facebook.com/savemanning

And Do even more!
Bypass all the bottlenecks and directly get in touch with Helle, Prime Minister of Danish Government.

The Prime Minister's Office
Christiansborg
Prins Jørgens Gård 11
1218 Copenhagen
E-mail stm@stm.dk
Phone: +45 33 92 33 00
Fax: +45 33 11 16 65



Thank you for your effort
FREE ANAKATA TEAM

Navodno Demonoid ponovo radi. Makar traker ako ne sajt...

  Demonoid Returns, BitTorrent Tracker is Now Online

Vrlo loše vesti sa američkog suda:

Federal Court Strikes Down Net Neutrality Rules, Sides with Big Telecom

Quote
A U.S. Appeals Court just invalidated the FCC's net neutrality rules that would've made it illegal for telecom companies to favor certain types of traffic over others. The court ruled that the commission lacked the authority to implement and enforce such rules which were embedded in a complicated legal framework.
The court describes its reasoning in the ruling:

Given that the Commission has chosen to classify broadband providers in a manner that exempts them from treatment as common carriers, the Communications Act expressly prohibits the Commission from nonetheless regulating them as such. Because the Commission has failed to establish that the anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules do not impose per se common carrier obligations, we vacate those portions of the Open Internet Order.

In other words, the FCC didn't have the authority to impose its rules because it defined broadband internet as an information service rather than a common carrier service, like telephones.
This is bad news. The ruling basically opens the door for companies like Verizon and Time Warner to cut special deals with websites to serve up their content faster. It also opens up the possibility of paid access to specific sites. Imagine the worst case scenario, where you literally have to pay an extra fee to get access to the websites you like. It's possible! At least the latest federal court ruling on Verizon's appeal to the FCC states that telecom companies have to tell subscribers which sites they're favoring.
This latest development in the years' long battle to preserve net neutrality is going to piss off a lot of people. And it should. The idea of giving preferential treatment to websites willing to pay for it means that smaller websites stand to lose out, and the very idea of competition on the internet is being essentially undermined since companies can simply buy prime placement. That said, the appeals court ruling is being largely viewed as a failure on the FCC's part for not writing the rules under a more solid legal framework.
"We're disappointed that the court came to this conclusion," said Free Press president and CEO Craig Aaron. "Its ruling means that Internet users will be pitted against the biggest phone and cable companies — and in the absence of any oversight, these companies can now block and discriminate against their customers' communications at will.
At least the FCC's still willing to fight the good fight. Chairman Tom Wheeler released this statement a few minutes after the ruling:

The D.C. Circuit has correctly held that 'Section 706 . . . vests [the Commission] with affirmative authority to enact measures encouraging the deployment of broadband infrastructure' and therefore may 'promulgate rules governing broadband providers' treatment of Internet traffic.' I am committed to maintaining our networks as engines for economic growth, test beds for innovative services and products, and channels for all forms of speech protected by the First Amendment. We will consider all available
options, including those for appeal, to ensure that these networks on which the Internet depends continue to provide a free and open platform for innovation and expression, and operate in the interest of all Americans.

Read the full ruling below.
DC Net Neutrality ruling by jeff_roberts881

Stephen Colbert i net neutralnost

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/432448/january-23-2014/end-of-net-neutrality

Avaj, evo još jedne potvrde stare teze da kapitalisti obožavaju kapitalizam sve dok kapitalizam od njih ne zatraži da igraju po njegovim pravilima - slobodno tržište i konkurencija su svetinje, ali ne i kada ispada da sad VI morate da se ponašate tržišno i kvalitetom pobedite konkurenciju.

Dakle, već mesecima se priča da mora nešto da se menja u načinu na koji se informacije šalju putem interneta jer postoje veliki servisi poput recimo striminga HD filmova kao što je Netflix koji sad već jedu veliki deo propusne moći interneta. U postojećoj strukturi interneta, sa važećom "net neutrality" doktrinom, internet provajder ima potpuno agnostički pristup informacijama: njegova infrastruktura je takva i takva i na raspolaganju je jednako svima koji plaćaju njegove usluge a informacije se putem te infrastrukture kreću po principu "prvi došao - prvi uslužen" pa je tako nebitno da li konkretni paket informacija ide od Netflixa ili je u pitanju privatni mejl koga ja šaljem svom bratu itd.

Konvencionalna tržišna logika takođe kaže da kad se pokaže da postojeći obim posla prevazilazi tvoj kapacitet da ga obavljaš, ili povećavaš svoj kapacitet ili te u poslu zameni neko drugi ko ima kapacitet. Konkurencija i tržište na delu, zar ne?


E, sad: američki internet provajderi, pogotovo veliki poput Comcasta su i do sada uživali u od države garantovanom monopolu u mnogim krajevima zemlje, koji je imao određena opravdanja čak i u okviru načelno slobodnog tržišta, ali su sad rešili da taj svoj monopol i zloupotrebe. Dakle, njihova logika je sledeća: Netflix zauzima ogroman deo njihove infrastrukture, pa zbog toga ispaštaju drugi korisnici kojima je na raspolaganju manje te infrastrukture. Konvencionalno, njihove opcije su da ulože pare u veću infrastrukturu ili da prepuste biznis nekom drugom. No, monopolistčki položaj im omogućava da urade nešto treće: da kažu Netflixu "rođaci, ako hoćete i dalje ovako da sipate strimove kroz našu mrežu, to se plaća dodatno, ali onda garantujemo isporuku vaših paketa po prioritetnom rasporedu".


Drugim rečima, Comcast je ucenio Netflix: platite nam da vaše pakete puštamo preko reda ili ćemo da vas prepustimo stihiji naše nedovoljno razvijene infrastrukture pa će korisnici da imaju iscepkane filmove, stalne bafering poruke i druge probleme. Korisnici koji su u dobrom broju slučajeva otkazali pretplatu na kablovsku televiziju jer koriste netflix (iTunes, Amazon itd.) da gledaju svoje serije i filmove. Koji su otkazali kablovsku jer im je preko kurca bilo da plaćaju 250 kanala da bi gledali jednu seriju, koja bi ih preko iTunesa koštala mnogo manje od pretplate, ili bi preko netflixa plaćali mnogo manju pretplatu za mnogo veću ponudu filmova i serija.

