Category: Internet

Things haven’t been going very well for The Pirate Bay recently ever since the notorious file-sharing website had to scrap its plans to shift hosting responsibilities from the Swedish Pirate Party to the Norwegian Pirate Party after a local copyright enforcement group threatened the Norwegian Pirate Party with a lawsuit. In a recent desperate attempt to find a host, the site tried migrating to servers in Greenland, but now The Register reports that The Pirate Bay has been booted out of Greenland less than 48 hours after settling down on its frozen tundra. Apparently Greenlandic telecom company Tele-Post “decided to block access to two domains operated by file-sharing network The Pirate Bay,” which put a quick end to the website’s adventures in the enormous northern landmass. We have no idea where The Pirate Bay will go next for a home but it wouldn’t surprise us if the site really did give North Korea a try at this rate.

To settle charges that it’s artificially boosting its own properties in search results, Google is offering to let consumers know that it’s the company behind Google Shopping. The Guardian reports that Google has made a settlement offer to European antitrust officials in which the company says it will “label results where its own properties, such as YouTube or Google Shopping, appear in listings when people perform searches.” The Guardian notes that this concession is unlikely to satisfy critics who claim that Google is pushing down rivals’ products to promote its own services, since the offer would do nothing to change the rankings in search results. Google skated in a similar investigation in the United States when the Federal Trade Commission found it didn’t violate American antitrust law late last year.

It seems that taking the Bing Challenge could make your computer more vulnerable to malware. PCMag reports that a new study from German independent testing lab AV-Test has found that searches conducted with Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing search engine retrieve five times as many malicious websites as searches conducted with Google. After studying around 10 million search results from each search engine, AV-Test found that Bing retrieved 1,285 malicious links while Google retrieved just 272 malicious links. Both Google and Bing were still vastly safer than Russian search engine Yandex, which returned a total of 3,300 malicious links out of 13 million search results studied.

Some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week:

Super-duper useful mandatory homework: Get a secure password now. As xkcd explains, most people’s approach to secure passwords (a word bastardized with “random” capital letters and punctuation that’s difficult to remember) is wrong. Now go get yourself a good password. If you need to ask why this is important, watch an informative playlist on hackers.

Scientists reveal a new technique called CLARITY that can render a brain nearly invisible — that is, rid the brain of light-scattering lipids that make it hard to look at in detail. [io9]

A must-watch Frontline documentary on the conflict in Syria, but not like you’ve seen before. A powerful human-interest piece. [PBS]

Markham Nolan: How to separate fact and fiction online

Read an eye-opening piece by Gina Kolata on the world of sham academic journals. It’s disturbing that even reputable academics get scammed. [NYTimes] It’s becoming increasingly difficult to parse what’s legitimate on the interwebs, as we learn from Markham Nolan’s talk on false Internet stories. Here’s a useful guide to some predatory open-access journals.

We’re a little late on this one, but The Invisible War is a harrowing, Academy Award-nominated documentary about rape in the U.S. military. (Did you know, for example, that 25 percent of U.S. servicewomen don’t report their rape because the person to report to is their rapist?) Watch the documentary »

Become a better thinker by applying Bayesian reasoning. [io9]

A riveting data visualization animation of all the drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004. [Pitch Interactive]

Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite!

Download a neat illustrated guide to TED2013 drawn by TED alum and Ford Futurist Sheryl Connelly. Read about her notes or download them from WeTransfer. Sunni Brown, doodle advocate, would approve. Watch her talk on doodling.

A slightly odd story about Rami Abdul Rahman, basically the one-man team behind the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which produces the main casualty reports coming out of the Syrian conflict. [NYTimes]

Completely useless and untimely: The Useless Website generator »

On Wednesday, CISPA came closer to reality as it passed the markup phase in the House Intelligence Committee. Now the bill has to make it through the House, then the Senate, and finally the President’s desk. That last one may have just become a little harder, however, as the administration doesn’t necessarily like what it sees in the cybersecurity bill.

The Obama Administration has finally issued a statement in regards to its stance on the controversial CISPA bill that’s expected to go before the House next week. The statement, written by Caitlin Hayden, a National Security Council spokesperson, says the newly amended CISPA is a good start, but doesn’t go far enough in protecting civil liberties:

“We continue to believe that information sharing improvements are essential to effective legislation, but they must include privacy and civil liberties protections, reinforce the roles of civilian and intelligence agencies, and include targeted liability protections. The Administration seeks to build upon the productive dialogue with Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Ruppersberger over the last several months, and the Administration looks forward to continuing to work with them to ensure that any cybersecurity legislation reflects these principles. Further, we believe the adopted committee amendments reflect a good faith-effort to incorporate some of the Administration’s important substantive concerns, but we do not believe these changes have addressed some outstanding fundamental priorities.”

