[Video:] What is Bitcoin?
Tagged: Internet RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
mazsa
-
mazsa
Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music
Since Napster: “In the decade since Napster, file-sharing has undermined the
protection that copyright affords recorded music, reducing recorded
music sales. What matters for consumers, however, is not sellers’
revenue but the surplus they derive from new music. The legal
monopoly created by copyright is justified by its encouragement of
the creation of new works, but there is little evidence on this
relationship. The file-sharing era can be viewed as a large-scale
experiment allowing us to check whether events since Napster have
stemmed the flow of new works. We assemble a novel dataset on the
number of high quality works released annually, since 1960, derived
from retrospective critical assessments of music such
best-of-the-decade lists. This allows a comparison of the quantity
of new albums since Napster to 1) its pre-Napster level, 2)
pre-Napster trends, and 3) a possible control, the volume of new
songs since the iTunes Music Store’s revitalization of the single.
We find no evidence that changes since Napster have affected the
quantity of new recorded music or artists coming to market. We
reconcile stable quantities in the face of decreased demand with
reduced costs of bringing works to market and a growing role of
independent labels.” http://papers.nber.org/papers/W16882 -
mazsa
5 Reasons Why the US Domain Seizures Are Unconstitutional http://torrentfreak.com/5-reasons-why-the-us-domain-seizures-are-unconstitutional-110312/
-
mazsa
The Anti-Choice Privacy Fundamentalists: “Most companies act responsibly and allow users to opt-in when appropriate. Even Facebook, which constantly receives criticism from privacy fundamentalists, has used opt-in as it deploys certain new features. For example, in January, Facebook rolled out a feature to allow users to share their contact information with others through Facebook. As Facebook described on its Developer Blog:
On Friday, we expanded the information you are able to share with external websites and applications to include your address and mobile number. With this change, you could, for example, easily share your address and mobile phone with a shopping site to streamline the checkout process, or sign up for up-to-the-minute alerts on special deals directly to your mobile phone.
As with the other information you share through our permissions process, you need to explicitly choose to share this data before any application or website can access it, and you can not share your friends’ address or mobile number with applications. Also, like other data you make available to third party apps and websites, you can always clearly see and control the ways your information is being used in the Application Dashboard.
Many privacy advocates immediately derided this new feature even though users would have to expressly give permission every time an application wanted to obtain access to their contact information. Blogs like the Huffington Post were awash with misleading headlines such as “Facebook Starts Sharing Your Home Address, Phone Number With Developers.” And groups like EPIC immediately objected to the new feature claiming that Facebook was “trying to blur the line between public and private information.”
It has become clear that opt-in is not enough for privacy fundamentalists. The objections likely stem from the fact that these groups fundamentally oppose the idea of corporations having personal information, not just about themselves, but about anyone. Their paternalistic view of Internet users is at the heart of arguments in favor of government regulation to protect consumers from themselves. They do not want to give users choice, they want to make the choice for users.
The goal of policymakers should be to give users the freedom to choose their own privacy settings; it should not be to enforce a rigid privacy doctrine on all users. As Congress considers privacy legislation in the coming months, it should remember that the focus should be about finding ways to empower users through competition, choice and innovation, not about taking away their freedom to choose.” http://www.innovationpolicy.org/the-anti-choice-privacy-fundamentalists
-
mazsa
Physicists Develop Quantum Version of Public Key Encryption – A Public Key Encryption system that can withstand quantum attack has been put forward by Japanese researchers https://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26531/?p1=Blogsl Cf. http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/03/16/143229/Physicists-Develop-Quantum-Public-Key-Encryption
-
mazsa
Cell phones are ‘Stalin’s dream,’ says free software movement founder / Richard Stallman: iPhones and Androids are ‘Big Brother’ tracking devices: “[...] “It just recently became possible to run some very widely used phones with free software,” Stallman said. “There’s a version of Android called Replicant that can run on the HTC Dream phone without proprietary software, except in the U.S. In the U.S., as of a few weeks ago there was still a problem in some dialing library, although it worked in Europe. By now, maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know.” [...]
