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Paul Merrell

Spies and internet giants are in the same business: surveillance. But we can stop them | John Naughton | Comment is free | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-harbour-ruling-edward-snowden

surveillance state NSA EU data privacy litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • On Tuesday, the European court of justice, Europe’s supreme court, lobbed a grenade into the cosy, quasi-monopolistic world of the giant American internet companies. It did so by declaring invalid a decision made by the European commission in 2000 that US companies complying with its “safe harbour privacy principles” would be allowed to transfer personal data from the EU to the US. This judgment may not strike you as a big deal. You may also think that it has nothing to do with you. Wrong on both counts, but to see why, some background might be useful. The key thing to understand is that European and American views about the protection of personal data are radically different. We Europeans are very hot on it, whereas our American friends are – how shall I put it? – more relaxed.
  • Given that personal data constitutes the fuel on which internet companies such as Google and Facebook run, this meant that their exponential growth in the US market was greatly facilitated by that country’s tolerant data-protection laws. Once these companies embarked on global expansion, however, things got stickier. It was clear that the exploitation of personal data that is the core business of these outfits would be more difficult in Europe, especially given that their cloud-computing architectures involved constantly shuttling their users’ data between server farms in different parts of the world. Since Europe is a big market and millions of its citizens wished to use Facebook et al, the European commission obligingly came up with the “safe harbour” idea, which allowed companies complying with its seven principles to process the personal data of European citizens. The circle having been thus neatly squared, Facebook and friends continued merrily on their progress towards world domination. But then in the summer of 2013, Edward Snowden broke cover and revealed what really goes on in the mysterious world of cloud computing. At which point, an Austrian Facebook user, one Maximilian Schrems, realising that some or all of the data he had entrusted to Facebook was being transferred from its Irish subsidiary to servers in the United States, lodged a complaint with the Irish data protection commissioner. Schrems argued that, in the light of the Snowden revelations, the law and practice of the United States did not offer sufficient protection against surveillance of the data transferred to that country by the government.
  • The Irish data commissioner rejected the complaint on the grounds that the European commission’s safe harbour decision meant that the US ensured an adequate level of protection of Schrems’s personal data. Schrems disagreed, the case went to the Irish high court and thence to the European court of justice. On Tuesday, the court decided that the safe harbour agreement was invalid. At which point the balloon went up. “This is,” writes Professor Lorna Woods, an expert on these matters, “a judgment with very far-reaching implications, not just for governments but for companies the business model of which is based on data flows. It reiterates the significance of data protection as a human right and underlines that protection must be at a high level.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This is classic lawyerly understatement. My hunch is that if you were to visit the legal departments of many internet companies today you would find people changing their underpants at regular intervals. For the big names of the search and social media worlds this is a nightmare scenario. For those of us who take a more detached view of their activities, however, it is an encouraging development. For one thing, it provides yet another confirmation of the sterling service that Snowden has rendered to civil society. His revelations have prompted a wide-ranging reassessment of where our dependence on networking technology has taken us and stimulated some long-overdue thinking about how we might reassert some measure of democratic control over that technology. Snowden has forced us into having conversations that we needed to have. Although his revelations are primarily about government surveillance, they also indirectly highlight the symbiotic relationship between the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ on the one hand and the giant internet companies on the other. For, in the end, both the intelligence agencies and the tech companies are in the same business, namely surveillance.
  • And both groups, oddly enough, provide the same kind of justification for what they do: that their surveillance is both necessary (for national security in the case of governments, for economic viability in the case of the companies) and conducted within the law. We need to test both justifications and the great thing about the European court of justice judgment is that it starts us off on that conversation.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

MPAA: Google Assists and Profits from Piracy | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/and-profits-from-piracy-150617

google profits piracy MPAA says against search engine or and open source Android

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 17 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 17 Jun 15
     
    " Ernesto on June 17, 2015 C: 0 Breaking The MPAA is refusing to hand over documentation discussing the legal case it helped Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood build against Google. According to the Hollywood group, Google is waging a PR war against Hollywood while facilitating and profiting from piracy."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 17 Jun 15
     
    " Ernesto on June 17, 2015 C: 0 Breaking The MPAA is refusing to hand over documentation discussing the legal case it helped Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood build against Google. According to the Hollywood group, Google is waging a PR war against Hollywood while facilitating and profiting from piracy."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Studies on file sharing - La Quadrature du Net - 0 views

wiki.laquadrature.net/Studies_on_file_sharing

studies file sharing Quadrature du Net

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 11 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 11 Aug 15
     
    "Contents 1 Studies 1.1 Evaluation of the effects of the HADOPI law 1.1.1 University of Delaware and Université de Rennes - 2014 - Graduated Response Policy and the Behavior of Digital Pirates: Evidence from the French Three-Strike (Hadopi) Law 1.1.2 M@rsouin - 2010 - Evaluation of the effects of the HADOPI law (FR) 1.2 People who share files are people who spend the more for culture 1.2.1 Munich School of Management and Copenhagen Business School - Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload 1.2.2 The American Assembly (Collumbia University) - Copy Culture in the USA and Germany 1.2.3 GFK (Society for Consumer Research) - Disappointed commissioner suppresses study showing pirates are cinema's best consumers 1.2.4 HADOPI - 2011 - January 2011 study on online cultural practices (FR) 1.2.5 University of Amsterdam - 2010 - Economic and cultural effects of unlawful file sharing 1.2.6 BBC - 2009 - "Pirates" spend more on music (FR) 1.2.7 IPSOS Germany - 2009 - Filesharers are better "consumers" of culture (FR) 1.2.8 Frank N. Magid Associates, Inc. - 2009 - P2P / Best consumers for Hollywood (EN) 1.2.9 Business School of Norway - 2009 - Those who share music spend ten times more money on music (NO) 1.2.10 Annelies Huygen, et al. (Dutch government investigation) - 2009 - Ups and downs - Economische en culturele gevolgen van file sharing voor muziek, film en games 1.2.11 M@rsouin - 2008 - P2P / buy more DVDs (FR) 1.2.12 Canadian Department of Industry - 2007 - P2P / achètent plus de musique (FR) 1.2.13 Felix Oberholzer-Gee (above) and Koleman Strumpf - 2004 -File sharing may boost CD sales 1.3 Economical effects of filesharing 1.3.1 University of Kansas School of Business - Using Markets to Measure the Impact of File Sharing o
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 11 Aug 15
     
