Though you all might get a kick out of this information so I’m posting it here.

On December 31, 2009, the Transportation Security Administration backed off on an ill-considered administrative subpoena it issued to trasportation industry blogger, Christopher Elliott. EFF assisted Mr. Elliott in responding to the subpoena.

The subpoena was hand-delivered to Mr. Elliott by a TSA representative on the evening of December 29, 2009. It sought all documents “concerning your receipt of TSA Security Directive 1544-09-06 dated December 25, 2009.” The much-criticized directive had been given to hundreds of employees of TSA and the airlines and described some of the passenger-related security measures put into place in the immediate aftermath of the unsuccessful attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight on December 25, 2009. The directive expired on December 30, 2009. Mr. Elliott obtained it in the course of his coverage of the situation and had sought TSA comment before publishing. The subpoena demanded all documents by the close of business on December 31, 2009, just two days after the agent delivered it.

Mr. Elliott’s counsel Anthony Elia, assisted by EFF and others, responded to TSA by objecting to the subpoena both on the grounds that it did not provide a reasonable time for Mr. Elliott to respond and because it improperly sought to require a journalist to reveal his sources and materials. Upon receipt of the objection, TSA first granted an extension to Mr. Elliott, then withdrew the subpoena entirely.

TSA also withdrew a similar subpoena it had issued to blogger Steve Frischling, but reportedly not until after the agents improperly threatened Mr. Frischling’s job and pressured him into giving them his computer, which they then apparently damaged. The facts of what occurred to Mr. Fischling are deeply troubling.

TSA should have known better than to use its civil administrative subpoena power to try to force these reporters to divulge their sources. This incident reinforces the need for a federal reporter shield law that fully embraces the new era of blogs, tweets and other nontraditional journalism tools. Nonetheless, we’re pleased that cooler heads prevailed at TSA this time.

Check this out! Wouldn’t it be great to still make as much money as these guys did AFTER folks pirated your movie! Check it out!

According to TorrentFreak, last summer’s Star Trek movie was the “most pirated movie of 2009.” So it seems that Paramount Pictures was prescient when it gave testimony before the FCC that used Star Trek as an illustrative example of how “Internet piracy” is poised to devastate Hollywood and (though the nexus here is less than clear) undermine residential broadband in America.

Funny thing is, Star Trek is on course to make more than $100 million in profits.

Here’s the financial breakdown, courtesy of The Numbers.com, which gathers financial data for movie industry analysts:

Production costs: $140m
Promotion costs: ~$100m
Global box office revenues: $385m
U.S. TV syndication rights: $30m
DVD & Bluray revenues (anticipated, based on sales and rentals since Nov. 2009): >$100m

Based on these figures, film industry analyst Bruce Nash at The Numbers predicts a net profit to Paramount of more than $100m on the movie. Not bad for the “most pirated movie of 2009,” which was camcorded and widely released on the Internet within days of theatrical release.

This is just one data point suggesting that Hollywood’s hue and cry about “Internet piracy” should be taken with a grain of salt. Other data points include Hollywood’s record breaking box office results for 2009 (in the midst of a recession!). And the fact that twice as many movies were released in 2009, as compared to 2004. (There is also far more new music being released today than 10 years ago, thanks to new digital technologies.)

The goal of copyright is to encourage creativity. As 2009 comes to a close, there is no evidence out there that “Internet piracy” is leaving us with fewer creators or fewer copyrighted works, even if you limit yourself to considering works being created by “professionals” employed by movie studios. And once you factor in all the new, noncommercial or semi-pro creators who have been empowered by the very same Internet technologies that Hollywood is blaming for “piracy,” well, it seems clear that creativity is alive and well, and that Hollywood’s demands for drastic overhauls of copyright law and broadband policy are disconnected from reality.

And, importantly, some of what Hollywood calls “piracy” is actually the result of its stubborn refusal to give legitimate customers what they want, whether it’s home media servers for their DVDs, the right to rip DVDs to make noncommercial remixes, or new options to rent DVDs. (Or new video-on-demand offerings unless the FCC first approves “selectable output control” DRM restrictions for our TVs.)

Yes, there are lots of unauthorized copies being made out there. But despite what Hollywood’s spokesmen would have us believe, the sky is not falling. In fact, as we ring in 2010, many industries would happily trade places with the major Hollywood movie studios.

Ran across this and thought others would find it interesting!

