hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1180.txt

Episode: 1180
Title: HPR1180: TGTM Newscast for 2/6/2013
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1180/hpr1180.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 21:06:28

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You are listening to TGTM News, number 89, recorded for Wednesday, February 6, 2013.
You are listening to the Tech Only Hacker Public Radio Edition, to get the full podcast
including political, commentary, and other controversial topics.
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This is Dan Washco and now the Tech Roundup.
From Tornfreak.com, Pirate Bay founder could be prosecutor for hacking within a month
by EnigMax.
The Swedish prosecutor says that in a month's time he hopes to bring charges against Pirate
Bay co-founder Gottfried Swarthome, who is alleged to have hacked into an IT company working
for Sweden's tax authority.
In late August 2012, Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfried Swarthome was deported from Cambodia
to Sweden.
It was presumed that Gottfried had been taken to serve the year in prison he was handed
for his involvement in the Pirate Bay.
After he touched down the Stockholm's Arlanda Airport, the authorities claimed Gottfried
had been involved in hacking Logica, a Swedish IT company working with local tax authorities.
Gottfried has been held ever since, first in solitary confinement, and more recently at
Mayor Fred Prison, roughly 65 kilometers outside Stockholm.
In addition, Gottfried is also a suspect in another hacking claim.
Quote, I contacted the prosecutor about two weeks ago and asked him about what will happen
in the near future.
Gottfried's mother, Christina Swarthome, informs Tornfreak.
She added, earlier, he told the media that he will decide about any prosecution or not
for the two infringements and four frauds that Gottfried is suspected of in late January
beginning of February.
To me, he has said that he would first finish his investigation and then decide about any
prosecution.
I didn't get any time scheduled for this."
Prosecutor Henrik Olin now says he hopes to complete his investigation in a month at which
point he'll make his decision.
Quote, our ambition is to be able to prosecute, but I am, of course, open to any new information
that may come in, says Olin.
Reports from his mother say that Gottfried is being treated well by both the guards and
his fellow inmates after he was moved from solitary.
His only enemy is boredom since he has still denied the computer and internet access,
a situation which isn't likely to change.
From eff.org, is it illegal to unlock a phone?
The situation is better or worse than you think, by Mitch Stoltz.
Legal protection for people who unlocked their mobile phones to use them on other networks
expired last weekend.
According to the claims of major U.S. wireless carriers, unlocking a phone bought after January
26 without your carrier's permission violates the digital millennium copyright ad, whether
the phone is under contract or not.
In a way, this is not as bad as it sounds, and otherwise, it's even worse.
What changed?
The DMCA prohibits circumventing digital locks that control access to copyrighted works
like movies, music, books, games, and software.
It's fantastically overloaded law that bans a lot of legal, useful, and important activities.
In what's supposed to be a safety valve, the U.S. Copyright Office and the Library of
Congress have the power to create exemptions for important activities that would otherwise
be banned by the DMCA.
In 2012, EFF asked for, and one, exemptions for jail-breaking or rooting mobile devices
to run on approved software and for using clips from DVDs and internet video and non-commercial
videos.
Consumer's Union and several smaller wireless carriers asked for an exemption for unlocking
phones.
The copyright office granted their exemption, too, but sharply limited the window to just
a few months.
First, the good news.
The legal shield for jail-breaking and rooting phones remains up.
It'll protect us at least through 2015.
The shield for unlocking your phone is down, but carriers probably aren't going to start
suing customers in mass, RIA style, and the copyright's office's decision, contrary
to what some sensationalist headlines have said, doesn't necessarily make unlocking
illegal.
Unlocking is an illegal gray area under the DMCA.
The law was supposed to protect creative works, but it's often been misused by electronics
makers to block competition and kill markets for used goods.
Now the bad news.
While we don't expect mass lawsuits anytime soon, the threat still looms.
More likely, wireless carriers or even federal prosecutors will be emboldened to sue not individuals,
but rather businesses that unlock and resell phones.
So what can we do?
Creating and defending the next round of exemptions will start in late 2014.
What we really need to do is either fix the exemption process or reboot the anti-circumvention
provisions of the DMCA or both.