    "Contents 1 Studies 1.1 Evaluation of the effects of the HADOPI law 1.1.1 University of Delaware and Université de Rennes - 2014 - Graduated Response Policy and the Behavior of Digital Pirates: Evidence from the French Three-Strike (Hadopi) Law 1.1.2 M@rsouin - 2010 - Evaluation of the effects of the HADOPI law (FR) 1.2 People who share files are people who spend the more for culture 1.2.1 Munich School of Management and Copenhagen Business School - Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload 1.2.2 The American Assembly (Collumbia University) - Copy Culture in the USA and Germany 1.2.3 GFK (Society for Consumer Research) - Disappointed commissioner suppresses study showing pirates are cinema's best consumers 1.2.4 HADOPI - 2011 - January 2011 study on online cultural practices (FR) 1.2.5 University of Amsterdam - 2010 - Economic and cultural effects of unlawful file sharing 1.2.6 BBC - 2009 - "Pirates" spend more on music (FR) 1.2.7 IPSOS Germany - 2009 - Filesharers are better "consumers" of culture (FR) 1.2.8 Frank N. Magid Associates, Inc. - 2009 - P2P / Best consumers for Hollywood (EN) 1.2.9 Business School of Norway - 2009 - Those who share music spend ten times more money on music (NO) 1.2.10 Annelies Huygen, et al. (Dutch government investigation) - 2009 - Ups and downs - Economische en culturele gevolgen van file sharing voor muziek, film en games 1.2.11 M@rsouin - 2008 - P2P / buy more DVDs (FR) 1.2.12 Canadian Department of Industry - 2007 - P2P / achètent plus de musique (FR) 1.2.13 Felix Oberholzer-Gee (above) and Koleman Strumpf - 2004 -File sharing may boost CD sales 1.3 Economical effects of filesharing 1.3.1 University of Kansas School of Business - Using Markets to Measure the Impact of File Sharing o
Paul Merrell

Intel Could Face Civil Charges in Europe - PC World - 0 views

www.pcworld.com/...e_civil_charges_in_europe.html

Intel antitrust DG Competition satellite litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 May 09 - Cached
  • But Intel could face even more payouts if Intel competitors, such as AMD, take civil cases on the back of the Commission's regulatory action, according to Alan Davis, an expert in competition law at Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM. "This will open the floodgates for competitors to sue," said Davis. "There was a complainant in this case, AMD [Advanced Micro Devices], and without question they and other competitors will pursue a case for damages." "The fine goes to the European Commission's coffers, not to the competitors who suffered damage to their businesses because of Intel's anti-competitive practices," he said. "What is likely to happen is that action will be started and a massive settlement will be made."
Paul Merrell

Memo to Potential Whistleblowers: If You See Something, Say Something | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5385860

