hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0940.txt

Episode: 940
Title: HPR0940: TGTM Tech News for 2012-03-07
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0940/hpr0940.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:14:12

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Music
You're listening to Toolkit 3 News, number 62, recorded for March 7, 2012.
You're listening to the Tech Only Hacker Public Radio Edition, to get the full podcast,
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Before proceeding to the Tech Roundup, I want to announce here that I will be attending
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Thank you.
And now for the Tech Roundup.
From perspectives.mvderona.com, by James Hamilton, did February 21, 2012, communicating
data beyond the speed of light.
In the past, I have written about the cost of latency and how reducing latency can drive
more customer engagement and increase revenue.
Two examples of this are the cost of latency and economic incentives applied to web latency.
No where is latency reduction more valuable than in high frequency trading applications,
because these trades can be incredibly valuable, the cost of the infrastructure on which
they trade is more or less an afterthought.
Not people at the major trading firms work hard to minimize costs, but if the cost of
infrastructure was to double tomorrow, high frequency trading would continue unabated.
High frequency trading is very sensitive to latency and is nearly insensitive to costs.
That makes it an interesting application area.
And it's one I watch reasonably closely.
It's a great domain to test ideas that might not yet make economic sense more broadly.
Some of these ideas will never see more general use, but many ideas get proved out in high
frequency trading and can be applied to more cost sensitive application areas once the
techniques have been refined or there is more value.
One suggestion that comes to up and just on nearly every team upon which I have worked
is the need to move bits faster than the speed of light.
Faster than the speed of light communications would help cloud hosted applications and
cloud computing in general, but physics blocks progress in this area resolutely.
What if it really were possible to transmit data at roughly 33% faster than the speed
of light?
It turns out this is actually possible and may even make economic sense in high frequency
trading.
Before you cancel your RSS feed to this blog, let's look more deeply at what is being
sped up, how much, and why it really is possible to substantially beat today's optical
communication links.
When you get into the details, every law is actually more complex than the simple statement
that gets repeated over and over.
This is one of the reasons I tell anyone who joins Amazon that the only engineering
law around here is there are no unchallengable laws.
It's all about understanding the details and applying good engineering judgment.
For example, the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, right?
Absolutely.
But the fine print is that the speed of light is 186,000 miles a second in a vacuum.
The actual speed of light is dependent upon the medium in which the light is propagating.
In an optical fiber, the speed of light is actually roughly 33% slower than in a vacuum.
More specifically, the index of refraction of the most common optical fibers is 1.52.
What this means is that the speed of light in a fiber is actually just over 122,000 miles
a second.
The index of refraction of light in air is very close to one, which is to say that the
speed of light in air is just about the same as the speed of light in a vacuum.
This means that free space optics.
The use of light for data communications without a fiber wave guide is roughly 50% faster
than the speed of light in a fiber.
Unfortunately, this only makes matters over long distances, but it's only practical
over short distances.
There have been test deployments over metro area distances.
We actually have one where I work, but generally it's a niche technology that has improved
practical and widely applicable.
In this approach, I'm not particularly excited.
Continuing this search for low refraction index data communications, we find that microwaves
transmitted in air are, again, have a refraction index near one, which is to say that microwave
is around 50% faster than light in a fiber.
As before, this is only of interest over longer distances, but unlike free space optics,
microwave is very practical over longer distances.
In longer runs, it needs to be received and retransmitted periodically, but this is
practical, cost effective, and is fairly heavily used in the telecom industry.
What hasn't been exploited in the past is that microwaves is actually faster than the speed
of light in fiber.
The 50% speed up of microwaves over fiber optics seems exploitable, and an enterprising set
of entrepreneurs are doing exactly that.
This plan was outlined in the giga-owned article from yesterday titled Wall Street Gains
Edge Over Trading by Microwave, and this approach, McCabe Brothers, are planning on linking New
York City with Chicago using microwave transmission.
This is a 790-mile distance, but fiber seldom takes the most direct route.
Let's assume a fiber-path distance of 850 miles, which will yield 6.9 millisecond propagation
delay if there are no routers or other networking gear in the way.
Give that both optical and microwave require repeaters.