I Netflix je konačno pokleknuo:



Netflix to Pay Comcast for Smoother Streaming

QuoteNetflix                  NFLX +0.03%   Inc. has agreed to pay Comcast                  CMCSA +0.29%   Corp. to ensure Netflix movies and television shows stream smoothly to Comcast customers, a landmark pact that could set a precedent for Netflix's dealings with other broadband providers, people familiar with the matter said.
In exchange for payment, Netflix will get direct access to Comcast's broadband network.
The deal comes just 10 days after Comcast agreed to buy Time Warner Cable                  TWC -0.98%   Inc. The acquisition, if approved, would establish Comcast as by far the dominant provider of broadband in the U.S., serving 32 million households before any divestitures it might make. It also comes amid growing signs that congestion deep in the Internet is causing interruptions for customers trying to stream Netflix movies and TV shows.
People familiar with the situation said Netflix Chief Executive         Reed Hastings didn't want streaming speeds to deteriorate further and become a bigger problem for customers.
In a statement confirming the broad outlines of the deal, the companies on Sunday said the agreement would provide "Comcast's U.S. broadband customers with a high-quality Netflix video experience for years to come."
The debate has been heating up over who should bear the cost of upgrading the Internet's pipes to carry the nation's growing volume of online video: broadband providers like cable and phone companies, or content companies like Netflix, which make money by sending news or entertainment through those pipes.
While several big Web companies in recent years have started paying major U.S. broadband providers for direct connections to get faster and smoother access to their networks, Netflix has held out—until now.
For the past year, the online-video giant, which has more than 30 million paid subscribers in the U.S., has been in a standoff with all of the major broadband providers, including Comcast, AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications                  VZ -0.60%   Inc. and Time Warner Cable Inc.
Netflix wanted to connect its specialized servers free of charge to the providers' networks, arguing that such a link would improve streaming quality for its customers.
Netflix has won such agreements from some smaller broadband providers in the U.S., including Cablevision Systems Corp., as well as operators overseas. But major U.S. providers, including Comcast, wanted to be paid for the connections, because of the heavy load of traffic Netflix sends through their networks.
In the wake of its deal with Comcast, Netflix is likely to agree to compensate the other big providers, said a person familiar with the situation.
Netflix has historically routed its streaming content to broadband providers through a number of Internet middlemen. But since mid-2012, the company has been trying to reduce what it pays these middlemen by getting broadband companies to hook up directly to its new video-distribution network without paying them fees for carrying its traffic.
In recent months, traffic jams have developed on some of its existing connections through middlemen to broadband providers like Comcast and Verizon. These bottlenecks included Cogent Communications, which Netflix was using as a "primary" route into Comcast, a person familiar with the matter has said.
People familiar with Netflix's and Cogent's thinking have said the broadband providers had been delaying upgrading those links. But broadband executives privately complained that Netflix could route its traffic more efficiently. Netflix has said that it carefully plans its traffic routes to make sure customers have the best experience possible.

Dakle, ovo znači da internet provajderi postaju ne samo davaoci usluga pristupa internetu već i davaoci sadržaja, a bez toga da u taj sadržaj ulažu išta. Nije nezamislivo da će provajderi uskoro nuditi pakete sadržaja uz pretplatu na inernet i onda će ljudi koji su pobegli od kablovske televizije ponovo dobiti isti dil, samo ovog puta preko interneta.

Mada ovaj baja veli da smo sve pogrešno shvatili i da je ovo normalan biznis-dil:


Inside The Netflix/Comcast Deal and What The Media Is Getting Very Wrong

Quote
On Sunday, Comcast and Netflix announced a commercial interconnect relationship between the two companies, which is in the very early stages of implementation, and as a result, many who clearly don't understand how the Internet works are writing about the news. Those who don't cover network infrastructure for a living should not be trying to explain the technical details behind today's announcement. Articles from mainstream outlets like TechCrunch, WSJ, NPR, Time and many others aren't even getting the basics right. Words like transit, peering, speed, bandwidth, capacity, etc. are being used interchangeably without any understanding of what they mean. [Updated 10:15pm: Time was originally mentioned due to a short piece they quickly put up when the news was announced. Since that post, they have done extensive, detailed coverage which is actually very good, so in fairness to them, I have removed them from the list.]
Naturally, many of these same people are also implying that because Netflix has to pay Comcast, consumers will foot the bill for this as Netflix will have to charge more for their service. This could not be further from the truth. Those stating this have no clue how Netflix delivers their content today or what costs they already incur. If they did, they would know this is not a new cost to Netflix, it's simply paying a different provider, and it should be at a lower cost. It should actually be cheaper for Netflix to buy direct from Comcast, and they also get an SLA, which also improves quality and that's a good thing. Given that Netflix has many options to buy transit from many different transit providers, why would they pay more? They wouldn't.
Some are mad at this deal as they say this will start a trend where content owners will need to pay multiple ISPs to have good video quality, which isn't true. The problem with that idea is that the vast majority of all content owners use third party content delivery networks (www.cdnlist.com) to get the content to ISPs and are NOT trying to build their own CDN like Netflix has. Only Netflix, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Google and a handful of others have built or are building out their own CDNs. Every other content owner out there including MLB, CBS, FOX, Disney, Viacom, NFL, etc. all use third party CDNs. So this has no impact on any of them as they aren't trying to place servers inside last mile networks and use companies like Akamai, Level 3, Limelight and EdgeCast for content delivery.
Even worse, some want to imply that today's announcement has to do with Net Neutrality and Tech Crunch went as far to say that the deal "may be legally outside of the traditional net neutrality rules." May be? Are they serious? Commercial interconnect relationships, also referred to as paid peering agreements, have been around since the Internet started, and it's how the Internet works. Commercial interconnect deals have NOTHING TO DO WITH NET NEUTRALITY. Implying otherwise shows a complete lack of regard in understanding how traffic is and has been exchanged across networks for the past twenty years. The media as a whole should stop trying to insinuate or imply that everything that happens between two networks comes down to Net Neutrality. It doesn't. [See: Netflix's Streaming Quality Is Based On Business Decisions by Netflix & ISPs, Not Net Neutrality]
In the hopes of trying to educate the market, let's clear up a lot of the confusion many in the media have created. The first one is that consumers need more "speed" from Comcast or Verizon to get better quality video streaming from Netflix. This is not the case. Netflix's videos are encoded at a certain level of quality, which requires the consumer to have a specific level of throughput, to get that quality. It has nothing to do with "speed". If you want to stream a 2Mbps video or a 4Mbps video from Netflix, you don't need more "speed", you need more throughput. Speed is the rate at which packets get from one location to another. Throughput is the average rate of successful message delivery over a communication channel. SPEED AND THROUGHPUT ARE NOT THE SAME THING. Next up are articles where it says that transit allows two networks to exchange "bandwidth", which is not accurate. Transit allows providers to exchange traffic, but bandwidth and traffic are not the same things. Bandwidth is simply the data rate measured in bits per second. Traffic is data in a network encapsulated in network packets.
Another statement I have seen people write about is saying that the deal focuses on the "two company's pipes". Netflix is not a network operator, they don't have any "pipes", they buy capacity from other network providers who have the pipes. So while this deal is about the interconnection between Comcast and Netflix, Comcast is the only one who actually owns the pipes. Netflix is simply leasing capacity from other network providers. In addition, Netflix does not own an "Open Connect Network". Open Connect is a program, it's not a network that Netflix "owns" as the servers caching and delivering Netflix's content are sitting inside the ISP networks, which isn't owned or operated by Netflix. Open Connect is just another CDN. It is most similar to Akamai, except Open Connect doesn't have SLAs with their customers.
Lately, many have been writing about transit with no real idea of just how many types of transit one can buy or how transit deals work. You can buy full transit, partial transit, select routes, on-net routes, etc. and ISPs will create a service and price around the customer request. Transit deals vary greatly, in size, type, price and host of other factors and are not a one-size-fits-all model. So when people write about "transit" without any definition, they are being too generic in its description. Many transit deals are alike, but transit relationships also vary greatly based on the region of the world you are buying transit in. CDNs like Netflix typically connect with many transit suppliers. This helps them route around problems and helps them avoid becoming a traffic problem by overloading any one path.
One thing not mentioned in all of these stories is all the different ways in which Netflix is currently streaming video. To date, a large percentage of Netflix's traffic, by my guess 50% or more in the U.S., hasn't been moved away from third-party CDNs and into the last mile. There are three different ways Netflix currently streams their videos. Via ISPs that are in their Open Connect Program, through third-party CDNs Level 3 and Limelight Networks and via Netflix's own CDN where they lease network services and run their own servers. So most writing about Netflix don't even know the basics of how their content is delivered today or how CDN and transit providers are involved.
Today's news is very simple to understand. Netflix decided it made sense to pay Comcast for every port they use to connect to Comcast's network, like many other content owners and network providers have done. This is how the Internet works, and it's not about providing better access for one content owner over another, it simply comes down to Netflix making a business decision that it makes sense for them to deliver their content directly to Comcast, instead of through a third party. Tied into Netflix's decision is the fact that Comcast guarantees a certain level of quality to Netflix, via their SLA, which could be much better than Netflix was getting from a transit provider. While I don't know the price Comcast is charging Netflix, I can guarantee you it's at the fair market price for transit in the market today and Comcast is not overcharging Netflix like some have implied. Many are quick to want to argue that Netflix should not have to pay Comcast anything, but they are missing the point that Netflix is already paying someone who connects with Comcast. It's not a new cost to them.
This how the Internet has grown since its inception. Senders and receivers of content have funded access, services, backbone and growth costs across the Internet. Each may pay different costs per Mbps based on volume, competition, location and many other factors. This is where being big and powerful helps negotiate a more favorable deal based on efficiencies you may be able to drive. If you get into picking and choosing that a really big CDN player gets bandwidth free because they are powerful, but a small CDN or content owner has to buy transit, that's not fair either. That is why companies have settlement-free interconnect policies, which are based on balanced and shared network investment. Commercial deals around interconnect help alleviate the bright lines between settlement-free interconnect (or peering) and a customer buying a retail product. Wholesale commercial deals take into account efficiencies and many other factors to drive a much lower unit cost.
There are no major "peering wars", as the media likes to portray, disagreements yes, but they are based off of business decisions, like any other contract for services. [See: Netflix's Streaming Quality Is Based On Business Decisions by Netflix & ISPs, Not Net Neutrality] Many options exist in the market for exchanging traffic and what is taking place between Netflix and ISPs is not new. These types of commercial arrangements between carriers, ISPs, content owners and transit providers happen every day. This time its simply high profile because it involves Netflix and the media picks up on it and implies or assumes things that simply aren't accurate.
Outside of authors who cover networking for a living, I wonder if any member of the media even knows how to do a traceroute. You'll notice that this whole Comcast/Netflix story broke early as a networking person who isn't a member of the media, published what he saw in a traceroute. If you write about content delivery, LEARN HOW TO DO A TRACE ROUTE and see how content is being delivered how you get to the source of where the content is being delivered from. If you are too lazy to learn, then you should really stop writing about the subject. I'm no networking engineer, so even for my piece I made sure to speak to those who design, build and connect networks for a living. Bottom line is this is good for Netflix, Comcast and for consumers and it has absolutely nothing to do with Net Neutrality.
Updated 9:46pm: Someone emailed me to suggest that I picked the title I did simply to fight with other media outlets as a way to push more traffic to my blog and make more money. So let me put it on record right now that no sponsor of my blog is charged based on how many page views I get. They all pay a flat fee per month no matter how many page views I get. I have no financial incentive to try and bump my page views quickly.

