Sunday 11 August 2013

Google Will Offer Free Wi-Fi at Starbucks

The tech giant recently announced its plans to roll out faster, free Wi-Fi connections to all Starbucks stores in the US over the next year and half with speeds up to 10x faster than now. Google agreed that the Internet has become as vital to our lives as other utilities, being used by people to plan their day, stay connected with family and friends, stay informed, and a whole slew of important activities that everyone sometimes takes for granted. This is why Google believes that a fast and reliable connection is a constant cause for concern.

Apparently, the tech giant is continually doing its best to ensure that people are online more frequently in order to increase its advertising revenue. Now Google has realized that the easiest way to do so is to directly offer consumers cheap and fast Internet connections.

The company announced that coffee shop plus Internet is a pairing that many of people have come to rely on. Wireless access to the Internet makes work time, downtime and travel time more enjoyable. Now Google is teaming up with Starbucks to deliver faster, free Wi-Fi connections to all 7,000 stores in the US. The company promised that when 

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Bradley Manning to Face 136 Years in Jail

Pfc. Bradley Manning, known for handing 700,000 secret documents to whistleblower website WikiLeaks, has recently been cleared of “aiding the enemy” charges, but still faces a maximum sentence of 136 years in military custody.

A few days ago Manning was convicted for 19 of the 21 charges he was charged, including 5 counts of espionage and 5 of theft. In court, he was declared “guilty” over and over again with the charges being listed. In the meantime, the guilty verdicts included 7 out of 8 counts brought under the Espionage Act. Manning was accused of disclosing Afghanistan and Iraq war logs, files on Guantanamo, and embassy cables, with the government claiming that he had reason to believe such data could be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of any foreign nation. The Manning is also known for disclosing a “Collateral Murder” video, which showed American military forces killing journalists and unarmed civilians in Iraq.

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Australian Teenager Exposed Apple

The tech giant is trying to plug the source of a leak exposed by an Aussie teenager. A boy named Sonny Dickson seems to be causing Apple serious problems by leaking prototypes of the company’s products online long before they are officially revealed. However, Apple can’t find the way to silence the boy.


In addition, the teen has also been making money by selling off some of the kit he gets his paws on. For instance, Sonny published a snap of an iPhone 5 battery before the launch of the device, and both the battery and specifications listed on it later turned out to be real. Local media reported that the tech giant fails to stop him simply because the guy is neither an employee nor a worker from one of its suppliers’ plants.

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EFF Claimed War on Patent Trolls

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has recently issued a statement, saying that it was leading a group of entities and law schools to start a new online resource called Trolling Effects. The idea is to crowdsource information, including demand letters, in order to help people fight patent trolls.

According to EFF activist Adi Kamdar, patent trolls should no longer manage to hide under a cloak of legal darkness. The new service is expected to shine a light on entities which abuse the patent system to shake down innovators. The problem is that patent trolls use the threat of expensive and lengthy patent litigation in order to extort settlements from innovators of any size. However, most of these threats never evolve into lawsuits, so most of the threatening letters never show up in public dockets.

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No Google Glass behind the Wheel in Britain

Unsurprisingly, the UK Department of Transport revealed that it favors a ban on Google Glass behind the wheel. Its representative claimed that drivers need to give their full attention to the road, so they can’t behave in a way which may stop them from observing what is happening on the road.

The UK Department of Transport is aware of the impending rollout of Google Glass and is currently in discussion with the police forces to make sure that people don’t use it while driving. The authority views Google Glass as something from the category of “careless or distracted driving”.

In the meantime, lawmakers across the pond are pondering the same problem. Nevertheless, since the United States cares about personal freedoms, banning normally doesn’t go down well with the public, particularly in parts of the country where you are able to purchase a confederate flag at any petrol station.

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Sunday 4 August 2013

UN Accused Facebook of Helping Pirates

Facebook normally has no troubles with anti-piracy outfits, as it doesn’t allow streaming of copyrighted content like other networks. But now it is not about digital piracy. The United Nations wants social network to walk the plank for refusing to answer questions about Somali pirates. The UN believes that Long John Silver and his ilk have been coordinating their raids on maritime shipping through Facebook.