This new statement comes almost a year after the White House issued its first statement in opposition to CISPA. At that time, the statement was much longer, and tore CISPA a new one. The old statement also ended with a veto threat.

It’s unfortunate then that this new statement contains no such thing. The new one doesn’t even address any of the specific failings in CISPA. It would have been nice to see the administration explicitly state it was against granting companies immunity when they share private information with government, or that it was against the bill allowing companies to share information directly with the NSA. We could assume that the administration, based upon last year’s statement, was against these provisions in CISPA yet again, but its silence doesn’t inspire confidence.

Regardless, it’s nice to see that the White House still has some issues with CISPA. It would have been even nicer to see the administration issue a veto threat, but this will have to do for now. Now we can only hope that the White House finally addresses the CISPA petition that got over 100,000 signatures last month.

[LA Times via TechDirt]

Well, that didn’t take long. The Hill reports that the House Intelligence Committee met in secret Wednesday to mark up CISPA and approve any last amendments before it made its way to the House floor. CISPA was approved on a vote of 18-2.

Now CISPA is heading to the House floor, but the question still remains – will CISPA protect your privacy? The amendments approved during the mark up point to a bill that’s well intentioned, but some privacy advocates still aren’t convinced. Those very same privacy advocates are now leading the fight to improve or kill what they feel is an attack on their online freedoms.

Are you concerned about CISPA? Do you think it will pass the House? Let us know in the comments.

The big question is whether or not the House Intelligence Committee actually improved CISPA during the mark up. There were six amendments approved, and all six were backed by the bill’s authors – Reps. Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger. The amendments talk a big game, but do they really take your privacy seriously?

Speaking to reporters, Rogers claims that this year’s CISPA addresses all the problems privacy advocates had with the bill:

“What we came up with, we think, is the right approach. It is the one bill out of everything you’ve seen on both sides of this great institution of the United States Congress that protects a free and open Internet and allows people to share cyber threat information to protect their clients, their business, their [personally identifiable information].”

One of the more publicized amendments would require the government to strike any personally identifiable information from the data it receives. The same would be required of companies receiving information from the government. The problem with these seemingly well intentioned amendments, at least according to TechDirt, is that the information isn’t wiped before it reaches the government. There’s an expectation that the government will wipe any personally identifiable information from the data as soon as they receive it, but it’s hard to say when that data will be wiped. Will the government wipe the data as soon as it receives it, or will it wipe it when it’s most convenient?

Another amendment would forbid companies from using the information it receives from the government for marketing purposes. This is definitely the most troublesome amendment only because it admits that CISPA would allow this sort of thing if left unchecked. According to the folks in Washington, CISPA is meant to combat cybersecurity. Why does the bill have to address something like marketing then? There are bigger problems with a cybersecurity bill when the kind of information it shares can be used for marketing purposes.

Alongside the amendments, the committee also struck some language from CISPA that said the information the government receives could be used for “national security purposes.” Critics said the language was too broad, and feared that information received under CISPA would be used in criminal investigations that have nothing to do with national security.

Despite these amendments, two members of the House Intelligence Committee still voted against CISPA. Rep. Adam Schiff threatened to vote against CISPA if his amendment wasn’t taken up, and he stayed true to his word. It’s a shame too as his amendment would have addressed a few major concerns privacy advocates have with the bill.

Schiff’s amendment would do what Rogers’ amendment does in that it removes personally identifiable information from data the government receives from companies. The only difference is that Schiff’s bills called for an automated system that would strike the information from data before it reached the government’s hands. It’s not said why the committee didn’t go with Schiff’s amendment, but some lawmakers have already shown that they don’t trust algorithmic software.

Even if the privacy protections actually protected users’ privacy, opponents of the bill are still sour over CISPA’s willingness to grant legal immunity to companies that share data with the government. In other words, you can’t sue a company that mishandles your information as long as that data was being used for “national security purposes.”

Opponents are also still unhappy with the bill not explicitly stating which government agency companies must share data with. Privacy advocates think the information should be sent to a civilian agency, like the Department of Homeland Security, but there’s nothing stopping a company from sharing information with the National Security Agency, a secretive organization that has little governmental oversight and is already rumored to be illegally collecting online communications.

Do you think the amendments approved by the House Intelligence Committee do enough to protect your privacy? Let us know in the comments.

