Court Case eases up on Piracy

What is a downloaded movie worth? What is a reasonable punishment for a person who downloads a movie, and one that uploads a movie? Is piracy theft, or should it just be consider plagiarism?

Internet piracy is still a relatively new phenomenon, most countries are currently far from nailing down their legislation on the spectacle, and the debate is well under way on how piracy should be treated in the justice system. Sweden, being a fore runner when it comes to both Internet piracy, and piracy prevention, is still leagues from a solid answer.

Therefore, leading judgments are important, and since the Internet and information sharing is global, it is very interesting to examine how other countries deal with their cases of piracy. A case well worth putting under the microscope is a subpoena from the U.S.; Malibu Media Llc vs. John Does.

Malibu Media Llc saw how some of their movies (and other IP products) were leaked on the Internet. The company then tracked the IP-address used for sharing these files over a Bittorrent protocol, and based on that IP-address the company found the uploader. This time it happened to be a home user rather than a public hotspot. Subsequently geo-location was used to find the physical address, and the subscription service used, and thereby identified the physical person behind the uploads.

Or so they thought.

The law suit is as a classic example of what may cause many pirates to choose to hide their IP-address, i.e. example via VPN services, but interestingly enough, the judge in Florida decided to go a different route. The judge ruled that although the address was correctly identified, you cannot rule out the possibility that someone else used the computer. Home networks and home computers are after all often shared by several people.

Similar judgments have been identified previously in the U.S., and seems to be increasingly common. In Sweden we have had relatively few court cases of piracy that had been triad on the basis of IP-address, but this case may be setting the stage for how these cases can come to be interpreted.

What do you think about internet piracy? Please comment below. 

Google Taking Action for Free Speech

In an obvious nod to the recent controversy surrounding the freedom of speech on the web, Google is now taking a clear stand, advocating for a free and unsupervised Internet. It was on Wednesday, January 18th, that Americans stood up in opposition to PIPA and SOPA – bills that would have censored the Web and imposed harmful regulations on primarily U.S. businesses, but also the entire world.

Individuals took action and closed down their personal blogs, companies closed their websites, and thousands of US citizens called their elected representatives in Washington, voicing their mistrust. Their voices were heard. Washington recognized the damage these bills could inflict on the Internet, and as a result, PIPA and SOPA have been indefinitely postponed. However postponed is not good enough; these bills needs to be buried forever. Google recognizes this, and is not petitioning everyone to sign up for a free Internet.

This development follows quite expected from the recent year’s disclosure of Internet espionage. It may seem like ages ago now, but it has not even been a year since former CIA employee Edward Snowden ,in a series of exposés beginning on June 5, 2013, publicized thousands of classified documents to several media outlets. The leaked documents revealed operational details of global surveillance programs run by the NSA, and the other Five Eyes governments of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, with the cooperation of a number of businesses and European governments.

Within the immediate days that followed Snowden had gotten his passport revoked, fled to and from several different countries, charged with espionage, and quickly seen himself go from patriot to traitor. However some people would say that he has made the exact opposite journey, and gone from traitor to patriot. Seldom has one man been called so many different polar opposites; a hero – a villain, a savior – an enemy, a patriot – a traitor.

The disclosures have fueled debates over mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and information privacy. Two court rulings since the initial leaks have split on the constitutionality of the NSA's bulk collection of telephone metadata, and most would argue that NSA have greatly surpassed their jurisdiction.

Espionage and terrorism have always been the dark side of freedom of speech, and will probably continue to be so until the end of man. The Internet has since the beginning been open and free, and has lately played pivot roles in aiding freedom around the world. Countries like Alger, Tunis, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen would not have started their paths towards democracy had it not been for the Internet. The Internet has help to uncover racial prosecutions and injustices in Saudi, Oman., Iraq, Djibouti, Sudan and West Sahara, and has also recently shined a strong light on the homophobic nation of Uganda, leading to western countries boycotting the African nation.

I short the Internet was born, and shall remain, free.

Governments alone should not determine the future of the Internet. The billions of people around the globe that use it and the experts that build and maintain it should. A free society depends on free expression. The flow of ideas and open access to information on the web helps communities grow and nations prosper.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/takeaction/

This may be the most important stand we ever make, and Google is leading the way. Please read the petition and get opinionated.

Do you think governments should be able to restrict the Internet? Please comment below.

Want Personal Data? Go Phish!

At least 2 million people received the email May 16 2013 notifying them that an order they had just made on "Wallmart's" website was being processed, though none of them had done any such thing.

Still, thousands of people clicked on the link in the email, taking many of them to a harmless Google search results page for "Walmart." Others weren't so fortunate.

The link led to the invisible download of malware that covertly infected their personal computers, turning them into remotely controlled robots for hackers.

Phishing, also known as “brand spoofing” or “carding”, is a term used to describe various scams that use (primarily) fraudulent e-mail messages, sent by criminals, to trick you into divulging personal information. The criminals use this information to steal your identity, rob your bank account, or take over your computer.