Stallman does his computing on a Lemote Yeeloong laptop running gNewSense, a GNU/Linux distribution composed only of free software. [...]
There are four essential software freedoms, Stallman explained. “Freedom Zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish. Freedom 1 is the freedom to study the source code, and change it so the program does your computing as you wish. Freedom 2 is the freedom to help others; that’s the freedom to make and distribute exact copies when you wish. And Freedom 3 is the freedom to contribute to your community, which is the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions when you wish.” [...]
“I don’t admire a person who says freedom is not important,” Stallman says. “Torvalds set a bad example for the community by publicly using a non-free program for the maintenance of Linux (his kernel, which is his main contribution to the GNU/Linux system). I criticized him for this, and so did others. When he stopped, it was not by choice. More recently, he rejected [the] GPL version 3 for Linux because it protects the users’ freedom from tivoization. His rejection of GPLv3 is why most Android phones are jails.” [...]”
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/031411-richard-stallman.html
-
mazsa
Son of ACTA: the next secret copyright treaty: “[...] TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) has been in the drafting stage for some time, but the US intellectual property chapter (PDF) only leaked yesterday. Canadian law professor Michael Geist calls it “everything [the US] wanted in ACTA but didn’t get. [...]”
-
mazsa
Tax competition at work: Amazon vs Illinois
Hello,
For well over a decade, the Amazon Associates Program has worked with thousands of Illinois residents. Unfortunately, a new state tax law signed by Governor Quinn compels us to terminate this program for Illinois-based participants. It specifically imposes the collection of taxes from consumers on sales by online retailers – including but not limited to those referred by Illinois-based affiliates like you – even if those retailers have no physical presence in the state.
We had opposed this new tax law because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive. It was supported by national retailing chains, most of which are based outside Illinois, that seek to harm the affiliate advertising programs of their competitors. Similar legislation in other states has led to job and income losses, and little, if any, new tax revenue. We deeply regret that its enactment forces this action.
As a result of the new law, contracts with all Illinois affiliates of the Amazon Associates Program will be terminated and those Illinois residents will no longer receive advertising fees for sales referred to Amazon.com, Endless.com, or SmallParts.com. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to April 15, 2011 will be processed and paid in full in accordance with the regular payment schedule. Based on your account closure date of April 15, 2011, any final payments will be paid by July 1, 2011.
You are receiving this email because our records indicate that you are a resident of Illinois. If you are not currently a permanent resident of Illinois, or if you are relocating to another state in the near future, you can manage the details of your Associates account here. And if you relocate to another state after April 15, please contact us for reinstatement into the Amazon Associates Program.
To be clear, this development will only impact our ability to continue the Associates Program in Illinois, and will not affect the ability of Illinois residents to purchase online at http://www.amazon.com from Amazon’s retail business.
We have enjoyed working with you and other Illinois-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program and, if this situation is rectified, would very much welcome the opportunity to re-open our Associates Program to Illinois residents.
Regards,
The Amazon Associates Team
http://directmatchmedia.com/amazon-terminates-illinois-affiliates.php
-
mazsa
Hacker group vows ‘cyberwar’ on US government, business “A leader of the computer hackers group known as Anonymous is threatening new attacks on major U.S. corporations and government officials as part of at an escalating “cyberwar” against the citadels of American power.
“It’s a guerilla cyberwar — that’s what I call it,” said Barrett Brown, 29, who calls himself a senior strategist and “propagandist” for Anonymous. He added: “It’s sort of an unconventional, asymmetrical act of warfare that we’ve involved in. And we didn’t necessarily start it. I mean, this fire has been burning.” [...]