Pošto se nisam na vreme setio da pokrenem poseban topik o Bitcoinu i zagađivao temu World Today postovima vezanim za kriptovalute, evo bar da na ovoj temi nastavim. Dakle, Mt. Gox, najveća berza za trgovanje Bitcoinima je poharana i dovedena do banrkota pre nekoliko dana. Evo kako se to sve desilo:

Lost in translation: the tangled tale of Mt. Gox's missing millions

Quote
Japanese authorities are trying to unravel what happened at Mt. Gox, the popular Bitcoin exchange that collapsed last week, and recent revelations are only serving to thicken the plot, not clarify it.
The tale of the Tokyo-based exchange appears to be like the code its software ran on; the latter was deemed "a spaghetti mess" by a company source who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection in the Tokyo District Court on Feb. 28, saying that some 750,000 customer bitcoin and 100,000 of its own bitcoin had vanished, possibly stolen. Based on the valuation of the volatile cryptocurrency at the time of the filing, that is roughly US$474 million. An additional ¥2.8 billion (about $28 million) in cash was unaccounted for.
Tokyo police are now scratching their heads. "The National Police Agency seems to lack the ability to analyze the bitcoin trading history of Mt. Gox," a government official told a source probing the investigation.
Poof!
What really happened? Mt. Gox has never quite escaped the adolescent image associated with its origins as a market for trading cards used in the fantasy game "Magic: The Gathering," even as it changed gears and rocketed to success as the world's largest forum for trading in bitcoin, the digital currency launched in 2009.
The site had 1 million customers as of December 2013, according to a document posted on the Web that was purported to be a leaked business plan.
Presiding over it all was CEO Mark Karpeles, who uses the online moniker MagicalTux. The attendant image of Karpeles as a stage magician may now inflame Mt. Gox customers who suspect their losses are due to sleight of hand, not sloppiness or outside thieves.
In the weeks before it went bust, Mt. Gox suspended bitcoin withdrawals to outside wallets, blaming a bitcoin software bug known as transaction malleability and warning that it could be used for fraudulent purposes.
After all, Mt. Gox had been attacked before. In June 2011, $8.75 million in bitcoin was apparently purloined by hackers using stolen passwords.
In April 2013, Mt. Gox's website was coming under distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks combined with frantic, frequent trades by a surge of new customers as the price of bitcoin climbed as high as $266.
'People trust us with a lot of money right now'
At that time, nearly a year ago, Gonzague Gay-Bouchery, Mt. Gox's head of marketing, talked with IDG News Service about the company's travails.
"We don't have a life, and we want to see our kids," he said. "And we want our customers to be very happy."
The site choked and sputtered, unable to cope with the massive amounts of traffic. Customers became angry, leaving Mt. Gox to attempt to quell a public relations disaster and a very real threat from cyberattackers trying to manipulate bitcoin's market price. Gay-Bouchery detailed Mt. Gox's plans for a faster trading engine that would be resistant to cyberattacks.
"Like everything, it takes a lot of time to make something bulletproof," he said. "We cannot release something half-baked."
He acknowledged that Mt. Gox was struggling to cope with new users, which numbered as many as 20,000 a day that month. The company hired more staff to more quickly complete anti-money laundering identity checks on its customers.
"I would really like to stress that people trust us with a lot of money right now," Gay-Bouchery said. "We want to do everything by the book. We may appear slow in many aspects, but we are taking our time to do it right."
In June, Mt. Gox had cut off U.S. dollar withdrawals, prompting widespread concerns over its solvency.
The following month, around July 2013, Bitcoin entrepreneur Roger Ver visited Mt. Gox's Tokyo headquarters. He published a video saying he believed the company's withdrawal problems were caused by the "traditional banking system, not because of a lack of liquidity at Mt. Gox."
"The traditional banking partners that Mt. Gox needs to work with are not able to keep up with the demands of the growing bitcoin economy," Ver said at the time.
But on Feb. 25, the day Mt. Gox's website went blank, Ver retracted his earlier statements in another video.
In an email interview last week, Ver recalled his meeting with Mt. Gox: "I watched him [Karpeles] log into his online bank account in real time and saw the balances with my own eyes. They had a huge amount of U.S. dollar liquidity at that time."
Ver doubts that transaction malleability, a long-known issue that in some cases can be exploited to make fraudulent withdrawals, was the sole cause of Mt. Gox's wipeout.
"The problem was clearly caused by poor code or other mismanagement at Mt. Gox," Ver said.
"I think there was a lack of corporate culture," said a source close to the company who observed obliviousness to major problems. "I just really don't know how they managed to stay open as long as they did."
Spaghetti code
"The environment was completely dysfunctional," said the company source, who worked at Mt. Gox owner Tibanne. "There was no testing or staging of code. Just development and production. It's a financial exchange and they're handling customer money. At least I would expect a workflow that encompasses these things."