CISPA may have passed committee, but now the real fight begins. The first obstacle standing in its way is the rest of Washington as both the White House and Senate were opposed to CISPA last year. The Senate’s insistence on passing the doomed CSA ultimately doomed CISPA as well. Schiff is also confident that the White House will come out against the bill again:

“I do think that the reservations that the White House has stated to the bill are still there and my expectation is that they would be appreciative of the steps that were taken, but also call for additional steps.”

Another obstacle standing in CISPA’s way is a renewed Internet grassroots movement dedicated to making sure the bill doesn’t pass. Groups like the ACLU and EFF are leading the charge while Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has teamed up with Fight For The Future to launch a petition aimed directly at stopping CISPA.

Despite all of this, CISPA will probably make it past the House again. It did last year, and the 2012 elections didn’t dramatically alter the House in a way that would make its members more likely to reject the bill.

It’s going to get really interesting, however, when the Senate reveals its own cybersecurity legislation. Will it be another bill similar to last year’s CSA or will the Senate adopt something similar to CISPA this time around? Another big question is whether or not the White House will reject it again as the Obama administration has remained quiet on the debate so far despite a White House petition calling for the death of CISPA reaching 100,000 signatures.

Do you think CISPA has any chance of passing the Senate? Will senators better take your privacy into account? Let us know in the comments.

[Image: EFF]

Internet auction giant eBay (EBAY) recently announced plans to begin sharing the browsing habits of its customers with third-party advertisers. The move follows similar strategies of other online companies such as Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and Facebook (FB). EBay traditionally used its proprietary user data to help grow its eBay Marketplaces business and promote products from various merchants to users who had shown interest in similar items on its website.

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Crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo experienced tremendous growth in 2012 and became a significant source of financing for independent businesses, Reuters reported. Consumers eagerly backed projects and companies for a total amount of $2.66 billion last year, an increase of 81% from $1.47 billion in 2011. The bulk of money raised came from North American users who invested $1.6 billion in various projects, an increase of 105% from 2011. One of the most popular crowdfunding projects of all time was the Pebble smartwatch, which raised more than $10 million from 66,434 backers who bought 85,000 watches. Research firm Massolution believes that crowdfunding will continue to increase in 2013 and could grow as high as $5.1 billion.

In early 2012, The Pirate Bay moved from its traditional .org domain to a .se domain to avoid the fate that befell Megaupload. For over a year now, The Pirate Bay has not moved from this domain, even when it was blocked in the UK and other European countries. That all changes today, however, as the most infamous site on the Web is making another move.

TorrentFreak reports that The Pirate Bay has now moved from its old .se domain to a new .gl domain. Those attempting to visit the old .se domain will be automatically redirected to the new domain.

So, why the sudden move? The Pirate Bay thinks that Sweden will seize its .se domain in the coming days. The move was made to make sure that users experience no downtime even if a seizure were to take place.

As TorrentFreak points out, the move to a new domain may also bypass the current IP blocks in place in the UK and other countries, if only for a short while. Even if these countries were to block the new IP address, The Pirate Bay has claimed that it has hundreds more in backup to counter any blocking attempts.

It will be interesting to see what happens from here. The Pirate Bay has already moved its servers out of Sweden to make sure physical raids can’t target it, and now its moving around the digital seas to avoid domain seizures. The Pirate Bay has been playing this cat-and-mouse game for years, and it doesn’t look like it’s gonna end any time soon.

Have you been hearing a lot about Bitcoin lately? Do you have absolutely no idea what the hell people are talking about? Are you in the least bit troubled by your lack of understanding?

Here, watch this video. It’s an incredibly well-made primer on the decentralized digital currency that’s grabbing a lot fo attention right now.

Afterward, if you’re still wondering if you should use Bitcoin, read this.

[Duncan Elms]

AT&T (T) on Tuesday announced plans to build an advanced fiber optic network that is capable of speeds up to 1Gbps in Austin, Tex. The company’s announcement came shortly after Google (GOOG) confirmed that it will launch its gigabit broadband Internet service, known as Google Fiber, in the city later next year. AT&T didn’t reveal additional details such as an estimated launch date, although the company said it is anticipating that it will “be granted the same terms and conditions as Google on issues such as geographic scope of offerings, rights of way, permitting, state licenses and any investment incentives.” AT&T’s press release follows below.

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To say that AT&T is stealing Google’s thunder isn’t really the right way to put it, but Ma Bell is using the buzz surrounding Google Fiber’s big launch into Austin as a way to springboard its own plans for a ultra-high speed network.