I'm not including their impact in the analysis.
Covering the 790 miles using microwaves will require 4.2 milliseconds.
Using these data, we would have the microwave link a full 2.7 milliseconds faster.
That's a very substantial time difference, and in the world of high-frequency trading,
a 2.7 millisecond is very monetizable.
In fact, I've seen HFT customers extremely excited about the very small portions of
a millisecond, getting 2.7 milliseconds back is potentially a very big deal.
This article continues with a quote from the McCabe Brothers website to read that quote
and examine all the links in the article, follow links in the show notes, to the article.
From eff.org, date February 24, 2012, appeals court upholds constitutional right against
forced decryption.
San Francisco, a federal appeals court, has found a Florida man's constitutional rights
were violated when he was imprisoned for refusing to decrypt data on several devices.
This is the first time an appellate court has ruled the Fifth Amendment protects against
forced decryption, a major victory for constitutional rights in the digital age.
In this case, titled United States, Versed Do, FBI agencies, two laptops and five external
hard drives, from a man they were investigating, but were unable to access encrypted data
they believed were stored on the device via an encryption problem called True Crypt.
When a grand jury ordered the man to produce the unencrypted contents of the drives, he
invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refused to do so.
The court held him in contempt and sent him to jail.
The electronic frontier foundation filed an amicus brief under seal, arguing that the man
had a valid Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, and that the government's
attempt to force him to decrypt the data was unconstitutional.
The eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that the act of decrypting data
is testimonial and therefore protected by the Fifth Amendment.
Furthermore, the government's limited offer of immunity, in this case, was insufficient
to protect his constitutional right because it did not extend to the government's use
of the decrypted data as evidence against him in a prosecution to read the rest of
the article, follow links in the show notes.
From EFF.org, by Ketitsa Rodriguez, dead March 2, 2012, Mexico adopts a alarming surveillance
legislation.
The Mexican Legislature, today, adopted a surveillance legislation that will grant the
police warrantless access to real-time use of location data.
The bill was adopted almost unanimously with 315 votes in favor of six against and seven
abstentions it has been sent to the President for his approval.
There is significant potential for abuse of these new powers.
The bill ignores the fact that most cellophones today constantly transmit detailed location
data about every individual to their carriers.
As all this location data is housed in one place with the telecommunication service provider,
police will have access to more precise, more comprehensive and more pervasive data than
would ever have been possible with the use of tracking devices.
The Mexican government should be more sensitive to the fact that mobile companies are now
recording detailed footprints of our daily lives.
In response to the law's adoption, Mexican human rights lawyer, Luis Fernando Garcia,
told EFF QUOTE, Mexican policy makers must understand that the adoption of board surveillance
powers without adequate safeguard undermines the privacy and security of citizens and is
therefore incompatible with the human rights obligations.
Sensitive data of this nature warns stronger protection, not-and-all-access paths.
Human rights advocates really evaluate all necessary legal options for challenging
the legality of the measure.
In the meantime, Mexican citizens should evaluate the possibility of requesting access to their
own personal data, retained by the mobile company going to the Mexican data protection
law.
In Germany, the politician and privacy advocate, Malt Spitz, used a similar local privacy
law, which, like laws in many European countries, give individuals a right to know what kinds
of data private companies retain about them, to force his cell phone care to reveal what
records it had on him.
The result was 35,831 different facts about his cell phone use over the course of six months.
Revealing vast amounts of personal information, to demonstrate just how intrusive this data
is, Spitz chose to make it all available to the public, watched the remarkable interactive
map of Spitz' location information if you haven't done so.
It is time to educate all of our legislatures and the general public that sensitive data
warns stronger protections, EFF will continue to report on mobile and online surveillance in
Mexico.
From torrentfreak.com, date February 20, 2012, by EnigmaX.
Pirate Bay ISP block challenged for centering lawful content.
During Bay 2011, the copyright information at Antipiracy Center, CRPAC, and the finished
branch of the music industry group IFPI, filed a lawsuit at the District Court of Helsinki.