Mt. Gox management ignored warnings that the software platform was "a spaghetti code mess" and showed little interest in cracking down on security flaws, the source said, adding that Karpeles grew bored of run-of-the-mill business tasks.
"Mark loved to circumvent the (development) process because he had direct access to all the servers," the source said. "So whenever he wanted to change something he would just change it on the live side, and that was that."
Karpeles could not be reached for comment. In a statement related to Mt. Gox's bankruptcy filing, the company described problems with the bug in the bitcoin system, saying, "We believe that there is a high probability that these bitcoins were stolen as a result of an abuse of this bug and we have asked an expert to look at the possibility of a criminal complaint and undertake proper procedures."
The errors in the Mt. Gox code likely allowed for bitcoins to be slowly siphoned off the exchange over time without anyone noticing, said the source, who added that one possibility is that the site's cold storage, essentially an offline vault used by bitcoin exchanges, either did not exist or was lost.
"Accounts were being hacked left and right," the source said. "But victims would contact support, made to wait two weeks and nothing would happen."
Mt. Gox's approach to money was equally questionable. Its account with Mizuho Bank was not segregated between customer funds and operational funds, the source said.
This week, an audio recording surfaced on the Web that purports to be a conversation held in late January between Karpeles and a Mizuho Bank official, who are speaking in Japanese. After airing his concerns about bitcoin, the official repeats the bank's decision that Mt. Gox's account must be closed.
Instead of becoming alarmed, Karpeles seemed more interested in his pet project to open a Bitcoin Cafe beside the company's headquarters, the source said.
But soon the problems would become too large to ignore.
Poker faces
Neither Karpeles nor his deputy, Gonzague Gay-Bouchery, outwardly showed signs of worry just two weeks before Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection, said Bruce Fenton, board member of The Bitcoin Association.
In emails and phone calls, Fenton approached both men around Feb. 14 to discuss a possible investment in Mt. Gox, an effort aimed at sorting out the company's problems. Of top concern was whether Mt. Gox had its bitcoins.
"We asked them flat out if they had [the bitcoins]," Fenton said in a phone interview Tuesday. "Gonzague said they had them."
The talks failed to progress as Mt. Gox's situation deteriorated, Fenton said.
The document titled "Crisis Strategy Draft," leaked on Feb. 25, suggests that the company had lost 744,408 bitcoins and outlined an implausible plan for recovery. Many people, including Fenton, felt the document was fake.
Fenton then emailed Karpeles asking about the company's bitcoin holdings. Karpeles didn't directly answer, instead saying there would be an announcement on Feb. 28, the day of its bankruptcy filing at Tokyo District Court.
"I just thought it [Mt. Gox] was profoundly poorly managed," Fenton said.
As a small protest gathered outside the company offices and Mt. Gox suspended withdrawals, management issues couldn't be ignored anymore. As part of his final act in the Mt. Gox drama, Karpeles was bowing in ritual Japanese apology at the bankruptcy press conference.
"I am deeply sorry for causing trouble," he said.

I Created Sons of Anarchy. Here's Why I Hate Google's Stance on Copyright.

Quote
Not-So-Zen and the Art of Voluntary Agreements

                 Google's anti-copyright stance is just a way to devalue content. That's bad for artists and bad for consumers.

