The Great Geek Manual News

A recent draft of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) surfaced on Wikileaks this weekend. Among other things, the draft aims to strengthen the power and rights of the entertainment industry and other copyright holders, by letting them choose how they want to be compensated for copyright infringements.

ACTA is an international agreement that aims to target piracy and counterfeiting globally. The degree of secrecy surrounding the negotiations is astonishing. Many institutions, the press and various individuals have requested that the participating countries provide an insight into their plans, but none have succeeded thus far.

It almost seems they are actively blocking the public from having their say, while in contrast they continue to receive input from anti-piracy lobbyists such as the RIAA and MPAA. However, as time progresses more details about ACTA become public, largely thanks to Wikileaks.

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Source: Torrent Freak

Thinking about letting a big-name blogger test-drive your new hybrid in the hope he’ll post a glowing review about it, or maybe sending some beverage products to an influencer, hoping she’ll spread the word?

You might have to think twice, if the Federal Trade Commission follows through with its proposed plan to start regulating viral marketing and blogs.

As part of its review of its advertising guidelines, the FTC is proposing that word-of-mouth marketers and bloggers, as well as people on social-media sites such as Facebook, be held liable for any false statements they make about a product they’re promoting, along with the product’s marketer. This could present a significant issue for marketers, including the likes of Microsoft, Ford and Pepsi, who spend billions on word-of-mouth and social media. PQ Media projects that marketers will spend $3.7 billion on word-of-mouth marketing in 2011.

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Source: Advertising Age

In a decision that is likely to alarm file-sharers worldwide, an almost empty French National Assembly has finally voted through its “three strikes law” designed to clamp down on file-sharing and illegal downloads.

This was despite the guerilla warfare waged against these proposals over the last few months by a handful of Deputies on the right (Lionel Tardy, Alain Suguenot), centre (Jean Dionis du Séjour) and left (Christian Paul, Patrick Bloche, Martine Billard). A clearly scandalised Jean Dionis du Séjour railed at the poor attendance for this key measure, as, he claimed, just one in forty deputies bothered to turn up for the final debate.

The provisions are included in a law on the distribution of works and the protection of rights with respect to the internet. The law is also referred to as the loi Hadopi, because it creates a “High Authority” (Haute autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet), which will in future be charged with monitoring and regulating the use of the internet in France.

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Source: The Register

U.S. lawmakers are pushing to raise U.S. defenses against cyberattacks, pushing legislation that would empower the government to enforce security standards for private industry for the first time.

The proposals, in Senate legislation that could be introduced as early as Wednesday, would expand the focus of the government’s cybersecurity efforts to include military networks and private systems that control such necessities as electricity and water distribution.

The legislation also calls for the appointment of a White House cybersecurity “czar” with the broad authority to shut down computer networks, including private ones, in the case of a cyberattack.

The legislation, co-sponsored by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV) and Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-ME), was drafted with White House input, although no official endorsement has been made by the Obama adminstration.

“People say this is a military or intelligence concern, but it’s a lot more than that,” Rockefeller, a former intelligence committee chairman, told reporters. “It suddenly gets into the realm of traffic lights and rail networks and water and electricity.”

The Rockefeller-Snowe measure would create the Office of the National Cybersecurity Adviser, whose leader would report directly to the president and would coordinate defense efforts across government agencies.

Source: All Headline News

Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the newly resurrected Senate Communications, Technology and the Internet subcommittee, planned to tell cable executives tonight that his panel will be busy this year developing a comprehensive broadband strategy and monitoring how the $7.2 billion in stimulus funds to expand broadband service is spent.

Kerry is addressing a dinner with hundreds of cable executives who are in Washington for the industry’s three-day annual trade show. “There are a lot of issues on our plate and we’re teeing up an aggressive subcommittee agenda to deal with them,” he planned to say, according to prepared remarks released by his office.

