Category: Internet

What the F%$#?

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Google went down yesterday:

You can all relax now. The near-unprecedented outage that seemingly affected all of Google’s services for a brief time on Friday is over.

The event began at approximately 4:37pm Pacific Time and lasted between one and five minutes, according to the Google Apps Dashboard. All of the Google Apps services reported being back online by 4:48pm.

The incident apparently blacked out every service Mountain View has to offer simultaneously, from Google Search to Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and beyond.

Big deal, right? Everyone has technical difficulties every once in a while. It goes with the territory.

But then, not everyone is Google. According to web analytics firm GoSquared, worldwide internet traffic dipped by a stunning 40 per cent during the brief minutes that the Chocolate Factory’s services were offline. Here’s the graph of what that looked like:

I’m wondering if maybe there was an issue with the latest brand of sniffer software from the NSA.

Still, this is weird.

This Has to be the Coolest Response to Blatant Plagiarism Ever

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Roll Tape

The boy band One Direction released a new song, Best Song Ever, which is blatantly cribbed from The Who’s 1871 asnthem Baba O’Reily. (see tape)

Pete Townshend has been remarkably sanguine about this, despite death threats from One Direction fans:

Legendary rockers The Who have announced they have no plans to ask One Direction to withdraw their new track Best Song Ever after a digital mob of rabid teenage girls bombarded them with death threats.

The English rock band issued the statement yesterday, weeks after the boy band released their hit song. From the day of its release, Best Song Ever had prompted various music columnists to make comparisons with the English band’s 1971 track Baba O’Riley.

The Twitterstorm first began brewing after a music reviewer on MTV.com commented about the track on 17 July: “[It] opens with a riff that sounds very similar to the Who’s Baba O’Riley.

A few days later, on ClickMusic, another reviewer slated the X Factor losers’ song, calling 1D’s songwriting team “creatively barren” and stating that “someone should call Trading Standards”.

The “Directioners” apparently tweeted and retweeted the article before the rumour began that Pete Townshend’s band was actually threatening legal action, although it had not.

………

Guitarist and songwriter Townshend, famed for smashing his guitar on stage, issued the following statement last night:

I like One Direction. The chords I used and the chords they used are the same three chords we’ve all been using in basic pop music since Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry made it clear that fancy chords don’t mean great music – not always. I’m still writing songs that sound like Baba O’Riley – or I’m trying to!

It’s a part of my life and a part of pop’s lineage. One Direction are in my business, with a million fans, and I’m happy to think they may have been influenced a little bit by The Who. I’m just relieved they’re all not wearing boiler suits and Doc Martens, or Union Jack jackets.

If you have paid any attention to the British press in recent months, you may have got the impression that nasty, nerdy male trolls were solely responsible for onine death threats. Well, it appears that teenage girls are just as bad.

This is a remarkably menschlichkeit response on the part of Townshend.

I am not particularly surprised, he has always been rather philosophical about such things.

The NSA Spying Gets Worse

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Now we have XKeyscore, which “collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’.”

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

 The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its “widest-reaching” system for developing intelligence from the internet.

 The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian’s earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight.

 ………

 The files shed light on one of Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

 “I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email”.

 US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden’s assertion: “He’s lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.”

 But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.

So, either Rep. Rogers knowingly lied, or he was lied to by the state security apparatus.

Yeah, it just keeps getting worse, and there is more to come, at least that is what Senator Ron Wyden said yesterday when he said that, “U.S. intelligence agencies’ violations of court orders on surveillance of Americans is worse than the government is letting on,” which means that even with a incredibly compliant FISA Court (You need to keep them away from toilet paper, because they will sign anything), they be bothered to follow the “law”.

A Patent Troll Bites the Dust

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One of the worst of the parasite, Eolas, has had its patents invalidated:

The inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, had never testified in court before last year. In February 2012, he left Cambridge to fly down to Tyler, an East Texas city of about 100,000, to testify at a patent trial. It was the culmination of a bold campaign by a man named Michael Doyle to levy a vast patent tax on the modern web.

Berners-Lee was one of several web pioneers who came through the court during the course of a four-day trial, which ultimately convinced a jury to invalidate two patents owned by Eolas, the tiny patent-holding company that Doyle and his lawyers transformed into one of the most fearsome “patent trolls” of all time.