Angered over the treatment of Bradley Manning, the Army private who is accused of leaking classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks and who is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military brig in Quantico, Va., Brown says the group is planning new computer attacks targeting government officials involved in his case. [...]
“We politely ask you to finally stand up and show some backbone,” said Brown, reading from the letter on his small laptop. “Unfreeze the account, or release the funds, so Bradley Manning and his lawyers can access it. Otherwise you prove you are nothing but a puppet of a criminal government, which is violating the Geneva Convention and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” [...]”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41972190/ns/technology_and_science-security/
-
admin
-
admin
-
-
-
mazsa
-
mazsa
Republicans: No compromise on net neutrality:
The last thing we need, in my view, is the FCC serving as Internet traffic controller, and potentially running roughshod over local broadcasters who have been serving their communities with free content for decades.
At the end of the last Congress, some members of Congress sought a compromise on net neutrality that would give Washington temporary control of the Internet while we sort this all out.
As far as I’m concerned, there is no compromise or middle ground when it comes to protecting our most basic freedoms.
So our new majority in the House is committed to using every tool at our disposal to fight a government takeover of the Internet…
We’re also going to do what we can to see that no taxpayer dollars are used to fund these net neutrality rules.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/republicans-no-compromise-possible-on-net-neutrality.ars -
mazsa
“Over 40 organizations endorse *The Declaration and “How-to” guide to new models of sustainability in the digital era* that are released today by the Free/Libre Culture Forum after4 months work.”
Sustainable Models for Creativity in the Digital Age: http://fcforum.net/sustainable-models-for-creativity
-
mazsa
Piracy is the Future of Television:
The convergence of television and the Internet is in its early stages, and the two media will increasingly
interconnect over the coming years. A number of services are currently competing to become the
dominant protocol for consumption of TV content via the Internet. This paper examines the major
services that are currently available for downloading or streaming television programs online, both
legal and illegal. We propose that, of the options now available to media users, illegal downloading is
the most usable and feature-rich, and bears the greatest potential for pioneering new modes of audience
engagement, as well as new global revenue streams, related to television products.This paper will recommend that legitimate services facilitating the online downloading/streaming of
TV adopt some of the protocols innovated by online pirates in order to improve the quality of their
offerings. Although Internet piracy has been regarded in many circles as a threat to television’s present
economic models, we argue that piracy can also be a boon to media corporations invested in shaping
TV’s evolution in the Internet era. Contemporary online piracy may prove to contain the seeds of
television’s future. http://convergenceculture.org/research/c3-piracy_future_television-full.pdf -
mazsa
Good trend: privacy as commodity
Angwin-Steel, 2011: Web’s Hot New Commodity: Privacy http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703529004576160764037920274.html
Cf. Laudon, 1996: Markets and Privacy -
mazsa
“[...]what looks like a Great Stagnation in the traditional market economy is to a significant extent a product of a vast growth in economic value that has occurred on the Internet and largely outside of the traditional market economy, and a corresponding cannibalization of and brain drain from traditional market businesses.
Most of the economic growth during the Internet era has been largely unmonetized, i.e. external to the measurable market. This is most obvious for completely free services like Craig’s List, Wikipedia, many blogs, open source software, and many other services based on content input by users. But ad-funded Internet services also usually create a much greater value than is captured by the advertising revenues. These include search, social networking, many online games, broadcast messaging, and many other services. Only a small fraction of the Internet’s overall value has been monetized. In other words, the vast majority of the Internet’s value is what economists call an externality: it is external to the measurable prices of the market. Of course, since this value is unmeasured, this thesis is extremely hard to prove or disprove, and can hardly be called scientific; mainly it just strikes me as subjectively obvious. [...]
