Episode: 920
Title: HPR0920: TGTM Newscast for 2012/02/08
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0920/hpr0920.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 04:58:58

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You're listening to Talk Geek 3 News, number 59, required for February 8, 2012.
You're listening to the Tech Only Hacker Public Radio Edition, to get the full podcast,
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Now the tech round up.
Data January 20, 2012, from eff.org, ACLU and EFF, to appeal secrecy ruling in Twitter WikiLeaks case,
Richmond, Virginia.
Find to make public government efforts to obtain internet users' private information without
a warrant, today the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU, and the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, the EFF, planned to file an appeal in the legal battle over the records of several
Twitter users in connection with the government's WikiLeaks investigation.
The ACLU and EFF represent Icelandic parliament member, Bergetta Hans Dattier, the appeal filed
jointly with other Twitter users, Jacob Applebaum, and Rob Gungrip.
In challenges US District Court, Liam O'Grady's November decision refusing to unseal or publicly
list all orders that may have been sent to companies other than Twitter and any related
motions and court orders.
Quote, these people want to try to protect their privacy and their First Amendment rights,
and the government should not be able to prevent that by hiding court records, our courts
or public.
Secret court orders and secret court docket should not be permitted, except in extraordinary
circumstances, said Aiden Fine, staff attorney with the ACLU speech Privacy and Technology
Project.
This case is just one example of the unfortunate recent trend to make our court processes less
open and transparent.
In light of the District Court's denial of stay, Hans Dattier and the other Twitter users
involved in the case did not appeal the judge's decision, requiring Twitter to turn over their
records.
Attorneys for Hans Dattier and Fine of the ACLU Rebecca Glenberg of the ACLU of Virginia
and Cindy Cohen, Lee Tien, and Masha Hoffman of EFF.
The motions were joined by attorneys from the law firm Kekir and Van Neste LLP and
the law office of John Decline on behalf of Jacob Applebaum and Ron Gangship, respectively
as well as local counsel in Virginia.
Editorial comment, after the ruling the Icelandic Member of Parliament, Ms. Berketa Hans Dattier
broke silence on the matter of this case, so I included in the other headlines section
links to her blog entry about it, as well as a link to a Radio Netherlands International
English podcast that includes an interview with her.
From EFF.org, dear January 28, 2012, by Jillian C. Ork, the right to an anonymity is a matter
of privacy.
Throughout history there have been a number of reasons why individuals have taken to
writing or producing art under a pseudonym.
In the 18th century, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay took on the pseudonym
Publius to publish the Federalist Papers.
In 19th century England, pseudonyms allowed women, like the bronze sisters, who initially
published under Kura Ellis and Acton Bell, to be taken seriously as writers.
Today, pseudonyms continue to serve a range of individuals and for a variety of reasons.
At EFF, review anonymity as both a matter of free speech and privacy, but in light of
the International Privacy Day, January 28, this peaceful focus mainly on the later, including
at the ways in which the right to anonymity or pseudonymity is truly a matter of privacy.
Human beings are complex creatures with multiple interests, as such many professionals use pseudonyms
online to keep their employment separate from their personal life.
One example of this is the guardian columnist, girl scientist, spelled GRL, who, upon discovering
her Google Plus account, had been deleted for violating their common name policy, penned
a piece explaining her need for privacy.
Another example is prominent Moroccan blogger, Hisham Kribchi, who has explained his use of
a pseudonym, stating, quote,
When I first started blogging, I want my identity to remain secret because I didn't want my
online activity to interfere with my professional life.
I want to keep both as separate as possible.
I also want to use a fake name because I wrote about politics and I was critical of my
own government.
A pseudonym would shield me and my family from personal attacks.
I want to have a comfortable space to express myself freely without having to worry about
the police when I visit my family back in Morocco.
Although Kribchi's reasoning is too fold, his primary concern even stronger than his
need for protection from his government was keeping his online life separate from his
employment.
Even Wail Gonam, the now famous Egyptian, who helped launch a revolution conducted
his activism under a pseudonym, not to protect himself from the Egyptian government,
but rather because he was an employee of Google and wanted to maintain an air of neutrality.
In 2008, an Alaskan blog, known as Alaska Muckraker or AKM, rose to fame for her vocal
criticism of fellow Alaskan and then McCain running mate Sarah Palin.
