Episode: 915
Title: HPR0915: TGTM Newscast for 2012/01/17
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0915/hpr0915.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 04:50:42

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For sure!
You're listening to Talk Geek To Me News, number 58, record for January the 17th, 2012.
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And now the tech round up. From eff.log, day of January 12, 2012 by Parker Higgins.
The internet goes to Washington on January the 18th.
There's some good news in the efforts to stop the internet blacklist bill Soapa Peepa,
representative Darrell Issa, an outspoken Soapa critic and the author of alternative legislation
called the Open Act, has announced that the oversight and government reform committee will
hold a hearing on January the 18th to hear from actual technical experts, technology
job creators, internet investors, and legal scholars.
EFF's activists will be providing life coverage of the event throughout EFF Live Twitter
account.
A number of online activists are strategizing plans for a Soapa blackout, censoring websites
and logos to draw attention to the hearing and showcase the widespread opposition to
the censorship bills.
We're glad to see lots of sites participating and we're urging folks to use social networks
on January the 18th to help spread the word.
The oversight committee hearing will address the topic of domain name service and search
engine blocks generally and explore ways for the government to avoid legislation that
would hamper economic growth.
Of course, as active and controversial legislation, Soapa and its evil twin in the Senate, the
Protect IP Act, Peepa, are certain to be discussed.
At length, here's a look at the witness scheduled to speak.
Alexis O'Hanian is a founder of Reddit, the social news platform that has been the
site of numerous anti-Soapa discussions.
He's spoken out against the bill personally saying, quote, this legislation affects my
entire industry and livelihood.
We never would have been able to start Reddit if Soapa were the law, and I worry about all
of the future innovation we'd miss out on if it were to pass, unquote.
Stuart Baker, the former Homeland Security Assistant Secretary and former General Counsel
for the NSA, is certainly an expert on the issue of cybersecurity and the law.
He's also been a vocal critic of Soapa, explaining the security problems with the original
bill and the manager's amendment in an extremely cogent blog post titled Soapa Rope a Dopa.
Brad Burnham is a founder of the prestigious Union Square Venture Investment firm.
Union Square has been behind some very high-profile tech companies like Twitter and Force Square.
In the seven years since its founding, supporting job creation and innovation in the tech sector,
Soapa Rope is rightly concerned that legislation like Soapa could undermine his investments
and the internet itself.
In a personal blog post, he lays out the problem, quote, the current legislation in Congress
does not just create an administrative burden.
It requires service providers who have built wonderful businesses on the deep conviction
about human nature to change their relationship with their users in a way that subverts their
core values.
Daniel Kaminsky is a well-known security expert known for discovering a major vulnerability
in the DNS system, the sort that DNS sec initiative is designed to address.
He is one of 21 trusted community representatives involved in the DNS sec implementation process.
He is a signer of the open letter from the internet engineers first published by EFF and
read into the congressional record by Representative Issa.
Michael McCloud-Ball is the Chief of Staff and First Amendment Council for the ACLU.
So he is likely to raise the major constitutional issues present in Soapa.
The ACLU has publicly opposed Soapa on First Amendment grounds, so we expect a free speech
focus.
To read the rest of his article, follow links in the show notes.
From EFF.org. January 10, 2012, by Ketitsa Rodriguez, biometrics in Argentina mass surveillance
as a state policy.
Two years ago, the UK dismantled the national ID scheme and shred their national identity
registry in response to great public outcry over the privacy invasive program.
Unfortunately, privacy protections have been less rosy elsewhere in Argentina.
The national ID fight was lost some time ago, a law enacted during the military dictatorship
forced all individuals to obtain a government mandate ID.
Now they are in the process of enhancing its mandatory national registry of persons,
with biometric data such as fingerprints and digitized faces.
The government plans to repurpose this database in order to facilitate easy access to law
enforcement by merging this data into a new security-focused integrated system.
This raises the specter of mass surveillance as Argentinian law enforcement will have
access to mass repositories of citizen information and be able to leverage existing facial recognition
and fingerprint matching technologies in order to identify any citizen anywhere.
In the waning days of 2011, Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner issued
an executive decree ordering the creation of the federal system of biometric identification.
A new centralized nationwide biometric ID service that will allow law enforcement to
cross-reference information with biometric and other data initially collected for the
purpose of operating a general national ID registry.
Similarly police fingerprint databases were limited to those suspected or convicted of
criminal offenses.
Recently however, the Argentinian federal police was given a large database holding digital
fingerprints collected from random Argentinians as part of the national ID and passport application
process.
Since March 2011, this database has been fed by data collected through the Renepa National
ID application process.
The PFA has managed to amass a database of about 8 million fingerprints.
