The Great Geek Manual News

Raymond Paul Steigerwalt was jailed for 21 months for his part in an alleged hack attack on US Department of Defense computers.

That was in 2005 and earlier this year in the US, former Brocade Communications System boss Gregory Reyes was jailed for 21 months and fined $15 million after he set up a plan to tamper with the financial records of stock options.

In August, Canadian actor Robert Smith was jailed for 21 months for possessing kiddie porn and making it available online.

Then, this month, Michael Logan was sentenced to 21 months in a US federal penitentiary for [wait for it] recording two films in a Washington, DC theater, says the Hollywood Reporter.

Right! Hell, he should’ve gotten more!

Hang on, though. Twenty-one months for camcording a couple of cruddy Hollywood flicks?

They were 28 Weeks Later and Enchanted, says Cinematical.

Yeh. But even so, 21 months does seem a bit steep.

Until you factor in the fact — well, the almost fact — that according to the MPAA, which never lies, “forensic analysis indicates Logan could be responsible for illegally recording more than 100 films from January 2006 to January 2008 in four states and the District of Columbia,” says the story.

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Source: P2P Net

I ran into Mike Weiss the other day at Digital Hollywood, and asked him how things at Streamcast Networks were going. Streamcast Networks has been the company behind the Morpheus file sharing client, and Weiss, Streamcast’s long-time CEO, has been an outspoken critic of the entertainment industry as well as lone fighter in an epic legal battle with the major record companies, which is why I was more than a little surprised when he told me that he shut down the company back in April.

Morpheus has been largely ignored by the P2P community in recent years because it was forced to install filters to prevent unauthorized file sharing after losing against the entertainment industry in front of the US Supreme Court. However, Morpheus used to be at some point one of the if not the most popular file sharing client, so it’s only appropriate to do a quick recap of its oftentimes turbulent history:

Morpheus started off as a Open Napster client back in 2000, operating two dozen or so Open Napster servers under the name of the Musiccity network. It switched to the Fasttrack network that was operated by Kazaa soon after, only to quickly become the most popular Fasttrack client, which also got the attention of the major record labels. The labels filed a lawsuit against Morpheus, Kazaa and Grokster, which at that time all shared the same network, in October of 2001.

Morpheus eventually had a fall-out with Kazaa in early 2002 when users of its client suddenly were unable to connect to the Fasttrack network. The makers of Morpheus at the time stated that Kazaa tried to get rid of unwanted competition, but Kazaa maintained that Morpheus just didn’t pay its licensing dues on time.

Morpheus switched to Gnutella soon after but lost a large amount of its users to Kazaa as result of the controversy. Morpheus also implemented support for several other P2P networks, including Neonet, which was its own DHT network.

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Source: P2P Blog

Sony Corp said five PC makers including Hewlett-Packard Co and Toshiba Corp will recall 100,000 computer battery packs made by the Japanese electronics maker due to a fire hazard.

Sony said the recall is expected to have limited impact on its earnings, and its shares outperformed a falling Tokyo stock market on Friday.

The recall is a fraction of a much bigger recall of 9.6 million Sony PC batteries in 2006, which cost the company around 35.5 billion yen ($360 million).

The U.S. government issued on Thursday a recall of 35,000 Sony batteries and the Tokyo-based company said it would recall a further 65,000 batteries worldwide.

PC makers have reported 40 cases of overheating, including four cases where users suffered minor burns, and 21 cases of minor damage from fires and overheating, a Sony spokeswoman said.

The recall affects around 74,000 notebook PCs sold by HP and 14,400 from Toshiba.

The faulty batteries are also used in laptop PCs from Dell Inc, Acer Inc and Lenovo Group Ltd, Sony said.

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Source: Reuters

What happens when you put three economists from the internet, telecomms, and the music businesses in a room and don’t let them out until they’ve agreed on something useful?

A paper published by the research unit of the British composers’ collection society today gives us a clue. The first results of a “knocking heads together” exercise, entitled Shadow pricing P2P’s economic impact, doesn’t offer any ready policy proposals - partly as a result of compromise - but it does offer a framework that’s better thought out than most attempts so far.