Now Eolas appears to be gone for good. The company mounted a lengthy appeal, but it was all for naught; this morning, a three-judge appeals panel affirmed the jury’s verdict without comment.

………

Pei-Yuan Wei created the pioneering Viola browser, a key piece of prior art, while he was a student at UC-Berkeley in the early 1990s. Scott Silvey, another UC-Berkeley student at that time, testified about a program he made called VPlot, which allowed users to rotate an image of an airplane using Wei’s browser. VPlot and Viola were demonstrated to Sun Microsystems in May 1993, months before Doyle claimed to have conceived of his invention.

Eolas claimed an tremendously broad patent on all forms of interactive web products.

Why the f%$# has Eolas been able to blackmail people for so long?

Seriously.

DuckDuckGo

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I’ve used the search engine DuckDuckGo now and again, and now the search engine, which does not record data on its users, has experienced a surge in use following the NSA revelations:

Gabriel Weinberg noticed web traffic building on the night of Thursday 6 June – immediately after the revelations about the “Prism” programme. Through the programme, the US’s National Security Agency claimed to have “direct access” to the servers of companies including, crucially, the web’s biggest search engines – Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

 Within days of the story, while the big companies were still spitting tacks and tight-lipped disclaimers, the search engine Weinberg founded – which pledges not to track or store data about its users – was getting 50% more traffic than ever before. That has gone up and up as more revelations about NSA and GCHQ internet tapping have come in.

 “It happened with the release by the Guardian about Prism,” says Weinberg, right, a 33-year-old living in Paoli, a suburb of Philadelphia on the US east coast. “We started seeing an increase right when the story broke, before we were covered in the press.” From serving 1.7m searches a day at the start of June, it hit 3m within a fortnight.

 Yet you’ve probably never heard of DuckDuckGo. “If you asked 100 people, 96 would probably think it was a Chinese restaurant,” as the SFGate site observed. (The name comes from the children’s game DuckDuckGoose, a sort of tag involving seated players.) You won’t find it offered as an alternative default search engine on any browser, on desktop or mobile. Using it is very definitely an active choice, whereas using Google is the default option on most browsers. And 95% of people never change the default settings on anything.

 But this 20-person business offers what none of the big search engines do: zero tracking. It doesn’t use cookies or store data about its users’ IP addresses, doesn’t offer user logins, and uses an encrypted connection by default. (Google provides an encrypted connection for logged-in users, but not automatically for non-logged in users.) If the NSA demanded data from DuckDuckGo, there would be none to hand over.

Seeing as how Google (full disclosure, they do cut me a check occasionally for the ads they serve on this site) is determined to drop the word “Don’t” from their motto, “Don’t be evil,” I do wish them all the success in the world.

Limited Disclosure of FISA Warrants to Internet Firms Approved

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Facebook and Microsoft have gotten permission to release total numbers of government requests for data, which both Facebook and Twitter have lambasted as inadequate.

It’s clear to me that this permission is intended more to conceal than reveal:

Facebook and Microsoft announced Friday that the U.S. government is allowing them to disclose U.S. national security-related requests they received, but lumped together with other law enforcement requests. Google pushed back against those conditions.

“Since this story was first reported, we’ve been in discussions with U.S. national security authorities urging them to allow more transparency and flexibility around national security-related orders we are required to comply with,” Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel, wrote in a blog post.

“We’re pleased that as a result of our discussions, we can now include in a transparency report all U.S. national security-related requests (including FISA as well as National Security Letters) — which until now no company has been permitted to do.”

The social-networking company reported that for the six months ending December 31, it had received between 9,000 and 10,000 user data requests from U.S. local, state and federal governments, including national security-related requests, Ullyot said. Between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook user accounts were affected by the requests, he said.

This is quite literally the least the state security apparatus could approve, something which Google notes:

We have always believed that it’s important to differentiate between different types of government requests,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We already publish criminal requests separately from National Security Letters. Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately.

It’s clear that this is an attempt to forestall transparency, and instead create the appearance of transparency, by the intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice.

It’s good news, because it’s clear that they, and the Obama administration, is in damage control mode, which would indicate that Google and Twitter will eventually be allowed greater disclosure.