Yet this process appears to have been too slow for the Argentinian government.
Further to the new decree, the CBIOS initiative will give PFA access to Renepa's database
and vice versa, doubling PFA's reach to approximately 14 million digitized fingerprints,
starting with the first New Year's baby of 2012, Argentina has even begun registering
newborn biometric information with the CBIOS.
Argentina projects that as national IDs and passport expire and are renewed and new
babies are born, that CBIOS database will grow to over 40 million within the next two
years.
To read the rest of this article about Argentinian biometric database, follow links in the
show notes.
From torrentfreak.com by NIGMEX, January 9, 2012, Pirate Bay shows fertility of domain
and DNS blocks.
In October 2011, a court in Finland ordered local ISP Elisa to block the Pirate Bay to
stop copyright infringement among its subscribers.
Today the blockade, which covers many domains and IP addresses, took effect.
But behind the scenes, there is an effort to unblock the site and render the court order
useless.
Meanwhile, there is already collateral damage.
The court order has succeeded in blocking a domain linking to the Electronic Frontier
Finland.
In May 2011, the Copyright Information Antipiracy Center, CIA PC, and the finished branch
of the Music Industry Group IFPI filed a lawsuit in the District Court of Helsinki.
The group demanded that the local ISP Elisa should be forced to protect the copyrights
of their members by stopping their subscribers accessing the Pirate Bay.
Initially, Elisa refused to describe the block demands as unreasonable, but a subsequent
court order left them with no choice.
On October 26, 2011, the District Court of Helsinki ordered Elisa to block a range of
domains and IP addresses associated with the Pirate Bay.
Although Elisa has contested the decision by filing with the Helsinki Court of Appeal,
in the meantime they have to comply.
Today Elisa confirmed it has become blocking the domains and IP addresses listed below,
along with follows.
IP addresses to be blocked, three IP addresses follow.
During the war between Finland and Russia, some suites decided to help Finland.
They said the finished course is ours.
A Pirate Bay insider told Torrent Freaks signaling their intention to circumvent the block.
The Pirate Bay originates from Sweden so that the Pirate Bay will see the finished course
as its own, only this time, it's against the copyright Russians.
East concluded.
And it appears the battle for the course has already begun.
The last domain on that list certainly peaked our interest, and not only because it includes
a typo.
The NYUD.net domain belongs to the peer-to-peer-based Coral CDN service, which links to IP addresses
all over the world, which is generally a good tool to make block sites accessible again.
Ironically enough, the domain in question reveals a very easy way to bypass the Pirate Bay
blockade in Finland.
Just use one of the alternative domains associated with the Pirate Bay, add nyud.net.
And the most resilient Torrent site becomes accessible again in Finland.
While this block can temporarily stop the basic file shareer from using the Pirate Bay,
we already see a surge of interest in blocking technology, censorship, net neutrality, copyright
legislation, and court practice in the media.
Junus Mucking of Finland's Pirate Party told Torrent Freak.
This probably ends up being beneficial to file sharing, and shows the blocking attempts
to be counterproductive.
Side effects will be that the more blocks there are, the more work around people learn.
This could severely hinder solving important crimes in the future he concludes.
To read the list of the following links in the show notes, from tectod.com by Glen Moody
Day, January 13, 2012, why Apple will not be part of the real tablet revolution.
You don't have to be a marketing genius, or industry-pundit to foresee that tablet will
be an extremely hot sector in 2012.
The launch of Apple's iPad in 2010 largely defined the category, just as the launch of
the iPhone defined a new kind of smartphone in 2007.
In 2012, we will probably begin to see Android tablets start to gain major market share
just as Android smartphones have done this year.
Currently the tablet is something of a cross between the hipsootech toy of choice and a
trivially easy-to-use computing device for couch potatoes, but those early sectors are incidental
to the tablet's real potential to revolutionize education, particularly in emerging economies.
The devices are perfect, they are compact, connect to the net wirelessly, run off battery
power for hours, and can be used by children and adults alike with little or no training.
There is just one problem, of course, the typical tablet's high-end pricing, hundreds
of dollars, places it so far out of reach for most of the world's population that it
might as well not exist for them, but that is what makes India's Akash tablet basic
cost around 50 bucks, but only $37 for Indian students thanks to a government subsidy
so remarkable and so important.
Of course, its specifications are somewhat limited compared to the iPad, 256 megabytes
of RAM, 2GB flash memory, a 7-inch 800x480 pixeled resistive touchscreen, but that's not
really the point.
The key issue is whether it is good enough for the educational purposes governments around
the world have in mind, for although the Akash began as a project purely for India, it
has been swiftly taken up by a number of other countries as this fascinating feature
about the creation of Akash by the Canadian wireless device make a datawind explains.