A UN commission on sanctions stated in its report to the UN Security Council that Somali pirates have been supported by a network of accomplices, which involves bankers, businessmen, politicians and aid workers. Investigations confirmed that all those facilitators 

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Cameron’s Adult Content Filter Officially Failed

David Cameron had to admit that his campaign against online porn proved ineffective. Media reports reveal that Cameron is getting much mockery over his plan to save kids from the perils of porn. However, he is still intended to press ahead with it anyway.

Cameron’s plan was build on the idea that Internet service providers had agreed to introduce family-friendly filters which automatically blocked porn unless clients chose to opt out. It was no surprise that the ISPs didn’t do so, with some of them lobbying the government to tell it to sling its hook.

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Google Will Improve Machine Vision

Google engineers have developed a machine vision technique able to bring high power visual recognition to ordinary desktop and even mobile computers. It is claimed that the system is able to recognize 100,000 object types within a picture in a few minutes.

The tech giant seems to have improved the fairly standard method of applying convolutional filters to a photo to pick out objects of interest. This appeared tricky, as the filters must need a sample of at least one per object type, i.e. if you are scanning Facebook for cats you will need a filter which identifies cats. In other words, the technique is limited to a small number of categories, or you will need a huge database.

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Hacking Is Not That Dangerous

It turned out that Intel subsidiary McAfee has exaggerated the cost of hacking in its fundamental study which was used to form the basis for American government cyber security policy. A study was conducted back in 2009 by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and claimed that hacking cost the world economy $1 trillion.
Now US President keeps quoting this figure, as well as intelligence officials and members of Congress, in order to press for legislation on cybercrime protection. However, it recently turned out that $1 trillion was a huge exaggeration by McAfee. This was revealed by another study that was carried out by CSIS. The outfit discovered multiple flaws in the methodology of McAfee’s study and made a conclusion that a specific number would be much more difficult to calculate. According to the new research, the proper number could be $100 billion to $500 billion – although it’s a pretty high figure, it is hardly a trillion.

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Google Accounts for 25% of all American Traffic

A survey by online monitoring company Deepfield revealed that Google takes a quarter of American Internet traffic. Over 60% all web-enabled devices exchange traffic with Google’s servers on a daily basis. In other words, the tech giant is bigger than Facebook, Netflix, and Twitter altogether. 

Experts of the monitoring firm explained that based on measurements of end device and user audience share, 60% of all web end devices and users exchange traffic with Google servers every day. The survey covers computers, mobile devices, game consoles, home media appliances, and other embedded devices. In the meantime, it isn’t just Google’s 

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Largest Patent Troll Finally Vanquished

Industry observers point out that key patents at the centre of the Internet will now be safe from patent troll Eolas in the largest trademark payouts ever. Indeed, the Eolas patents have been so threatening to the Internet that Sir Tim Berners-Lee showed up in court in order to take on the trolls a year ago.

The case was the result of Michael Doyle’s effort to levy a vast patent tax, and its outcome was a major disappointment for the latter, because the court invalidated his patents and an appeals court agreed.

20 years ago, Michael Doyle was the director of a computer laboratory at the University of California-San Francisco and oversaw the creation of software enabling doctors to view embryos online. At the time, Doyle claimed it was the first “interactive” use of the Internet and patented the idea in 1994.

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Apple Afraid of Penetration Tester

A few days ago, tech giant had to shut down its Mac, iPhone, and iPad developer site to carry out a huge unscheduled maintenance. At first, Apple didn’t reveal the reason, but later the company admitted that its security experts detected an intruder who might have stolen users’ data.

Although sensitive data was encrypted and not accessed, Apple claimed that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and email addresses might have been accessed. But it later turned out that the evil intruder was Ibrahim Balic – a London-based penetration tester. Organizations regularly hire Balic in order to find flaws in their systems, and Ibrahim recently decided to take a look at Apple’s websites. In result, he discovered 13 bugs there and reported all of them through the online bug reporter. After a bug report the portal was taken offline.