From TechDirt.com, anti-piracy group already demanding that Kim.com's new mega-service
be shut down by Mike Masnick.
This probably isn't a huge surprise, but with the launch of Kim.com's new mega-cloud
drive system, many in the entertainment industry have assumed that he must be relaunching mega
upload and a way to infringe.
However, it seems pretty clear that mega is quite different and mostly resembles other
well-known legitimate services like Google Drive, Dropbox, and Amazon's cloud offerings.
Still, that hasn't stopped some in the anti-piracy community from trying to shut down the
site already.
Robert King is the lead figure behind stop-file lockers and anti-piracy group dedicated
to bringing file hosting services to their knees by strangling their finances.
Last year, King claimed his group had a hand in disrupting the cash flow to hundreds of
sites and actually shutting down dozens more.
Now he has a very big scalp on his mind.
King, an Australian and adult industry player, says that stop-file lockers have just begun
a campaign to have the payment processing of all mega resellers terminated.
Apparently, waiting for actual evidence of infringement or even specific liability for
mega is too much to ask.
This is silly, while we may have doubts about how mega is running, shutting it down without
even understanding what it's about seems incredibly short-sighted.
Plenty of successful legitimate companies have been built out of those who were earlier
sued for infringement.
Isn't it worth at least making sure he's breaking the law before insisting he must
have done so?
Also from techdirt.com, TechCrunch admits that using Facebook comments drove away most
of their commenters by Mike Masnick, and this article is written in the first person
perspective by Mike Masnick, so I'm going to read it that way.
I must admit to something of a minor fasts nation and how other sites manage their comments.
As we've noted many times, we've personally found that keeping our comments pretty wide
open fosters the best sorts of discussions in the long run.
Yes, like any sites, there are some users who are annoying and some who exhibit trollish
behavior, but most people can get past that pretty quick.
In fact, at times, those people, while frustrating initially, can spur some really interesting
conversations.
One thing we've never quite understood, however, is the attack on anonymity that so many
sites insist upon.
As we've seen over and over again, many of our most insightful comments have come from
anonymous commenters.
So it was actually surprised a few years ago when TechCrunch moved to switch all of its
comments to Facebook comments, claiming that one of the good things about it was that
it required you to provide your real name.
Apparently, that wasn't actually such a good thing for lots and lots of commenters.
As after nearly two years, TechCrunch has dumped Facebook comments and is pleading for
commenters to come back.
Our comments are obviously far from perfect, but we've never been at a loss for having
spirited discussions on nearly all of our posts.
There's just something awesome about the community it likes to really dig into the various
stories.
That's part of why we've always viewed this site as discussion site, rather than the
news or reporting site.
We post stuff with our opinion because we expect people to respond, go to our bad,
career disagree, in the comments, and for some sort of discussion to ensue.
That doesn't mean that we like to encourage trollish behavior, but we recognize that
encouraging a real community has its benefits.
And one key aspect to that is keeping the barrier low.
Too many other sites seem to think the best way to deal with the messiness of some annoying
commenters is to make it more difficult to comment.
However, as TechCrunch has discovered, like chemotherapy, it's a solution that can
kill off many of the good sales along with the bad.
From tornfreak.com, the 16th century religious wars and today's copyright monopoly wars
have more in common than you think, by Rick Falkfinch.
People in power have always tried to prevent the common folk from attaining knowledge that
threatens their power.
This happened in the 16th century and it is happening now.
The group in society that can control what other groups know and don't know will rise
to power in every other aspect.
Therefore, information technology has always been policed, even militarized, to some extent,
by any group that obtains the ability to control it.
It has been the case since the dawn of civilization that some group has told everybody else what
the world looks like, how it works, and how what happens in it.
Usually that group is placed at the center of a particular world view in one way or another.
This continues today with governments all over the world trying to put their spin of events
on the news flow, putting themselves in a good light to literally get away with murder.
The quest for the net's liberty is not a fight for some silly right to download free music.
It's much larger than that.
It breaks the Higanami that has stood for millennia.
This is why the old guard is terrified of the internet.
