Wednesday, February 01, 2012


Mitigating the downside of using a service targeted by the RIAA's DoJ team... Lessons for future Cloud users?
Retrieve Your Legal Data From Megaupload.com
After the Justice Department indicted the top officials of the Hong Kong-based file-sharing site Megaupload.com on Jan. 19 and ordered a server purge, [First I heard that. No need for Due (or any) Process? Bob] legal users of the site have been scrambling to retrieve their data.
… The hosting companies possessing Megaupload customer's data could begin purging data as soon as Feb. 2, as the Justice Department has frozen the Megaupload administrators' assets so they can't pay their hosting bills. However, it remains unclear how much time users actually have to safely remove their data from the service before the cloud evaporates.
… The Electronic Frontier Foundation has teamed up with Megaupload's hosting company, Carpathia Hosting, to assist users in safely evacuating their data. While Carpathia doesn't have access to any customer data, [other than having it in their physical possession? Bob] the company has created the website MegaRetrieval, which points users to an EFF e-mail address where users can submit their contact information to request legal help from the EFF to retrieve their data.

(Related) RIAA's amendment to that pesky Constitution thing?

(Related) This kind of thinking give the **AA's heartburn...
Angry Birds CEO sees opportunity in piracy


Just preparing our justification for nuking Terhan?
Iran Now a ‘Top Threat’ to U.S. Networks, Spy Chief Claims
American officials have complained for years that U.S. networks were crawling with Russian and Chinese hackers. On Tuesday, the nation’s top intelligence official told Congress that there’s a new danger to America’s information security: Iran. Too bad he didn’t provide much evidence to back up the claim.
“Russia and China are aggressive and successful purveyors of economic espionage against the United States,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper noted in his prepared testimony (.pdf) to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “Iran’s intelligence operations against the United States, including cyber capabilities, have dramatically increased in recent years in depth and complexity. We assess that FIS [Foreign Intelligence Services] from these three countries will remain the top threats to the United States in the coming years.”


Failure to control your employees? What happened to the two dispatchers?
California family settles lawsuit over leaked crash images
February 1, 2012 by Dissent
Dan Whitcomb of Reuters reports a settlement in a precedent-setting case I’ve been covering for the past several years:
The family of a teen whose mangled corpse was shown in horrific car-crash photos that went viral online has settled a lawsuit against the California Highway Patrol for $2.37 million, ending a 5-year legal battle that changed state law.
The extremely graphic pictures, taken by investigators and leaked by two dispatchers, were posted across the Internet and used to taunt family members of 18-year-old Nicole “Nikki” Catsouras following her 2006 crash on an Orange County highway.
The settlement was made public by the highway patrol and an attorney for Catsouras’s parents and three sisters on Tuesday as a March trial date loomed in the long-running case.
Read more on WXXI.
The settlement, however, is not the end of the family’s struggle, as copies of the photos still appear on web sites, despite the family’s efforts to get them removed. The Highway Patrol will now assist in those efforts, which might actually help. If those photos were taken by the Highway Patrol, couldn’t they send web hosts DMCA takedown notices? [Can a government agency claim copyright? Bob]
Links to previous coverage of the Catsouras case on this blog can be found here.


Perhaps they are trying to prove a conspiracy to obstruct traffic?
Another subpoena to Twitter for Occupy related account
January 31, 2012 by Dissent
sosadmin writes:
Twitter today informed user @destructuremal that the State of New York had issued a subpoena for his account information. The account holder, Malcolm Harris of New York City, is an Occupy Wall Street activist who has been involved in movement organizing since at least September 2011.
Read more on PrivacySOS.
The subpoena says:
TWITTER IS DIRECTED not to disclose the existence of this subpoena to any party. Such disclosure would impede the investigation being conducted and interfere with the enforcement of law.
So exactly who/what authority is directing Twitter not to disclose? Does such “direction” have the force of a court order gagging Twitter? It would seem that it doesn’t but I would love to hear from some lawyers about this “direction” and its legal authority to compel nondisclosure.
According to information in the docket for this case, the incident and arrest by NYPD (Arrest #:M11685086) occurred on October 1, 2011 at 16:20.
Under “charges,” the docket shows:
PL 240.20 05
**TOP CHARGE**
 Violation, 1 count, Not an arrest charge, Arraignment charge
Description Dis/con: obstructing Traff
The next court appearance for Mr. Harris is scheduled for February 29, 2012. He was assigned legal representation by Legal Aid.
So for obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic a D.A. can demand Twitter produce a user’s tweets and user account information such as e-mail addresses? Seriously? How is this not an abuse of power?


