Episode: 1205
Title: HPR1205: TGTM Newscast for 3/10/2013
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1205/hpr1205.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 21:34:36

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You're listening to TGTM news number 90 record for Sunday March 10, 2013.
You're listening to the Tech Only Hacker Public Radio Edition to get the full podcast
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This is Dan Washco and now the Tech Roundup from Tornfreak.com by Andy Dated March 1, 2013.
US government wins appeal in Kim.com extradition battle.
Kim.com and his associates have lost the key battle in their extradition fight against
the United States.
On two earlier occasions including once in the high court.com's legal team successfully
argued they were entitled to examine mountains of evidence held by the US authorities.
But those rulings were overturned this morning when the court of appeal said that the United
States would be allowed to present a summary case after all.
.com says he'll take an appeal to the Supreme Court.
After Kim.com and his associates were arrested in New Zealand in January 2012, it became clear
that the United States government would seek their extradition on copyright, racketeering,
money laundering and other charges.
In May 2012, the .com defense received the boost when Judge Harvey in the North Shore District
Court disagreed with the prosecution and ordered disclosure of all documents relating to the
alleged crimes of the so-called mega conspiracy.
In the high court in August 2012, Justice Helen Winkleman dismissed the application for
a New Jessel review and upheld the earlier decision handed down in the North Shore District
Court.
Kim.com and his co-accuses, Matthews Ortman, Finn Batato, and Brown Von Der Kolk were
to be given access to the documents in order to mount a full and proper defense.
But refusing to give in the US hit back again, launching an appeal against the ruling in
hope of a different outcome.
Today, a New Zealand appeals court handed down its ruling and it represents a huge setback
for .com and friends.
Returning Justice Winkleman's ruling on disclosure, the Court of Appeals said that an extradition
hearing is not a trial in which innocence or guilty is determined.
Therefore, the procedures appropriate in such a trial were not applicable in this case.
Since extradition treaties effectively amount to understandings between governments to ensure
those suspected of crimes are brought to account, all the US has to do is prove to the court
that .com and his associates have a prima facia case to answer.
Just per the High Court's disclosure ruling .com's legal team had hoped to obtain mass information
from the FBI, including records, relating to the covert operations carried out.
Those that detailed the evidence and complaints put forward to authorities by copyright holders
plus records that show communications between copyright holders and mega-upload, including
discussions and agreements on takedown notices.
But following today's ruling, the US government will be allowed to submit its case for extradition
in summary format.
That's the high level of detailed demanded by .com's legal team.
This morning Kim.com said that the show is not over yet and will go to the highest court
in the land.
If the Supreme Court accepts the case in .com wins, the evidence disclosed would be hugely
helpful in his ongoing legal battles.
However, even in defeat, the possibility remains that an extradition judge could demand
to see more evidence from the United States.
If that information was not forthcoming, the judge could refuse to extradite.
The extradition hearing is expected to go ahead in August this year, but the date could
be further delayed if the Supreme Court takes up the case.
Morning, this article contains some foul language and may not be work safe.
From tornfreak.com by Ernesto, data March 4, 2013, the Pyrepe moves to North Korea.
The Pyrepe says it has been offered virtual asylum in North Korea.
The move comes after the Norwegian Pyre Party was forced to stop routing traffic for the
infamous BitToran site by a local copyright group.
Quote, we can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the Republic of Korea to
fight our battles from their network.
The Pyrepe says, a trace route indeed suggests that the Pyrepe is now being routed through
the dictatorial country.
Last week, the Swedish Pyrepe Party was forced to shut down its routing services to the
Pyrepe.
The party and its leaders took the difficult decision after they were threatened with a lawsuit
by local anti-piracy group.
Luckily for the Pyrepe, the Pyrepe parties of Norway and Cataluna were willing to take
over the role.
However, after just a few days, the Norwegians had to shut down their Pyrepe note as well,
facing similar threats as their Swedish comrades.
Quote, we've been in talks with them for about two weeks since they opened access to
foreigners to use 3G in their country.
A Pyrepe insider told us, TPP has been invited just like Ert Schmidt and Dennis Robman.
We've declined up until now.
While the Pyrepe may not visit North Korea, they announced that they are using the country's
network to connect the BitTorne site to the rest of the world.
This is truly an ironic situation.
We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations
from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said
to be held high.