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Experts Estimate Spy Data Centre Capacity

After it was revealed that American spooks are spying on the online activities of people around the world, a new government database in Utah is now in the centre of attention.

The database is supposed to be a place to house and process information gathered from phone and Internet service provider, satellites and fiber-optic cables. The centre is expected to open in September and hold “yottabytes” of information or five “zettabytes” according to different sources. Anyway, it is more data than human brains are able to comprehend.

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House of Representatives and NSA

Apparently, American lawmakers aren’t interested in curbing the PRISM spy program. Press reports revealed that the House of Representatives voted 217-205 to defeat an amendment to the defense appropriations bill. The latter was supposed to limit the NSA’s ability to harvest electronic data, including telephone call records.

Fighting the legislation was an unlikely alliance of libertarian Republicans and some Democrats in Congress. In result, 94 Republicans favored the amendment and 134 didn’t, while 111 Democrats supported it and 83 opposed. However, the White House and senior intelligence officials were against the amendment by Republican Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, prompted by Snowden’s leak.

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Indian Movie Pirates Win the Battle

Numerous attempts by the entertainment industry in cooperation with the Anti-Piracy Cell of the Kerala Police to crack down on copyright infringers failed. The authorities had to admit that attempts to locate the original source of uploading the content through some software tools had no results. Moreover, hopes that the local ISPs would block portals hosting pirated content have also backfired.

The Internet Service Providers Association of India is yet to receive a formal request from the Anti-Piracy Cell of the Kerala Police on locating the infringers, but the attempts by the broadband providers to block such portals weren’t effective going by past experience. The outfit explained that they couldn’t block it because material was being uploaded from different servers. This is why they had an idea that the Department of Telecom, which provides the license to ISPs, could play a better role in this situation – it was able to block uploading illegal content trafficked via the international gateway. It also could ask the Indian host company to disable such services.

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British ISPs Will Block More File-Sharing Services

UK ISPs have been recently ordered to block subscribers from accessing another couple of file-sharing websites - EZTV and YIFY Torrents. The reason is of course copyright infringement. The two portals were alleged of providing Internet users mass access to illegal material by entertainment industry groups, including the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).

EZTV, as you might have already guessed, is a TV torrent website. YIFY Torrents positions itself as the service offering high-quality DVD rips. Movie industry has won a High Court order a few days ago which is yet to be published, but will take effect soon. The order in question follows efforts by the two outfits to contact the owners of both websites.

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British ISP: “Want Filtering? Move to North Korea!”

One Internet service provider from the United Kingdom simply told its subscribers that if they want filtering they should choose another provider or move to North Korea.

In response to David Cameron’s unpopular pornography filtering crusade, an ISP Andrew & Arnolds pointed out that the authorities demanded providers to offer filtering as an option, so they offered an active choice when users sign up. The subscribers are suggested to choose between two options: unfiltered internet access and censored internet access. The first option means no filtering of any material within the ISP network, with the user being responsible for any filtering in their own network. The other option offers restricted access to unpublished government mandated filter list and Daily Mail website, but still fails to guarantee that children are safe from porn. In case the potential clients choose the latter option, the ISP tells they have to either pick another provider or move to North Korea. Andrew & Arnolds claims: “Our services are all unfiltered” and wonders if that is enough of a choice for the government.

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Gmail Spam Monopoly Claimed by Google

The search giant began putting adverts in the space reserved for e-mail messages in Gmail users’ inboxes. Although Google has been installing adverts alongside Gmail messages for a while now, these new adverts show up as messages which can be opened like ordinary e-mails and forwarded to others.

The advertisements show up in the new “promotions” tab of Gmail’s new multi-tab interface, marked with a yellow background and labeled “ad” in case users fail to spot them. Google has issued a statement, explaining that the adverts are part of the Promotions tab in the new inbox in Gmail. Users are able to see the old style of advert if they disable the Promotions tab. So, if you are too annoyed by the ads, just do that.