Cory Doctorow, my former EFF colleague, now novelist and all-around-inspiration, gave a stirring speech entitled “How to Destroy the Book” in November at a Canadian conference dedicated to literacy. Fittingly, it was spontaneously transcribed and posted online at The Varsity.ca. The whole thing is terrific, but the first portion, an elegy to books and what they mean to us, is stirring and highly recommended to anyone who loves books:

When I buy an audiobook on CD, it’s mine. The license agreement, such as it is, is “don’t violate copyright law,” and I can rip that CD to mp3, I can load it to my iPod or any number of devises—it’s mine; I can give it away, I can sell it; it’s mine. But when you buy an audiobook through Audible, which now controls 90 per cent of the [downloadable] audiobook market, you get a license agreement, not a property interest. The things that you can do with it are limited by DRM; the players you can play it on are limited by the license agreements with Audible. Audible doesn’t do this because the publishers ask them to. Audible and iTunes, because Audible is the sole supplier to iTunes, do this because it’s in their own interest….

Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right. These people were readers before they were publishers before they were writers before they worked in the legal department before they were agents before they were salespeople and marketers. We are the people of the book, and we need to start acting like it.

As it happens, the battle over whether you “own” digital goods (like e-books, CDs, and software) or merely “license” them will be a hot issue in court in 2010, with EFF deeply involved in the fight.

Internet censorship is quite a ponderable question. It’s so available and allows for so much interaction outside our own country that I know our officials are having a hard time coping. If you have been watching this freedoms of the internet disappear with a slight amount of fear and disgust you’ll be interested in this article I found…online!

Our fellow Internet freedom advocates at Electronic Frontiers Australia are gearing up for an important fight in the new year as the Australian government proposes mandatory national Internet filters with a secret blacklist. EFA is looking for volunteers and colleagues — particularly Australians, but they can use help from outside Australia as well — to help take on this critical issue. As Lelia Green wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald, the censorship proposal risks “legitimating a range of repressive policies pursued by some of the globe’s least accountable governments.”

In 2006, the New York Times reported that the People’s Republic of China was defending its Internet censorship and surveillance practices by claiming that they were not particularly different from those of other countries. The Times reported that a Chinese official argued (in the newspaper’s paraphrase) that “the controls [China] places on Web sites and Internet service providers in mainland China do not differ much from those employed by the United States and European countries”.

“If you study the main international practices in this regard you will find that China is basically in compliance with the international norm,” [Liu Zhengrong] said. “The main purposes and methods of implementing our laws are basically the same.”

[...]

“It is clear that any country’s legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal information,” he said. “We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job on this front.”

This argument sounded like a weak rationalization in 2006, and the Times noted various qualitative differences between Internet restrictions in the PRC and those in liberal democracies. But researchers have told us that governments around the world, including Australia’s, seem eager to chip away at those differences. The forthcoming book Access Controlled from the OpenNet Initiative, according to its authors, reports on an alarming trend where “Internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online surveillance are increasing in scale, scope, and sophistication around the world, in democratic countries as well as in authoritarian states.” The OpenNet Initiative researchers have also noted that governments are increasingly looking to other countries’ practices as precedents. Soon illiberal regimes’ claims that Internet censorship and national firewalls are a widespread international norm could ring less hollow. Some year soon, it may be sober fact rather than rationalization.

EFA’s fight against Internet censorship in Australia is crucial. We hope Internet users around the world will join it.

We have to take seriously the threats of digital freedom restrictions and yet find a harmonious balance in all things trade and global. It’s a hard post to strike and though I know there are hardnoses on both sides of the issue, it is my hope that a harmonious balance can be found. If you aren’t familiar with this organization and what they do, you should be. Freedom is a terrible thing to waste. I’ve included a summary of their organization so you can get to know them better.

The Internet is global, and so are threats to digital freedom. Over the past year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has fought Internet censorship, oppressive copyright laws and privacy violations wherever they’ve been under threat around the world.