The paper identifies three elements of the supply chain in the digital age. There are what it calls MSPs or Music Service Providers, such as PirateBay or iTunes, for example; MRPs or Music Rights Providers such as ASCAP or the PPL, and ISPs. When these groups are lined up in a Game Theory Prisoner’s Dilemma situation, the paper suggests, there is a high risk of a “sub-optimal outcome.” That’s a diplomatic way of saying everyone loses.

Rights providers would be tempted to continue to shun the digital market, ISPs continue to bear heavy costs and potential liabilities and stick with delivering music to their customers using the unlicensed MSPs (eg via Bittorrent trackers), and the MSPs remain at the mercy of the others, so fail to invest.

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Source: The Register

The PlayStation 2 just passed its 8th birthday here in North America, and the console is still going strong. With 131.3 million units sold worldwide, Sony is looking to continue to tap into that market. To that end, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe’s developer relations manager George Bain has revealed that the company will be removing the content approval process in an attempt to attract smaller developers.

“You no longer have to submit a game for content approval,” Bain explained at the Casual Connect conference in Kyiv. Citing Russia and India as examples, Bain said that independent developers in all countries can now “create low-development cost titles and release them in their market.”

Since there are no licensing fees, the only cost to the developer would be the PS2 dev kit. In order to help alleviate some of that financial burden, Bain said that in some cases Sony will lend out dev kits. Another option for developers making small, casual titles is to purchase PS2 debug dev kits, which cost about 1/10 of a full version.

Bain went on to explain another possible option for smaller local developers: the PlayStation Network. “One thing that a lot of developers seem to forget is that PlayStation Network is free,” he explained. “Consumers do not have to pay a monthly fee… game developers should create games for local markets.”

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Source: Ars Technica

People have been submitting this story nonstop, but I wanted to take some time to read the details before commenting on it. It’s not the first time that folks have argued that the damages sought by the RIAA in various lawsuits against file sharers are unconstitutional. However, the few times it’s been brought up in court, the arguments haven’t been persuasive. However, this time around, it looks like the big legal guns are getting involved, and the argument seems a lot more comprehensive and compelling.

In the past, it’s been noted that the RIAA has curiously avoided suing any Harvard students, with one of the theories being that Harvard had made it quite clear to the RIAA that it would fight back hard. And, with Harvard law school at its disposal, and various professors there indicating that they had serious legal problems with the RIAA’s strategy, the RIAA simply decided to ignore any file sharing going on at that prestigious university.

However, for RIAA critic and well known law professor, Charles Nesson, waiting around for the RIAA to sue someone at Harvard was getting boring, so he went out and found a case to participate in. Along with two third year law students, Nesson has hit back hard on the RIAA’s efforts in a court filing, where it’s noted that the very basis for many of the RIAA’s lawsuits is very likely unconstitutional.

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Source: Tech Dirt

Google has announced that it will now begin including scanned documents in its search results - a feat that requires an immense amount of processing power and advanced image recognition technology. Unlike standard text documents, scanned files don’t contain any text data that Google’s spiders can index. Instead, Google has employed Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, converting photos of words into digital text files.

In the past Google would attempt to index these image files as well as possible, but could typically search only file titles and nearby metadata - not the contents of the documents. From now on Google searches will include the text within these scanned images in normal search results. When you encounter a scanned document you’ll be able to view it in its original form as a PDF, or as a converted text file (click “View As HTML”).

Such technology has existed for quite a while, but accuracy has always been an issue - and the fact that Google is doing it on such massive scale makes it a very impressive accomplishment. It also opens the doors to much more thorough searching, especially for content that is often found in printed documents (like academic papers).

Source: Tech Crunch

A Japanese man has enlisted hundreds of people in a campaign to allow marriages between humans and cartoon characters, saying he feels more at ease in the “two-dimensional world.”

