Global minilinks for 2008-03-29

Deeplink by Danny O'Brien

• Israel Adopts Fair Use
  In their reform of national copyright law, Israel opts for an open-ended and court-defined idea of fair use, similar to the United States.
• India Wants Blackberry Crypto
  On the eve of renewing RIM's license in the country, India wants the keys to the mobile device's encryption system.
• Council of Europe Thinks Hard About Internet Filtering
  Good (but minimal) recommendations for any country considering tampering with the Net.
• Industry Losing Faith In WIPO; Debates US WTO Cases Against China
  
• Caught in a Culture War: Yahoo!'s Sticky China Situation
  Rebecca MacKinnon analyses the problems faced by a compliant Yahoo!
• Russia's Government Files Sneak Onto the Net
  "For many years secret databases from the Interior Ministry, road police and phone operators have been available on the Russian black market."
• EU's Privacy Chief Not Happy with Biometic Passports
  Says the exemptions aren't good enough, and the real security weaknesses lie elsewhere.
• Canada's ISPs get a Net Neutrality Wake-Up Call
  When the country's wholesalers start throttling without permission, what can downstream providers do?
• UK's Byron Review on Internet Child Safety Published
  Despite widespread fears, is surprisingly mild in its recommendations.
• A New Organization to Fight Three Strikes In France
  "Squaring The Net" challenges the French government to understand how the Net works, and not create dangerously impractical laws like the Olivennes law.
• EU and US Struggle with Common Language for Privacy
  High-level meetings between the two powers try to cross the wide gulf of how to protect privacy.
• Free the Music
  Musicologist Ed Baldwin explains why copyright term extension in Europe makes no sense for artists or consumers.
• Israel Fights Back: A Purim Story
  Bill Patry records Israel's challenge to the United States "watchlist" of countries who don't tow America's ideas of IP law.

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Software for Keeping ISPs Honest

Deeplink by Peter Eckersley

Yesterday's announcement of a détente between Comcast and BitTorrent was great news. Unfortunately, the general problem of ISPs doing strange things to Internet traffic without telling their customers is likely to continue in the future. EFF and many other organizations are working on software to test ISPs for unusual (mis)behavior. In this detailed post, we have a round-up of the tools that are out there right now, and others that are in development...

[Read the entire post]

minilinks for 2008-03-28

miniLinks by Hugh D'Andrade

• NY Times Wiretapping Coverage -- The Inside Story
  An excerpt from NY Times author Eric Lichtblau's new book
  on warrantless wiretapping.
  
• Fee for All -- Music as Service from ISPs
  Warner is developing proposals that would make access to
  music a service charged by ISPs.
  
• Charging Schools Instead of Suing Students
  A new proposal from major labels would charge schools a fee
  to allow students to share music legally.
  
• CBC Uses BitTorrent for Prime Time Release
  A high-resolution version of a series finale was released
  without copy protection over P2P networks for more
  efficient distribution.
  
• DHS Blinks -- New Hampshire Joins Montana in Real ID Victory
  
  Two out of four hold-out states have been receiving
  unrequested extensions on Real ID requirements.
  
• Big City Muni Wi-Fi is Dead, Urban Wireless Isn't
  Plans to blanket cities with free wi-fi aren't panning out
  -- but free urban hotspots are spreading.
  
• Rock Against Telecom Immunity!
  A song for telecom companies that broke the law when they
  handed their customer's data to the NSA without a warrant.
  

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Comcast Reduces Discrimination, Plans To End It Altogether

Deeplink by Peter Eckersley

Last month, shortly before the FCC held its first hearing in an investigation of Comcast's interference with BitTorrent and other P2P protocols, we noticed that Comcast was no longer injecting forged TCP RST packets in the simple tests we had been running on its cable network. Those tests had been showing interference through January 2008. Some sources with access to larger datasets informed us that the cable ISP was nonetheless still using RST packets against some BitTorrent sessions, just not the simple uses of BT and Gnutella that we had been testing. The status quo: Comcast is still interfering with P2P, but they are being more subtle about it.

Today, Comcast has announced that it will phase out its discrimination against P2P protocols entirely by the end of the year. According to the WSJ's coverage, the cable company is considering switching to non-discriminatory dynamic traffic shaping, which — as we've previously argued — is a much more responsible way of coping with network congestion. We're also pleased that Comcast is collaborating with the BitTorrent developers; we've been urging them to collaborate with the wider technical community for some time.

This is a big victory for common sense and a big victory for an Internet based on open standards, not the whims of major ISPs. But there's still more work to do.

In particular, the Internet community clearly needs to do a lot more testing for discrimination by the thousands of ISPs around the planet. EFF — and a number of other groups — have been working to build tools for those tests. In a follow-up post, we'll talk about projects that have already launched, and others that are in the pipeline.

[Update: The follow-up post is now online.]