With the help of our global partners and supporters like you, EFF has been able to achieve great things over the past year:

• Protecting Freedom of Expression. EFF helped establish the Global Network Initiative, garnering commitments from leading technology companies worldwide to resist pressure from government censors in repressive countries and to advance freedom of expression in their products and services.
• Making Information More Accessible. EFF helped make knowledge and information accessible to more people across the world by fighting for exceptions and limitations to copyright for the reading disabled, for libraries and archives, for educational purposes, and for innovative services.
• Assembling the World’s Copyright Laws. EFF helped create Copyright-Watch.org, the most comprehensive publicly available database of international copyright laws ever assembled. Currently including the laws of 187 countries, Copyright-Watch.org was created to strengthen the global network of copyright experts, to facilitate comparative policy research, and to provide for national advocacy support.
• Creating Global Privacy Standards. EFF worked with public interest organizations from every continent to create international standards for privacy that ensure the priority of civil rights in the face of increasing surveillance and monitoring.
• Influencing European Internet Policy. EFF collaborated with digital rights and consumer protection advocates in Europe to preserve judicial oversight and due process in IP enforcement efforts and to fight Three Strikes proposals.
• Promoting Access to Knowledge in Developing Countries. EFF promoted access to knowledge in the developing world by encouraging government bodies to create interoperability standards that encouraged universal access.
• Exposing the Lack of Transparency in Trade Negotiations. EFF led the battle to shed sunlight on the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret multi-national pact that could severely limit digital rights.
• Fighting Against Abuse of Cybercrime Legislation. EFF supported local activists in Brazil, Kazakhstan, and Thailand fighting against the abuse and misuse of cybercrime laws to suppress legitimate activity. EFF also fought to secure privacy rights and civil liberties protections in the legislative implementation of the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention.

This is but a sample of the things we’ve worked on in 2009. For more information about our international mission, see http://www.eff.org/issues/international.

Please donate to EFF today, and join us in the fight for a free and open Internet:

http://www.eff.org/give

Thanks in advance for your support!

Happy Holidays from EFF’s International Team

I’m going to be harping on here for a while about EEF and what they do. I think it is in every businesses interest to keep up with what it going on concerning licensing, censure and controls the govenment imposes on us that affect our business. What’s happening online right now will effect us for years to come and set the tone for how those years will play out. Digital rights, copy rights, global and at home, are impacted by the thoughts in this article:

As we count down to end of 2009, the emerging star of this year’s holiday shopping season is shaping up to be the electronic book reader (or e-reader). From Amazon’s Kindle to Barnes and Noble’s forthcoming Nook, e-readers are starting to transform how we buy and read books in the same way mp3s changed how we buy and listen to music.

Unfortunately, e-reader technology also presents significant new threats to reader privacy. E-readers possess the ability to report back substantial information about their users’ reading habits and locations to the corporations that sell them. And yet none of the major e-reader manufacturers have explained to consumers in clear unequivocal language what data is being collected about them and why.

As a first step towards addressing these problems, EFF has created a first draft of our Buyer’s Guide to E-Book Privacy. We’ve examined the privacy policies for the major e-readers on the market to determine what information they reserve the right to collect and share.

*Based on the proposed Google Books Privacy Policy. The policy is subject to change prior to final acceptance of the Google Books Settlement.
**The Nook will not ship until January 2010 and as yet has no publicly available product-specific Terms of Use or Privacy Policy. Results based on the general Barnes and Noble Privacy Policy.

read more

Social media is not only a marketing tool as businesses use it, but it’s a social gathering place of large amounts of people who want to interact in ways they choose to which encompasses privacy issues for most users. Facebook has recently modified their privacy policy in terms of how you are or are not allowed to be private. I’ve included an article below that I found great for explaining the new policy.

As you may have heard by now, one of the biggest problems with Facebook’s recent privacy overhaul was that it removed users’ ability to hide their friend lists from the world. This was one of several changes that were met with substantial criticism and anger from the media and from Facebook users. The significance of the changes was eloquently explained by Joseph Bonneau, a researcher with the Cambridge University Security Group:

[T]here have been many research papers, including a few by me and colleagues in Cambridge, concluding that the social graph is actually the most important information to keep private. The threats here are more fundamental and dangerous-unexpected inference of sensitive information, cross-network de-anonymisation, socially targeted phishing and scams.

It’s incredibly disappointing to see Facebook ignoring a growing body of scientific evidence and putting its social graph up for grabs. It will likely be completely crawled fairly soon by professional data aggregators, and probably by enterprising researchers soon after. The social graph is powerful view into who we are—Mark Zuckerberg said so himself—and it’s a sad day to see Facebook cynically telling us we can’t decide for ourselves whether or not to share it.

Another aspect of the friend list controversy has been its impact on political activism in oppressive regimes. In an interview with PC World, Facebook seemed to claim that the new friend list policy would somehow aid dissident movements. A spokesperson said, “We believe that Facebook, as demonstrated during the Iran elections and events in multiple other countries since our inception, plays a critical role in allowing people to communicate, organize and stand up against oppressive regimes and there is real value of connecting and sharing, which is what we’re trying to facilitate.”