transparency whistle-blowers resources ExposeFacts.org

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing creates a moral frequency that vast numbers of people are eager to hear. We don’t want our lives, communities, country and world continually damaged by the deadening silences of fear and conformity. I’ve met many whistleblowers over the years, and they’ve been extraordinarily ordinary. None were applying for halos or sainthood. All experienced anguish before deciding that continuous inaction had a price that was too high. All suffered negative consequences as well as relief after they spoke up and took action. All made the world better with their courage. Whistleblowers don’t sign up to be whistleblowers. Almost always, they begin their work as true believers in the system that conscience later compels them to challenge. “It took years of involvement with a mendacious war policy, evidence of which was apparent to me as early as 2003, before I found the courage to follow my conscience,” Matthew Hoh recalled this week.“It is not an easy or light decision for anyone to make, but we need members of our military, development, diplomatic and intelligence community to speak out if we are ever to have a just and sound foreign policy.”
  • Hoh describes his record this way: “After over 11 continuous years of service with the U.S. military and U.S. government, nearly six of those years overseas, including service in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as positions within the Secretary of the Navy’s Office as a White House Liaison, and as a consultant for the State Department’s Iraq Desk, I resigned from my position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the escalation of war in 2009.” Another former Department of State official, the ex-diplomat and retired Army colonel Ann Wright, who resigned in protest of the Iraq invasion in March 2003, is crossing paths with Hoh on Friday as they do the honors at a ribbon-cutting — half a block from the State Department headquarters in Washington — for a billboard with a picture of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Big-lettered words begin by referring to the years he waited before releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. “Don’t do what I did,” Ellsberg says on the billboard.  “Don’t wait until a new war has started, don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. You might save a war’s worth of lives.
  • The billboard – sponsored by the ExposeFacts organization, which launched this week — will spread to other prominent locations in Washington and beyond. As an organizer for ExposeFacts, I’m glad to report that outreach to potential whistleblowers is just getting started. (For details, visit ExposeFacts.org.) We’re propelled by the kind of hopeful determination that Hoh expressed the day before the billboard ribbon-cutting when he said: “I trust ExposeFacts and its efforts will encourage others to follow their conscience and do what is right.” The journalist Kevin Gosztola, who has astutely covered a range of whistleblower issues for years, pointed this week to the imperative of opening up news media. “There is an important role for ExposeFacts to play in not only forcing more transparency, but also inspiring more media organizations to engage in adversarial journalism,” he wrote. “Such journalism is called for in the face of wars, environmental destruction, escalating poverty, egregious abuses in the justice system, corporate control of government, and national security state secrecy. Perhaps a truly successful organization could inspire U.S. media organizations to play much more of a watchdog role than a lapdog role when covering powerful institutions in government.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Overall, we desperately need to nurture and propagate a steadfast culture of outspoken whistleblowing. A central motto of the AIDS activist movement dating back to the 1980s – Silence = Death – remains urgently relevant in a vast array of realms. Whether the problems involve perpetual war, corporate malfeasance, climate change, institutionalized racism, patterns of sexual assault, toxic pollution or countless other ills, none can be alleviated without bringing grim realities into the light. “All governments lie,” Ellsberg says in a video statement released for the launch of ExposeFacts, “and they all like to work in the dark as far as the public is concerned, in terms of their own decision-making, their planning — and to be able to allege, falsely, unanimity in addressing their problems, as if no one who had knowledge of the full facts inside could disagree with the policy the president or the leader of the state is announcing.” Ellsberg adds: “A country that wants to be a democracy has to be able to penetrate that secrecy, with the help of conscientious individuals who understand in this country that their duty to the Constitution and to the civil liberties and to the welfare of this country definitely surmount their obligation to their bosses, to a given administration, or in some cases to their promise of secrecy.”
  • Right now, our potential for democracy owes a lot to people like NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Kirk Wiebe, and EPA whistleblower Marsha Coleman-Adebayo. When they spoke at the June 4 news conference in Washington that launched ExposeFacts, their brave clarity was inspiring. Antidotes to the poisons of cynicism and passive despair can emerge from organizing to help create a better world. The process requires applying a single standard to the real actions of institutions and individuals, no matter how big their budgets or grand their power. What cannot withstand the light of day should not be suffered in silence. If you see something, say something.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14
     
    While some governments -- my own included -- attempt to impose an Orwellian Dark State of ubiquitous secret surveillance, secret wars, the rule of oligarchs, and public ignorance, the Edward Snowden leaks fanned the flames of the countering War on Ignorance that had been kept alive by civil libertarians. Only days after the U.S. Supreme Court denied review in a case where a reporter had been ordered to reveal his source of information for a book on the Dark State under the penalties for contempt of court (a long stretch in jail), a new web site is launched for communications between sources and journalists where the source's names never need to be revealed. This article is part of the publicity for that new weapon fielded by the civil libertarian side in the War Against Ignorance.  Hurrah!
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

How to treat government like an open source project | Opensource.com - 0 views

opensource.com/...open-collaborative-government

how to treat government open source project opensource way the open source way

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 03 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 03 Jun 14
     
    "Open government is great. At least, it was a few election cycles ago. FOIA requests, open data, seeing how your government works-it's arguably brought light to a lot of not-so-great practices, and in many cases, has spurred citizen-centric innovation not otherwise imagined before the information's release."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 03 Jun 14
     
    "Open government is great. At least, it was a few election cycles ago. FOIA requests, open data, seeing how your government works-it's arguably brought light to a lot of not-so-great practices, and in many cases, has spurred citizen-centric innovation not otherwise imagined before the information's release."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

MPAA Secretly Settled With Hotfile for $4 Million, Not $80 Million | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/le-4-million-80-million-141224

hotfile MPAA settle millions less why yup secretly tricky Intellectual Property enforcement

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 25 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 25 Dec 14
     
    [# ! Is this the exemplary IP Enforcement aimed to 'Save The Culture'...? # It seems more a weird #wangle... # ... or, perhaps, it is that a bunch of bucks is what matters.... # ! #artists and #creators shouldn't support such #hoax.] " By Ernesto on December 24, 2014 C: 0 Breaking Last December the MPAA announced one of its biggest victories to date. The Hollywood group won its case against file-hosting site Hotfile, who agreed to a $80 million settlement. However, this figure mostly served to impress and scare the pubic, as we can now reveal that Hotfile agreed to pay 'only' $4 million." [# ! Yup! Why "#secretly"...?]
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 25 Dec 14
     
    [# ! '#Tricky' IP #enforcement...] " By Ernesto on December 24, 2014 C: 0 Breaking Last December the MPAA announced one of its biggest victories to date. The Hollywood group won its case against file-hosting site Hotfile, who agreed to a $80 million settlement. However, this figure mostly served to impress and scare the pubic, as we can now reveal that Hotfile agreed to pay 'only' $4 million." [# ! Yup! Why "#secretly"...?]
Gary Edwards