Later, after invading against a rude email sent to constituents by Alaska State Representative
Michael Dugan, AKM was outed by Dugan, who wrote that his, quote, own theory about public
process is you can say what you want as long as you are willing to stand behind it using
your real name, unquote.
AKM, a blogger decidedly committing an act of journalism could have had any number of
reasons to remain anonymous as she later wrote, quote, I might be a state employee, I might
not want my children to get grief at school, I might be fleeing from an ex partner who
was abusive and would rather he not know where I am, my family might not want to talk
to me anymore, I might alienate my best friend, maybe I don't feel like having a brick
phone through my window, maybe my spouse might work for the Palin administration, maybe
I'd rather people not know where I live or where I work, or none of those things may
be true, none of my readers nor Mike Dugan had any idea what my personal circumstances
might be.
Though Dugan claimed that AKM gave up her right to anonymity, when her blog began influencing
public policy he's wrong, in the United States the right to anonymity is protected by the
first amendment and must remain so to ensure both the free expression and privacy rights
of citizens, similarly in 2009 Ed Wielins, a former official with the Department of Justice
out anonymous blogger John Blevins, a professor at the South Texas College of Law, in the
National Review calling him irresponsible and a coward, Blevins took the fall gracefully
later explaining why he had chosen to blog under a pseudonym.
Unlike Kryptchi, Blevins reasons were numerous, he feared losing tenure and legal clients,
but he also feared putting the jobs of family members in the political space at risk.
A friend of mine, let's call him Joe, is the sibling of a famous celebrity, but while
he's very proud of his sibling Joe learned early on that not everyone has his best interests
at heart.
Therefore Joe devised a pseudonym to use online in order to protect the privacy of himself
and his family.
In Joe's case the threat is very real, celebrities are regularly stalked, their houses broken
into, his pseudonym keeps him feeling normal in his online interactions while simultaneously
protecting his sibling and the rest of his family from invasions of privacy.
Anonymity and pseudonymity may seem increasingly difficult to achieve online, not only to
companies like Facebook restrict your right to use a pseudonym, but even when you do think
you're anonymous you might not be, as blogger Rosemary Port found in 2009 after Google
turned her over her name in response to a court order.
While we should continue to fight for our privacy under the law.
The best thing we can do as users who value their right to anonymity is to use tools
like TOR.
Anonymous bloggers can use global voices, advocacy, online guide to blogging anonymously with
WordPress and TOR.
And all internet users should educate themselves about what is and isn't private on their online
accounts and profiles.
From TORNFREAK.com by EnigmaX, they generate 20th 2012.
What made it a rogue site worthy of destruction?
File hosting services all around the world will have looked on in horror yesterday as
Mega Upload, one of the world's largest cyberlocker services was taken apart by the FBI.
Foreign citizens were arrested in foreign lands and at least $50 million in assets seized.
So what exactly prompted this action?
TORNFREAK read every word of the 72 page indictment so you don't have to.
And we were surprised by its contents.
Yesterday a massive operation took down Mega Upload, one of the world's leading file storage
services and one of the world's biggest sites period.
While the timing came as a huge post-soap of protest surprise, the fact that the site
was targeted was not.
For many months there have been rumblings behind the scenes that something might be done
about Mega Upload, nevertheless the manner in which the action was taken and the language
used by the authorities in doing so was utterly unprecedented.
So the key question this morning is this, what made Mega Upload a rogue site which deserved
to be completely dismantled and its key staff arrested.
The answers lie in the 72 page indictment and showed just how the authorities with the
massive assistance of the MPAA no doubt framed Mega's activities in such a way as to strip
it of any protection under the DMCA.
In the U.S., online service providers are eligible for safe harbor under the DMCA from
copyright infringement suits by meeting certain criteria, however the indictment states
that a member of the mega-conspiracy capital M capital C no less do not meet these criteria
because quote, they willfully infringing copyrights themselves on these systems have actual
knowledge that the materials on their systems aren't infringing or alternatively know facts
or circumstances that would make infringing material apparent, receive a financial benefit
directly attributable to copyright infringing activity where the provider can control that
activity and have not removed or disabled access to known copyright infringing material from
service they control.
End quote.
Let's cover the last point first, the apparent a non-removable of known copyright material
from Mega Upload servers first, a little background on how Mega Upload's user uploading system
worked because this is absolutely crucial to the case against the site.
