The Great Geek Manual News

Almost three years have passed since The Pirate Bay’s servers were seized by the Swedish police.

In the years since the raid a lot has changed. For one, The Pirate Bay grew to become the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet and one of the most prominent sites in the world. Some estimate that approximately 50% of all Internet traffic is coordinated by The Pirate Bay tracker.

The Pirate Bay raid eventually led to an investigation that took two years to complete. The police reported its findings in 4,000 pages of legal paperwork and in three weeks from now, starting February 16th, it will be tested in court. Four individuals are charged with ‘assisting copyright infringement’, while several copyright holders together are claiming over $100 million in damages.

The fate of the four will partly depend on the expert witnesses presented by both sides. The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde revealed some of the witnesses the prosecution will call, while casting doubt on their competence. Among them, IFPI CEO John Kennedy and policeman employee Jim Keyzer, who later took a job at Warner Bros.

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Source: Torrent Freak

The Internet now has reached a landmark 1-billion users worldwide and that number is only expected to grow as wireless devices such as cellphones allow more users to surf the web, says digital tracking firm comScore.

“A key driver to that growth has been its ability to break down cultural barriers and cross over country borders,” said Jamie Gavin, senior marketing and communications analyst at U.K.-based comScore.

“I think one of the Internet’s great strengths is that it kind of unites people in that way,” Mr. Gavin said from London Friday.

ComScore found that more than a billion people aged 15 and older used the Internet from home and work computers around the world in December.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo Internet sites were the top three visited by the more than 1 billion users last December.

The Asia-Pacific region accounted for the highest share of global Internet users at 41 per cent, followed by Europe at 28 per cent and North America at 18 per cent.

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Source: The Globe Mail

Microsoft Corp. on Monday released a nearly finalized version of its new web browser Internet Explorer 8.

The Redmond, Washington-based firm said the IE 8 is faster, easier to use, and more secure than rival web browsers Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

In IE 8, only the tab and not the browser closes when a bad site is hit and Web services like maps or translation can be opened on a small window so users don’t have to leave a webpage.

IE 8 is also capable of seeing and blocking third-party content providers that track users’ activities as well as keep browsing private by not recording sites viewed.

The release of the pre-final version comes when Microsoft Corp. is losing its share of the browser market to competitors. Last year, the IE’s share of the market is 68 percent. Mozilla’s took 21 percent of the market with its Firefox.

Source: All Headline News

It’s a modern medical twist on an ancient art. Scientists at Draper Laboratory, in Cambridge, MA, are developing a nanosensor that could be injected into the skin, much like tattoo dye, to monitor an individual’s blood-sugar level. As the glucose level increases, the “tattoo” would fluoresce under an infrared light, telling a diabetic whether or not she needs an insulin shot following a meal. The researchers have already tested a sodium-sensing version of the device in mice, and will soon begin animal tests of the glucose-specific sensor.

The most reliable way to measure blood sugar is by pricking the finger for a tiny blood sample and using enzyme-laden test strips to detect glucose. In an attempt to free diabetics from this time-consuming and expensive regime, a number of novel glucose-sensing technologies are under development, from implanted devices that continually monitor blood sugar and dispense insulin, to noninvasive sensors that detect glucose through the skin via infrared light.

Heather Clark and her colleagues are developing something designed to operate in between these two extremes. The material consists of 120-nanometer polymer beads coated with a biocompatible material. Within each bead is a fluorescent dye and specialized sensor molecules, designed to detect specific chemicals, such as sodium or glucose.

When injected into the skin, the sensor molecule pulls the target chemical–say, sodium–into the polymer from the interstitial fluid, which surrounds cells. To compensate for the newly acquired positive charge of a sodium ion, a dye molecule releases a positive ion, making the molecule fluoresce. The level of fluorescence increases with the concentration of the chemical target. Scientists can swap in different recognition molecules to measure different targets, including chloride, calcium, and glucose. The range of concentrations that the sensor can detect can be varied by altering the ratio of the components, depending on whether it is important to measure precise concentrations or more broad variability.

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Source: Technology Review

Yes we can … see the Vice-President’s home. For as long as Dick Cheney lived at the official vice-presidential residence in Washington, the public was denied access to satellite imagery of the home on the popular Google Maps service.