Comic books are immensely popular in Japan, with some fictional characters becoming celebrities or even sex symbols. Marriage is meanwhile on the decline as many young Japanese find it difficult to find life partners.

Taichi Takashita launched an online petition aiming for one million signatures to present to the government to establish a law on marriages with cartoon characters.

Within a week he has gathered more than 1,000 signatures through the Internet.

“I am no longer interested in three dimensions. I would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world,” he wrote.

“However, that seems impossible with present-day technology. Therefore, at the very least, would it be possible to legally authorise marriage with a two-dimensional character?”

Befitting his desire to be two-dimensional, he listed no contact details, making it impossible to reach him for comment to explain if his campaign is serious or tongue-in-cheek.

But some people signing the petition are true believers.

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Source: AFP via Yahoo! News

A federal judge tentatively has set (.pdf) a March 9 retrial date in the Jammie Thomas music file sharing case. Of about 30,000 cases the Recording Industry Association of America has lodged against peer-to-peer users, the Thomas case was the first and only one to go to trial.

After a four-day trial last year, a Duluth, Minnesota, federal jury found Thomas liable of copyright infringement and dinged her $222,000 for 24 songs she was sharing on the Kazaa network. But last month, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis, who presided over the case, declared a mistrial.

His decision meant that the RIAA’s 5-year-old copyright infringement litigation campaign has never been successful at trial. Davis’ decision focused at the heart of all file sharing cases: What level of proof was necessary for the RIAA to prevail — a question still unanswered five years after the RIAA’s litigation campaign commenced.

Davis had instructed the jury last year that the recording industry did not have to prove anybody downloaded the songs from Thomas’ open Kazaa share folder. Davis read Jury Instruction No. 15 to jurors saying they could find unauthorized distribution — copyright infringement — if Thomas was “making copyrighted sound recordings available” over a peer-to-peer network “regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown.”

Still, there’s no guarantee of a trial. The RIAA is requesting the judge’s permission to appeal his mistrial order. The judge has not ruled on that motion.

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Source: Wired’s Blog

But tell that to the poor CIO who just shelled out six figures to buy another rack of servers. Technology sure doesn’t feel free when you’re buying it by the gross. Yet if you look at it from the other side of the fat pipe, the economics change. That expensive bank of hard drives (fixed costs) can serve tens of thousands of users (marginal costs). The Web is all about scale, finding ways to attract the most users for centralized resources, spreading those costs over larger and larger audiences as the technology gets more and more capable. It’s not about the cost of the equipment in the racks at the data center; it’s about what that equipment can do. And every year, like some sort of magic clockwork, it does more and more for less and less, bringing the marginal costs of technology in the units that we individuals consume closer to zero.

As much as we complain about how expensive things are getting, we’re surrounded by forces that are making them cheaper. Forty years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it’s obesity, for which we have the Green Revolution to thank. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T-shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee, thanks to China and global sourcing. So too for toys, gadgets, and commodities of every sort. Even cocaine has pretty much never been cheaper (globalization works in mysterious ways).

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Source: Wired

The file-sharing oriented news website, P2Pnet, has won its case against the Canadian businessman Wayne Crookes. The Supreme Court ruled that linking to defamatory material doesn’t constitute as publishing. Since the case is about linking, the outcome will have implications for all websites on the Internet, including BitTorrent sites.

Wayne Crookes, a former Green Party organizer, had sued p2pnet claiming that the news site defamed him by merely linking to articles he didn’t agree with. With the freedom of online speech at stake, the case was heard by the British Columbia Supreme Court.

In the decision, Judge Stephen Kelleher disagreed with Crookes, as he ruled that linking to other websites does not amount to publication. Since ‘publication’ is needed to prove defamation, Crookes simply has no case. Judge Kelleher writes in the decision: “Although a hyperlink provides immediate access to material published on another website, this does not amount to republication of the content on the originating site. This is especially so as a reader may or may not follow the hyperlinks provided.”