Mega had developed a system whereby files set to be uploaded by users were hashed and
order to discover if a copy of the file already exists on the Mega Service.
If a file existed, the user did not have to upload his copy and was simply given a unique
URL in order to access the content in future.
Like this meant in practice is that there could be countless URLs owned by various users
but which all pointed to the same file.
Mega Upload's abuse tool to which major copyright holders were given access enabled the removal
of links to infringing works hosted on Mega Upload's servers.
However, the indictment claims that it quote did not actually function as DMCA compliance
tool as the copyright owners were led to believe unquote and here's why.
The indictment claims that when a copyright holder issued a takedown notice for content
referenced by its URL, only the URL was taken down, not the content to which it pointed.
So although the URL in question would report that it had been removed and would no longer
resolve to infringing material, URLs issued to others would remain operational.
Furthermore, the indictment states that a low Mega Upload staff referred to as members
of the conspiracy, discussed how they could automatically remove child pornography from
their systems, given a specific hash value.
The same standards weren't applied to complaint about copyright works.
In June 2010, it appears that Mega Upload was subjected to something of a test by the
authorities.
The company was informed pursuant to a criminal search warrant from the US District Court
for the Eastern District of Virginia that 39 infringing movies were being stored on their
service in Copatia, hosting in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Quote, a member of the Mega Conspiracy informed several of his co-conspirators at that time
that he located the named files using internal searches of their system.
As of November 18, 2011, more than a year later, 36 of the 39 infringing motion pictures
were still being stored on the service controlled by the Mega Conspiracy.
Unquote, the indictment reads.
The paperwork goes on to accuse Mega Upload of running a program between September 2005
and July 2011, which rewarded users for uploading infringing material.
A citation from an internal Mega Upload email from February 2007 titled Reward Payments
claims to show that at least two key staff members knew that cash payments were being paid
to users who uploaded infringing material, including, quote, full popular DVD rips, unquote,
and software with key generators wears.
Then, the indictment starts to throw up some very interesting questions, especially
how the authorities managed to get hold of not just one, but many of Mega Uploads internal
company emails, dating back to 2006, to use in the case against them.
It's certainly possible that the authorities were monitoring Mega Uploads correspondence,
but there are also at least two mentions in the indictment of an unnamed person described
as quote, an unindicted co-conspirator unquote, while prosecutors sometimes use this term
to describe people who have been excluded from an indictment on evidentiary concerns.
They also use it to describe individuals who have been granted immunity from prosecution.
In any case, these emails are being heavily relied upon since many appeared to indicate
knowledge among staff that copyright works were held on the company's service.
Here's a sample.
The email from 2006 claims to show how Mega Upload attempted to download large amounts
of content from YouTube and appeared by April that year to have obtained 30% of the site's
content.
A follow-up email in 2007 claimed that quote, Kim, Mega Uploads, found a really wants to
copy YouTube one-to-one unquote.
To read the rest of the samples of the email correspondence between internal staffers
of Mega Upload, you may read the full article at the show notes.
However, later on in the article, in one email, Kim.com reportedly said, this is a serious
threat to our business.
Please look into this and see how we can protect ourselves.
Adding should remove our domain to another country, Canada, or even Hong Kong.
The indictment separately lists several movies being distributed from Mega Uploads servers
in the United States, all of which were not yet commercially available.
There is no indication, however, that Mega Uploads operators knew they were there.
On face value, it would seem that in a handful of site instances, staff at the company did
indeed link each other to copyright works, but when the massive scale of the Mega Upload
operation is set besides them, their significance is put into a different perspective.
The issue of not taking down content is a fascinating one.
Mega Upload is not on its own when a hash's content then allows users to access already
stored versions of the same files, nevertheless, while taking down a specific URL and not the
content itself be enough to appease the courts.
Finally, and despite the assertions of the MPAA, RAAA, and the authorities, Mega Upload
carried a huge amount of non-infringing content, giving the service itself substantial non-infringing
users, nevertheless, all content has now been seized, leaving millions of people and
companies without their personal data.
Cyberlocker services and potential stops all around the world will be watching this
case like Hawks.
SizeMick doesn't really come close.
A tutorial comment there has been a lot of coverage of the Mega Upload case, both on
TorrentFreak, TechDirt.com, and OzTechnica.