At least, that is what I hope.

Interesting Idea

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Green Eagle observes on the web, you can judge a book by its cover:

………

 As a motion picture art director, I work a lot with graphic artists constructing imitation documents of one kind and another. Perhaps because that is part of my job, I like to look for stylistic cues that give away the nature of a document, without reference to its content. This is an area (at least as it relates to politics) that has not received much attention, although institutions like the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore have fine collections of this material, much of it produced by people who are mentally ill.

 In particular, very little has been said about this phenomenon on the internet. This is probably understandable; websites are a relatively recent thing, and some of the relatively well known visual characteristics of the work of the mentally disturbed are eliminated by the template-driven layout of the vast majority of websites. For example, the chaotic writing of the Miz Thang example, or the handwritten political specimen shown below are not really possible on the internet. Well, enough preface, let me dive in with some examples:

He draws comparisons between whack job websites and works of art from the mentally ill.

I won’t post his examples. The picture that I am posting is the home page of the Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, which shows most of the characteristics he describes.

The tinfoil hat folks wear is reflected in their web designs.

You Phone Company is Refusing to Complete Rural Calls, and Deceiving Us About It

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Telcom law maven Harold Feld shows how FCC Loopholes resulting from VOIP exceptions are destroying one of the central requirements of voice calls:

Increasing numbers of rural communities are reporting problems with incoming phone calls. Outgoing calls work fine, but when someone tries to call one of these rural communities from an urban area, the connection doesn’t go through.

Though the phone never rings in the rural community, the urban caller might hear a “false ringback” in his earpiece, inserted so he will think there’s simply no answer and won’t complain about the lack of service.

This “rural call completion” problem, which also includes connections with very bad sound quality, is getting scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission.
The problem “causes rural businesses to lose customers, cuts families off from their relatives in rural areas, and creates potential for dangerous delays in public safety communications in rural areas,” according to the FCC.

………

In the last several years, businesses called “least cost routing” companies have sprung up. These companies promise phone networks to find the least expensive way to route their phone calls. The phone companies themselves don’t know how the least cost routing companies are routing the phone calls. They just trust them to do it.

Since completing calls to rural areas is expensive, least cost routers generally try to find long, complicated routes that will minimize the termination fees and other charges by making the call look like it comes from someplace with lower fees. This introduces something called “latency.” The lengthy routes mess up the IP-based phone call, causing long breaks in the signal that the traditional phone network (operated by a rural phone company) interprets as dead air or a disconnect.

………

The FCC refuses to classify IP-based services as “telephone” services (although it has the authority to do so). As a result, it can only regulate IP-providers indirectly with something called “ancillary authority.” Whether “ancillary authority” allows the FCC to regulate IP-based providers, such as least cost routers, remains to be seen.

The problem here is one of philosophy: the Washington consensus that deregulation always leads to innovation is a dangerous delusion.

We need only to compare the performance of our lightly regulated telcos to those of more highly regulated places like, Japan, France, or Korea, to see that consumers pay more, and get less, both in terms of performance and reliability.

Deregulation makes it easier to collect monopoly rents, and it is easier, and more lucrative to seek those rents than it is to succeed for innovation or evolutionary product improvement.

Every one gets screwed but the incumbent phone and cable companies, and it strangles real innovation.

OK, Google is Going Full Evil

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The Inevitable Downfall Video (NSFW)

Google is killing its Google Reader RSS Reader:

Google Reader, one of the world’s most popular RSS readers, is shutting down on July 1, 2013, Google announced Wednesday.

 The search giant is pulling the plug on the 7-year old project citing “declining usage.” Google says it is shuttering Reader and deprecating or shutting down a number of other services as part of the company’s “spring cleaning” initiative — one that seeks to help the company focus on the features that need the most use.

Seeing as how this app has been pretty much on autopilot for a while, it’s not like it was sucking up much in the way of resources.

My guess is that Google™ saw it as an alternative to Google+™, they dumped some sharing features from the program a year ago, and this was a large part of the reason to axe the program.

They are terrified of Facebook, and so they push G+.

As an aside, one of the problems with Google+™ is that G+ still sucks.