  By Kurt Sutter




Hollywood and its activists always make for a convenient and easy punching bag. Public opinion gets wildly distorted, so folks perceive us as decadent spendthrifts who drive to work in gold Maybachs, where we dabble in our "art," while minions massage our feet and feed us the marinated roe of endangered species. Other than Diddy, that's just not the case.
   And man, this manipulation is getting fucking dangerous.
   Let's consider the March 11 anti-copyright rant in Slate by Marvin Ammori, a lawyer working for Google (which somehow he forgot to mention in the article). He compares Hollywood to that insidious "ex who won't give up" pursuing you and making your life miserable. As a guy with more than a few exes, I have to tell you, Marv, the most insidious ex is the one who hides the truth, steals your money, and lies to all your friends. That's what Ammori and Google are doing.
   Clearly, I'm not a lobbyist. I don't think you're allowed to say "fuck" in lobby school. Or at least, I'm sure there's a fuck cap, which I've already exceeded. I'm a writer who makes his living in television and film (The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, Outlaw Empires.) I create dramatic content. I'm blessed. I get paid a lot of money to do something I love. I wouldn't trade the 80-hour weeks, the psychiatrist bills, the death threats, the hostile-work-environment claims, or the fact that I have to reintroduce myself to my children every hiatus for anything. But make no mistake: I work hard to create my content. So do the hundreds of people I employ who work with me every day.
   So does every other writer, producer, director, actor, musician, tech developer, and artist out there. We all commit and burn to do what we love.
   Everyone is aware that Google has done amazing things to revolutionize our Internet experience. And I'm sure Mr. and Mrs. Google are very nice people. But the big G doesn't contribute anything to the work of creatives. Not a minute of effort or a dime of financing. Yet Google wants to take our content, devalue it, and make it available for criminals to pirate for profit. Convicted felons like Kim Dotcom generate millions of dollars in illegal revenue off our stolen creative work. People access Kim through Google. And then, when Hollywood tries to impede that thievery, it's presented to the masses as a desperate attempt to hold on to antiquated copyright laws that will kill your digital buzz. It's so absurd that Google is still presenting itself as the lovable geek who's the friend of the young everyman. Don't kid yourself, kids: Google is the establishment. It is a multibillion-dollar information portal that makes dough off of every click on its page and every data byte it streams. Do you really think Google gives a shit about free speech or your inalienable right to access unfettered content? Nope. You're just another revenue resource Google can access to create more traffic and more data streams. Unfortunately, those streams are now pristine, digital ones of our work, which all flow into a huge watershed of semi-dirty cash. If you want to know more about how this works, just Google the word "parasite." And if you think I'm exaggerating, ask yourself why Google spends tens of millions of dollars each year to hire lawyers and lobbyists (like Marv) whose sole purpose is to erode creative copyright laws.
   Do they do this because they hate artists? No. They do it because they love money.
   Every writer, producer, actor, musician, director, tech wizard, and fine artist working today needs to be aware of what this all means for our future—we will lose the ability to protect and profit from our own work. Every kid out there who aspires to be an actor or musician or artist: This is your future that's at stake. More importantly, everyone who enjoys quality entertainment: This impacts you most of all. Content excellence cannot sustain itself if it loses its capacity to reward the talent that creates it. Consider this clunky analogy: If your local car dealership started selling your favorite luxury car for $1,000, then $100, then started giving it away, what do you think would happen to the quality of that vehicle? Before long, the manufacturer would be forced to let go of the skilled laborer, the artisan, and the craftsman, and eventually cut back on everything in the production process. And before long, that fabulous, high-end car you so enjoyed will be a sheet of warped plywood on top of two rusty cans.
   Yep, it's cheap, and it's shit.
   Look, whether you think I'm an idiot or a prophet (ironically, that's the name of my new autobiography: The Idiot Prophet), at the very least, I hope you take away a few things from this, whatever the hell this is.
   

   
• At this point, we are not talking about legislation or throwing handcuffs on any single party. We don't want blood. Voluntary agreements are simply a place to start. It means sitting down to begin a fair, open dialogue to find a solution that gives consumers the access and tools they need, while still protecting the livelihood and rights of content creators. This means that everyone is welcome to the table—artists, corporations, consumers, Google ... hell, bring along Marvin and all his exes!
• Voluntary agreements can bring strange bedfellows together. The creative industry is now working with ISPs on the Copyright Alert System, a voluntary, cooperative effort to let subscribers know when their network might be used for illegal downloading. And it was created with input from public interest groups, including Public Knowledge, the Future of Privacy Forum, and others.
• No one benefits from piracy except the criminals and the portal that opens its doors to them. Stealing content may feel like a win, but supporting piracy will ultimately diminish the quality of the content you've come to love and depend on. Google and the other copyright killers will tell you the opposite to assuage your burden of guilt and theirs, but again, it's in their best interests to do everything and anything that serves their current bottom line.
• Diddy drives a solid-gold Maybach, never wears the same Rolex twice, and his boxers are made of the fur of baby pumas he kills with his bare hands.*

*This intel may not be accurate; I found it all on Yahoo.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/3-insane-ways-companies-are-using-copyrights-to-bully-you/

Kim Dotkom, iako nije građanin Novoga (a ni staroga, kad smo već kod toga) Zelanda, te ne može birati i biti biran - osnovao političku partiju (i ima potpisan primerak Majn Kampfa, ali uverava javnost da nije nacist):

Kim Dotcom Launches Party For New Zealand Elections

Quote"This is a movement for the freedom of the Internet and technology", says the fugitive millionaire – who cannot stand for election in New Zealand himself
       Kim Dotcom, a German entrepreneur wanted by the US authorities for copyright infringement and money laundering in connection with his Megaupload venture, has launched a political party in New Zealand. However, not being a citizen, he cannot stand as one of the candidates.
The Internet Party manifesto says it will fight for for net neutrality, faster broadband and online privacy, and plans to contest the next parliamentary election in September.
Dotcom came to prominence as the founder of cloud-based file hosting service Megaupload which was shut down by New Zealand authorities in January 2012 on behalf of the US Department of Justice. He is accused of illegally earning around $175 million through the website, while causing losses of at least $500 million for the US entertainment industry.
The entrepreneur continues to battle extradition, with the next hearing scheduled for June. If convicted in the US, he faces a sentence of up to 20 years.
Earlier this week it emerged that one of Dotcom's recent projects – a successor to Megaupload called Mega – is now valued at around £108 million thanks to a 'reverse takeover' deal.
The Dotcom Party
Dotcom has never made a secret of his political ambitions. After stepping down as the director of Mega in September 2013 and previewing an online music service called Baboom in January, the fugitive millionaire got to work on the Internet Party, all this while out on bail.

The Internet Party promises to enable faster, cheaper Internet connections, reform copyright legislation and boost the country's technology sector through incentives and benefits. It also plans to introduce a New Zealand-sponsored digital currency similar to Bitcoin, and get out of the 'Five Eyes' intelligence agreement, which the country shares with Australia, Canada, the UK and the US.

The Party needed 500 paying members to run for the elections, and achieved this goal in seven hours. Registration was open through the website and a specially developed mobile app. "The Internet Party app is symbolic of everything the Internet Party represents," said Dotcom. "We're a breath of fresh air, and a dose of common sense, for a tired and adversarial political system that has lost touch with modern New Zealand and the Internet generation."

The launch didn't go without issues – earlier this week Dotcom admitted he owned a signed first edition of Mein Kampf, and a local news publication accused him of sympathising with the Nazis.

The entrepreneur told the New Zealand Herald that the allegations were a 'smear campaign' organised by political rivals. He explained that he was a collector, and also owned items that had belonged to Churchill and Stalin.

To become a part of the next government, the Internet Party needs to win an electoral seat or secure five percent of the vote – which is not that unlikely, given Dotcom's popularity in the country and his engagement with the public.