I suggest you file this case as much as I will be following it, however, I can't read
everything into these podcasts, so you may want to follow articles, follow links, do searches
of the three aforementioned sites on your own.
However, it is fascinating how the e-leagles operated.
Mega Upload had both people legally operating and e-leal operating, and now because of the
rap musicians who have historically been short-changed by the big record labels, the big name
wants for moving the content to Mega Upload and getting paid as they were automatically
major sources of downloads and advertising revenues.
So the deal offered from Mega Upload to rap artists who were famous was better than
the deal offered by the RIAA and Kim.com in his last guest article written for TorrentFreak.com
said that he found a way to pay them 90% of the time, regardless of whether or not their
download is paid, preceded this attack.
You are not, you want to believe that the FBI is merely acting for their bosses, the RIAA
and MPAA or not, I submit that for your consideration, but I do want to turn now to another Mega Upload
article that details how the e-leagles operated as I found the patterns fascinated.
And then finally, to end up the tech segment, I will read about a foreign social networking
site to give an example of how people are reacting to the United States-America's fascist
and heavy-handed attitude toward the internet.
So that further ado, from TorrentFreak.com, day of January 28th, 2012, by a NIGMEX,
Mega Aftermath, upheaval in Pirate Warrersland.
While last week's shutdown of Mega Upload is a huge interest in itself, but a wave of
aftershocks and side effects are proving equally fascinating to watch, in addition to causing
all sorts of problems for legitimate users of file-sharing services, there is no avoiding
the fact that certain elements of the piracy scene are in a mess, amazingly still the beat
goes on.
Despite its rogue-stite status and various other warnings, when Mega Upload went down
last week, it still came as a shock.
But what came next was unprecedented, a dramatic reaction in Cyberlockerland that took out vast
libraries of digital content and capacity, the perception of the established ground rules
had been changed without passing of a single new door.
FBI are rest by huge numbers of police, enormous cash and asset seizures overseas, reward program
scrutiny, knowledge of payouts to persistent uploaders of infringing content, extradition.
These are things that changed the game.
Quote, if the US government can come forward Kim.com, it can happen to almost anyone, unquote,
a file-hosting operator told Torrent Freak on condition of anonymity.
I'm trying to think of everything I did positively wrong in the last three years and worrying
about that and the next three years also, if we even have that long.
For many hosting sites, it was time to react quickly.
Over this week, we documented the drastic actions taken by services such as file Sonic
and file serve, who shut down all third party sharing and, like many of this close down
their affiliate payout programs.
Later, we showed how file hosting competitors, such as foreshared, rapid share, and hot
file, had grown as users hunted for spare capacity.
In the space of a week, and the Mega Upload shut down aside, huge libraries of both
legitimate and pirate material were wiped out as file host after file host deleted and
impossible to calculate number of files and closed down thousands of suspected infringing
accounts.
And this is where it gets quite interesting.
For more than half a decade Hollywood and the recording industry have spent millions
of dollars, not so much on actually eliminating illegal content, but getting rid of links to
content, such as those found on BitTort.
This week, without a single cease and desist being sent, cyber lockers across the globe
not only self-deleted vast quantities of files, but in doing so made millions of links across
thousands of linking sites completely useless too.
For the operators of these linking sites and their uploaders this week has been a very
hard work indeed, for some sites it was all too much and the shutters have simply come
down.
The problem it seems is money.
While there is money to be made in torrent sites, the content shares there are largely
altruistic.
The cyber lockers scene is more complex and incestuous, with revenue being generated in a
handful of basic ways on both legal and illegal content.
Through reward programs, uploaders get paid on the number of times people subsequently
download content.
Typically, release sites can upload the content themselves and get paid like a regular uploader
when people download.
We want programs are important for cyber lockers too, since they attract customers away from
competitors and also give them an incentive to supply content.
Release sites and wears forms and uses the cyber lockers to get content, and when they
get there they are faced with a choice.
But a little, relatively slowly but for free, or pay for a premium account and get lots
as quickly as possible.
In many cases, choosing the first option means that cyber lockers also make more money
from advertising.
While various sites shut their rewards programs this week, those uploading purely for the money
were hit hard.
In fact, many who had cash mounting up in their accounts lost at all.
Some cyber lockers simply kept the accrued money, while the victims were livid.
Those who hate financially motivated sharing commented that just as had been served.
But while it's clear that some uploaders often young and in less well off countries are
sharing small time for a few bucks, for some the reward payouts are more important.