Ostensibly for national security reasons, the government blocked access to such images, even though detailed satellite photos of the White House and the Pentagon, among other sensitive locations, were readily available.

But just a few days after new Vice-President Joe Biden moved into the ornate 19th-century home, the cartographic obstruction is no more.

The move appears to be a simple coincidence – Google received updated data at the same time Mr. Cheney left the vice-presidency – but it was nonetheless hailed by many as emblematic of a new era of transparency in Washington that the public now has access to detailed photos of the partially converted Naval Observatory where U.S. vice-presidents have lived since the 1970s.

Located just a few kilometres northwest of downtown Washington, the complex itself is also still used by scientists to observe the stars. Under the Bush-Cheney administration, the home was represented in the maps service by a pixelated, blurry mess.

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Source: The Globe and Mail

In less than a week, two different forms of Trojan horses have invaded Macs whose users downloaded pirated copies of first Apple iWork 09 and now Adobe Photoshop CS4.

As of Monday morning, 21,000 people had downloaded the first Trojan horse in a pirated copy of iWork, according to Intego, a UK-based developer of privacy and security software for the Mac. The second Trojan horse in a pirated copy of Photoshop had been downloaded 5,000 times.

“If we extrapolate the total number, it is twice that,” said Peter James, a spokesperson for Intego. The company is warning Mac users to avoid downloading pirated software.

Security analyst Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks advised, “Pay for your software. It is not antivirus, it is not patch. There is no vulnerability other than your gullibility.”

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Source: News Factor

When the Wikipedia pages for Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd both say that the men have died (when in fact they haven’t) and the changes are reverted five minutes later, is it a public relations disaster for the online encyclopedia or triumph of the communal editing model?

Hardcore Wikipedians are currently working through the answer to that question, and the end result of the deliberations could be a new process for flagging revisions to contentious articles. Wikipedia is no stranger to article vandalism, and it’s not as though the world isn’t aware of that fact by now (see Stephen Colbert’s attempt to rewrite the entry for “elephant,” for instance, or last week’s episode of 30 Rock). But the edits to the Byrd and Kennedy bios attracted national attention after the Washington Post ran a piece about the five minutes of inaccuracy.

In response, Wikipedia cofounder Jimbo Wales demanded the use of “flagged revisions,” a process that would only allow trusted editors to make changes to particular parts of the site–perhaps only to the biographies of living people (BLP), for instance. Unvetted editors could still make changes, but they would have to be approved by a reliable editor before going live for the rest of the world to see.

Legally, Wikipedia appears to be fine, since the organization has nothing to do with the false information. But is it unethical not to do more to protect the reputations of real people who are still living and who could be harmed/embarrassed/punked by false Wikipedia information? Wales says yes.

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Source: Ars Technica

The World Trade Organisation has ruled that China must stop turning a blind eye to the widespread sale of pirated software.

The ground-breaking ruling requires that China destroy counterfeit software after it has been confiscated by authorities, and offer greater legal protection to foreign copyright.

The ruling is intended to break the current cycle of distribution, which often sees confiscated software back on the streets within days of its initial seizure.

The US launched the dispute in 2007 out of frustration at rip-offs of software, films and other trademarked property openly available in Chinese cities.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance, a coalition of US music, movie, book and software industry groups, estimates that piracy in China costs them more than $3.7 billion in lost sales.

“Today, a WTO panel found that a number of deficiencies in China’s Intellectual Property Rights regime are incompatible with its WTO obligations,” says acting US Trade Representative Peter Allgeier. “We will engage vigorously with China on appropriate corrective actions to ensure that US rights holders obtain the benefits of this decision.”

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Source: PC Pro

Yahoo is touting a new set of tools it is using to block spam for its webmail service.

Company anti-spam czar Mark Risher made a posting on Tuesday outlining some of the new protections that the company is putting into place.

“At Yahoo, we take spam seriously,” wrote Risher.

“It’s a huge challenge and the bad guys are always out there trying to make a buck with their scams, but we’re committed to helping keep you safer online.”

Amongst the tools is a computing cluster which utilises the company’s Hadoop distributed computing system.