For example, there is still no way to feed your blog RSS to G+, which you can do in Facebook, Twitter, and even lowly MySpace.  (If someone knows a work around, tell me)

And to go further down the “We Love Evil” path, Google has now banned ad blocking software from its Android Market, the Play Store:

Google has removed all ad blocking apps from Google Play, its online store for Android applications, on the basis that they interfere with other services. Searches for “adblock” and related terms on Wednesday evening no longer returned any references to ad blocking software.

Till Faida, co-founder of Adblock Plus, condemned the decision, calling it a threat to consumer choice. “By unilaterally removing these apps, Google is stepping all over the checks and balances that make the Internet democratic,” he said in a statement, suggesting that Google’s actions threaten Internet freedom in the same way that SOPA and PIPA did.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In its letter to Adblock Plus, Google said the software violates Section 4.4 of the company’s Developer Distribution Agreement.

Section 4.4 states, “You agree that you will not engage in any activity with the Market, including the development or distribution of Products, that interferes with, disrupts, damages, or accesses in an unauthorized manner the devices, servers, networks, or other properties or services of any third party including, but not limited to, Android users, Google or any mobile network operator.”

Evil. It’s what’s dinner.

On a related note, my guess is that Feedburner will be done away with in the near to medium term, so if you have an email subscription, you would need to change.

I’m looking at alternatives.

This is Your Moment of Schadenfreude

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For the past 7 years, fans of the libertarian icon Congressman Ron Paul have run RonPaul.com, and now the batsh%$ insane iconoclastic politico has decided that he wants the domain.

So, is he offering to buy the site?  Nope, he is appealing to the United Nations to seize the domain:

Ron Paul is feuding with his rabid fan base over the ownership of RonPaul.com. Paul wants it, but his fans own it. They’re willing to sell it to him… for a price Paul doesn’t agree with. So now he’s taken the dispute all the way to the United Nations.

………

 The proprietors of RonPaul.com say they reached out to the retired politicain and offered him RonPaul.org as a free gift, but if he “insisted” on owning RonPaul.com then they would sell it to him. There was a catch, though. It would be part of a “liberty package” with the site’s 170,000 person mailing list for… wait for it… $250,000. They think the price is totally worth it:

The value we put on the deal was $250k; we are getting our mailing list appraised right now but we are confident it is easily worth more than $250k all by itself. Claims that we tried to sell Ron Paul “his name” for $250k or even $800k are completely untrue, and there is little doubt that our mailing list would have enabled Ron Paul to raise several million dollars for the liberty movement this year. It would have been a win/win/win situation for everyone involved.

But Paul did not respond to their generous offer. Instead, he went to the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization to file a 13 page complaint asking for control of both domains. Oops! Paul’s opting for legal action is notable because he’s spoken out against the U.N. in the past. They generally aren’t very popular among libertarians. They aren’t so bad now that he wants control of his own name’s website.

(Emphasis mine)

The United f%$#ing Nations????? Seriously?

I guess that it’s Libertarianism for thee, and not for me.

I think that Ron Paul has officially entered into the world of the “leeches”, as Ayn Rand would put it.

Too Much Free Time Example of the Millennium

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I give you Ryan Werber, who created the world’s most amusing traceroute:

6 Episode.IV (206.214.251.1) 68.642 ms 67.307 ms 67.005 ms
7 A.NEW.HOPE (206.214.251.6) 65.986 ms 68.502 ms 68.708 ms
8 It.is.a.period.of.civil.war (206.214.251.9) 67.067 ms 70.139 ms 66.52
9 Rebel.spaceships (206.214.251.14) 70.214 ms 70.192 ms 71.622 ms
10 striking.from.a.hidden.base (206.214.251.17) 71.427 ms 74.206 ms
11 have.won.their.first.victory (206.214.251.22) 71.665 ms 70.434 ms 7
12 against.the.evil.Galactic.Empire (206.214.251.25) 69.218 ms 70.621
13 During.the.battle (206.214.251.30) 69.059 ms 68.931 ms 69.981 ms
14 Rebel.spies.managed (206.214.251.33) 77.247 ms 72.757 ms 77.61
15 to.steal.secret.plans (206.214.251.38) 71.224 ms 71.164 ms 69.543
16 to.the.Empires.ultimate.weapon (206.214.251.41) 68.744 ms 68.824
17 the.DEATH.STAR (206.214.251.46) 72.316 ms 74.551 ms 66.354 ms
18 an.armored.space.station (206.214.251.49) 69.413 ms 70.334 ms 6
19 with.enough.power.to (206.214.251.54) 66.182 ms 66.627 ms 71.23
20 destroy.an.entire.planet (206.214.251.57) 71.926 ms 71.266 ms 70.
21 Pursued.by.the.Empires (206.214.251.62) 67.298 ms 65.956 ms 66.
22 sinister.agents (206.214.251.65) 65.020 ms 67.806 ms 70.508 ms
23 Princess.Leia.races.home (206.214.251.70) 68.894 ms 71.147 ms 71
24 aboard.her.starship (206.214.251.73) 72.130 ms 71.093 ms 74.026
25 custodian.of.the.stolen.plans (206.214.251.78) 68.568 ms 67.939 ms
26 that.can.save.her (206.214.251.81) 67.063 ms 69.874 ms 68.889 m
27 people.and.restore (206.214.251.86) 70.395 ms 70.144 ms
28 freedom.to.the.galaxy (206.214.251.89) 66.098 ms 65.432 ms
29 0——————-0 (206.214.251.94) 75.931 ms 74.159 ms 80.012
30 0——————0 (206.214.251.97) 73.026 ms 73.403 ms 73.256
31 0—————–0 (206.214.251.102) 83.602 ms 82.079 ms 70.743
32 0—————-0 (206.214.251.105) 70.459 ms 69.403 ms 68.782 m
33 0—————0 (206.214.251.110) 68.516 ms 72.472 ms 71.811 ms
34 0————–0 (206.214.251.113) 69.056 ms 65.981 ms 68.202 ms
35 0————-0 (206.214.251.118) 66.790 ms 71.556 ms 74.292 ms
36 0————0 (206.214.251.121) 68.286 ms 71.042 ms 71.587 ms
37 0———–0 (206.214.251.126) 72.702 ms 71.785 ms 72.442 ms
38 0———-0 (206.214.251.129) 78.143 ms 74.411 ms 72.828 ms
39 0———0 (206.214.251.134) 69.692 ms 66.187 ms 67.369 ms
40 0——–0 (206.214.251.137) 69.184 ms 70.678 ms 67.445 ms
41 0——-0 (206.214.251.142) 70.383 ms 68.220 ms 67.543 ms
42 0——0 (206.214.251.145) 67.593 ms 72.970 ms 73.220 ms
43 0—–0 (206.214.251.150) 70.964 ms 69.082 ms 70.831 ms
44 0—-0 (206.214.251.153) 73.856 ms 71.848 ms 70.311 ms
45 0—0 (206.214.251.158) 71.517 ms 69.204 ms 69.538 ms
46 0–0 (206.214.251.161) 68.076 ms 68.179 ms 67.620 ms
47 0-0 (206.214.251.166) 68.738 ms 70.518 ms 68.757 ms
48 00 (206.214.251.169) 68.281 ms 70.225 ms 74.811 ms
49 I (206.214.251.174) 70.203 ms 71.668 ms 71.672 ms
50 By.Ryan.Werber (206.214.251.177) 68.900 ms 71.461 ms 72.297 ms
51 When.CCIEs.Get.Bored (206.214.251.182) 75.816 ms 73.957 ms 71.333 ms
52 read.more.at.beaglenetworks.net (206.214.251.185) 70.254 ms 73.799 ms

Unfortunately, his little trick went viral, and then the script kiddies decided to DDOS the site, so the traceroute no longer works.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Considering the Privacy Agreement They Have for Me

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I have no sympathy for all for the bank executives who had their personal data posted online:

Following attacks on U.S. government websites last weekend, Anonymous seems to have made a new “Operation Last Resort” .gov website strike Sunday night.

Anonymous appears to have published login and private information from over 4,000 American bank executive accounts in the name of its new Operation Last Resort campaign, demanding U.S. computer crime law reform.

A spreadsheet has been published on a .gov website allegedly containing login information and credentials, IP addresses, and contact information of American bank executives.

