hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1070.txt

Episode: 1070
Title: HPR1070: TGTM Newscast for 9/5/2012
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1070/hpr1070.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 18:25:54

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You're listening to TalkEak to Me News, number 74, record for Wednesday, September 5, 2012.
You're listening to the Tech Only Hacker Public Radio Edition.
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Before I sought the Tech Roundup, I'd like to make an announcement that me and my partners
in my web server co-op have moved our server, we've decided to move our data to Iceland,
a country with an active work going on in the legislature to make them the best country
for new media that needs freedom of speech protections.
And no, I didn't start the idea.
Someone else said it's time for the move to me instead of a little co-op.
So I'm very excited, because now I get to change the upcoming, shortly I'll change one
of my sound bites to be inserting a pirate news stream into the interwebs via Iceland
or something like that, I'll come up with something good for you guys.
We is now international in a way, and I hope you'll share my joy in that.
Before I kick off the Tech Roundup, I also want to talk about the content of the Tech Roundup.
I'm going to actually read two different articles about domain seizures.
Both have a little different perspective, and I think it's important to get them both
in.
We also have a perspective comp from James Hamilton.
The engineer from Amazon Web Services normally I shun his work that reads advertising copy,
but the problems that they are trying to overcome, and I'm not a big company guy, so I probably
will be a client, are just so interesting and relatively unique from my perspective.
I hear nothing else about them except from his comp.
So I'll be having that, so if you think I'm advertising I'm not, but like I said, just
some interesting shit, and now the Tech Roundup.
From torrentfreak.com dated August 30, 2012, by Ernesto, U.S. Returns sees domains to streaming
link site after 18 months.
At the end of January last year, the U.S. authorities kicked off yet another round
of domain seizures, this time against sites connected with sports streaming.
One of the most prominent targets at the time was Roja Director, one of Spain's most
popular sites which describes itself as a major internet sports broadcast index.
The site links to free streams of many soccer events plus NBA, NLB, NFL, MPB, and IPL matches.
While rights holders see Roja Director as an illegal phone in their side, Spanish courts
have already ruled otherwise.
The site is owned by a Spanish company that pays its taxes and has been deemed to operate
legally in Spain, not once, but twice.
However, they didn't hold back the U.S. government's decision to seize the .com and .org domains
of the company.
After the seizure, Roja Director continued its operation as usual under .es and MED domains.
However, it wasn't planning on giving up the original domains that easily and fort
back in and out of court.
We immediately initiated talks with the government through our legal representatives in San Francisco
and New York in order to obtain the return of our domains, Roja Director's own explains
now.
Since it wasn't possible at that stage to recover domains amicably, we filed a complaint
against the government, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement Agency of the United States of America.
The result was a long court battle in which the U.S. had to show why it was allowed to keep
the domain names.
Now, after nearly 19 months, it appears that the U.S. authorities are not able to.
Yesterday, United States Attorney Pete Bajara informed the judge that they are giving up
the case.
In light of the particular circumstances of this litigation, the government now seeks
to dismiss its amended forfeiture complaint.
The decision to seek the dismissal of this case will best promote judicial economy and
serve the interests of justice.
Bajara writes,
The case has now been dismissed, meaning that Roja Director can welcome back its .common.org
domains.
Roja Director's owner says they swiftly informed all the responsible registries and the domains
should be up and running again later today.
Shortly after the learning of the court order, we sought proceedings with the organization's
responsible for all .common.org domain registrations, whereas line and PIR respectively in order to
restore the domains.
In the coming hours, Roja Director will again be accessible from RojaDirected.com and RojaDirected.org.
That is, from the domains that never should have been censored, he concludes.
This is not the first time the authorities have been forced to return a seized domain.
Next year music blog, Daja's One, had its domain name returned after more than 12 months,
it turned out that the seizure initiated by the RAA was a mistake.
Thus, ford the mistakes have been without consequences for the US, but it's clear that passing
super-like legislation, where domains can be seized left and right will become harder
and harder.
From Tecter.com, by Mike Masnick, dated Friday, August 31, 2012.
RojaDirect's question fits of a botched domain seizures.