Quote datawind CEO Sunit was invited to meet with Thailand's Minister for Information
Communications Technology who was so interested in purchasing 10 million tablets that he attended
their meeting even as floodwaters decided on Bangkok.
Profiles arrived from Turkey which wants 15 million tablets, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and
Tobago, Panama and Egypt.
This gives an indication of the potential of the Akash low-cost tablet to provide portable
computing devices and would them access to digital knowledge on a truly global scale.
The feature also explains how exactly datawind managed to produce a tablet for a tenth of
the cost of an iPad.
Part of the difficulty in engineering such a device is that the underlying goal that its
final price should be within the means of those who can't afford high-priced tablets dictates
crucial engineering and component decisions.
A piece of high-impact musician glass such as the touchscreen face of an iPad can cost
upward of $20.
Datawind's touchscreen glass which the company had engineered down the street cost less
than $2, though it won't allow for luxuries like pension zoom finger swiping.
There were also compromises on processing power.
Datawind's 366 MHz processor cost less than $5 a fraction of the $15 price tag on the
chips that power iPads and other comparable tablets.
And while a decision to run Google's free Android mobile operating system on the gadget saves
money, it requires code to dig deep into the Linux kernel that underpins the software
tweaking it until it runs smoothly on Datawind's weaker processor.
As that makes clear, one key ingredient in the design of the Akash was Android and hence
free software.
This meant that Datawind's software engineers were able to build on several years work
by Google and two decades of coding by the Linux community rather than starting from scratch.
It's a reminder that even if, as seems likely, Apple's iPad retains its highly profitable
hold on the upper end of the market, it will never be able to offer a model that is competitive
with minimalist tablets built around free software at the bottom.
And since it is precisely those ultra cheap models that will be sold in their hundreds
of millions, perhaps even billions one day, that means that the real tablet revolution,
the one that will transform education in emerging economies and with it, their societies will
not be one in which Apple plays a major part, despite its early leadership there.
From torrentfreak.com, by Ernesto, did January 13, 2012.
The pirate bay will stop serving torrents.
In a month, the pirate bay will no longer offer downloads of dock torrent files instead
of the largest torrent site on the internet will only provide so-called magnet links to
its visitors.
The first step in this direction was made today with the pirate bay replacing the current
default torrent download links with magnets.
Could this be the end of an error?
After half a decade of loyal service, the pirate bay shut down its tracker in November 2009.
The pirate bay argued that bit torrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such
as DHT and PEX.
In addition, the pirate bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and
switch to offering magnet links instead.
We're talking to the other torrents admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for
all sites.
Moving away from torrents and trackers totally, like pick a date and all agree from this date
will not support torrents anymore, a pirate bay insider told torrentfreak at the time.
Now two years later, that date is coming soon.
Today, the pirate bay made the first step towards this new future by making magnets the default
download links instead of torrents.
Torrentfreak was further informed that in a month or so, the largest torrent site on
the internet will stop serving torrent files indefinitely.
The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users,
but in reality, very little will change for the average pirate bay visitor.
Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet
link instead of a torrent file.
Pirate bay team told torrentfreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a magnet
site is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy.
This is topical since this week, courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local
internet progress to block the torrent site.
Perhaps even better, without the torrent files, everyone can soon host a full copy of
the pirate bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future.
Unlike the site's users, existing torrent sites that scraped that torrent files from
the pirate bay will have to make some drastic changes.
If they want to continue serving torrent files, they will have to fetch them from DHT.
Also hot links to that torrent files will stop working and will soon redirect to the
pirate bay's detail page for the files in question.
One of the potential downsides of using magnets is that it could take a bit longer for downloads
to start, especially if there are relatively few people serving a file.
This is because the torrent file has to be fetched from other users instead of being
download directly from the site.
More background on these and other technicalities can be found here.
The good news is that all mainstream bit torrent clients support magnet links.
This wasn't the case back in 2009, but when the pirate bay hinted, then the future they
could become a magnet only site, all developers quickly made their clients fully compatible.
There's no doubt that a torrentless pirate bay will certainly mark the end of an error.
At the moment, it's hard to predict what the impact of the pirate based decision will
be on the bit torrent community, but torrents, however, will never disappear completely.
News from icelandreview.com, dissentingdemocrat.wordpress.com, magi-micneil.wordpress.com, spanklessboogie.blocksbat.com,
contact.com used under a ranged permission.
News from eff.log and torrentfreak.com used under permission of the creative commons
by attribution license.
News from democracynow.org used under permission of the creative commons by attribution non-commercial
no-drivers license.
Audio-interlude moment of clarity number 106 used under permission of Lee Camp.
News sources retain their respective copyrights.
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