For many release sites, those rewards pay the server bills.
Quote, we needed to pay out and when, file host named redacted on request, shut down
sharing, we were all but finished, unquote, one admin of a release site told Torrent
Freak.
Quote, 90% of our content was hosted there.
Then they deleted all our files and closed the account.
They won't even speak with us about it.
A whole year's work gone, we shut at the end of the month, unquote.
But like working aunts, whose nest has just been smashed apart by angry humans, others
are utterly unfazed and just want to know which hosts are still paying out.
Despite the climate of fear, quite a few hosts say they are and it's evident from the
links being posted on release blogs that the upload for cash crew have noticed them quickly.
Things however are still in a state of flux.
Some of the file hosts still paying out appeared to be offering tiered rewards systems with
just about every country in the world getting a reasonable deal, but with the United States
right at the very bottom.
Another interesting rumor, which at the time of writing we have been unable to confirm,
is that one of the file hosts who banned third-party downloads earlier this week is now
re-enabling them.
This is something to look out for, without third-party links being operational, users are
extremely unlikely to sign up for a premium account, and this is where the cyber lockers
can make good money.
So finally, one has to ask, whether the mega upload shutdown has damaged the internet
piracy infrastructure, providing an answer is not easy.
The amount of material coming online has not really reduced.
Content feeding from the scene is business as usual.
Torrent sites are watching on closely, but the public ones tend not to host content.
Their users do.
Cyber lockers are in a mess, but already recovering.
Release sites are continuing albeit with a reduced number of multiple links to the same content.
Perhaps the best test is whether it's now very hard or impossible to find and download
popular content.
Not even close.
From Venezuelaanalysis.com, by Tamara Pearson of Venezuelaanalysis.com, new Venezuelan
social network takes off.
Mi Rida, January 25, 2012.
The new Venezuela social network, called Plaxed, which allows streams of short posts to
100 characters, as well as event invitation polls and questions, was created as an alternative
site so that the files or personal details found on the network, quote, aren't blocked,
erased, or followed, unquote, by U.S. Laws, said its creator, Cesar Coaches, a systems
and a nearing student.
The idea for a website began one and a half years ago, but was on trial a long time.
Then the project became a success.
We had 10,000 people registered in just one day, which collapsed our servers, unquote,
Cotiz, said, quote, we want a social network specifically for Venezuela, for phones and
desktops, and that is completely free.
Anyone can create a social network, be it for personal use or business, unquote, Cotiz,
said.
Plaxed is still under development, based on the freeware status net.
It still contains a lot of English, which is gradually being replaced.
It has no advertising, and its name, according to Cotiz, doesn't mean anything.
It's important that Venezuelians gradually take on new technology and create new social
networks, in order to start to eliminate this dependence that we have on websites made
in other countries, which fall under the law of those countries, so they can take the
information we put there at any time and do whatever they want with it, unquote.
Cotiz explained that Venezuelians could take Plaxed to court.
Should it do something on-tward with its information it has, because it falls under Venezuelian
laws, where they could not do that in the case of other social networks, like Facebook
or Twitter.
Social networking in Venezuela has experienced growth in recent years in Venezuela, as
internet usage has risen 40%, while President Hugo Chavez's Twitter account has the most
followers in the country.
According to report by Tendencius and Digitalis, Venezuela is third in Latin America for social
networking media use, with 30% of internet users registering on Facebook and 21% on Twitter.
Last year, the United Nations Institute UNESCO award Venezuelist info centers the King
Hamid bin Issa Al-Khalifa prize for their work in providing free internet access as well
as training, especially to people who were previously excluded due to poverty or location.
In 2010, there were 668 info centers, and since then many more have been built.
Other headlines in the news?
My Twitter case and thought crime.
This is Brigitte Hans Dattier's official blog post entry on the Twitter case.
The state were in Freedom's Road.
This is the English Podcasts from Rio Nellins and to National it features the interview
with Brigitte Hans Dattier.
News from Havana at times.org.org.gov.com and dissidentvoice.org use under a range permission.
News from EFF.org and twartfreak.com use under permission of the Creative Commons by Attribution
Non-Commercial.no-derivorous license.
News from renisreliaanalysis.com is copy-left audio-interlude moment of clarity number 112.
Use under permission of Lee Camp.
News sources retain their respective copyrights.
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