However, an anonymous ZDNet commenter offered an altogether different perspective:

A number of my friends in Iran are active student protesters of the government. They use Facebook extensively to organize protests and meetings, but they had no choice but to delete their facebook accounts today. They are terrified that their once private lists of friends are now available to “everyone” that wants to know. When that “everyone” happens to include the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and members of the Basij militia, willing to kidnap, arrest, or murder to stifle dissent, the consequences seem just a bit more serious than those faced from silly pictures and status updates.

Facebook, to its credit, responded to these criticisms by partially restoring users’ previous control. Although their effort had a few false starts, users are now able to make use of a new checkbox:

By un-checking this, users can prevent most people from viewing their friend lists. (For a clear step-by-step guide, check out CNet’s excellent tutorial.)

This is certainly an improvement, but it still falls short of the level of control that users had prior to the overhaul. Users are still unable to hide their friend lists from some or all of their friends, or from third-party Facebook applications which their friends install. In addition, the checkbox is in a counterintuitive and difficult to find location, entirely separate from most user privacy settings.

Facebook’s ostensible goal in this overhaul was to give users more clarity, flexibility and control. But, with friend lists, they’ve accomplished exactly the opposite.

Facebook’s new privacy policy has many up in arms. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the article below. I thought it was straight and to the point concerning Facebooks’ new policy. What do you think about it?:

It’s been a little over a week since Facebook debuted a massive revamp of its privacy settings. EFF immediately followed that release with a detailed critique, concluding that the changes were “clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before [and] will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data.”



Since then, EFF’s criticisms — and those of other vocal privacy advocates like ACLU, CDT, and EPIC — have been echoed throughout the mainstream press and across the web. As a Boston Globe editorial titled “Facebook’s Privacy Downgrade” correctly pointed out, “Most people who join Facebook do so because they want to share photos and messages with friends and family, not to expose their lives to the entire world.”

Notably, in a testament to the even-handedness of EFF’s critique, The Atlantic cited our blog post both in a story collecting negative reactions and in another story collecting positive reactions to the Facebook privacy revamp.

Not to be outdone by the media, Facebook users themselves were also immediately up in arms over the new changes. Negative comments flooded the Facebook Blog and the Facebook Site Governance page. Several of those comments were collected by the San Francisco Chronicle in a story titled “Facebook users speak out against new privacy settings”. Meanwhile, unhappy users used Facebook itself to organize opposition to the changes, with new groups being formed to protest the privacy revamp and older groups seeing renewed activity.

The past week’s privacy backlash culminated today with the filing of a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), joined by several other consumer and privacy groups. In the complaint, EPIC alleges that Facebook’s latest privacy changes are deceptive and unfair and asks that the FTC open an investigation and order Facebook to restore to its users the control over their privacy that has been lost in the transition. Considering the many tens of millions of American consumers who use Facebook, we hope and expect that the FTC will seriously consider the important questions raised by today’s complaint.

Ray Bradbury, author of The Illustrated Man, had the main character be a living screen of sorts. It was an unpleasant experience to say the least. Well this sort of technology is coming available soon. New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania have developed a silicon-and-silk implantable device which sits under the skin like a tattoo. They are already using them on mice and the hope is for the device to have LEDs in them.

They use a silk substrate to implant the device. The silk part eventually dissolves inside the body (can anyone say – spiderman!) So far they aren’t very big, just the size of a piece of rice and only about 250 nanometers thick.

The plan is for these things to be able to be hooked up to any kind of electronic device which can also be implanted in the body. They of course have some useful benefits in the health industry – but pretty much they just sound like Big Brother and the Antichrist. What do you think?

Apple and Microsoft have each introduced new mice with “multi-touch” sensing. Most people don’t think much about the little mice we use to run our computers, but the mouse was an awesome step forward for computing invented in 1968 by Doug Englebart. Since then there haven’t been too many changes to the design. Basically mice only allow movement using the palm and clicking a left, right and middle mouse button or a wheel.

Those who developed the multi-touch screens we are all beginning to consider commonplace, led the way for what amounts to multi-touch mice. The development of such screens allowed detection of multiple simultaneous presses all over a display screen. A multi-touch mouse uses the same idea and provides for more buttons for input.

Apple’s mouse is already on the market for $69 and Microsoft has 5 prototypes that are still in development. As usual Microsoft’s philosophy seems to be “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”