The groups demanded that local ISP Elisa should start blocking the pirate bay in order to
protect the copyrights of their members, while Elisa initially requested a subsequent court
order in October 2011 for them to comply and last month it was initiated.
The matter is currently under appeal, but in the meantime Elisa's block must remain,
which means that no content indexed by the pirate bay illicit or fully authorised is
available to the ISP's customers.
For one, Elisa customer, that situation is unacceptable.
Antilane says that the enforcement order head down to his ISP was unlawful, so he has
responded by final complaint with the authority that sanctioned the block.
His complaint states that under finished copyright law any injunction should avoid collateral
damage.
Such a wide block fails to consider this responsibility, Lane insists, adding that enforcement
of the decision is based in an erroneous application of law.
His complaint is being made on three grounds.
One, Lane says he has been working on a project and the media created is being distributed
via the pirate bay, due to the block distribution of the content is being affected.
Two, as a client of Elisa himself, Lane says that due to the blockade he can no longer
download or indeed upload any material that is deemed by creators to be free distribution.
On the copyright law, this legal content cannot be a target of the injunction, but nevertheless
its availability is being threatened.
Three, Lane states that the injunction is based on an incorrect application of law.
Service providers can only be ordered to block access to infringing files.
But there are huge numbers of other works being affected by the blanket censorship.
Furthermore, Lane says that the blockade also affects all legal content uploaded to the
pirate bay after it was initiated, and such preemptive censorship is against Finland's Constitution.
In respect to Iron 3, Lane attached a list of Creative Commons GPL and Public Domain
material, affected, including content from dope stores and corporate titles such as Steel
is Film, Lion's Share, and Zeig East from Jamie King's Vodo, Rep, a remix manifesto, Finland's
own Star Trek parody series Star Rec, and many open source software applications.
No blocking mechanism should block content that's available legally.
Junus, a machinant of Finland's pirate party, tells Tornfreak, if the proposed methods
can't reasonably differentiate between authorized and non-authorized content they should never
be put into action.
There is no reason to block even the pirate base website itself, as it texts and images
there, a whopping 90 megabytes, are definitely not illegal for distribution per se, machinant
ads.
Lane seeks a correction to the existing injunctions so that it no longer breaches the copyright
act and constitutional law.
From Tornfreak.com, dated March 1, 2012 by Enigmex, Kim.com, US government is protecting
an outdated monopolistic business model.
After speaking with Tornfreak on Monday, Kim.com has elaborated on his situation and interview
with three news, Campbell Live, which now gives us the opportunity to reveal a bit more detail
about the current musings of the mega upload founder.
Aside from the heavy head nature of the shutdown, the underlying shock in this case has its
roots in the undermining of a previously presumed level of legal protection for service providers.
Earlier this week, .com told us that in recent years, mega upload has spent millions of dollars
seeking out the very best legal advice and the conclusions drawn or clear, providing the
site did its part in tackling infringement, it would be protected on the DMCA and could
not be held liable for the actions of its users.
It's achieving this protection .com told us that the company had developed relationships
with 180 takedown partners, companies authorized to directly remove infringing links for mega
upload systems and between them they had taken down an axis of 15 million links.
Those companies include the major studios of the MPAA who incidentally in seven years
of the company's existence had never tried to sue mega upload for copyright infringement.
On the advice of mega upload legal team, the company believed it had the same bright
as YouTube in its case against entertainment giant Viacom and that 2010 case, the US
District Judge Louis L. Stanton, said service providers cannot be held liable for infringement
as long as they remove links upon copyright holder requests, even if the provider knows
that parts of their service are being used to host illicit content.
YouTube won their lawsuit and I'm sitting in jail.
My house is being raided, all my assets are frozen without a trial, without a hearing.
This is completely insane is what it is, said .com of his predicament.
.com told Tornfreak that the indictment left out many key facts, not least that mega upload
users enter into a binding legal agreement when they sign up to the file poster, which
include promising not using the service to commit crimes or infringements, a point tackled
again today by three news is John Campbell.
Of course, that is a romantic notion though, isn't it?
That's just because we tick the box accepting the terms of service that we're going to
behave ourselves when we're in there, right?
Question Campbell, adding that mega must have known that people would have inevitably
agreed to the terms of service and then gone on and done whatever they liked.