The government's admission that had once again mistakenly seized and censored a website
for over a year when it dropped its case against RojaDirected.com Porto 80 has reminded everyone
that Daja's One was not an isolated case.
It was a part of a wider program where DHS via ICE and the DOJ systematically believed
whatever the RAA and MPAA were telling them, leading to the blatant censorship of a variety
of websites without proper due process.
Thankfully, some in Congress are paying attention.
By partisan congressional reps, Zo Lothgren and Jason Chavez and Jared Paulus have teamed
up to send a letter raising a number of questions about operation in our sites, to both the
Attorney General Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano.
The letter does not even mention the RojaDirected case but focuses on what happened to Daja's
One, pointing out their concern with the program and how it appears to violate free speech
rights, ignore due process, and destroy legitimate businesses.
The letter raises the fact that Daja's One is not an isolated case.
As we pointed out in the past, we're aware of at least a few other domains that were
seized and whose owners had challenged the seizures, and yet, well over a year later,
there appeared to be no evidence of either a return of those domains while the future process
started.
Given how the Fed's treated the Jazz One with secret extensions preventing the Jazz
One from representing itself in court, we've learned how many other domains the DOJ and
ICE had incorrectly and illegally seized, and which they were now keeping in that kind
of holding pattern.
It's good to see that this letter directly asks about the issue.
Begin quote.
Other complaints have been raised by websites seized under in our sites, that bear similarities
to the Daja's One case.
These complaints center around unnecessary delays in advancing and resolving cases, difficulty
in obtaining documents from the government that are fundamental to the underlying cases,
such as affidavits and difficulty even maintaining contact with the U.S. attorneys prosecuting
the case.
The effect of these problems is to severely limit the ability of website owners to challenge
the legality and merits of the domain-name seizures.
The letter goes on to ask a series of important questions for both DHS and DOJ, especially regarding
the other failure of both departments in a Daja's One situation.
What is the process for determining which sites to target?
Who is involved in that process?
What specific steps to the DOJ and ICE take to ensure that affidavits and other material
are thoroughly reviewed for accuracy prior to seizing a domain?
2.
To what extent are government agents required to evaluate whether the potentially infringing
material to which target sites link, or which they host themselves, or non-infringing
fair uses, impliedly licensed and-or-dominimous use?
3.
Do government agents consider whether a site complies with the DMCA safe hovers if so how does
this affect the determination to target a site?
4.
How many sites have attempted to retrieve their domains by any process, judicial or informal,
and what is the status of those cases?
5.
Have you ever made any changes to your domain seizure policies or the implementation as
result of the issues arising from the Daja's One seizure or any of the seizure?
If so, what were these changes?
6.
What specific steps has the DOJ and ICE taken to ensure that domain names seizure cases
proceed without unnecessary delays, and that website owners seeking to restore their
domain names have swift access to the officials and documents necessary to resolve their cases?
7.
How many more seizures do you anticipate occurring in the next 6 months and year?
It seems to me that questions 4 and 5 are the key ones here, which means I fully expect
DOJ and ICE to be especially non-responsive in whatever answers they provide.
From Tornfreak.com, by EnigmaX did September 1, 2012, Pirate Party Pirate Bay Proxy fights
back after DDoS attack.
The emergence of anonymous style activist groups in recent years, the DDoS attack has proven
a popular way to not only voice dissent, but also take away opponents freedom of speech.
But while some may find it entertaining to watch government and corporate websites collapse
under the onslaught of tens of thousands of angry LOICs, this is a knife that cuts both
ways, and increasingly turned sites, or at the shop end.
During more than its fair share of attacks is the Pirate Bay, in mid-May the site collapsed
under a huge denial of service assault, after it may be coincidentally criticized elements
of the anonymous collective for carrying out DDoS attack on Virgin Media, the first local
ISP to file court orders to block access to the Pirate Bay.
But while Virgin was DDoS for blocking access to the Pirate Bay, it is now the term the
UK Pirate Party to pay the price for facilitating access to the infamous Torrent site.
Although it is favored by UK citizens looking to circumvent the local ISP blockade against
the Pirate Bay, the reverse proxy operated by PPUK is used by people all over the world,
but since Wednesday the site has been largely unavailable.