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Letters To The Editor: People Speak Out On Surveillance

Deeplink by Tim Jones

With Congress in the middle of recess, surveillance issues have receded from the front pages. But look a few pages further in, and you'll find signs that the issues are very much on the minds of ordinary Americans:

Jerry Moe of Brown Deer, Wisconsin, in The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Once again, Congress will vote on new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legislation. President Bush says he will not sign any bill that doesn't include retroactive immunity for telecom companies which have, in his words, "helped the government in the war on terror" by allowing access to customers' phone calls and e-mails.

Exactly how the telecoms behaved and what information they passed onto the government is not known. The issue is not that complicated, though. Do we citizens really want our landlords, or others, for example, to "help" the government search our homes without a warrant? Of course not. The assault on our constitutional liberties is the same but without the high-tech mumbo jumbo that surrounds the FISA debate.

Terence Hughes of Phoenix, AZ, in The Arizona Republic:

It's important to recognize that it's our Constitution that ultimately protects us, most notably from the abuses of those who are sworn to uphold it. Congress needs to continue to stand firm and deny immunity for the telecom industry. Ignorance of the law, or being encouraged to ignore it, is no defense.

Maureen Ugolini of Bloomington, Indiana in The Bloomington Pantagraph:

I was beginning to think our representatives in the House would give this president everything he asked of them. Not so today (Friday). They said ``no'' to immunity for telecom companies. Thank you all.

Linda Maloney of Burlington, Vermont in The Burlington Free Press:

Congratulations to Sen. Leahy for standing against legalized lawbreaking. Why do we have laws, if they can be selectively broken by the privileged few, with no penalties attached? We must not fall for scare tactics again. Getting rid of the Constitution does not make us safer; it makes us something less than Americans. It makes us unfree. Is there a greater danger than that?

Kaye Gamble of Sleepy Hollow, Illinois in The Daily Herald:

If the House passes the Senate FISA with immunity for the telecom companies, Americans who have been illegally spied on will have no recourse...

President Bush is actually concerned about the telecommunication companies getting sued because when the companies are sued, his administration will be pulled into the illegal wiretapping quagmire.

We elected House and Senate members to protect our rights. It is time for our legislators to do their job.

and Lynn Barnett of Vernon Hills, Illinois:

I applaud the efforts of the Democratic leadership to pass the Restore Act (HR 3773). I strongly agree that our national security needs can be met by this bill, which does not grant retroactive immunity to the telecom companies for their "collaboration" with the government. I think the courts should decide whether the telecoms deserve immunity for their release of records to the Bush administration, without court orders and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Unfortunately, Mark Kirk voted against this bill, as did many of his Republican colleagues. I disagree with Congressman Kirk on many issues, but his support for the erosion of my civil rights is especially troubling. (He voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Bill S3930, which stripped habeas corpus rights from detainees). He already knows this, but I will be voting for Dan Seals in November.

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PrivacyFinder.org: Search, but with Privacy

Deeplink by Peter Eckersley

The level of privacy offered by search engines is generally woeful. Last year, the three big players (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) made some improvements by limiting the duration for full retention of logs about who has searched and what they've searched for. That means that after a year or two, it would be harder — though probably not impossible — for the major search engines and their advertising partners to reconstruct a complete history of your searches.

Ask.com went further with their AskEraser feature, which allows users to have their logs deleted and to opt-out of being tracked (Ask.com could have done better by finding a way for opt-out to be available without a cookie).

Despite these improvements, the average Internet user still has very little privacy for their search history. We have documented the measures you can take to protect yourself, but they aren't all that simple.

So it's exciting to report that one small search engine is experimenting with ways to be an aide, rather than a threat, to privacy. PrivacyFinder is a research project at the CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (full disclosure: Lorrie Cranor, who heads the lab, is also on the EFF Board). It offers an interface to Yahoo! and Google, but with two notable improvements: an excellent logging/data retention policy, and a feature that shows the user information about sites' privacy policies along with the search results. That way, if two sites offer the same service but one of them is better from a privacy point of view, the user will see that quickly. The PrivacyFinder researchers tell us they've observed that people will, for instance, pay more for an item from an online store if they can see that it has an excellent privacy policy.

PrivacyFinder seems to be making productive use of P3P, an old privacy standard that has, in many other respects, fallen short of expectations. If you run a search on the site, you can quickly see when one result matches your standards and others don't.

Privacyfinder's logging policy is amongst the best in the industry (Ixquick is also first-rate). Privacyfinder only keeps search records for a week, unless the user explicitly opts in to being tracked. Because the CMU Laboratory wants to do research on the use of search engines, it's offering prizes for people who are willing to be tracked for research purposes. That's the way we like to see it done.

Meanwhile, several other developments are in the works. New York State legislators have been talking about taking parts of the search privacy problem into their own hands. There are rumors of new startups planning to enter the "privacy search" market. And EFF is working on a scorecard for systematically evaluating the effectiveness of various privacy measures at search engines. Stay tuned to Deeplinks for future developments!