Today, AT&T has announced intentions to build its own advanced fiber optic infrastructure “capable of delivering speeds up to 1 gigabit per second” in Austin, Texas.

No other details – like the when and how much – have been divulged. We’re guessing that AT&T will be unwilling to offer anything like Google Fiber’s free internet (with construction fee, of course). But as far as the pricing goes, it remains to be seen.

No surprise here, but AT&T makes a point to say that they don’t expect the project to “materially alter their anticipated 2013 capital expenditures.”

Also, AT&T expects to be given the same terms as Google in the city of Austin:

AT&T’s expanded fiber plans in Austin anticipate it will be granted the same terms and conditions as Google on issues such as geographic scope of offerings, rights of way, permitting, state licenses and any investment incentives.

Of course, all of this comes on the heels of Google’s announcement that they will be expanding their Google Fiber initiative to Austin in mid-2014. Google says the price will be similar to what it is in Kansas City, and that they will be giving the service free to public institutions like schools, libraries, and hospitals.

No matter what, this is great for the residents of Austin, who now have multiple companies looking to give them crazy fast internet. Some cities have all the luck.

Time Warner Cable (TWC) doesn’t seem too concerned about Google’s (GOOG) ultrafast fiber service encroaching on yet another one of its territories by launching in Austin this week. In a statement given to The Wall Street Journal, a Time Warner Cable spokesperson said that the company is “prepared for added competition and believe that any innovation in broadband technology is good for all of us.” Praising Google for providing “innovation in broadband technology” is an intriguing thing for Time Warner Cable to say since its CTO earlier this year said that the company doesn’t plan to build out fiber to the home because there’s no evidence that American consumers actually want super-fast networks. It will be interesting to see if Google Fiber’s plan to expand to more markets spurs more aggressive network upgrade investments from rival ISPs, especially ISPs that have been dismissive about the need to boost network speeds.

We’ve spent the past year researching the lineup for TEDGlobal 2013 — and bookmarking some amazing websites and pages along the way. Here are 11 you really didn’t know you needed. But you do.

1. BioNumbers
An addictive database of useful biological numbers. Just go and start looking around, and try to stop — you can start off with the most popular numbers, or perhaps the most amazing. Sample:

• Average duration of a single eye blink, Human Homo sapiens: 0.1-0.4 sec
• Characteristic heart rate, Pond mussel: 4-6 beats per minute
• Number of skin cells, Human Homo sapiens: 1.1e+11 cells [1.1e+11 is scientific notation for 1.1*10^11, or one hundred and ten billion]

Found thanks to speaker: Uri Alon

2. ‘I regretted the minute I pressed share’: A Qualitative Study of Regrets on Facebook” (PDF)
Ever regret posting something dumb on Facebook? In one of the most entertaining academic papers ever written, a team of researchers at Alessandro Acquisti’s lab share clinical interviews about social-media shame. From authors: Yang Wang, Saranga Komanduri, Pedro G. Leon, Gregory Norcie, Alessandro Acquisti, and Lorrie Faith Cranor.

Found thanks to speaker: Alessandro Acquisti

3. Blind Juggler
Not quite what it sounds like, this is a collection of videos of robots that can juggle a small plastic ball — without any cameras or sensors to tell them where the ball is. The robots run from simple to baroque. Who knew pure physics was so hypnotizing to watch …

Found thanks to speaker: Raffaelo D’Andrea

4. “Short-Wavelength Light Sensitivity of Circadian, Pupillary, and Visual Awareness in Humans Lacking an Outer Retina”
Get ready to have your mind slightly blown: You have a body part you didn’t know about. Inside your eye, where you have rods and cones to process vision, there’s a third kind of receptor that tells light from dark, and helps adjust your sleep cycle. And in two legally blind patients with nonfunctioning rods and cones, Dr. Russell Foster and his team show in this paper, that third kind of receptor still works.

Found thanks to speaker: Russell Foster

5. Carnyx Scotland
What is a carnyx? A 2,000-year-old Scottish musical instrument, made of bronze, as tall as a man, with a bell shaped like the head of a boar. It was played between, let’s say, 300 BC and AD 200. Do you want to know more? Why, yes you do.

Found thanks to speaker: John Kenny

6. The Cloud Appreciation Society
Cloud videos, cloud news, and the cloud of the month. Cloudspotters of the world, unite and look up.

Found thanks to speaker: Gavin Pretor-Pinney

7. “The Art of Pickpocketing”
This is just a single video but you’ll have to watch it twice — see “gentleman thief” Apollo Robbins steal the watch right off a New Yorker writer’s wrist.