We were hit by DDoS attack, at about 2200 on the 29th, PPUK's Harry Percival told Torrent
Freak.
The proxy had been hit before, but this time things were different.
Previous attacks were directed toward the site's main IP, but this time the target was
PPUK's main hostname, PPUK, or in the middle of a new product, were in the attacker's
truck.
We had been testing geographically aware DNS as part of an ongoing project, and have
different IPs for the UK and worldwide, personal explained.
However, due to the attack, PPUK's upstream provided blocked several of the IP addresses
being utilized by the proxy.
Yesterday all IPv4 addresses were blocked, but now services being restored in the site
is returned to normal.
IPv6 addresses remained online throughout, and were not affected by the DDoS.
Pirate Party and forms Torrent Freak, they are working with their provider to mitigate
the issue, and are also looking to advance anti-DDoS technology to fight any future attacks.
To read the rest of this article, follow links in the show notes.
From perspectives.mvderona.com, dated August 21, 2012, by James Hamilton, Glacier, engineering
the cold data storage in the cloud.
Earlier today, Amazon web services announced Glacier, a low-cost, cloud-hosted cold storage
solution.
Cold storage is a class of storage that is discussed infrequently, and yet is by far the
largest storage class of them all.
Ironically, the storage we usually talk about and the storage I've worked on for most
of my life is the high IOPS rate storage supporting mission critical databases.
These systems today are the best hosted on NAND Flash, and I've been talking recently
about two AWS solutions to address this storage class.
Cold storage is different.
It's the only product I've ever worked upon with a customer requirements or a single
dimensional.
With most products, the solution space is complex and even when some customers may like a
comparative product better for some applications, your product still may win in another.
Cold storage is pure and undimensional.
There is only really one metric of interest, cost per capacity.
It's an undifferentiated requirement that the data be secure and very highly durable.
These are essentially table stakes in that no solution is worth considering if it's
not rock solid on durability and security.
But the only dimension of differentiation is price per digabyte.
Cold storage is unusual because the focus needs to be singular.
How can we deliver the best price per capacity now and continue to reduce it over time?
The focus on price over performance, price over latency, price over bandwidth actually
made the palm more interesting.
With most products and services, it's usually possible to be the best on at least some
dimensions, even if not on all.
On cold storage, to be successful, the price per capacity target needs to be hit.
On glacier, the entire product was focused on delivering a penny per gigabyte a month.
With high redundancy and security and to be on a technology base where the price can
keep coming down over time.
Cold storage is elegant in its simplicity and, although the margins will be slim, the
volume of cold storage data in the world is too pennedous.
It's a very large market segment.
All storage in all tiers backs up to the cold storage tier, so it's provably bigger
than all the rest.
Audit logs end up in cold storage as do web logs, security logs, seldom access compliance
data, and all the other data I refer jokingly to as right only storage.
It turns out that most files and active storage tiers are actually never accessed.
In cold storage, this trend is even more extreme where reading a storage object is the exception,
but the objects absolutely have to be there when needed.
Quickups aren't needed often and compliance logs are infrequently accessed, but when
they are needed, they need to be there.
They absolutely have to be readable and they must have been stored securely.
But when cold objects are cold for, they don't need to be there instantly.
The cold storage tier customer requirement for latency ranges from minutes to hours and
in some cases even days.
Customers are willing to give up access speed to get very low cost, potentially rapidly
requiring database backups don't get pushed down to cold storage until they are unlikely
to get accessed.
But once pushed, it's very inexpensive to store them indefinitely.
Tape has long been the media of choice for very cold workloads and tape remains an excellent
choice at scale.
What's unfortunate is that the scale point where tape starts to win has been going up over
the years.
My scale tape robots are incredibly large and expensive.
The good news is that very high scale storage customers, like large hajron collider, are
very well served by tape, but over the years the volume economics of tape have been moving
up scale and fewer and fewer customers are cost effectively served by tape.
In the 80s, I had a tape storage backup system for my use net server and other home computers.
At the time I used tape personally and any small company could afford tape, but this
scale point where tape makes economic sense has been moving up.
Small companies are really better off using disk since they don't have the scale to hit
the volume economics of tape.
The same has happened at mid-size companies.
Tape usage continues to grow, but more and more of the market ends up on disk.
