The Pirate Bay Founder Kept in Solitary Confinement

One of The Pirate Bay founders, Gottfrid Svartholm, is currently locked up in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. Gottfrid is only allowed to speak to his guards.

He was arrested by Cambodian police in Phnom Penh and immediately deported to Sweden because its government wanted him as much as to sign an aid package with Cambodia. Although he was supposed to go back to Sweden to serve his one year’s jail sentence for copyright violation, he is apparently getting some unusual treatment.

His mother, Kristina, admitted that The Pirate Bay prison term was being used to hold Svartholm for a more serious crime of conducting a hacker attack on the Swedish taxman. This case is known as the “Logica case”, for which a couple of other people were arrested earlier in 2012. Nevertheless, as far as Kristina knows, those people aren’t even in custody, which means that the case might not even come to a trial. Kristina adds that nobody in this case has been charged, nor there is prosecution, so Gottfrid is probably being kept in custody because of the government’s fear that he might destroy evidence and disturb the investigation.

In response, the prosecutors claim that Svartholm could continue with criminal activities if they let him go free. But since the court decided that such reason was really dumb, the prosecutors had to use The Pirate Bay charge to keep him locked up. Kristina confirmed that her son is at least kept under restrictions as the prosecutor, which includes a TV in the cell. Gottfrid can also buy cigarettes and sweets from a kiosk twice a week and go out for one hour a day in the yard with high concrete walls. However, he isn’t allowed to meet other people except for the guards.

Google Shares Fell after Earnings Leak

The international company has seen its share prices plummet with its Chief Executive Officer being ruthlessly parodied after he somehow managed to accidentally leak the company’s 3rd-quarter earnings to the web a few days ago.

Local media suggest that the company’s financial printer has accidentally published a draft version of its third-quarter earnings online. The search giant was expected to publish its financial report only after the markets closed.

An incomplete press release saying “PENDING LARRY QUOTE” featured comments from CEO Larry Page, who admitted that at just 14 years old, Google has cleared its first $14 billion revenue quarter. Page sounded really excited about the progress the company was making in developing a single Google experience across various devices. The report featured net profit of $2.18 billion, which is not as good as $2.73 billion in the same period in 2011. Although the final version which was released just a few hours later showed the same numbers, it also had a CEO comment in place of the above quoted line on the draft. Moreover, the results were not as good as his comment suggested. As a result, the financial analysts weren’t impressed, though, fairly speaking, most of the industry experts hadn’t factored in the purchase of Motorola Mobility. In fact, Google reported that its 3rd-quarter earnings missed the expectations of the Wall Street, and that was the main reason for its shares falling 9% before trading was temporarily halted.

The independent tech analysts were telling the press that the soft results were only “a hiccup in Google’s climb” and that the company was still “on the growth side of the wave”. In addition, a number of parody websites emerged online after the incident. For instance, “PendingLarry” on Twitter became quite popular, with over 1200 followers thus far.

Australia Will Censor Abusive Portals

The Australian police confirmed it would prosecute Facebook hate page owners. A top copper from Victoria’s Police e-crime squad is reported to be looking at way he could catch and prosecute people who created a Facebook page which denigrated Jill Meagher. The latter was abducted, raped and killed this September.

In most cases, the police can do nothing about online crime, but Greg Dever, Detective Senior Sergeant, is studying the laws and believes he might have grounds to arrest the creators of the online pages on incitement grounds. In the meantime, there has been a backlash against hate pages in Australia after Jill Meagher case. There were also calls for the creators to be extradited to somewhere unpleasant, like the United Kingdom.

Susan McLean, the country’s cyber-safety campaigner and former Victoria Police officer recently claimed that the police weren’t taking sufficient actions to pursue individuals behind such pages. For example, Dever claimed during the interview that Facebook was reasonably liable for requests in case it was inciting violence or encouraging unauthorized acts.

Greg Dever pointed out that over the past few months the police had had a number of pages closed down. They included the ones that flogged guns and drugs, as well as the page containing dead-baby jokes, and even a page featuring hateful and hurtful comments inciting murder directed at coppers.

Nevertheless, thus far there have been almost no prosecutions launched from social media crimes. According to Detective Dever, today the situation had reached a tipping point, so it is inevitable that there will be more prosecutions.

US ISP Will Start Sending Infringement Warnings

According to media reports, one of the largest US broadband providers, AT&T, is ready to start sending anti-piracy warnings next month. The company’s management has already decided how and when they will act. 

Apparently, AT&T had come up with a plan to apply the “six-strikes” graduated response system. In means that the users who often visit “notorious sites” won’t be able to access them any longer, until they pass an online copyright education. The “six-strikes” regime was the idea of the entertainment industry and involved 5 largest American ISPs – together they made up the Center for Copyright Information.

Although AT&T made no official statements about a launch date, some of the documents leaked from the ISP proved what the company was planning to start soon. The papers informed the ISP’s employees about the upcoming changes, saying that in an attempt to help the rights holders fight online piracy, they should send warnings to the customers who are found to be downloading illegal material.

The copyright holders issue reports containing IP-addresses associated with the infringing activities. The Internet service provider promised not to share any personally identifiable data about its subscribers with rights holders until authorized by the subscriber or required to do so by the court. The leaked papers specify a launch date as of 4 weeks from now. According to other information, the remaining ISPs (which are Verizon, Cablevision, Comcast, and TWC) will also join action the same day.