If true, it could be that Anonymous has released banker information that could be connected to Federal Reserve computers, including contact information and cell phone numbers for U.S. bank Presidents, Vice Presidents, COO’s Branch Managers, VP’s and more.

This has been your moment of schadenfreude.

I wonder what Blankfein’s home phone number is.

This is One Way to Deal with Proprietorial Overreach

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A petition at the White House has Called for the firing of United States Attorney Carmen Ortiz for her wildly disproportionate prosecution of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide while facing decades in prison for downloading public documents.

It is now about 80% of the way to reaching the 25,000 signatures to require a response from the Obama administration.

Needless to say, the administration response will be either to do nothing, or to promote her, because they see “tough on crime” as a political winner.

I called it “Murder by Prosecutor” last night, which is (of course) rhetorical excess, but this was proprietorial excess.

Of course, we don’t know why he committed suicide, he did have a history of depression, but it’s fairly certain that this did not help.

On the bright side, I think that this is driving a discussion of overzealous prosecutors, and even if Ms. Ortiz keeps her job, her political career beyond this, she is/was seen as a rising star in the Massachusetts Democratic Party Establishment, has been detoured if not ended, which should hopefully make prosecutors think twice when they decide to destroy someone just to make an example.

Over the past 30 years, US laws have been changed to grant enormous power to prosecutors.

Based on how they file, and what they choose to present at sentencing, they now have the ability to dictate sentences to an unprecedented degree.

This has been corrupting the operation of the federal justice system for decades.

Murder by Prosecutor

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Aaron Swartz, age 26, suicide.

We cannot know all the reasons behind this, but his harassment by prosecutors was likely a contributing factor.

He was probably targeted because of his high profile opposition to SOPA (see vid). (To its shame, the New York Times does not mention this in the obit)

We have developed a regime where anyone can be harassed, and likely convicted, basically for being “troublesome.”

The term I used a while back, “Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen,” describes this phenomenon.

As If Facebook Did Not Suck Enough

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I’m sure you have heard of the Instagram thing, where they came out with new terms of service which said that they could sell your photographs, and you did not get anything.

It’s a classic Facebook move, but it really does not bother me, because I don’t “get” instagram.

If I want to funky things to photos I snap with my camera phone, I’ll do it on my PC on an old copy of Paint Shop Pro.*

That being said, I really don’t get Facebook either.  I appreciate its huge user base, and I signed up so that I could mirror my blog there, boosting eyeballs.

In the process I did reconnect with a bunch of old friends, but again, that’s largely a function of the user base, not the site.

One of the problems is that it appears that every upgrade makes the totality of the experience worse.

The latest innovation is that Facebook will be adding auto start videos to its video feed:

Get ready for video ads in your news feed.

 Facebook is set to unveil a new video-ad product in the first half of next year in its largest attempt to date to attract big swaths of ad dollars from TV advertisers, according to several industry executives who have been briefed on the company’s plans over the past few weeks.

 ………

 In what’s sure to be a controversial move, the visual component of the Facebook video ads will start playing automatically — a dynamic known as “autoplay” — according to two of the executives. Facebook is still debating whether to have the audio component of the ads activated automatically as well, one of these people said.

 On the desktop version of Facebook, the video ads are expected to grab a user’s attention by expanding out of the news feed into webpage real estate in both the left and right columns — or rails — of the screen. Facebook is also working on a way to ensure that the video ads stand out on the mobile apps as well, though it is unclear how exactly the company will accomplish this.

I guess that they decided that the whole anal probe ad server thing just wasn’t evil enough.

I do not get it. Are already running their server farms on power generated by incinerating harp seal pups, and claiming that it was “green” energy.

Isn’t that evil enough for them?

Damn, he needs to buy a white Persian cat and a bond villain lair, and be done with it.

*BTW, a big f%$# you to the folks Adobe® who bought the makers of the program, JASC, and shut them down a couple of years later, because they did not want the product, a fairly capable and easy to use image editor, they just wanted to shut down a competitor.

Telco Breakup Has Hit the Mainstream

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Because it’s hit the New York Times:

Since 1974, when the Justice Department sued to break up the Ma Bell phone monopoly, Americans have been told that competition in telecommunications would produce innovation, better service and lower prices.