Box extends its enterprise playbook, but users are still at the center | CITEworld - 0 views

www.citeworld.com/...boxworks2014.html

wordSDK Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 03 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • The 47,000 developers making almost two billion API calls to the Box platform per month are a good start, Levie says, but Box needs to go further and do more to customize its platform to help push this user-centric, everything-everywhere-always model at larger and larger enterprises. 
  • Box for Industries is comprised of three parts: A Box-tailored core service offering, a selection of partner apps, and the implementation services to combine the two of those into something that ideally can be used by any enterprise in any vertical. 
  • Box is announcing solutions for three specific industries: Retail, healthcare, and media/entertainment. For retail, that includes vendor collaboration (helping vendors work with manufacturers and distributors), digital asset management, and retail store enablement.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Ted Blosser, senior vice president of Box Platform, also took the stage to show off how managing digital assets benefit from a just-announced metadata template capability that lets you pre-define custom fields so a store's back-office can flag, say, a new jacket as "blue" or "red." Those metadata tags can be pushed to a custom app running on a retail associate's iPad, so you can sort by color, line, or inventory level. Metadata plus Box Workflows equals a powerful content platform for retail that keeps people in sync with their content across geographies and devices, or so the company is hoping. 
  • It's the same collaboration model that cloud storage vendors have been pushing, but customized for very specific verticals, which is exactly the sales pitch that Box wants you to come away with. And developers must be cheering -- Box is going to help them sell their apps to previously inaccessible markets. 
  • More on the standard enterprise side, the so-named Box + Office 365 (previewed a few months back) currently only supports the Windows desktop versions of the productivity suite, but Levie promises web and Mac integrations are on the way. It's pretty basic, but potentially handy for the enterprises that Box supports.
  • The crux of the Office 365 announcement is that people expect that their data will follow them from device to device and from app to app. If people want their Box files and storage in Jive, Box needs to support Jive. And if enterprises are using Microsoft Office 365 to work with their documents -- and they are -- then Box needs to support that too. It's easier than it used to be, Levie says, thanks to Satya Nadella's push for a more open Microsoft. 
  • "We are quite confident that this is the kind of future they're building towards," Levie says -- but just in case, he urged BoxWorks attendees to tweet at Nadella and encourage him to help Box speed development along. 
  • Box SVP of Enterprise Annie Pearl came on stage to discuss how Box Workflow can be used to improve the ways people work with their content in the real world of business. It's worth noting that Box had a workflow tool previously, but it was relatively primitive and seems to have only existed to tick the box -- it didn't really go beyond assigning tasks and soliciting approvals.
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Sep 14
     
    This will be very interesting. Looks like Box is betting their future on the success of integrating Microsoft Office 365 into the Box Productivity Cloud Service. Which competes directly with the Microsoft Office 365 - OneDrive Cloud Productivity Platform. Honestly, I don't see how this can ever work out for Box. Microsoft has them ripe for the plucking. And they have pulled it off on the eve of Box's expected IPO. "Box CEO Aaron Levie may not be able to talk about the cloud storage and collaboration company's forthcoming IPO, but he still took the stage at the company's biggest BoxWorks conference yet, with 5,000 attendees. Featured Resource Presented by Citrix Systems 10 essential elements for a secure enterprise mobility strategy Best practices for protecting sensitive business information while making people productive from LEARN MORE Levie discussed the future of the business and make some announcements -- including the beta of a Box integration with the Windows version of Microsoft Office 365; the introduction of Box Workflow, a tool coming in 2015 for creating repeatable workflows on the platform; and the unveiling of Box for Industries, an initiative to tailor Box solutions for specific industry use-cases. And if that wasn't enough, Box also announced a partnership with service firm Accenture to push the platform in large enterprises. The unifying factor for the announcements made at BoxWorks, Levie said, is that users expect their data to follow them everywhere, at home and at work. That means that Box has to think about enterprise from the user outwards, putting them at the center of the appified universe -- in effect, building an ecosystem of tools that support the things employees already use."
Gary Edwards

Meteor: The NeXT Web - 0 views

www.meteor.com/people

html

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Sep 14
     
    "Writing software is too hard and it takes too long. It's time for a new way to write software - especially application software, the user-facing software we use every day to talk to people and keep track of things. This new way should be radically simple. It should make it possible to build a prototype in a day or two, and a real production app in a few weeks. It should make everyday things easy, even when those everyday things involve hundreds of servers, millions of users, and integration with dozens of other systems. It should be built on collaboration, specialization, and division of labor, and it should be accessible to the maximum number of people. Today, there's a chance to create this new way - to build a new platform for cloud applications that will become as ubiquitous as previous platforms such as Unix, HTTP, and the relational database. It is not a small project. There are many big problems to tackle, such as: How do we transition the web from a "dumb terminal" model that is based on serving HTML, to a client/server model that is based on exchanging data? How do we design software to run in a radically distributed environment, where even everyday database apps are spread over multiple data centers and hundreds of intelligent client devices, and must integrate with other software at dozens of other organizations? How do we prepare for a world where most web APIs will be push-based (realtime), rather than polling-driven? In the face of escalating complexity, how can we simplify software engineering so that more people can do it? How will software developers collaborate and share components in this new world? Meteor is our audacious attempt to solve all of these big problems, at least for a certain large class of everyday applications. We think that success will come from hard work, respect for history and "classically beautiful" engineering patterns, and a philosophy of generally open and collaborative development. " .............. "It is not a
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Sep 14
     