Quote, at the same time, companies from their country are chasing a competitor from other
countries, bribing police and lawmakers threatening political parties and physically
hunting people from our crew.
And through our help comes a government-famous and our part of the world for locking people
up for their thoughts and forbidding access to the information they add.
Well, it turns out that this was actually a hoax, because there's an update from their
Facebook page.
The Pyrepe admits on Facebook, as expected, that it was a hack for the laws.
Quote, we hope that yesterday's little hack proved that we know the internet better than
our enemies.
Since about 40% of the entire internet's traffic consists of torrent enabled by us.
You can almost say that we are the internet.
Fuck with the internet, and we'll ridicule you, until you beg for mercy.
Quote, we've hopefully made clear once again that we don't run TPB to make money.
A profit-hungry idiot doesn't tell the world that we have partnered with the most hated
dictatorial ship in the world.
We can play that stunt though, because we're still only in it for the fucking lulls,
and it doesn't matter to us if thousands of users disband the ship.
We've also learned that many of you need to be more critical, even towards us.
You can't seriously cheer the fact that we moved our servers to Bloody North Korea.
Applauds to you who told us to fuck off.
Always stay critical towards everyone.
Update, the Norwegian Pirate Party told Torrent Freak that they never routed any traffic.
They just put their name on the node.
The Telecom Company, Avello, pulled the plug allegedly after being contacted by copyright
holders.
From AllGov.com by Noel Brinkeroff, dated March 5, 2013.
Next up for Big Brother, recording and transcribing public conversations.
Matt Lease, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, is working on ways to literally
record all human conversations no matter where they take place.
But his research is being funded by the Department of Defense, raising the question of how
such a technology might be used in the hands of the government.
Lisa's plan is to utilize crowdsourcing, voice recognition software, and everyday devices
like smartphones to gather human speech, whether in a business meeting or on the street, and
store it somewhere so people could access what they said any time.
He told Wired's Danger Room that he saw the work as both a, quote, need and opportunity
to really make conversational speech more accessible, more part of our permanent record instead
of being so ephemeral, and really trying to imagine what this world would look like if
we really could capture all these conversations and make use of them effectively going forward.
End quote.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, like Lease's idea so much, gave
him a $300,000 grant to support his efforts.
If successful, this new system could raise, quote, some thorny legal and social questions
about privacy, quote, wrote Robert Beck Hughesen at Wired.
One example cited by Lease involves, quote, respecting the privacy rights of multiple people
involved, end quote, and how to gain permission of everyone talking before capturing and
storing conversation.
In the hands of spy agencies, this is not expected to be an issue.
To learn more, head on over to the article link mentioned in the show notes and check
out some of the information like DARPA wants you to transcribe and instantly recall all
your conversations by Robert Beck Hughesen of Wired, crowdsourcing document re-revalence
assessment with Mechanical Turk by Catherine Grady and Matthew Lease and public buses
in many U.S. cities will soon be monitoring private conversations for the government by
no-brinking off of allgov.com.
For me, ff.org, dated March 4, 2013 by Mitch Stoltz and Parker Higgins.
White House supports unlocking phones, but the real problems runs deeper.
The White House has come out today in support of legalizing the unlocking of cell phones for
use on different carriers, saying it makes common sense that all consumers deserve that flexibility.
The statement came as a response to a recent petition that received over 114,000 signatures.
While we're people concerned about cell phone unlocking, unlocking a phone for use on a
different carrier may run a foul of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
which prohibits the so-called circumvention of technical locks on copyrighted works.
In a nod to the unworkability of such a ban, the law outlines a process for the Librarian
of Congress to establish some exemptions every three years.
In 2006 and 2010, the Librarian approved the exemption targeted at cell phone unlocking,
but opted not to in the 2012 process.
That doesn't necessarily make unlocking illegal, but it does strip it of its explicit legal
protection it had before.
Today's White House statement acknowledges two important points about the controversial
act, anti-circumvention provision, that it has gotten in the way of innovation and competition,
and that its rigid rulemaking procedures are an imperfect fit for some issues specifically
technical ones.
That sentiment was echoed in the Library of Congress statement also issued today.
The rulemaking process, quote, was not intended to be a substitute for deliberations of broader
public policy, end quote.
The White House is correct.
The failure to protect phone unlockers from legal threats was misguided, but the more important
problem is that the DMCA puts an unelected official in charge of regulating personal
devices in the first place.