What we’ve witnessed instead is low-quality service and prices that are higher than a truly competitive market would bring.

After a brief fling with competition, ownership has reconcentrated into a stodgy duopoly of Bell Twins — AT&T and Verizon. Now, thanks to new government rules, each in effect has become the leader of its own cartel.

The AT&T-DirectTV and Verizon-Bright House-Cox-Comcast-TimeWarner behemoths market what are known as “quad plays”: the phone companies sell mobile services jointly with the “triple play” of Internet, telephone and television connections, which are often provided by supposedly competing cable and satellite companies. And because AT&T’s and Verizon’s own land-based services operate mostly in discrete geographic markets, each cartel rules its domain as a near monopoly.

The result of having such sweeping control of the communications terrain, naturally, is that there is little incentive for either player to lower prices, make improvements to service or significantly invest in new technologies and infrastructure. And that, in turn, leaves American consumers with a major disadvantage compared with their counterparts in the rest of the world.

On average, for instance, a triple-play package that bundles Internet, telephone and television sells for $160 a month with taxes. In France the equivalent costs just $38. For that low price the French also get long distance to 70 foreign countries, not merely one; worldwide television, not just domestic; and an Internet that’s 20 times faster uploading data and 10 times faster downloading it.

It’s not from their editorial board, it’s from former Times correspondent David Cay Johnston, whose beat is consumer protection and tax loopholes, but the fact that anyone gets space in the “Gray Lady” to suggest that deregulation will not create a telecommunications utopia is worth noting.

Yeah, This is How “Balanced” Agreements With the RIAA and MPAA Work

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The RIAA and the large ISPs have an agreement to implement a “six strikes” agreement in to limit “piracy”.

At the core of this agreement is an “independent and impartial” expert to evaluate evidence against people, but now it appears that this “expert” is an RIAA lobbyist:

A month before the controversial “six strikes” anti-piracy plan goes live in the U.S., the responsible Center of Copyright Information (CCI) is dealing with a small crisis. As it turns out the RIAA failed to mention to its partners that the “impartial and independent” technology expert they retained previously lobbied for the music industry group. In a response to the controversy, CCI is now considering whether it should hire another expert to evaluate the anti-piracy monitoring technology.

Starting next month the MPAA, RIAA and five major Internet providers in the United States will start punishing persistent BitTorrent pirates,

The scheme is being coordinated by the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) who agreed to hire an impartial and independent expert to review the evidence that will be used to accuse suspected subscribers.

However, earlier this week the news broke that the touted independent technology expert, Stroz Friedberg, is not so neutral. In fact, the company is a former RIAA lobbying firm.

The lobbying job earned the company more than half a million dollars ($637,000), which makes it hard to view the company as “independent and impartial” as the agreement between the copyright holders and ISPs requires.

This is why you don’t cut deals with the RIAA and the MPAA.

They are not, and have never been, good faith players in this debate.

Sanity Breaks Out In IP

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A federal judge just ruled that there is no legal obligation to secure your WiFi signal in order to prevent file sharing:

It looks like it might be hard for rights holders in various entertainment industries to sue individuals who have open Wi-Fi networks for copyright infringement done by guests, if the following court case is any indication. A California man whose open network was allegedly used to download a copyrighted video cannot be sued, according to a ruling by a federal judge.

The complaint filed in April of this year alleged that Hatfield was negligent because he didn’t secure his network, and therefore liable.

AF Holdings, who admitted in its case that it does not know the identity of the user who downloaded its video using BitTorrent, targeted Josh Hatfield with a lawsuit in federal court because it was downloaded via his unsecured home Internet connection. Hatfield moved for a dismissal on the grounds that the plaintiff failed “to state a claim” and that the claim “is barred by Section 301 of the Copyright Act and by immunity under the Communications Decency Act.”

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton dismissed the claim last week. The Electronic Frontier Foundation planned on submitting an amicus brief on behalf of Hatfield if the case had gone forward.

I’m not surprised by the ruling, but I am surprised that it happened this early in the process.

I think that people are beginning to recognize just how f%$#ed up the current IP regime is, and they are no longer willing to treat potential offenders like they’ve robbed a gas station.