Such wrong with the bulk of the market using disk for cold storage?
The problem with disk storage systems is they are optimized for performance and they are
expensive to purchase, to administer and even to power.
Disk storage systems don't currently talk at cold storage workload with that necessary
fanatical focus on cost per capacity.
What's broken is that customers end up not keeping data they need to keep, or paying
too much to keep it because the conventional solution to cold storage isn't available
at small and even medium scales.
Cold storage is a natural cloud solution in that the cloud can provide the volume economics
and allow you in small scale users to have access to low-cost, off-site, multi-datacent
to cold storage and of course previously only possible at very high scale, implementing
cold storage centrally in the cloud makes excellent economic sense in that all customers
can gain from the volume economics of the aggregate usage.
Amazon's Glacier now offers cold storage where each object is stored redundantly in multiple
independent data centers at a penny per gigabyte a month.
I love the direction and velocity that our industry continues to move.
By the way, if Glacier has court your interest and you are an engineer or engineering leader
with an interest in massive scale distributive storage systems.
We have big plans for Glacier and our hiring.
Send your resume to Glacier-Dash-jobsat-amazon.com.
From TechDirt.com, by Tim Kushing, did August 31, 2012, Common Sense for School Internet
Safety Policies.
We talk quite a bit here about the growing pains of various institutions when faced with
upstarts like the internet and social media.
The usual suspects like the recording industry and newspapers come to mind first, but one
of our oldest institutions continues to painfully stumble its way into the future.
The educational system.
The institution's deep-seated mistrust of the most used encyclopedia in the world is already
well known, but as email has given way to texting and social networks have expanded past
the confines of the school yard, those seeking to somehow control the seeming chaos have
worked steadily to bang out reactionary policies and ever tightening guidelines.
Rather than temper their actions with some common sense or a bit of perspective, educators
and some parent groups have often decided to deploy.
Terrible zero-talent policies and overly bored guidelines rely on a variety of tech-related
boogie men, online predators, cyberbullying, sexting porn, Wikipedia vandals, to keep
questions to a minimum.
Fortunately, someone is actually attempting to inject some common sense into school
internet safety policies.
Tackling many of the issues that seem to go hand in hand with attempting to provide
a lot of guidance in a digital era by a Bruce Schneier coms 26 internet safety talking
points compiled by Scott McLeod at dangerously irrelevant.
McLeod found with the UCEA Center for Advanced Study of Technology Leadership and Education
Castle runs through the whole alphabet and adds a few corollaries detailing talking points
he uses for discussing internet safety with principles and superintendents.
The entire piece is definitely worth reading.
Here's a few selections from McLeod's list.
First off bad things will happen, but it's not the tool being used, it's the user.
See, mobile phones, Facebook were copied to YouTube, blogs, working spaces, Google and
whatever other technologies you're blocking are not inherently evil.
Stop demonizing them and focus on people's behavior, not the tools, particularly when
it comes to making policy.
In addition to school administrators, members of our government and very security agencies
should be presented with a copy of this talking point.
F, you never can promise 100% safety.
For instance, you never would promise the parent that her child would never ever be in
a fired school.
The quit trying to guarantee 100% safety when it comes to technology.
Provide reasonable supervision, implement reasonable procedures and policies and move on.
Another thing out government and its affiliate agencies do well, use fear to acquire and maintain
control.
G, the online predators will prey on your school children argument as a false buggy man.
A scare tactic that is fed to us by the media, politicians, law enforcement and computer
security ventors.
The number of report incidents and the news of this occurring is zero.
To read the rest of the story, follow links in the show notes.
Other items in the news, to read the story associated with these headlines, follow links
in the show notes.
The battle for privacy intensifies in Australia.
By EFFs Rebecca Bow from Thornefreak.com.
Kim.com wins release of $4.83 million.
Some lawyers set to get paid.
Pirate Bay founder rested in Cambodia.
News from techdirk.com, perspectives.nvderona.com, Havana at Times.org, roastore.com, magiMcNeil.wordpress.com,
and allgov.com used under a range permission.
News from Thornefreak.com and freeculture.org used under permission of the creative comments
by attribution license.
News sources retain their respective copyrights.
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