What’s worse for the traditional market (as opposed to this recent tsunami of unmonetized voluntary information exchange), this tidal wave of value has greatly reduced the revenues of certain industries. The direct connection the Internet provides between authors and the readers put out of business many bookstores. Online classifieds and free news sources have cannibalized newspapers and magazines. Wikipedia is destroying demand for the traditional encyclopedia. Free and cut-price music has caused a substantial decline in music industry revenues. So the overall effect is a great increase in value combined with a perhaps small, but I’d guess significant reduction in what GDP growth would have been without the Internet. [...]
Cowen suggests that external gains of similar magnitude occurred in prior productivity revolutions, but I’m skeptical of this claim. A physical widget can be far more completely monetized than a piece of information, because it is excludable: if you don’t pay, you don’t get the widget. As opposed to information that computers readily copy. (The most underappreciated function of computers is that they are far better copy machines than the paper copiers). [...]” http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/02/great-stagnation-or-external-growth.html
admin is discussing. 
mazsa
Creating illusion of consensus: HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED:-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All
mazsa
Court confirms: IP addresses aren’t people “[...] Just because some lawyer cites an Internet Protocol (IP) address where illegal file sharing may have taken place, that doesn’t mean that the subscriber living there necessarily did the dirty deed. Or is responsible for others who may have done it. [...]” http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/court-confirms-ip-addresses-arent-people-and-p2p-lawyers-know-it.ars
mazsa
6 Projects for Internet Access as an Inalienable Right
Internet Is Easy Prey For Governments http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/02/07/014258/Internet-Is-Easy-Prey-For-Governments
Global net crackdown to shatter ‘utopian’ internet: experts http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/global-net-crackdown-to-shatter-utopian-internet-experts-20110204-1ag3i.html
As the Egyptian protests show, technologies that democratize communications can also centralize control http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/02/egypt-technology.html
(How Was Egypt’s Internet Access Shut Off? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=egypt-internet-mubarak )
(USA: Internet ‘kill switch’ bill will return: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20029282-281.html http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/kill-switch-legislation/ http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/30/0044222/Internet-Kill-Switch-Back-On-the-US-Legislative-Agenda
Civil Liberties Issues in Cybersecurity Bill: https://cdt.org/files/pdfs/20100624_joint_cybersec_letter.pdf
Cf. http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/01/Myth-v-Reality.pdf )(How To Stop Domain Names Being Seized By The US Government http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-stop-domain-names-being-seized-by-the-us-government-110205/ )
(Communicate if Your Government Shuts Off Your Internet http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Communicate_if_Your_Government_Shuts_Off_Your_Internet )
Should Internet access be an inalienable right? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/28/AR2011012806250.html
#Egypt Proves We Need a New Net http://rushkoff.com/2011/02/05/egypt-proves-we-need-a-new-net/ (“And, as we saw when push came to shove over WikiLeaks in the United States, how quickly this very same authority can be used to cut off “enemies of the state” from access and funding.”)
Projects:
1. Dot-P2P
Dot-P2P http://dot-p2p.org/ , an alternative DNS hierarchy that resists censorship. The project aims to create a new top-level domain, .p2p, and name-resolution software that will hook into the normal client DNS resolver. (However, the new software will not interfere with name resolution for traditional TLDs like .com and .net.) Dot-p2p developers expect the .p2p service infrastructure to be mobile and hence flexible under attack; by contrast, administration is currently expected to be centralized. However, the developers would like to see a design for decentralized administration as well.
HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1954391
Cf. Why the P2P DNS project will not work http://sam.sargeant.name/post/2109713451/p2p-dns-wont-work http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1972834
2. Tonika
Tonika http://5ttt.org is an administration-free platform for large-scale open-membership (social) networks with robust security, anonymity, resilience and performance guarantees.