With spear-phishing they use social engineering – researching social media and other publicly available online sources – to profile high value targets and personalize bogus emails. Broader phishing campaigns may engage partners in crime to conduct high volume mailings, but very realistic looking emails will invariably hook a significant number of users who will download a malformed spreadsheet or click on a link to a fraudulent website.

Make no mistake, phishing and spear-phishing works. RSA recently reported that in 2013 there were nearly 450,000 phishing attacks and estimated losses of over $5.9 billion.

Even before phishing became so prevalent, legitimate businesses and financial institutions would hardly ever ask for personal information via e-mail. If you receive such a request, call the organization and ask if it's legitimate or check its legitimate Web site. Look for misspellings and bad grammar. While an occasional typo can slip by any organization, more than one is a tip-off to beware.

In the fake-Wal-Mart attack, people missed clear warning signs — such as the company name being misspelled and the sender's address being very long and strange.

The success of phishing is largely determined by the low levels of user-awareness regarding how the companies which fraudsters try to imitate, operate. Many legitimate sites contain special warnings saying that they never ask users to send confidential data in messages. However, users continue to send their passwords to phishers.

Phishing is a modern hydra, cut of one head and two more grows out. The only way to actually combat phishing is with awareness and to starve it out. I personally think this is a result of the young age of the Internet; people are simply not accustomed to online scammers the same way we are local market hustlers. In a few years phishing and scamming will probably have malnourished itself out of existence, but until then we all need to be aware. 

Please don't feed the phish. 

Google's expanding their AI Mind

Google is expanding its ambitions in Artificial Intelligence with the acquisition of AI company DeepMind for a reported $400 million.

It’s no secret that Google has an interest in AI; after all, technologies derived from AI research help fuel Google’s core search and advertising businesses. AI also plays a key role in Google’s mobile services, its autonomous cars, and its growing stable of robotics technologies.

With the addition of futurist Ray Kurzweil to its ranks in 2012, Google also has the grandfather of “strong AI” on board, a man who forecasts that intelligent machines may exist by midcentury.

If all this sounds troubling, don’t worry: Google’s acquisition of DeepMind isn’t about fusing a mechanical brain with faster-than-human robots and giving birth to the misanthropic Skynet computer network from the Terminator franchise.

DeepMind's Web site describes the London-based company as "cutting edge" and specializing in combining "the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms." The site says the company's initial commercial applications are simulations, e-commerce, and games.

Google has been particularly focused on advances in artificial intelligence recently. Scientists working on the company's secretive X Labs created a neural network for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors and then unleashed it on the Internet. The network's performance exceeded researchers' expectations, doubling its accuracy rate in identifying objects from a list of 20,000 items.

I wrote about Artificial Intelligence as a part of my article series The Conscious Internet. Do you think the age of Artificial Intelligence is upon us? Comment below...

Handshaking 101

I have to many times, both in this business world and outside of it, met people who just don’t know how to shake hands. Often you can’t put your finger on it, but you know there is something wrong with this person because of the way he/she shakes hands. Premature hugging is something else, not to be covered here, but likewise as odd.

The result of a bad handshake is that you are forever going to look at that person with a bit of skepticism. “Sure, he delivers on every occasion, but THAT handshake … “ This is just not going to fly. To help you novice handshakers out there here’s a few handshakes you may want to avoid:

1. The sweaty slip – some people have a natural tendency to get sweaty hands and many get them when they are nervous, that’s just normal. It can make shaking hands tricky in stressful situations such as job interviews. However, I think there is no excuse for a wet, slobby handshake. If you get sweaty hands simply dry them on a piece of clothing before shaking someone’s hand. It’s just the only courteous thing to do. 
2. The limp fish - not gripping the other person’s hand firm enough and then shaking from your wrist is a big mistake because the messages I receive about the other person doing that include: ‘I am not confident’ or ‘I am a push-over’. 
3. The pinch – when someone pinches your fingers with their fingers. This is maybe something the Queen does, but has no place in real life. Again, this half-hearted handshake sends me signals like ‘I am not bothered about shaking your hands properly’ or ‘I don’t think you deserve a proper handshake’. 
4. The hand-holder – where the person shaking your hand keeps holding on and thinks he is actually holding hands with you rather than shaking hands. After anything more than 3 shakes my natural instinct tells me to pull my hand back and say ‘let go, why are we holding hands now?’ My mind is then suddenly preoccupied with forcing myself not to pull my hand away, which means I am no longer concentrating on the introduction or anything the other person is saying.
5. The avoider – someone that doesn’t make eye contact when they shake your hand or someone that pulls their hand away too quickly. This again signals to me that they are either under-confident, very shy, or they don’t really want to meet me or shake my hand. 
6. The crushing gripper – when you shake someone’s hand and it feels like they are crushing every single bone in your hand. A hand shake that is too firm will make anyone feel uncomfortable. It makes you think ‘is the person trying to hurt me on purpose?’ and triggers a natural ‘I need to run away’ instinct.