Dropboks proverava šta pohranjujete u "svoj" folder tamo i sprečava vas da šerujete stvari za koje neko drugi drži pravo na kopiranje:




http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/dropbox-clarifies-its-policy-on-reviewing-shared-files-for-dmca-issues/

QuoteFor years now, Internet users have accepted the risk of files and content they share through various online services being subject to takedown requests based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and/or content-matching algorithms. But users have also gotten used to treating services like Dropbox as their own private, cloud-based file storage and sharing systems, facilitating direct person-to-person file transfer without having to worry.
This weekend, though, a small corner of the Internet exploded with concern that Dropbox was going too far, actually scanning users' private and directly peer-shared files for potential copyright issues. What's actually going on is a little more complicated than that, but it shows that sharing a file on Dropbox isn't always the same as sharing that file directly from your hard drive over something like e-mail or instant messenger.
The whole kerfuffle started yesterday evening, when one Darrell Whitelaw tweeted a picture of an error he received when trying to share a link to a Dropbox file via IM. The Dropbox webpage warned him and his friend that "certain files in this folder can't be shared due to a takedown request in accordance with the DMCA."
Whitelaw freely admits that the content he was sharing was a copyrighted video, but he still expressed surprise that Dropbox was apparently watching what he shared for copyright issues. "I treat [Dropbox] like my hard drive," he tweeted. "This shows it's not private, nor mine, even though I pay for it."
In response to follow-up questions from Ars, Whitelaw said the link he sent to his friend via IM was technically a public link and theoretically could have been shared more widely than the simple IM between friends. That said, he noted that the DMCA notice appeared on the Dropbox webpage "immediately" after the link was generated, suggesting that Dropbox was automatically checking shared files somehow to see if they were copyrighted material rather than waiting for a specific DMCA takedown request.
Dropbox did confirm to Ars that it checks publicly shared file links against hashes of other files that have been previously subject to successful DMCA requests. "We sometimes receive DMCA notices to remove links on copyright grounds," the company said in a statement provided to Ars. "When we receive these, we process them according to the law and disable the identified link. We have an automated system that then prevents other users from sharing the identical material using another Dropbox link. This is done by comparing file hashes."
Dropbox added that this comparison happens when a public link to your file is created and that "we don't look at the files in your private folders and are committed to keeping your stuff safe." The company wouldn't comment publicly on whether the same content-matching algorithm was run on files shared directly with other Dropbox users via the service's account-to-account sharing functions, but the wording of the statement suggests that this system only applies to publicly shared links.
We should be clear here that Dropbox hasn't removed the file from Whitelaw's account; they just closed off the option for him to share that file with others. In a tweeted response to Whitelaw, Dropbox Support said that "content removed under DMCA only affects share-links." Dropbox explains its copyright policy on a Help Center page that lays out the boilerplate: "you do not have the right to share files unless you own the copyright in them or have been given permission by the copyright owner to share them." The Help Center then directs users to its DMCA policy page.
Dropbox has also been making use of file hashing algorithms for a while now as a means of de-duplicating identical files stored across different users' accounts. That means that if I try to upload an identical copy of a 20GB movie file that has already been stored in someone else's Dropbox account, the service will simply give my account access to a version of that same file rather than allowing me to upload an identical version. This not only saves bandwidth on the user's end but significant storage space on Dropbox's end as well.
Some researchers have warned of security and privacy concerns based on these de-duplication efforts in the past, but the open source Dropship project attempted to bend the feature to users' advantage. By making use of the file hashing system, Dropship effectively tried to trick Dropbox into granting access to files on Dropbox's servers that the user didn't actually have access to. Dropbox has taken pains to stop this kind of "fake" file sharing through its service.
In any case, it seems a similar hashing effort is in place to make it easier for Dropbox to proactively check files shared through its servers for similarity to content previously blocked by a DMCA request. In this it's not too different from services like YouTube, which uses a robust ContentID system to automatically identify copyrighted material as soon as it's uploaded.
In this, both Dropbox and YouTube are simply responding to the legal environment they find themselves in. The DMCA requires companies that run sharing services to take reasonable measures to make sure that re-posting of copyrighted content doesn't occur after a legitimate DMCA notice has been issued. Whitelaw himself doesn't blame the service for taking these proactive steps, in fact. "This isn't a Dropbox problem," he told Ars via tweet. "They're just following the laws laid out for them. Was just surprised to see it."
Still, we feel this is important information for Dropbox users to know. There are certain limitations on how accounts can be used. Any Dropbox file shared via a "public link," even if it's a link that you only intend to share with a single person, is being compared against a database of previous material subject to the DMCA. It could be blocked on those grounds.

Zbogom net neutralnosti, bilo je lepo poznavati te...

F.C.C., in 'Net Neutrality' Turnaround, Plans to Allow Fast Lane

QuoteThe Federal Communications Commission will propose new rules that allow Internet service providers to offer a faster lane through which to send video and other content to consumers, as long as a content company is willing to pay for it, according to people briefed on the proposals.

The proposed rules are a complete turnaround for the FCC on the subject of so-called net neutrality, the principle that Internet users should have equal ability to see any content they choose, and that no content providers should be discriminated against in providing their offerings to consumers.
Watch: What is net neutrality?
The FCC's previous rules governing net neutrality were thrown out by a federal appeals court this year. The court said those rules had essentially treated Internet service providers as public utilities, which violated a previous FCC ruling that Internet links were not to be governed by the same strict regulation as telephone or electric service.



  The new rules, according to the people briefed on them, will allow a company like Comcast or Verizon to negotiate separately with each content company—like Netflix, Amazon, Disney or Google—and charge different companies different amounts for priority service.
  Proponents of net neutrality have feared that such a framework would empower large, wealthy companies and prevent small start-ups, which might otherwise be the next Twitter or Facebook, for example, from gaining any traction in the market.
  The new proposals, drafted by the FCC's chairman, Tom Wheeler, and his staff, will be circulated to the other four commissioners beginning Thursday, an FCC spokeswoman said. The details can be amended by consensus in order to attract support from a majority of the commissioners. The commission will then vote on a final proposal at its May 15 meeting.
 
   

još će net liberali da slave Putina na kraju

a ovo se spremalo već godinama, ako ne decenijama

samo Putin i Švedska da izdrže, za ostalo koga briga

Kome i dalje nije jasan koncept net neutralnosti i šta će svet izgubiti ako FCC dopusti njeno narušavanje, medium.com ima koristan prajmer:


How the FCC Plans to Save the Internet By Destroying It: An Explainer

QuoteThe FCC wants to make good on President Obama's pledge to make net neutrality into law. It's just having a very hard time actually doing it.
Net Neutrality is the simple concept that the company that provides you internet access on your phone and at your house should be a utility — like a phone company. It should deliver you the information you ask for at the speed you are promised without playing favorites or blocking or degrading services.
That sounds like a simple enough goal, and it's an incredibly important goal.
It's the principle that has allowed innovation on the net — the creation of YouTube and Google and Instagram and Facebook and Pinterest and Wikipedia and countless personal websites — without those companies and organization having to negotiate contracts with and pay tolls to the ISPs that stand between those services and ordinary internet users.
That era is about to come to an end—if the FCC's latest attempt to save net neutrality is put into place. This proposal will explicitly allow ISPs to create fast and slow lanes on the internet.
In fact, if the FCC isn't stopped from its proposal, discrimination on the net will become the default, not the exception.
The FCC will kill the internet in order to save it.
Note: This is a long post so here's the TL;DR.
1) The FCC has a very simple way to create simple, fair and enforceable rules to protect innovation, free speech and commerce. It lacks the courage and (perhaps) political capital to re-grant itself this power.
2) Lacking this power, the FCC is relying on a small loophole given to it by the courts.
3) That loophole requires the FCC to allow Verizon, Comcast and AT&T to create slow and fast lanes.
4) The loophole also allows ISPs have to strike individual deals with sites and apps. The rates for non-slow service can vary hugely. Those services that don't pay will get relegated to the slow lane.
5) The FCC wants to call this "net neutrality." It's nothing of the sort and the proposal needs to be killed. It's a bargain that will kill innovation on the net.
6) Even if you are a progressive who loves Obama, the best thing you can do is help kill this proposal and show there is political will for real internet protection.
The legal battles and arguments are very complicated. But the conundrum all boils down to a simple problem.
The Bush Administration decided that internet access was a special beast that should be deregulated.
Previous telecommunications systems — most notably the phone system — are regulated as "common carriers". This means you can call whoever you like; you can use whatever phone you want; and anyone in a service area can sign up at a fair rate.
This designation recognizes that communication systems are too important to be left to the vagaries of profit-be-damned executives and that the operators are in very powerful positions to do harm and extract tolls.
But the Bush administration's FCC ruled that internet service providers—the companies you pay to get your computers and phones online—weren't common carriers.
Instead they were "information services," (think something like Lexis-Nexis or the Bloomberg terminal) which the government has little power to regulate. It's a non-sensical designation, but the Supreme Court ruled that even if it was dumb and not the best choice, the FCC has the right to re-classify at will.

---

You can see the oddness most clearly in a case involving mobile phone roaming.
A smaller mobile phone company wanted Verizon to offer roaming access when its subscribers wandered into Verizon territory. Because phone call carriers are regulated as common carriers, the FCC clearly had the power to order Verizon to offer roaming phone calls at very defined, very fair rates that would be offered at the same fair rate to all companies.
But since the FCC had decided that internet access wasn't special, Verizon sued over mobile data roaming. It said the FCC had no power to require it to offer data roaming, and even if the FCC did have that power, it couldn't dictate the terms.
In the court's plain words: "If a carrier is forced to offer service indiscriminately and on general terms, then that carrier is being relegated to common carrier status."
Put in other terms, the FCC can't impose net neutrality rules that protect the internet unless ISPs are common carriers.

---

But the FCC has spent the last 10 years trying to have net neutrality and deregulation. And it's still trying to do that.
Even as it deregulated ISPs, the Bush FCC issued some faux "rules" in 2005 that required ISPs to let you use the applications, services and devices that you like. These were known as the "Four Freedoms."
But when the FCC actually tried to enforce these "rules" against Comcast for secretly blocking users who were using peer-to-peer services, the court said the rules had no grounding in law.
So after a couple years of dithering, the Obama FCC tried again in 2011 to regulate what they'd deregulated, relying on some odd authorities found hither and nither in the federal code.
Verizon fought them and this January, a court said the FCC had no power to prohibit ISPs from discriminating or blocking online services and threw out the rules.

---

But the court gave the FCC a little wiggle room in that data roaming case I mentioned.
It said the FCC could require a provider to offer data roaming agreements, but it could NOT closely control the terms of those offers and they could vary hugely. Because if the FCC did try to control the terms, that would be a common carrier obligation.
So this is what the FCC is going to do for the entire internet.
It's going to allow ISPs to charge Netflix and YouTube and whomever for fast access. ISPs won't be able to block services, but it doesn't have to provide services on a fair basis.
The FCC is going to try to draw up rules that try to make those agreements sort-of-fair, but the strongest those rules can be is holding ISPs to standard called "commercially reasonable". If it tries to make the rules actually fair, then the FCC has overstepped its authority.
Here's how a federal court imagined this scenario (.pdf) might be legal and give the FCC a little authority:

Verizon might [...] charge an edge provider like Netflix for high-speed, priority access while limiting all other edge providers to a more standard service. In theory, moreover, not only could Verizon negotiate separate agreements with each individual edge provider regarding the level of service provided, but it could also charge similarly-situated edge providers completely different prices for the same service.

And that's what the FCC is calling Net Neutrality now.
(Disclosure: I run a startup called Contextly that provides content recommendations to publishers at the end of stories. We serve millions upon millions of images a day and pay substantial money for our bandwidth. I can't imagine having to sign contracts with ISPs around the country just to make sure these images load quickly. This would kill our business.)
This proposal is a mess.
First of all, it allows each ISP to negotiate individualized and secret contracts with any internet service. That's awful enough, but even worse, there don't even have to be any standard terms.
So if you are a startup that streams daily news clips to users, if you want fast service you'll have to negotiate individually with AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Comcast, TimeWarner, Sprint, etc. And they'll each try to figure how much they can squeeze out of you.
That's not hand-wringing. Verizon told the court they'd be doing this if they could. AT&T has floated proposals to create fast and slow lanes for apps. And Comcast is notorious for messing with internet traffic in secret and devious ways.
So what happens if a giant ISP demands unfair terms that there's no way your startup could pay?
Well, you then get to hire a lawyer and some expensive experts and file a complaint with the FCC. Meanwhile your videos hardly load on mobile and your users start abandoning you.
When you do finally win a year or two later, Verizon will then challenge the win, arguing that in this case the FCC was overstepping its bounds and that it was treating Verizon as a common carrier. Regardless if Verizon wins or not, your company is in the deadpool.
As for companies like Netflix, their cost of operations will go up since they will be paying for bandwidth twice. And the cost you pay for Netflix is going to go up, too.
The FCC is calling this "net neutrality". It's going to say it will protect innovation from extortion on a case-by-case basis.
Meanwhile, since there's hardly any competition in broadband, Verizon and Comcast and AT&T will divide up their networks into slow and fast lanes — keeping the slow lanes slow.
Like a mafia protection racket, they are going to extract a nice percentage from internet services like YouTube and Facebook and get a de facto veto over innovative companies like What's App. "That's a cool show you made there HBO with Game of Thrones. It'd be a pity if people could only watch it at 320p."
That's not net neutrality. It's the opposite of net neutrality.
Even worse, it creates perverse incentives for ISPs to keep most of their network slow and congested so that every service that wants to thrive will have to pay to get decent service.
We've already seen this happen.
Comcast effectively throttled Netflix in the last few months, refusing to open a decent size port into its network — even though its customers were screaming to watch shows online. It wasn't that Netflix was filling Comcast's network with unwanted traffic.
Comcast users were requesting videos and Comcast intentionally screwed their own customers by throttling the pipe between them and Netflix in order to make Netflix pony up double for bandwidth.
If there had been any competition for broadband service— where it was really possible for its customers to switch ISPs, Comcast would have been scrambling to help its customers watch videos quickly.
Instead, it gave its customers crappy service for months and let Netflix see what would happen if it didn't pay the toll. Which Netflix eventually did. And the FCC refused to even say Boo.
That's what a monopolist looks like. That's why common carrier rules were invented. And the FCC's new fake net neutrality rules will only make this worse.
The simplest fix is to simply re-impose common carrier rules. All that takes is 3 out of 5 FCC commissioners to vote to do so and the FCC has those votes today.
Everyone knows their internet service should work like a utility. You pay Comcast or AT&T a certain amount of money per month and you get a level of service and you get to watch Netflix or upload videos and play World of Warcraft or whatever it is you like to do on the internet. At least in theory.
Unfortunately, Comcast and AT&T are powerful and profitable, and they do not want to be utilities. Being a utility is boring. A utility's profit margins, while solid, don't compare to that of a Google or a Facebook or a Netflix. And because AT&T and Verizon and Comcast are the necessary pipes between you and those services, they'd like to get paid double.
They can charge Netflix and Google big tariffs to get to "their" customers. Or even better, they can launch their own video services, which will flow to your house through special tubes that are as fast as a slip-and-slide and uncrowded with other traffic. And Netflix? It will crawl and time out and stutter unless Netflix pays alot for faster access. At least, that's the telecom's executives' dream.
And to make that dream possible, these companies donate heavily to politicians — and they've managed to convince lots of Republicans that the idea of prohibiting ISPs from slowing down Netflix amounts to "regulating" the internet.
That's a ridiculous argument, akin to say that the FCC's requirement that the phone company allow you to call whichever plumber you want is regulating the plumbing industry.
Simply put, the FCC is too scared of the big telecoms to do the simple thing and reclassify your ISP as a common carrier. (The midterms are coming up.)
So instead, the FCC is taking some small slivers of regulatory hope from recent court rulings, trying to create some semblance of control over ISPs and claiming victory.