Today the outrage is about phones with carrier locks, but what really rubs against the
grain of common sense is to premise, set forth in DMCA's Section 1201 that the Librarian
of Congress should have to temporarily whitelist certain uses every three years.
We're glad that the White House recognized that if you buy a device you own it, and
you should be able to use it as you choose, your rights to reuse, resell, or give away
devices are especially important, and the Obama administration gets this.
As the administration's telecommunications agency pointed out last year, digital locks
backed by the legal threats aren't just used to police copyrights, they use the block
competition.
Of course, the DMCA doesn't apply to only mobile phones and unlocking.
It also gets in a way of jail-breaking tablets, game consoles, and other personal devices.
It's used to threaten academics and tinkers, to block publication of research on computer
security, and to cover up embarrassing failures of DRM.
It's still potentially illegal to watch subscription video services or blu-ray discs
on the devices and operating systems of our choice.
And even where EFF and others have convinced the Library of Congress to create temporary
exemptions to the DMCA for things like phone jail-breaking DVD decryption and read-aloud
functions for e-books, creating and selling the tools to do these things is still illegal
under the DMCA.
Now that the Obama administration has recognized the problem, we hope they will commit to fixing
it and not just for phone users.
From eff.org dated March 1st, 2013, by Dan Arbok.
Firefox's new, smarter cookie policy is a privacy win for users.
Mozilla recently announced a change to its default cookie policy for Firefox that will
help protect users against unwanted tracking by invisible third parties.
In short, a user will have to intentionally interact with a site in order for the
machine site to be able to set a tiny snippet of data used for identification purposes
known as a cookie on the user's machine.
This change currently available to users running the Nightly Test Build of Firefox will bring
Firefox in line with its competitors Safari, which had had a similar policy in place
for a decade.
It is far from a silver bullet against tracking as there are several other methods to
track users, and this will not block cookies that currently exist in a user's browser.
In other words, users must clear their cookies for the new policy to be effective.
But instead of just clearing your cookies, for users interested in taking five minutes
to drastically enhance their privacy, check out our tips for comprehensive tracking protection
customizations to your browser.
Now I'll head over to the article on the link in the show notes for those tips.
This move by Mozilla signals that the organization is willing to provide users with much needed
technical countermeasures for tracking.
Instead of relying solely on the currently-stalled development of the W3C, do not track standard
that appears increasingly unlikely to yield results.
The patch is a careful step towards protecting users against increasingly pervasive tracking
by disallowing third parties to set cookies.
It will be harder for third party advertisers, data brokers, and other invisible trackers
to build the dossier of all the websites that a user visits over many years.
This new cookie policy is in no way a hack or gaming of how technology is supposed to
work, but rather behavior all but encouraged under the recent IETF technical specification
on cookies.
Enhancing user privacy without disrupting user experience may seem like a completely
obvious measure to take, but advertisers and other firms have a vested interest in tracking
users to serve users with behaviorally targeted advertisements.
Since this industry has a lot of influence on money, it is hard to make even the smallest
change to the status quo, despite the fact that behaviorally targeted advertising represents
only a small fraction of advertising-based business models and countermeasures, like these
will not hurt ad-supported publishers.
Mozilla should be praised for standing up for its users, despite a powerful interest poised
to attack the sensible tracking countermeasures.
However, it is important to keep in mind that this cookie policy change represents low
hanging fruit, where privacy can be better protected without any requirement for publishers
to change how their websites operate.
There may be harder battles for Mozilla to fight in the future to protect users from
tracking that do not require changes to websites or broader changes to the online monetization
ecosystem.
We look forward to helping Firefox make bigger strides towards offering the and enabling
countermeasures against tracking and creating tools for users that push the ecosystem in
a positive direction that better protects users.
Other headlines in the news to read these stories follow the links in the show notes.
Drone Nightmare scenario now has a name, Argus.
This is an analysis by the ACLU of a new digital video recording technology that is equivalent
to the surveillance power of up to 100 reaper drones.
Staff been produced by TGTM News Team Editorial Selection by Deep Geek, views of the story
authors reflect their own opinions and not necessarily those of TGTM News.
News from TechDirt.com, TheStand.org, Maggie McNeil, WordPress.com, and AllGov.com used
under arranged permission.
News from EFF.org and Tornfreak.com used under permission of the Creative Commons by Attribution
License.
News from DemocracyNow.org and People's World.org used under permission of the Creative
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