It's not that you can copy and spread their propaganda without asking, heck, that's what
they want and have always wanted.
What they fear is that you can fact-check it and publish your findings without asking anybody's
permission, or worse still, you can start communicating your own view of the world rather
than relating everything you think to their image of the world.
All of this happened before.
When the printing press was invented, it wasn't a revolutionary invention as such.
It was a revolutionary combination of four other inventions, metal-movable type, block-pressing,
metal-based angst, and cheap cloth-based paper, and revolutionized society by its ability
to distribute information cheaply, quickly, and accurately.
At its invention, Gutenberg pictured the Catholic Church using the printing press to distribute
its Bible's better and faster, being able to get a more consistent interpretation of
Christianity out to the smallest village, but that's not quite what happened.
Rather, a new movement emerged, one that was much better at using the new technology
and which used its superior ability to distribute information and getting the upper hand over
the Catholic Church.
It was called Protestantism, and different from Catholicism in one crucial aspect.
It printed Bibles in people's own languages.
The power to interpret the Bible from Latin had been shattered, ruined, destroyed, and with
it a large amount of the power of the Catholic Church.
They tried every trick in the book to put a cat back in the bag and sabotage this technology,
up to and including the death penalty, which was instituted in France on January 13, 1535
against the crime of using a printing press at all.
It didn't work.
The cat was indeed out of the bag.
People could publish and distribute their own ideas.
The Higanami fell, but not without some 200 years of horrible wars.
Looking closer at the situation, a bloody war between Catholicism and Protestantism seems
odd and puzzling.
There are two branches of the same religion that worship the same God, using the same instruction
manual.
Only the language of the instruction manual differs.
One branch has it in local languages.
The other branch has its instruction manual in Latin.
Why was this worth 200 years of warfare across the entire known world at the time?
The differences are indeed superficial, but the consequences of those differences are
not.
In one branch, it means that those who know Latin, the clergy and the academics, get the
ability to tell everybody else what to do, and it was ruled in a strict religious top-down
hierarchy.
In other branch, that power of interpreting the instruction manual, the Bible, rested
with the people themselves.
The religious wars were never about religion as such.
They were about who held the power of interpretation, about who controlled the knowledge and culture
available to the masses.
It was a war of gatekeepers of information.
Does this narrative feel familiar?
Interestingly, one of the methods used by the people on the Catholic side of the fight
was to suppress dissent by censoring the printing press.
While criminal and harsh penalties didn't work, commercial incentives to kill freedom
of speech worked flawlessly.
Mary I of England gave printing monopoly to London's printing guild, the London company
of stationers on May 4, 1557.
This monopoly gave them exclusive rights to printing on all of England in exchange for
allowing the queen's censors to prevent any threatening ideas from seeing the light
of day.
This monopoly was very beneficial for the new gatekeepers, the printers, and the ruling
classes alike, with every member of the public losing the freedom of information from it.
But how would those members of public know what ideas were never before their eyes and
understand their impact to society?
This monopoly stands to this day.
It was the copyright monopoly that started like this.
Yes, that means you can view today's copyright monopoly wars as a logical continuation
of the 16th century religious wars.
There is nothing new under the sun.
More headlines in the news?
To read these stories, follow the links in the show notes.
The Justice Department does not need to explain why it wanted Twitter information of certain
WikiLeaks supporters without a warrant, the Fourth Circuit ruled.
It requests for Twitter users' data rise 20% in 2012.
Imagine, BitTorrent Group Sysop speaks out as he heads to prison.
Mega launches brilliantly secure but not anonymous.
Staff been produced by the TGTM News Team, editorial selection by DeepGeek, views of the
story authors reflect their own opinions and not necessarily those of TGTM News.
News from TechDirt.com, TheStand.org, IcelandReview.com, and AllGov.com, used under arranged
permission.
News from Tornfreak.com and EFF.org, used under permission by the Creative Commons by
Attribution License.
News from DemocracyNow.org, used under permission of the Creative Commons by Attribution, non-commercial,
no derivatives license.
News sources retain their respective copyrights.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Talk Geek to Me.
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Your feedback matters to me, please send your comments to DG at DeepGeek.us.
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