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Global minilinks for 2008-03-22

Deeplink by Danny O'Brien

• Antigua Says It Will Start Ignoring US Copyrights
  WTO gave Antigua the right to ignore US IP rights as part of a judgement over online gambling bans. Now the small country is threatening to begin its data haven status, starting in April.
• France's Olivennes Law in Final Negotiations (Google Translation)
  Sticking point among parties to the discussion is ISP filtering; outside, users are worried about government access to IP addresses and end-user liability for others using their network.
• CBC to Release Program DRM-Free Via BitTorrent
  Canada's public TV station is to use P2P to distribute one of its shows.
• Fouad Mourtada: Free!
  After serving 47 days of a ten year sentence, the Moroccan who created a fake Facebook entry is pardoned by the authorities.
• Both Sides of Tibet Battle Use Internet Video
  Censored footage from Tibet evades China's Youtube block, while Chinese nationalists put their statements in YouTube form, too.
• German Supreme Court Puts Halt to Some Data Retention Use
  While they prepare to judge the constitutionality of data retention, German stops its use for all but serious crimes.
• Anonymous Blogging Guide Now in Chinese
  Ethan Zuckerman's guide to using Wordpress and Tor has been translated by a (naturally anonymous) benefactor.

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minilinks for 2008-03-20

miniLinks by Hugh D'Andrade

• FISA Attacks Fail to Sway CT Representative
  Rep. Joe Courtney has a good video explaining why he
  opposes telecom immunity, despite being attacked on the
  issue.
  
• Republican Opposes Telecom Immunity
  A Republican candidate in North Carolina says he wants
  telephone companies held accountable.
  
• Facebook Expands Privacy Features
  Facebook is making some privacy improvements -- but some
  changes are just theatre.
  
• Craigslist Not Liable for Postings
  A Circuit Court has ruled that Craigslist cannot be held
  liable for discriminatory housing ads posted on its site.
  
• Fingerprinting Foreign Visitors
  Airlines are objecting to a government plan would require
  them to collect fingerprints of each visitor to the United
  States.
  
• "All You Can Eat" iTunes?
  Apple is considering giving customers access to the entire
  iTunes library for a premium.
  
• Google Book Search Gets Better
  Library users can now use Google Book Search's new API to
  get a preview of books in the catalog.
  
• Hollywood Gets Into Spying Game
  MPAA chairman says he wants to work with ISPs to police
  networks and fight copyright infringement.
  
• Indie Labels Bypassing iTunes
  Independent record labels are going straight to the
  consumer, opening their own stores with high-quality audio
  and hard-to-find tracks.
  

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Talk Back to the House

Deeplink by Tim Jones

It seems somehow appropriate that the House's awesome vote to hold phone companies accountable for illegal spying would happen at the onset of a week dedicated to government transparency. Few things need transparency more than secret government surveillance law, and so we've rebuilt Stop The Spying.org to help you find where your congressperson stands.

Visit the site to find out how your representative voted. If they stood strong, you can send them a thanks, and if they didn't stand so strong, you can ask them to do better next time.

And as you thank the house, EFF thanks you for giving them the support they needed to cast the right vote!

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Hollywood's Record Year Shows MPAA's Piracy Folly

Deeplink by Hugh D'Andrade

To hear the MPAA tell it, Hollywood faces a mortal threat from something vaguely defined as "piracy." The danger is supposedly so great that the MPAA has been lobbying Congress for help -- all the while inflating their numbers to exaggerate the amount of filesharing on college campuses.

But recent news reports show the movie industry has just had a record-breaking year. The box office brought in $9.63 billion, a 5.4% increase over last year. And that's only box office -- if 2006 numbers are any indication, sales from theatrical showings will amount to just 20% or so of overall revenue.

It seems that the threat of piracy isn't so great after all. As Ars Technica put it: "If piracy is killing the movie business, it's doing so in exactly the same way that home taping killed the music business in the 1980s."

The big picture is that the film industry is bringing in big dollars, and getting a bigger slice of the pie almost every year. In part that may be because movie fans can enjoy movies any number of ways, from video rental to pay-per-view to iTunes downloads to Netflix subscription -- and each of those methods makes money for the film industry.

Compared to the music industry, which has suffered an undeniable decline in revenues over the last few years, the film industry is enjoying record year after record year. The numbers show an upward trend in movie revenue during the same period that saw the rise of P2P filesharing networks.

So why the constant panic messages from the MPAA? Paying customers are forced to watch absurd PSAs bemoaning the evils of piracy before enjoying a legally bought or rented film. The MPAA continues to lobby Congress for protection. And they have even begun arguing against network neutrality legislation on the grounds that it would interfere with P2P filtering by ISPs.

The film industry is doing well because it has given the public what it wants -- DRM aside, they've let fans view movies cheaply and in a variety of forms (in other words, they are succeeding despite DRM, not because of it). Now all they need to do is lay off the heavy-handed rhetoric and enjoy their ever-increasing revenue stream.

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