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Source: iT News

Canada’s Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) famously decided last year to allow Bell Canada to single out P2P traffic for bandwidth throttling between the hours of 4:30pm to 2am. But even as it allowed a practice that the US Federal Communications Commission had just put the kibosh on, the CRTC also launched a much broader hearing on the entire issue of network neutrality.
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With the ISP responses now in, it’s clear just how widespread deep packet inspection (DPI) has become at Canadian ISPs. It’s enough to make staff Canuck Frank Caron weep into his Molson’s.

Christopher Parsons, a grad student at the University of Victoria (the Fightin’ Vikes!), has done yeoman’s work by combing through the numerous (and lengthy) ISP submissions to CRTC and compiling them into a set of tables (PDF). This makes it simple to compare responses across ISPs, and one of the obvious places to start is with filtering. So who uses DPI to throttle Internet traffic?

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Source: Ars Technica

The U.S. Supreme Court let stand on Wednesday a ruling that a federal law designed to keep Internet pornography away from children violated constitutional free-speech rights.

The high court rejected a Justice Department appeal defending the law and handed a victory to those who argued that the efforts of Congress to regulate cyberspace by keeping minors away from online pornography infringed on free-speech rights.

The law in question required that website operators use credit cards or adult access codes and personal identification numbers to keep minors from seeing harmful pornography. Violators faced up to six months in prison and fines of as much as $50,000 a day.

It was adopted in 1998 after the Supreme Court struck down on free-speech grounds another law called the Communications Decency Act. The law has never been enforced as lower courts repeatedly have ruled it unconstitutional.

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Source: Reuters

A major credit card processor, Heartland, revealed this week that hackers have breached its system, allowing up to 100 million illegal duplicate credit card payments to be made per month.

The company said it was contacted about suspicious activities by Visa and Mastercard, and that a hacker planted software that stole credit card data from Heartland’s networks.

Heartland processes credit cards for about 250,000 companies. The company claims no social security numbers, encrypted personal identification numbers, addresses or telephone numbers were stolen.

The breach happened some time in 2008, Robert Baldwin, Heartland’s president and chief financial officer said. Technology watchers say this could be a record-setting compromise of credit card data.

Baldwin said his company has been cooperating with the Secret Service and the Justice Department. Officials think that the attack was perpetrated by a sophisticated group that has hacked into other financial institutions. Baldwin told USA Today that Heartland will notify victims that their information was stolen after the situation is sorted out.

Source: All Headline News

Norwegian companies have found their Google ads presented at the dubious file sharing search engine Isohunt. It looks like Ask.com is involved.

The newspaper Dagens Næringsliv reports that several Norwegian companies have found their Google Adwords/AdSense text ads on the notorious Canadian file sharing site Isohunt — a BitTorrent search engine.

Given that some of the companies belong to the record business — among them Sony BMG and the Norwegian media store Platekompaniet — the industry has reacted strongly.

Interestingly enough, Google has already excluded Isohunt as a Google Adwords partner, exactly because it helps users find illegal downloads.

Isohunt has managed to serve Google ads because another ad network apparently serves “surplus ads” from Google.

We were not aware that Google accepts reselling of ads of this kind, but it seems to be the only explanation.

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Source: Pandia

The Recording Industry Association of America is objecting to the webcasting of pretrial arguments in an upcoming file-sharing trial.

The RIAA claims that the re-runs “will be readily subject to editing and manipulation by any reasonably tech-savvy individual.”

That is among the arguments the RIAA is making in urging a federal appeals court to reverse a Massachusetts federal judge’s order that would allow the pretrial broadcast this Thursday. The broadcast, assuming it goes forward, will include a Boston University student and his attorney challenging the RIAA’s copyright infringement case. It is believed to be the first time a U.S. federal trial court has allowed a live internet stream from the courtroom.

“Petitioners are concerned that, unlike a trial transcript, the broadcast of a court proceeding through the internet will take on a life of its own in that forum,” the RIAA wrote (.pdf) the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals. “The broadcast will be readily subject to editing and manipulation by any reasonably tech-savvy individual. Even without improper modification, statements may be taken out of context, spliced together with other statements and broadcast (sic) rebroadcast as if it were an accurate transcript. Such an outcome can only do damage to Petitioner’s case.”

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Source: Wired’s Blog