---

It's time for this FCC charade to stop.
There's only one way to get real rules to protect the most innovative communications platform ever built and it's simple as hell. It just requires courage on the part of the FCC and outrage on the part of those of us who live on and love the net.
There's something ironic about opposing the FCC on these rules by raising a ruckus — by flooding them with comments; by expressing your outrage online and to your representatives.
You'll be their best friend. There's still hope in policy circles that the FCC wants to do the right thing, but it's just scared to.
Our job is to make it clear, like the net did with SOPA, that doing the right thing—creating real net neutrality rules—is the only option for the FCC.
We have to make it clear that destroying the internet in order to save it is not an option, and we can't and won't let that happen.

Još jedan detaljan i jasan članak o tome kako se Internet menja uvođenjem "brzih traka" za firme koje bi to da plate:


http://www.vox.com/2014/5/2/5665890/beyond-net-neutrality-the-new-battle-for-the-future-of-the-internet

Google daje autorima muzike proverbijalnu ponudu koje se ne može odbiti:

YouTube subscription music licensing strikes wrong notes with indie labels

Quote
Trade association WIN gives online video giant 24 hours to rescind 'indefensible' letters for upcoming Spotify-style service
  Independent music labels are at loggerheads with YouTube over the licensing terms for its upcoming streaming music subscription service.
The service – still not officially announced, but the subject of longstanding speculation within the music and technology industries – is expected to compete directly with Spotify, Deezer and their rivals.
Music industry trade association the Worldwide Independent Network (WIN) has accused YouTube of strong-arm negotiating tactics trying to force indie labels to sign up to the new service.
WIN, which represents independent labels worldwide, claims that YouTube is approaching labels directly with a "template contract" and threatening that if they do not sign it, all their music videos will be blocked on YouTube.
It also claims the terms of the contract are non-negotiable, and undervalue the music of these labels in comparison to Spotify, Rdio, Deezer and other subscription streaming services.
WIN had planned to issue a press release lambasting YouTube this morning, with quotes from other indie trade bodies around the world.
Overnight, new talks with YouTube and the prospect of a resolution to the dispute led to the release being put on hold, but press agency AFP – which like The Guardian had seen the original release – ran its story as planned.
"Our members are small businesses who rely on a variety of income streams to invest in new talent. They are being told by one of the largest companies in the world to accept terms that are out of step with the marketplace for streaming," said WIN chief executive Alison Wenham in the original release.

"We believe, as such, that these actions are unnecessary and indefensible, not to mention commercially questionable and potentially damaging to YouTube itself, given the harm likely to result from this approach."
Contacted by The Guardian overnight, YouTube provided this response: "YouTube provides a global platform for artists to connect with fans and generate revenue for their music," said a spokesperson. "We have successful deals in place with hundreds of independent and major labels around the world, however we don't comment on ongoing negotiations."
Sending contracts directly to independent labels would be a controversial move in itself, because many are members of another trade body, Merlin, which negotiates collective licensing deals with new digital music services on their behalf.
Merlin declined to comment when contacted by The Guardian, although its chief executive Charles Caldas recently criticised at YouTube in a speech at industry conference Music Connected, referring to a quote from musician Billy Bragg suggesting artists who criticise Spotify for its low royalty payments "should be marching to YouTube central with flaming pitchforks".
At Music Connected, Caldas said "The ironic thing is that the service that pays the least is the service that's the most well funded and run by the biggest company in the world: their figures are by far the worst, whether you measure them on a per-stream basis or a per-user basis," before adding "I can't say Billy's right, but I can say that he's not wrong." – a hint at possibly-fraught negotiations between Merlin and YouTube.
WIN and Merlin are completely separate organisations, and WIN is not involved in those licensing discussions. Its concern is over the "termination" letters that it says have been sent to labels, threatening to block their content on YouTube if they do not sign up to the new service. WIN has now given YouTube a 24-hour deadline to rescind those letters.
While YouTube's negotiating tactics have left many indie labels feeling bullied, its current online video service has also become an important platform for them to help musicians build their fanbases.

That was emphasised at the Music Connect conference where Caldas made his comments. A separate panel of indie labels talking about how they break new artists all agreed that YouTube – along with another free service, SoundCloud – was crucial to their efforts.
Meanwhile, YouTube executives defended the company against criticism from labels and artists at the Midem music industry conference in February. "We've paid out to the music industry over the last several years over a billion dollars," said vice president of YouTube content Tom Pickett at the show.
YouTube's plans to go head to head with Spotify, Deezer and other subscription music services have been rumoured for some time. In March, the New York Post reported that it would be called Music Pass, and would likely cost $5 a month with ads or $10 a month for an ad-free version.

QuoteJedan od osnivača sajta Pirate Bay Peter Sunde uhapšen je na jugu Švedske na osnovu presude koja ga tereti za kršenje autorskih prava.
Inače, Sunde je bio u bekstvu gotovo dve godine, a tražio ga je Interpol.

QuoteUprkos tome što je sud presudio u njihovu korist, sajt i dalje funkcioniše.
Trenutno se na sajtu može pročitati da Pirate Bay vodi više različitih organizacija i da je registrovan na Sejšelima.

Uhapšen jedan od osnivača sajta Pirate Bay

Ali se barem Demonoid vratio na scenu.

demonoid šljaka u punom kapacitetu već neko vreme, a povremeno je vaskrsavao i u godinama u kojima nije formalno radio. ja tu sidujem polarisov disk, pa se dešavalo da ljudi svlače od mene i u vreme kada sajt nije bio dostupan.