Found thanks to speaker: Apollo Robbins

8. Wild Sex
Curious about how birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it? Two seasons of frank, hilarious video lessons about animal sex, hosted by Dr. Carin Bondar. (Electric eels, I might add, do it, though it shocks ‘em. I know.)

Found thanks to speaker: Carin Bondar

9. Wild Sanctuary
This is one of those browser tabs you can keep open all day long — a constant soundtrack of field-recorded wild animal noises. You’ll hear birdsong, whales, and mysterious jungle beeping of some kind.

Found thanks to speaker: Bernie Krause

10. 88 Bar
Catch up on Chinese memes and culture in this fascinating group blog, curated with the help of An Xiao Mina.

Found thanks to speaker: An Xiao Mina

11. Global Gigs
Dreaming of a job far far away from wherever you are right now? This site (somewhat tricky to navigate but worth it) offers detailed first-person reports on the kinds of jobs you can get as a traveling expat.

Found thanks to speaker: Holly Morris

Google’s (GOOG) gigabit broadband Internet service has been well received by the lucky few who have it, while the rest of us have been left eagerly awaiting for it to arrive in our hometowns. Google Fiber is currently available in Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas, and is rumored to be launching in Austin, Texas later this year. Carlos Kirjner and Ram Parameswaran of Bernstein Research estimate that it cost Google $94 million — $42 million in Kansas and $52 million in Missouri — to build the Fiber infrastructure and connect homes in its current markets, TechCrunch reported. The analysts believe the rumored Austin rollout will cost the same or even less than the offerings in Kansas City, although they remain skeptical of a nationwide build out.

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Rumors about Google (GOOG) bringing its high-speed fiber network to Austin, Texas gained a little more steam over the weekend when unnamed sources told Austin-based station KVUE that Google would indeed announce plans to expand its fiber service to the city this week. And now Engadget has got hold of a leaked embargoed press release from the Gig.U initiative congratulating the city of Austin for getting hooked up with Google Fiber, thus making it the second city to have access to the service that first launched in Kansas City last year. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt late last year insisted that Google Fiber “isn’t just an experiment,” but rather “a real business” that the company is “trying to decide where to expand next,” so it’s not all that surprising that Google has decided to slowly roll it out to other markets.

Google (GOOG) and the City of Austin, Texas on Friday sent out press invitations for a special announcement slated for next week. Unnamed sources have told Venture Beat that the event could involve Google Fiber and potential plans to bring its gigabit broadband Internet service to the city. It is also speculated, however, that the announcement could be for a new Austin-based Google campus or perhaps some other partnership between the two parties. Google Fiber is currently available in Kansas City and the company recently announced plans to expand its high-speed Internet service to residents in Olathe, Kansas later this year. Google’s event is scheduled to take place on April 9th at 11:00 a.m. CDT/12:00 p.m. EDT.

The history of the Internet is an area of study that’s woefully ignored by the modern generation. I was part of the generation that grew up just as the Internet was just getting started, and the generation before me can even remember a time when the Internet wasn’t even a thing.

Unfortunately, those who came after us take the Internet for granted. Their formative years were spent with broadband speeds and unlimited access. They didn’t have to live through an era of dial-up modems and AOL installation discs littering the computer desk. For that generation, here’s an episode of Computer Chronicles, a PBS-produced series on technology, that explores the Internet of yesteryear.

Beyond giving the young ‘uns a history lesson, this particular episode is also incredibly prophetic in how it predicted the coming war between copyright and the Internet. It also predicted the rise of amateur musicians making it big thanks to the Internet through video uploads and music sharing through multiple avenues.

Shortly after launching its “Operation Free Korea” initiative, notorious hacking group Anonymous has fired its first shots at North Korea. The group had demanded supreme leader Kim Jong-un resign, in addition to abandoning his nuclear ambitions and installing free democracy across the Asian country. Earlier this week, hackers belonging to Anonymous claimed to have stolen the passwords of 15,000 users from the North Korean propaganda website Uriminzokkiri. After its demands were not met, the group has begun to take down various properties belonging to Pyongyang.

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New licensing agreements with Google Play, Microsoft (MSFT) and other services helped musicians generate more royalties in the U.K. from digital music services than radio for the first time last year, The Guardian reported. Songwriters earned a total of £51.7 million in the U.K. (roughly $77.7 million USD) in digital royalties, an increase of 32.2% from £39.1 million in 2011. Digital music services are now the single biggest source of income for musicians in the U.K., surpassing radio and live events. Online licensing revenues have doubled in the county since the arrival of download and streaming services such as Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes Store and Spotify in 2008.