“We’ve got to develop a coherent, comprehensive national approach to broadband service in this country,” Kerry planned to say. “We have to view the $7.2 billion broadband investment in the stimulus package as a down payment on a national strategy to deliver broadband to rural Americans who can’t access it and urban Americans who can’t afford it.”

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Source: The Wall Street Journal

The Federal Trade Commission kicked off its big DRM conference in Seattle Wednesday morning by saying that the goal was not to “take sides” over the question of whether DRM is good or bad—but the conference nevertheless opened with a warning.

Mary Engle, an FTC Acting Deputy Director, began her remarks by warning that those who use DRM had better get serious about disclosing it and the limits that it places on products. She referenced the Sony BMG rootkit debacle, saying that “sellers who use DRM technology to enforce the terms of bargains with consumers need to be particularly careful to disclose in advance” what those bargains are.

And just stuffing the disclosure into the fine print of an End User License Agreement (EULA) isn’t good enough. “If your advertising giveth and your EULA taketh away,” she said, “don’t be surprised if the FTC comes calling.”

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Source: Ars Technica

TorrentFreak and other peer-to-peer-interested sites are taking a hard look at a controversial law that will make it easier for copyright holders to get personal information on people they claim are infringing on their rights. Despite massive public disapproval, rules based on the EU’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) goes into effect on Wednesday, April 1. (No fooling.)

The law, which permits the rights holders to petition the court for the names of people associated with IP addresses via which infringement is alleged to have occurred, will also increase penalties and eventually criminalize large-scale infringement. In a recent poll, 48% of Swedes said they believe the new law is wrong, with just 32% approving. More memorably, Rikard Falkvinge, chairman of Sweden’s Pirate Party and co-leader of the Facebook protest, castigated the digital literacy of the legislation’s authors, telling TorrentFreak that “These laws are written by digital illiterates who behave like blindfolded, drunken elephants trumpeting about in an egg packaging facility.”

Source: Beta News

A French bill that proposes disconnecting users from the Internet if they download music or video files illegally has drawn criticism from consumer groups and opposition legislators.

The government wants to stem the flow of songs and films circulating freely on the Internet, depriving artists of revenues and threatening the survival of production companies.

“Artists need to make a living. We are ruining them. We must react and have the courage to take our responsibilities,” said Jean-Francois Cope, head of ruling UMP party legislators in the National Assembly.

Music companies have been hit hard by Internet piracy in recent years and the trend shows no sign of abating.

About 95 percent of the music downloaded from the Internet around the world in 2008, or more than 40 billion files, was illegal.

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Source: iT News

A bill designed to protect people from the risks to security and privacy associated with computer-to-computer file-sharing programs has been introduced in the House.

The legislation, introduced March 5, would prohibit certain types of behavior on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks on computers and make them punishable as unfair or deceptive actions under consumer protection laws.

P2P programs let users easily share videos, music and other data, but have also been used to extract sensitive information from someone’s computer without the victim’s knowledge. P2P networks automatically search hard drives for files that are available for sharing, and the security risks associated with the programs have drawn concern from lawmakers.

The legislation would require the file-sharing programs to show users a “clear and conspicuous notice” that computer’s files could be made available to another computer if the program is used. It would require informed consent from the computer’s owner immediately before the program is installed.

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Source: Federal Computer Week

Mexico will start a national register of mobile phone users that will include fingerprinting all customers in an effort to catch criminals who use the devices to extort money and negotiate kidnapping ransoms.

Under a new law published on Monday and due to be in force in April, mobile phone companies will have a year to build up a database of their clients, complete with fingerprints. The idea would be to match calls and messages to the phones’ owners.

Hundreds of people are kidnapped in Mexico every year and the number of victims is rising sharply as drug gangs, under pressure from an army crackdown, seek new income.

Lawmakers who pushed the bill through Congress last year say there are around 700 criminal bands in Mexico, some of them operating from prison cells, that use cell phones to extract extortion and kidnap ransom payments.