    "How do we transition the web from a "dumb terminal" model that is based on serving HTML, to a client/server model that is based on exchanging data?" From a litigation aspect, the best bet I know of is antitrust litigation against the W3C and the WHATWG Working Group for implementing a non-interoperable specification. See e.g., Commission v. Microsoft, No. T-167/08, European Community Court of First Instance (Grand Chamber Judgment of 17 September, 2007), para. 230, 374, 421, http://preview.tinyurl.com/chsdb4w (rejecting Microsoft's argument that "interoperability" has a 1-way rather than 2-way meaning; information technology specifications must be disclosed with sufficient specificity to place competitors on an "equal footing" in regard to interoperability; "the 12th recital to Directive 91/250 defines interoperability as 'the ability to exchange information and mutually to use the information which has been exchanged'"). Note that the Microsoft case was prosecuted on the E.U.'s "abuse of market power" law that corresponds to the U.S. Sherman Act § 2 (monopolies). But undoubtedly the E.U. courts would apply the same standard to "agreements among undertakings" in restraint of trade, counterpart to the Sherman Act's § 1 (conspiracies in restraint of trade), the branch that applies to development of voluntary standards by competitors. But better to innovate and obsolete HTML, I think. DG Competition and the DoJ won't prosecute such cases soon. For example, Obama ran for office promising to "reinvigorate antitrust enforcement" but his DoJ has yet to file its first antitrust case against a big company. Nb., virtually the same definition of interoperability announced by the Court of First Instance is provided by ISO/IEC JTC-1 Directives, annex I ("eye"), which is applicable to all international standards in the IT sector: "... interoperability is understood to be the ability of two or more IT systems to exchange information at one or more standardised interfaces
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Columbia Pictures Wants Anti-Piracy Policies Kept Secret, Indefinitely | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/ept-secret-indefinitely-141113

antipiracy policies secret industry wants entertainment media politics culture

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 14 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 14 Nov 14
     
    " Ernesto on November 13, 2014 C: 1 Breaking Columbia Pictures has asked a Florida federal court to keep its anti-piracy policies secret forever. The records in question are part of the now closed case between Hotfile and the MPAA. Previously, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams ruled that the information should be unsealed in the public's interest. " [# ! '#Secret' #policies...? # ! This is proper of long ago past # ! dark mankind ages...]
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 14 Nov 14
     
    " Ernesto on November 13, 2014 C: 1 Breaking Columbia Pictures has asked a Florida federal court to keep its anti-piracy policies secret forever. The records in question are part of the now closed case between Hotfile and the MPAA. Previously, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams ruled that the information should be unsealed in the public's interest. "
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

U.S. Court Extends Global Shutdown of DVD Ripping Software | TorrentFreak - 1 views

torrentfreak.com/of-dvd-ripping-software-150323

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 24 Mar 15 - No Cached
    • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.
      Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 24 Mar 15
       
      https://www.eff.org/cases/betamax-case
    • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.
      Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 24 Mar 15
       
      # ! Don't '#They' know 'The Betamax Case'...?
Paul Merrell

How Edward Snowden Changed Everything | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...ard-snowden-changed-everything

surveillance state Snowden Wizner state-of-play civil-liberties must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Ben Wizner, who is perhaps best known as Edward Snowden’s lawyer, directs the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project. Wizner, who joined the ACLU in August 2001, one month before the 9/11 attacks, has been a force in the legal battles against torture, watch lists, and extraordinary rendition since the beginning of the global “war on terror.” Ad Policy On October 15, we met with Wizner in an upstate New York pub to discuss the state of privacy advocacy today. In sometimes sardonic tones, he talked about the transition from litigating on issues of torture to privacy advocacy, differences between corporate and state-sponsored surveillance, recent developments in state legislatures and the federal government, and some of the obstacles impeding civil liberties litigation. The interview has been edited and abridged for publication.
  • en Wizner, who is perhaps best known as Edward Snowden’s lawyer, directs the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project. Wizner, who joined the ACLU in August 2001, one month before the 9/11 attacks, has been a force in the legal battles against torture, watch lists, and extraordinary rendition since the beginning of the global “war on terror.” Ad Policy On October 15, we met with Wizner in an upstate New York pub to discuss the state of privacy advocacy today. In sometimes sardonic tones, he talked about the transition from litigating on issues of torture to privacy advocacy, differences between corporate and state-sponsored surveillance, recent developments in state legislatures and the federal government, and some of the obstacles impeding civil liberties litigation. The interview has been edited and abridged for publication.
  • Many of the technologies, both military technologies and surveillance technologies, that are developed for purposes of policing the empire find their way back home and get repurposed. You saw this in Ferguson, where we had military equipment in the streets to police nonviolent civil unrest, and we’re seeing this with surveillance technologies, where things that are deployed for use in war zones are now commonly in the arsenals of local police departments. For example, a cellphone surveillance tool that we call the StingRay—which mimics a cellphone tower and communicates with all the phones around—was really developed as a military technology to help identify targets. Now, because it’s so inexpensive, and because there is a surplus of these things that are being developed, it ends up getting pushed down into local communities without local democratic consent or control.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • SG & TP: How do you see the current state of the right to privacy? BW: I joked when I took this job that I was relieved that I was going to be working on the Fourth Amendment, because finally I’d have a chance to win. That was intended as gallows humor; the Fourth Amendment had been a dishrag for the last several decades, largely because of the war on drugs. The joke in civil liberties circles was, “What amendment?” But I was able to make this joke because I was coming to Fourth Amendment litigation from something even worse, which was trying to sue the CIA for torture, or targeted killings, or various things where the invariable outcome was some kind of non-justiciability ruling. We weren’t even reaching the merits at all. It turns out that my gallows humor joke was prescient.
  • The truth is that over the last few years, we’ve seen some of the most important Fourth Amendment decisions from the Supreme Court in perhaps half a century. Certainly, I think the Jones decision in 2012 [U.S. v. Jones], which held that GPS tracking was a Fourth Amendment search, was the most important Fourth Amendment decision since Katz in 1967 [Katz v. United States], in terms of starting a revolution in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence signifying that changes in technology were not just differences in degree, but they were differences in kind, and require the Court to grapple with it in a different way. Just two years later, you saw the Court holding that police can’t search your phone incident to an arrest without getting a warrant [Riley v. California]. Since 2012, at the level of Supreme Court jurisprudence, we’re seeing a recognition that technology has required a rethinking of the Fourth Amendment at the state and local level. We’re seeing a wave of privacy legislation that’s really passing beneath the radar for people who are not paying close attention. It’s not just happening in liberal states like California; it’s happening in red states like Montana, Utah, and Wyoming. And purple states like Colorado and Maine. You see as many libertarians and conservatives pushing these new rules as you see liberals. It really has cut across at least party lines, if not ideologies. My overall point here is that with respect to constraints on government surveillance—I should be more specific—law-enforcement government surveillance—momentum has been on our side in a way that has surprised even me.
  • Do you think that increased privacy protections will happen on the state level before they happen on the federal level? BW: I think so. For example, look at what occurred with the death penalty and the Supreme Court’s recent Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. The question under the Eighth Amendment is, “Is the practice cruel and unusual?” The Court has looked at what it calls “evolving standards of decency” [Trop v. Dulles, 1958]. It matters to the Court, when it’s deciding whether a juvenile can be executed or if a juvenile can get life without parole, what’s going on in the states. It was important to the litigants in those cases to be able to show that even if most states allowed the bad practice, the momentum was in the other direction. The states that were legislating on this most recently were liberalizing their rules, were making it harder to execute people under 18 or to lock them up without the possibility of parole. I think you’re going to see the same thing with Fourth Amendment and privacy jurisprudence, even though the Court doesn’t have a specific doctrine like “evolving standards of decency.” The Court uses this much-maligned test, “Do individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy?” We’ll advance the argument, I think successfully, that part of what the Court should look at in considering whether an expectation of privacy is reasonable is showing what’s going on in the states. If we can show that a dozen or eighteen state legislatures have enacted a constitutional protection that doesn’t exist in federal constitutional law, I think that that will influence the Supreme Court.
  • The question is will it also influence Congress. I think there the answer is also “yes.” If you’re a member of the House or the Senate from Montana, and you see that your state legislature and your Republican governor have enacted privacy legislation, you’re not going to be worried about voting in that direction. I think this is one of those places where, unlike civil rights, where you saw most of the action at the federal level and then getting forced down to the states, we’re going to see more action at the state level getting funneled up to the federal government.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 15
     