Well, there are other laws that protect users and those are privacy laws.
For example, in the US it's the Electronic Communication Privacy Act, which prohibits
us from looking into the accounts of users for actively and look for things, respawn.com.
It's like mail, it's private, we cannot just go in there and police what these users
are uploading.
Although the company is clearly trying to distance themselves from comparisons to mega upload,
Swiss based rapid share made the same point in a recent Tornfreak interview, the file
hosted said that it would always respect customer privacy by never looking through their
files without permission.
Earlier this month, the EU court effectively banned the practice after music rights groups
BAM, failed in its bid to force social networking site netlog to proactively scan upload user files
for infringement.
It's not unusual for huge figures to be punted around and copyright infringement cases,
and in this one, in particular, mega upload is accused of costing copyright holders half
a billion US dollars.
That figure has been repeated dozens of times, but according to .com, it's just a tip
of the iceberg.
If you read the indictment, and if you hear what the prosecution has said in court, at
least $500 million of damage would just music files, and it's within a two week time period,
so they are actually talking about $13 billion damage within a year just for music downloads.
The entire US music industry is less than $20 billion, he explained.
So, with all of the file hosting services out to choose from, why would the authorities
single out mega upload?
We discussed this with .com on Monday and in common with the Campbell interview, the name
media fire came up.
Media fire is a huge file hosting operation, in July 2011 they were clocking up 34 million
unique monthly visitors, and 3 million behind mega upload.
In the previous month, the term media fire was even partially censored by Google as being
a piracy related term.
There can be little doubt that either Hollywood or the recording labels ask Google to take
this action.
But of course, what media fire doesn't have is the imagery generated by the figurehead
like .com, and if there's one thing that Hollywood is all about after money, its image,
and .com believes he presents their perfect watch enemy character.
I'm an easy target, my flamboyance, my history as a hacker, you know, I'm not American,
I'm living somewhere in New Zealand, around the world, I have funny number plates on
my cause, you know, I'm an easy target, he told 3 news.
I'm not Google, I don't have 50 million dollars in my account, and right now I'm not
a penny on my account.
All my lawyers currently are basically working without a penny, and they are all still
on board and still doing their job because what they see here is unfair, is unreasonable,
and it's not justice.
But when one cuts through all the drama of the past couple of months, and even with
the demise of mega upload, a service painted as the worst of the worst by Hollywood, and
the authorities, piracy has not gone away, despite everything it continues, .com believes
the reasons for that are obvious, it's a service issue with regional time delays providing
a prime example.
If the business model would be one where everyone has access to this content at the same time,
you know, you wouldn't have a piracy problem, so it's really, in my opinion, the government
of the United States protecting an out-did monopolistic business model that doesn't work
anymore in the age of the internet, and that's what it all boils down to, he explains.
Yesterday, at the behest of the U.S. government, a court in New Zealand considered revoking
Kim.com's fail, in the event that attempt failed, with the mega upload found a continuing
to insist that he's not going to flee the country, as the prosecution has suggested.
For what it's worth, we believe .com's claim, he is full of fight, genuinely optimistic,
that he can win this battle, and has exciting plans for the future, none of which appear
to involve hiding in a cave or befriending Hugo Chavez.
I'm no piracy king, he concludes, I offer it online storage and bandwidth to users.
That's it.
You can watch the full three news show here, and read our earlier articles here.
Other headlines in the news, to read these news, follow links in the show notes to the
article.
Debate over non-GPL version of busy box supposedly settled.
Gigabit internet for $70, the unlikely success of California's Sonic.net.
News from Havana at times.org, and these times.com, the audio, moment of clarity number 121,
Maggie McNeil.wordpress.com, perspectivesmvderona.com, and allgov.com, used under a range permission.
News from EFF.org, and torrentfreak.com, used under permission of the Creative Commons
by Attribution License.
News from peoplesworld.org, used under permission of the Creative Commons by Attribution
Non-Commercial Node-Driver's License.
Audio-Inteludes, NSA, and Vogue Cursey YouTube user, Anani Ops, news sources retain their
respective copyrights.
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