When employees were asked for their email addresses, were they told they would be made public or was it just assumed they would understand that?
OR: State workers upset about getting emails at home
February 1, 2012 by Dissent
Dennis Thompson Jr. reports:
Some Oregon state workers are shocked and angry that a key legislator gained access to their home email addresses through public records requests with state agencies.
A number of state employees received an email at home last week from Rep. Dennis Richardson, R-Central Point, who asked them to participate in a survey to help identify cost-saving measures.
“It concerned me when I got a personal email from an elected official,” said Barbara Neliton, an employee at Oregon Private Health Partnerships. “My first reaction was, ‘How did they get my address?’”
Read more on StatesmanJournal.com
I don’t blame folks for being upset. If personal e-mail addresses are subject to open records law, then no state or public employee should ever provide their real home e-mail address to an employer. Throwaway account time…?


Support for yesterday's article stating that Target was concerned about “showrooming”
January 31, 2012
Pew - The rise of in-store mobile commerce
The rise of in-store mobile commerce - "During the holiday season, 25% of cell owners used their phone inside stores to gather price comparisons; 24% used them to look up online reviews. And 19% of those who searched for a better price on an in-store product eventually bought the product online." Aaron Smith Senior Research Specialist, Pew Internet Project, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, January 30, 2012.


I thought this (rejection of high priced journals) would eventually catch on. So, what is the new business model?
January 31, 2012
Boycott Against Scientific Journal Publisher Gathering Supporters
Wired Campus by Josh Fischman: "Elsevier, the global publishing company, is responsible for The Lancet, Cell, and about 2,000 other important journals; the iconic reference work Gray’s Anatomy, along with 20,000 other books—and one fed-up, award-winning mathematician. Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access to work that should be much more easily available. He asked for a boycott in a blog post on January 21, and as of Monday evening, on the boycott’s Web site The Cost of Knowledge, nearly 1,900 scientists have signed up, pledging not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journal. The company has sinned in three areas, according to the boycotters: It charges too much for its journals; it bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy things they don’t want in order to get a few things they do want; and, most recently, it has supported a proposed federal law (called the Research Works Act) that would prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by its grant recipients freely available."

(Related) The flip side of publishing? Will scientists even be allowed to work on an antidote?
"The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has recommended that details of two research papers involving Avian Flu not be published because of security concerns. At least one of the research groups says that their work should be logically reproducible. The NSABB's censorship recommendations do not (currently) have the force of law, but Science and Nature voluntarily delayed publication."


Some of this is “Me too!,” just jumping on the bandwagon. Some like Open Office have had ebook creation tool for years.
NBC Publishing Wants to Prove a TV Company Can Make Better E-Books
With Apple’s big iBooks announcement dominating the last two weeks of e-publishing news, you may have missed this lower-profile story announced a week ago at Digital Book World: NBC News, a Comcast-owned media empire NBC Universal, is launching a new venture, NBC Publishing, to produce electronic and print books under the NBC brand. But make no mistake: NBC Publishing’s approach to books will be digital-first.


Another “Me too!” industry – online education. Access to the “best teacher in the world” could cost less than access to the closest teacher...
… Last week, news broke that Professor Sebastian Thrun would be stepping down from teaching at Stanford to launch an online learning company called Udacity. Udacity is an outgrowth of his incredibly popular Artificial Intelligence class offered through Stanford last fall.
Now it appears that two other Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng (Ng taught last term's massive Machine Learning class) have started their own company, Coursera, one that offers a very similar service as Thrun's.
… Much of the vision of Coursera echoes what Thrun said on stage at the DML conference when he unveiled his plans for Udacity: for too long, access to a world-class education has been available to only a select few. "We see a future where world-leading educators are at the center of the education conversation," says Coursera, "and their reach is limitless, bounded only by the curiosity of those who seek their knowledge; where universities such as Stanford, Harvard, and Yale serve millions instead of thousands. In this future, ours will be the platform where the online conversation between educators and students will take place, and where students go to for most of their academic needs."

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