    A must-read. Ben Wizner discusses the current climate in the courts in government surveillance cases and how Edward Snowden's disclosures have affected that, and much more. Wizner is not only Edward Snowden's lawyer, he is also the coordinator of all ACLU litigation on electronic surveillance matters.
Paul Merrell

Microsoft to host data in Germany to evade US spying | Naked Security - 0 views

nakedsecurity.sophos.com/...-in-germany-to-evade-us-spying

surveillance state NSA FBI EU data-centers privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Microsoft's new plan to keep the US government's hands off its customers' data: Germany will be a safe harbor in the digital privacy storm. Microsoft on Wednesday announced that beginning in the second half of 2016, it will give foreign customers the option of keeping data in new European facilities that, at least in theory, should shield customers from US government surveillance. It will cost more, according to the Financial Times, though pricing details weren't forthcoming. Microsoft Cloud - including Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online - will be hosted from new datacenters in the German regions of Magdeburg and Frankfurt am Main. Access to data will be controlled by what the company called a German data trustee: T-Systems, a subsidiary of the independent German company Deutsche Telekom. Without the permission of Deutsche Telekom or customers, Microsoft won't be able to get its hands on the data. If it does get permission, the trustee will still control and oversee Microsoft's access.
  • Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dropped the word "trust" into the company's statement: Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every individual on the planet to achieve more. Our new datacenter regions in Germany, operated in partnership with Deutsche Telekom, will not only spur local innovation and growth, but offer customers choice and trust in how their data is handled and where it is stored.
  • On Tuesday, at the Future Decoded conference in London, Nadella also announced that Microsoft would, for the first time, be opening two UK datacenters next year. The company's also expanding its existing operations in Ireland and the Netherlands. Officially, none of this has anything to do with the long-drawn-out squabbling over the transatlantic Safe Harbor agreement, which the EU's highest court struck down last month, calling the agreement "invalid" because it didn't protect data from US surveillance. No, Nadella said, the new datacenters and expansions are all about giving local businesses and organizations "transformative technology they need to seize new global growth." But as Diginomica reports, Microsoft EVP of Cloud and Enterprise Scott Guthrie followed up his boss’s comments by saying that yes, the driver behind the new datacenters is to let customers keep data close: We can guarantee customers that their data will always stay in the UK. Being able to very concretely tell that story is something that I think will accelerate cloud adoption further in the UK.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Microsoft and T-Systems' lawyers may well think that storing customer data in a German trustee data center will protect it from the reach of US law, but for all we know, that could be wishful thinking. Forrester cloud computing analyst Paul Miller: To be sure, we must wait for the first legal challenge. And the appeal. And the counter-appeal. As with all new legal approaches, we don’t know it is watertight until it is challenged in court. Microsoft and T-Systems’ lawyers are very good and say it's watertight. But we can be sure opposition lawyers will look for all the holes. By keeping data offshore - particularly in Germany, which has strong data privacy laws - Microsoft could avoid the situation it's now facing with the US demanding access to customer emails stored on a Microsoft server in Dublin. The US has argued that Microsoft, as a US company, comes under US jurisdiction, regardless of where it keeps its data.
  • Running away to Germany isn't a groundbreaking move; other US cloud services providers have already pledged expansion of their EU presences, including Amazon's plan to open a UK datacenter in late 2016 that will offer what CTO Werner Vogels calls "strong data sovereignty to local users." Other big data operators that have followed suit: Salesforce, which has already opened datacenters in the UK and Germany and plans to open one in France next year, as well as new EU operations pledged for the new year by NetSuite and Box. Can Germany keep the US out of its datacenters? Can Ireland? Time, and court cases, will tell.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Nov 15
     