Comparison: http://blog.5ttt.org/2011/01/egypts-internet-fiasco.html
3. Starfish
Goal “Enable the creation of a world-wide user-controlled network of both wired and wirelessnodes based on a distributed architecture.” http://kemenczy.at/files/Starfish%20Concept.pdf
http://kemenczy.at/index.php/starfish
4. Digitata
http://digitata.org plans to provide the resources and information to local communities, NGOs, aid orginisations on how to build a digitata and technical specifications to manufactures who wish to support the principals by creating the hardware. To become a central repository of technical specifications and experiences to help everybody. The ultimate vision to see digitatas grown all over the world where access to the internet and teaching resources is limited, that children around the world have the opportunity to discover technology for themselves. Achieving this by means of low cost mass produced standardised kits which can customised to their environments.
5. Daihinia
Daihinia™ http://daihinia.com/ is a tool for WiFi. It turns a simple Ad-Hoc network into a Multi-hop Ad-Hoc network. Multi-hop Ad-Hoc networks offer a higher level of flexibility than the usual Infrastructure Mode: in Infrastructure Mode all the computers have to be in the range of the Access Point, while in Multi-hop Ad-Hoc networks they have to be within one another’s range.
6. Netsukuku
Netsukuku http://netsukuku.freaknet.org/ is designed to be a distributed, anonymous mesh network that relies only on normal wireless network cards. FreakNet is even building its own domain name architecture. http://www.masternewmedia.org/the-alternative-p2p-wireless-internet-network-the-netsukuku-idea/
Code: http://dev.hinezumi.org/browser/netsukuku/sandbox/lukisi/branches
admin
admin
admin
admin
admin
mazsa
How 1researcher helped US beat China’s censors http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/05/how-one-researcher-enabled-the-u-s-government-to-slip-news-through-chinas-censors/
mazsa
#Bitcoin: someone swapping his own #BTC and USD back-and-forth to create an illusion?
Bitcoin has (briefly) reached USD parity and is trading at a 10% spread. I would not have expected that to happen, through it might still be cheating: someone swapping his own BTC and USD back-and-forth to create an illusion. As long as there are no outside parties with large amounts of BTC to tap into this, the guy is safe. Come to think of it, it’s actually not a bad way to bootstrap the digital commodity…
6 hours ago · Like ·
You and Attila Lendvai likes this.
Peter Földiák
That is what’s called a “market maker”, right?
6 hours ago · Like
Daniel A. Nagy
Not quite. A market maker is one who puts forth both buy and sell offers. He expects to profit and never trades with oneself. One who trades with oneself at an inflated price can expect to lose money.
6 hours ago · Like
mazsa
How 1man tracked down Anonymous & paid a heavy price “[...] But within a day, Anonymous had managed to infiltrate HBGary Federal’s website and take it down, replacing it with a pro-Anonymous message (“now the Anonymous hand is bitch-slapping you in the face.”) Anonymous got into HBGary Federal’s e-mail server, for which Barr was the admin, and compromised it, extracting over 40,000 e-mails and putting them up on The Pirate Bay, all after watching his communications for 30 hours, undetected. In an after-action IRC chat, Anonymous members bragged about how they had gone even further, deleting 1TB of HBGary backup data.
They even claimed to have wiped Barr’s iPad remotely.
The situation got so bad for the security company that HBGary, the company which partially owns HBGary Federal, sent its president Penny Leavy into the Anonymous IRC chat rooms to swim with the sharks—and to beg them to leave her company alone. (Read the bizarre chat log.) Instead, Anonymous suggested that, to avoid more problems, Leavy should fire Barr and “take your investment in aaron’s company and donate it to BRADLEY MANNINGS DEFENCE FUND.” Barr should cough off up a personal contribution, too; say, one month’s salary?
As for Barr’s “pwning,” Leavy couldn’t backtrack from it fast enough. “We have not seen the list [of Anonymous admins] and we are kind of pissed at him right now.”