Most of Mexico’s 80 million mobile phones are prepaid handsets with a given number of minutes of use that can be bought in stores without any identification. The phones can be topped up with more minutes via vendors on street corners.

The register, detailed in the government’s official gazette, means new subscribers will now be fingerprinted when they buy a handset or phone contract.

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Source: Reuters

President Obama is continuing to fill the senior ranks of the U.S. Department of Justice with the copyright industry’s favorite lawyers. Donald Verrilli announced Wednesday that he had been named associate deputy attorney general. Verrilli is the lawyer who pulled the plug on Grokster, sued Google on behalf of Viacom, and represented the Recording Industry Association of America against a Minnesota woman named Jammie Thomas who’s accused of illicit file sharing.

This follows a string of other pro-copyright industry picks that Obama has made. Last month, there was Obama’s selection last month of a top RIAA lawyer–currently squaring off in court with Harvard University’s Berkman Center–to be third-in-command at the Justice Department.

Vice President Joe Biden has long been an ally of the recording industry, urging the criminal prosecutions of copyright-infringing peer-to-peer users and trying to create a new federal felony involving playing unauthorized music. And another senior Justice Department post has gone to the top antipiracy enforcer for the Business Software Alliance, a strong supporter of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention rules.

Obama’s latest choice, Verrilli, is a senior litigator in the Washington, D.C. offices of the Jenner & Block law firm. In technology circles, he’s probably best known for arguing the Minnesota case called Capitol v. Thomas. In that case, the RIAA convinced the judge to accept jury instructions saying that the “making copyrighted sound recordings available for electronic distribution on a peer-to-peer network” violated the law, even if none had actually been transferred.

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Source: CNet

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

Here’s a glimmer of hope that 2009 will be the year of DRM reform.

Questionable DRM regimes have caught the eye of the US Federal Trade Commission, which has announced it will host a town hall meeting on March 25 to address the consumer protection, anti-competition, and disclosure issues surrounding DRM restrictions in the digital marketplace.

The FTC is also accepting public comment and research on DRM to be submitted online, due by January 30.

“Digital rights management (DRM) refers to technologies typically used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, and copyright holders to attempt to control how consumers access and use media and entertainment content,” the FTC states. “Among other issues, the workshop will address the need to improve disclosures to consumers about DRM limitations.”

The meeting will include demonstrations of DRM-related technology, panel discussions on the benefits and disadvantages of DRM use on consumers, legal issues involving DRM, and “consideration of the need for government involvement to better protect consumers.”

It would seem the FTC is at least considering insisting that folks who purchase digital media be given adequate notice on the terms and material limitations of their purchases. The fact that companies cripple their products with DRM on the sly has always been a major point of contention for the technology.

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Source: The Register

A recent US Army intelligence report identifies Twitter as a potential communication channel for terrorist activities. I think it is fantastic that intelligence efforts like this have the foresight to recognize emerging channels of communication and that there is effort being put into proactively enumerating the potential use cases. Yet, I am not impressed with the limited case studies presented in the report (the obvious case of Twitter being used for communication in addition to extremely specific situations of Twitter being utilized to trigger explosive devices). I feel that the use cases presented in this report are a good start, but they do not go beyond the obvious scenarios. Therefore, in this article, I want to further the discussion on how micro-blogging channels may be leveraged by terrorist organizations to obtain real time surveillance and intelligence of their efforts. I feel this sort of a conversation will be beneficial to counter-intelligence efforts (I will write a separate article on how Twitter may be actively leveraged by counter-intelligence).

Before I go any further, I want to get out of the way a probable knee-jerk reaction that I suspect some readers may have at this point. I am in no way proposing Twitter or social media as an evil (in fact I’m a huge fan of Twitter and I use it on a daily basis). That would be as absurd as saying that the Internet is evil because criminals can use it to communicate. Twitter is a channel of communication - my goal is to point out increased capabilities this channel may provide for criminal use.

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Source: O’Reilly Blog