    The European Community's Court of Justice decision in the Safe Harbor case --- and Edward Snowden --- are now officially downgrading the U.S. as a cloud data center location. NSA is good business for Europeans looking to displace American cloud service providers, as evidenced by Microsoft's decision. The legal test is whether Microsoft has "possession, custody, or control" of the data. From the info given in the article, it seems that Microsoft has done its best to dodge that bullet by moving data centers to Germany and placing their data under the control of a European company. Do ownership of the hardware and profits from their rent mean that Microsoft still has "possession, custody, or control" of the data? The fine print of the agreement with Deutsche Telekom and the customer EULAs will get a thorough going over by the Dept. of Justice for evidence of Microsoft "control" of the data. That will be the crucial legal issue. The data centers in Germany may pass the test. But the notion that data centers in the UK can offer privacy is laughable; the UK's legal authority for GCHQ makes it even easier to get the data than the NSA can in the U.S.  It doesn't even require a court order. 
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

RIAA and Tech Giants Clash In Usenet Piracy Case - TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/h-in-usenet-piracy-case-160303

riaa tech giants clash usenet piracy case #HollywoodvsSiliconValley access vs greed

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 04 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 04 Mar 16
     
    The RIAA has joined adult publisher Perfect 10 in its appeal against Giganews. Both argue that the Usenet service is directly liable for the blatant copyright infringements on its service. Giganews is supported by several digital rights groups and tech companies, who fear that the RIAA's request endangers a free and open Internet.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Copyright case over "Happy Birthday" is done, trial cancelled | Ars Technica UK - 0 views

arstechnica.co.uk/...irthday-is-over-trial-canceled

molesting copyright case against Happy Birthday cancelled agreement reached labels unhappy

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 10 Dec 15
     
    "Settlement details aren't yet public, but Warner/Chappell isn't happy. by Joe Mullin (US) - Dec 10, 2015 8:22am CET"
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

How to speed up your internet connection on Linux | HowtoForge - 0 views

www.howtoforge.com/...r-internet-connection-on-linux

how to speed internet connection GNU_Linux linux

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 21 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 21 Oct 15
     
    "...there isn't a way to transform a slow internet connection into a lighting-speed one if your provider is just not giving you enough bandwidth, no matter what you do. This post is only aiming to provide generic advice on how to make things a little bit better if possible, and if applicable to each case."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 21 Oct 15
     
    "...there isn't a way to transform a slow internet connection into a lighting-speed one if your provider is just not giving you enough bandwidth, no matter what you do. This post is only aiming to provide generic advice on how to make things a little bit better if possible, and if applicable to each case."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Top open source in government stories for 2015 | Opensource.com - 0 views

opensource.com/...best-of-government-2015

Top Ten Top 10 top 10 open source government stories open technolgy politics

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 26 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 26 Dec 15
     
    "Each year, I reflect on Opensource.com's top government stories of the year. I look for trends among our most popular stories. Stories about new tools and applications generally top the list, as well as, case studies detailing how governments are implementing those tools."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 26 Dec 15
     
    "Each year, I reflect on Opensource.com's top government stories of the year. I look for trends among our most popular stories. Stories about new tools and applications generally top the list, as well as, case studies detailing how governments are implementing those tools."
Paul Merrell

EFF Pries More Information on Zero Days from the Government's Grasp | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

www.eff.org/...cy-zero-days-governments-grasp

surveillance state zero-day-exploits FOIA litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Until just last week, the U.S. government kept up the charade that its use of a stockpile of security vulnerabilities for hacking was a closely held secret.1 In fact, in response to EFF’s FOIA suit to get access to the official U.S. policy on zero days, the government redacted every single reference to “offensive” use of vulnerabilities. To add insult to injury, the government’s claim was that even admitting to offensive use would cause damage to national security. Now, in the face of EFF’s brief marshaling overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the charade is over. In response to EFF’s motion for summary judgment, the government has disclosed a new version of the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, minus many of the worst redactions. First and foremost, it now admits that the “discovery of vulnerabilities in commercial information technology may present competing ‘equities’ for the [government’s] offensive and defensive mission.” That might seem painfully obvious—a flaw or backdoor in a Juniper router is dangerous for anyone running a network, whether that network is in the U.S. or Iran. But the government’s failure to adequately weigh these “competing equities” was so severe that in 2013 a group of experts appointed by President Obama recommended that the policy favor disclosure “in almost all instances for widely used code.” [.pdf].
  • The newly disclosed version of the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP) also officially confirms what everyone already knew: the use of zero days isn’t confined to the spies. Rather, the policy states that the “law enforcement community may want to use information pertaining to a vulnerability for similar offensive or defensive purposes but for the ultimate end of law enforcement.” Similarly it explains that “counterintelligence equities can be defensive, offensive, and/or law enforcement-related” and may “also have prosecutorial responsibilities.” Given that the government is currently prosecuting users for committing crimes over Tor hidden services, and that it identified these individuals using vulnerabilities called a “Network Investigative Technique”, this too doesn’t exactly come as a shocker. Just a few weeks ago, the government swore that even acknowledging the mere fact that it uses vulnerabilities offensively “could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security.” That’s a standard move in FOIA cases involving classified information, even though the government unnecessarily classifies documents at an astounding rate. In this case, the government relented only after nearly a year and a half of litigation by EFF. The government would be well advised to stop relying on such weak secrecy claims—it only risks undermining its own credibility.
  • The new version of the VEP also reveals significantly more information about the general process the government follows when a vulnerability is identified. In a nutshell, an agency that discovers a zero day is responsible for invoking the VEP, which then provides for centralized coordination and weighing of equities among all affected agencies. Along with a declaration from an official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, this new information provides more background on the reasons why the government decided to develop an overarching zero day policy in the first place: it “recognized that not all organizations see the entire picture of vulnerabilities, and each organization may have its own equities and concerns regarding the prioritization of patches and fixes, as well as its own distinct mission obligations.” We now know the VEP was finalized in February 2010, but the government apparently failed to implement it in any substantial way, prompting the presidential review group’s recommendation to prioritize disclosure over offensive hacking. We’re glad to have forced a little more transparency on this important issue, but the government is still foolishly holding on to a few last redactions, including refusing to name which agencies participate in the VEP. That’s just not supportable, and we’ll be in court next month to argue that the names of these agencies must be disclosed. 
Paul Merrell