Were Barr’s vaunted names even correct? Anonymous insisted repeatedly that they were not. As one admin put it in the IRC chat with Leavy, “Did you also know that aaron was peddling fake/wrong/false information leading to the potential arrest of innocent people?” The group then made that information public, claiming that it was all ridiculous. [...]” http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/how-one-security-firm-tracked-anonymousand-paid-a-heavy-price.ars
-
admin
Hackers Reveal Offers to Spy on Corporate Rivals http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/politics/12hackers.html
mazsa
How To Stop Domain Names Being Seized By The US Government http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-stop-domain-names-being-seized-by-the-us-government-110205/
mazsa
#egypt: tweet by voicemail “anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet .” http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/some-weekend-work-that-will-hopefully.html
mazsa
Top 5 Cyberlaw Developments of 2010, Plus a 2010 Year-in-Review http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/01/top_cyberlaw_de_5.htm
mazsa
Whole ISPs & telecoms behind VPN: “Soon the decision of Parliament to impose new requirements on telecommunications companies to store information about their customers, but there are telephone companies that have decided to oppose the law.
Internet operator Bahnhof for example, will do everything it can to make the law as toothless as possible. [...]
- In our case, we plan to let our traffic to go through a VPN service, “says Jon Karlung who is president. [...]” http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=sv&tl=en&u=http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx%3Fprogramid%3D1646%26artikel%3D4311500&act=url
Cf.: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/27/0320209/Swedish-ISPs-To-Thwart-EU-Data-Retention-Law
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/0417208/UK-ISPs-Consider-VPN-To-Avoid-Piracy-Crackdown
mazsa
How the FBI raided Anonymous http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/two-real-guns-pointed-at-me-how-the-fbi-raided-anonymous.ars
-
admin
mazsa
6 Ideas For Those Needing Defensive Technology to Protect Free Speech from Authoritarian Regimes and 4 Ways the Rest of Us Can Help https://www.eff.org/wp/surveillance-self-defense-international
Pdf: https://www.eff.org/files/eff-surveillance-self-defense.pdf
mazsa
World’s first mathematically proven hack-free software: http://www.hindustantimes.com/World-s-first-hack-free-software-developed/H1-Article1-655632.aspx
mazsa
“PirateBox is a self-contained mobile collaboration and P2P file sharing device. Simply turn it on to transform any space into a free and open P2P file sharing network. [...] No logins are required and no user data is logged. Users remain completely anonymous – the system is purposely not connected to the Internet in order to subvert tracking and preserve user privacy.” http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox
mazsa
“[...] The world needs more people seriously engaged with improving the lot of activists who make use of the net (that is, all activists). We need to have a serious debate about tactics such as the Distributed Denial of Service – flooding computers with bogus requests so that they can’t be reached – which some have compared to sit-in demonstrations. As someone who’s been arrested at sit-ins, I think this is just wrong. A sit-in derives its efficacy not from merely blocking the door to some objectionable place, but from the public willingness to stand before your neighbours and risk arrest and bodily harm in service of a moral cause, which is itself a force for moral suasion. As a tactic, DDoS has more in common with filling a business’s locks with super glue, or cutting its phone lines – risky, to be sure, but closer to vandalism and thus less apt to convince your neighbours to look sympathetically on your cause.
We need to fix the mobile internet, which – thanks to closed networks and devices – is more amenable to surveillance and control than the fixed-line variety. We need to fight the move – driven by entertainment companies and IT giants such as Apple and Microsoft – to design devices to work covertly and without the consent of their owners in the name of protecting copyright.
We need to pay heed to Jonathan Zittrain (another scholar whom Morozov both dismisses and then later inadvertently agrees vigorously with), whose The Future of the Internet warns that the increase in crime, sleaze and fraud on the net will cause user fatigue and make people more willing to accept locked-down devices and networks that can be used to control, as well as protect them.
We need all of this, and a serious critique and roadmap for the future of net activism, because the world’s oppressive regimes (including supposedly free governments in the west) are availing themselves of new technology at speed, and the only way for activism to be effective in that environment is to use the same tools.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/25/net-activism-delusion
http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2011/03/anonymous-and-breaking-laws-ethically.html