This is a landmark decision for freedom of speech on the Internet. It goes even further though, since it is not limited to blogs and news outlets. The judge made it very clear that a hyperlink does not equal publication. This means that the current ruling might be relevant to copyright cases involving BitTorrent sites as well, since they merely link to files and do not host any copyrighted content themselves.

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Source: Torrent Freak

In January, Hewlett-Packard will introduce a glossy black mini-laptop at retail for a mere $379. When it does, it will become the first major computer maker this decade (besides Apple, of course) to push a non-Windows PC in stores.

This Linux-based version of the HP Mini 1000 will not slay Microsoft (MSFT) Windows. But it will add to a growing sense that the iconic operating system’s best days are behind it.

Since we first began to fall in love with the personal computer — before we met YouTube and Google (GOOG), cable and DSL – Microsoft Windows has pretty much run the show. We’ve become so accustomed to our Microsoft-controlled existence that jokes about the Start menu and the Blue Screen of Death have become part of our national conversation. That’s the genius of Apple’s (AAPL) hilariously mean Mac vs. PC commercials; as viewers, we connect with the message about the portly PC guy because we feel like we know him. In a way, we do — we’ve lived with him in the den or the home office for decades now.

Today, evidence is mounting that Microsoft’s dominance in computing isn’t what it used to be. It’s not just the Windows Vista flop and those damning commercials, either: Apple’s Mac OS is gradually taking share from Windows; and HP (HPQ) and Dell (DELL), the world’s largest PC makers, are investing in bigger homegrown software teams to do work they once left to Microsoft. Look at the high-growth computing markets for smartphones and low-cost mini-laptops, and the shift is even more striking; the most popular smartphones from Research in Motion (RIMM) and Apple of course don’t run Windows, and more than 35% of today’s mini-laptops run a non-Windows operating system.

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Source: CNN’s Fortune Blog

Although reportedly now in legal mediation talks with Apple, Mac clonemaker Psystar this week introduced Blu-ray — a technology not yet supported by Apple — in an optional drive for its Mac desktop PCs.

A furious round of legal charges and countercharges with Apple hasn’t stopped Psystar from shipping its latest Mac clone, a desktop PC enabled with Blu-ray. Meanwhile, accounts are surfacing that the clone maker plans a Mac laptop, too.

Psystar announced in a press release this week that it has started shipping its Psystar Open Computer with options for a Blu-ray drive and an Nvidia 9800GT graphics card. Adding a Blu-ray drive raises the base price of the desktop Mac clone by $310 to $864.99.

Rudy Pedraza, Psystar’s president, leveraged the press release to denounce Apple for delaying support for Blu-ray, a technology characterized by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at Apple’s latest notebook PC launch as “a bag of hurt.”

“Blu-ray has already won the format war. Not only is there fully functional and mature support for Blu-ray in other operating systems but you can now rent Blu-ray discs from almost any rental chain. Blu-ray has become pervasive technology that is being widely adopted by consumers everywhere,” Pedraza contended.

Source: Beta News

A new report reveals incidents of online fraud in the UK have jumped nearly 20% from the year before.

The study, conducted by Garlik, claims there were 250,000 incidents of online financial fraud in 2007.

It as an alarming number, but one dwarfed by the three and a half million online crimes that were carried out in the same period, a 9% rise from the previous year. Of these crimes, the report estimates 84,000 cases were of online identity fraud.

Ominously, the report suggests the economic downturn and the increasing awareness of online theft and its rewards could result in more individuals taking up e-crime.

“It’s critical in this time of financial crisis that individuals are vigilant with their personal information, because as long as the credit crunch continues, we can expect to see a real growth in online financial fraud,” says Garlik’s chief executive Tom Ilube.

The report was based on estimated data gathered in collaboration with leading criminologists, which Garlik claims was necessary source due to the absence of cybercrime data from the Government.

A recent BBC investigation into e-crime, revealed debit and credit card fraud was worth £500 million, backing claims by the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, which last year claimed e-crime was running out of control.

“At the moment it seems that the internet is increasingly perceived as a sort of ‘wild west’, outside the law,” its report read.

Source: PC Pro