Apple could use Brooklyn case to pursue details about FBI iPhone hack: source | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...apple-encryption-idUSKCN0WU1RF

surveillance state Apple FBI Brooklyn iPhone security

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • If the U.S. Department of Justice asks a New York court to force Apple Inc to unlock an iPhone, the technology company could push the government to reveal how it accessed the phone which belonged to a shooter in San Bernardino, a source familiar with the situation said.The Justice Department will disclose over the next two weeks whether it will continue with its bid to compel Apple to help access an iPhone in a Brooklyn drug case, according to a court filing on Tuesday.The Justice Department this week withdrew a similar request in California, saying it had succeeded in unlocking an iPhone used by one of the shooters involved in a rampage in San Bernardino in December without Apple's help.The legal dispute between the U.S. government and Apple has been a high-profile test of whether law enforcement should have access to encrypted phone data.
  • Apple, supported by most of the technology industry, says anything that helps authorities bypass security features will undermine security for all users. Government officials say that all kinds of criminal investigations will be crippled without access to phone data.Prosecutors have not said whether the San Bernardino technique would work for other seized iPhones, including the one at issue in Brooklyn. Should the Brooklyn case continue, Apple could pursue legal discovery that would potentially force the FBI to reveal what technique it used on the San Bernardino phone, the source said. A Justice Department representative did not have immediate comment.
Paul Merrell

Challenge to data transfer tool used by Facebook will go to Europe's top court | TechCrunch - 1 views

techcrunch.com/...k-will-go-to-europes-top-court

surveillance state NSA Irish_High_Court EU data-privacy litigation ECJ

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The five-week court hearing in what is a complex case delving into detail on US surveillance operations took place in February. The court issued its ruling today. The 153-page ruling starts by noting “this is an unusual case”, before going into a detailed discussion of the arguments and concluding that the DPC’s concerns about the validity of SCCs should be referred to the European Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling. Schrems is also the man responsible for bringing, in 2013, a legal challenge that ultimately struck down Safe Harbor — the legal mechanism that had oiled the pipe for EU-US personal data flows for fifteen years before the ECJ ruled it to be invalid in October 2015. Schrems’ argument had centered on U.S. government mass surveillance programs, as disclosed via the Snowden leaks, being incompatible with fundamental European privacy rights. After the ECJ struck down Safe Harbor he then sought to apply the same arguments against Facebook’s use of SCCs — returning to Ireland to make the complaint as that’s where the company has its European HQ. It’s worth noting that the European Commission has since replaced Safe Harbor with a new (and it claims more robust) data transfer mechanism, called the EU-US Privacy Shield — which is now, as Safe Harbor was, used by thousands of businesses. Although that too is facing legal challenges as critics continue to argue there is a core problem of incompatibility between two distinct legal regimes where EU privacy rights collide with US mass surveillance.
  • In a written statement on the ruling Schrems added: “I welcome the judgement by the Irish High Court. It is important that a neutral Court outside of the US has summarized the facts on US surveillance in a judgement, after diving through more than 45,000 pages of documents in a five week hearing.
  • Making a video statement outside court in Dublin today, Schrems said the Irish court had dismissed Facebook’s argument that the US government does not undertake any surveillance.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Schrems’ Safe Harbor challenge also started in the Irish Court before being ultimately referred to the ECJ. So there’s more than a little legal deja vu here, especially given the latest development in the case. In its ruling on the SCC issue, the Irish Court noted that a US ombudsperson position created under Privacy Shield to handle EU citizens complaints about companies’ handling of their data is not enough to overcome what it described as “well founded concerns” raised by the DPC regarding the adequacy of the protections for EU citizens data.
  • On Facebook, he also said: “In simple terms, US law requires Facebook to help the NSA with mass surveillance and EU law prohibits just that. As Facebook is subject to both jurisdictions, they got themselves in a legal dilemma that they cannot possibly solve in the long run.”
  • While Schrems’ original complaint pertained to Facebook, the Irish DPC’s position means many more companies that use the mechanism could face disruption if SCCs are ultimately invalidated as a result of the legal challenge to their validity.
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