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Japan to Develop System Preventing Child Porn

An online watchdog group from Japan is currently planning to introduce a system under which everyone sharing child porn-related content from their PCs or other devices would be urged to delete the material. The system in question is studied by the Internet Content Safety Association (ICSA), an outfit comprised of mostly private-sector ISPs, in order to keep such content from being spread on the Internet through file-sharing software.

The system, expected to be enforced next spring, will need the collaboration of the National Police Agency. It will work the following way: prefectural police authorities will use their cyberpatrol systems to identify IP addresses of people sharing child porn through file-sharing software. His data will be passed on via the NPA and ICSA to ISPs, who will then send e-mail warning to the subscribers in question, urging them to delete the material.

Although it’s not against the law to download such content, some file-sharers may be unaware that they are sharing kids porn through such clients. In case the users fail to delete the questionable content and leave it available to be uploaded, they could be charged with public display of kids porn or other acts in violation of the law banning child prostitution and child porn.

The ICSA, the NPA and the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry are going to hold discussions on the sharing of details on potential infringers and sending notifications through e-mail.

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Microsoft Asked to Censor Itself

In its continuous efforts to make pirated material harder to find, rights owners ask the search giant to remove millions of search results on a weekly basis. Although those automated requests are normally legal, there are more mistakes than you might expect. For instance, in an embarrassing act of self-censorship Microsoft recently asked Google to filter links to its very own website.

As you know, the search giant has already received takedown requests for over 100 million URLs in 2013. Although major part of the submitted URLs do link to infringing material, not all requests Google receives are correct.

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America Threatened Snowden Supporters

A US Senate panel has recently voted unanimously to establish trade sanctions against the Russian Federation or any other state which offers asylum to an ex spy agency contractor Edward Snowden. The 30-member Senate Appropriations Committee asked Secretary of State John Kerry to meet with congressional committees in order to push for sanctions against any country which offers asylum to Snowden.



It was claimed that Edward Snowden is classified as a spy, not just a whistleblower who revealed that the United States was slurping information on its own citizens and snooping on its allies. As you know, Snowden is still holed up in Sheremetyevo international airport in Russia, where he had fled to escape capture and trial in the US.

Snowden had to ask for temporary asylum in Russia until he finds a way to reach a country which is ready to shelter him. Thus far, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela have all offered sanctuary to Edward, but the problem is to get him there first.

Fight against Dotcom Cost NZ Taxpayers $1.6 million

While Kim Dotcom’s lawyer bills continue to skyrocket, the taxpayers of New Zealand also have to foot an ever-escalating bill. According to the recent estimates, around 10,000 hours have been invested in the case, which cost $1.6 million to the public.

It’s been years that Kim Dotcom and his MegaUpload associates brought profit to the lawyers in numerous countries – actually, legal costs is regular business expense for everyone running a large business with worldwide reach. However, by 2012 the revenue streams hadn’t just dried up, but all existing assets had been scooped up by the US, Hong Kong and New Zealand governments after the raids against the now-defunct MegaUpload hosting service.

As you know, for the last year and half, Kim Dotcom and his associates Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato and Bram van der Kolk have been engaged in a never-ending legal battle on several fronts.

Google Deleted 100 Million Search Results in 2013

Since the beginning of the current year rights owners have asked the search giant to remove over 100 million links to “pirate” websites. This figure is already double the number Google processed for the whole last year. Google is currently processing an average of 15 million “pirate” links per month. Although this number is leveling off, the rights owners aren’t satisfied yet. 


Banning Is Invitation to Piracy

New Zealand’s censors have recently banned a horror movie Maniac, a serial killer flick starring Elijah Wood, from any kind of public distribution, claiming that it is potentially injurious to the public good. In response, the movie distributor said that the banning is an actual invitation to piracy and was right.










PayPal Cut off VPN Provider

Payment service PayPal has cut off the popular VPN provider iPredator, known as an anonymity service run by The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde. Swedish based iPredator can’t accept payments anymore, and its PayPal assets are frozen for up to 6 months. The payment service failed to provide any details as to why the VPN provider was banned. It is only known that the action comes after their credit card processor stopped doing business with all VPN services.