The document also reveals details on how the ISP will punish its users after the 6th strike. In this event, repeated copyright infringers that access “rogue websites” will be redirected to an educational page and have to complete an online course on copyright before they get access to the web again. However, after the 5th notification, the copyright holder has the right to pursue legal action against the subscriber and may seek a court order that requires an ISP to hand over personal details.

Although these measures don’t mean suspending an account, the broadband providers still have to collect the IP addresses of users they send notifications to. Afterwards, the MPAA and the RIAA could use them for further investigation. Well, we’ll see if their efforts ever prove to be worth all the trouble.

Netflix Illegally Used Illegal Subtitles

As a matter of fact, it turned out that content being used in Finland by Netflix was illegally using subtitles stolen from some enthusiast group.

The Finnish subscribers using Netflix last week discovered that the content was provided along with the subtitles that had been created by some movies and TV-series enthusiast amateur outfit called DivX Finland. The group in question shares the subtitles on the Internet for free, but specifies in the license terms that the use of the texts for commercial purposes is not allowed.

Surprisingly enough, it turned out that the subtitles were illegally used by the outfit which had legal content but couldn’t understand the language the film is in, just like pirates. According to Jarmo Hakala from DivX Finland, the group was pleased that their subtitles were accepted by a large content provider, but pointed out that Netflix really should have asked for their permission first. Hakala admitted he was mostly amused and confirmed that he would undoubtedly have given permission if the company had asked. However, there are others in the content industry who are miffed and believe that Netflix owes them money for using the illegal subtitles.

Antti Kotilainen, the executive director of Copyright Information and Control of Finland, claimed that the whole situation didn’t matter, because the efforts of the enthusiasts were themselves illegal. In other words, it was just a matter of entertainment industry stealing from a thief.

In the meantime, Copyright Information and Control reminded that the local Copyright Act allows the translation for private use, but not for open online distribution.

White House Cleared Chinese Tech Firm of Spying Allegations

Finally, the US White House has cleared Huawei of all spying allegations. Just a week ago, the American congressional report has warned against allowing Huawei and ZTE, both based in China, to supply critical telecom infrastructure. The fears were that the use of Chinese software posed a security risk to American companies, since Huawei could transfer over sensitive information to its government.

Nevertheless, the White House reviewed the security risks posed by Huawei and ZTE to American telecommunications firms and found no evidence that they had spied for their government. It was said that there was risk about the gear of Huawei, the 2nd largest manufacturer of networking equipment throughout the globe, but that was because of several vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, this is perfectly normal for the tech equipment and doesn’t mean that the manufacturer is spying for a foreign government.

Undoubtedly, the American press won’t let things go. Some already started discussion whether or not the security flaws found in Huawei gear appeared there deliberately. The others say that it gives an opt out for Apple or Microsoft when vulnerabilities are discovered in their products.

In the meanwhile, the White House inquiry was not the same that the senators conducted. First of all, it was helped by intelligence agencies and studied the reports of suspicious activity. The investigators also asked detailed questions of almost a thousand telecom gear buyers. As for Huawei, the company claimed that it spent one year collecting evidence and then was ignoring whatever didn’t fit into the spying idea.

Actually, the truth is that the White House was hoping that its research would prove that Huawei had indeed been spying. It was said that someone from the government really wanted evidence of spying, so the research would definitely have found it, if it were there.

Huawei representatives claimed that although the company didn’t see the review, it wasn’t surprised that it revealed no evidence of Huawei espionage. In the meantime, the allegations were based on the assumption that the company’s CEO founded Huawei 25 years ago after being laid off by the Chinese army. This is quite a weird basis for accusing of spying, though.

The Pirate Bay Moved to the Cloud

The largest BitTorrent tracker has been operating for almost a decade now. Within these years, The Pirate Bay faced endless line of problems and copyright owners were doing their best to make it disappear. However, the tracker managed to not just surpass them, but also to thrive. Now The Pirate Bay has moved from physical servers to the cloud.

Earlier in October, Swedish authorities have raided PRQ – a company that used to host the servers of The Pirate Bay – and seized a few of them. Although it is still unclear who exactly had suffered after this move, it is known that the TPB wasn’t amongst them. However, the portal wasn’t so lucky 6 years ago, when Swedish authorities seized some of its servers and kept the site offline for 3 days. From now on, it won’t happen any more. This move came as no surprise, taking into account that earlier this year the portal started a project based on flying drones. Industry observers made a conclusion that the file-sharing service was planning to go into the air soon.

The representatives of the tracker explain that their information now flows around in many clouds, encrypted and ready to be used any time. So, any efforts to attack the tracker will now be “an attack on everything and nothing”. From now on, The Pirate Bay’s new infrastructure will be hosted by a few cloud-based providers that don’t even know who their client is. So, if one of the providers cuts the website off, the TPB can just use new virtual servers from another one. All they will have to do is upload the VM-images and reconfigure the load-balancer in order to resurrect the portal.

The tracker also ensured that the location of its cloud providers is secure and all traffic is encrypted. The operators of The Pirate Bay are completely confident with their decision. In the meantime, the news about the tracker moving to the cloud led to various debates, both optimistic and less positive. The positive ones approve of the decision, because using several cloud hosting firms is very beneficial. But some believe that taking the tracker offline is still possible, since the load balancer will be hosted with a major Internet service provider, who can usually be easily dealt with for the government. Anyway, all experts agree that moving to the cloud makes The Pirate Bay more reliable than ever.

Wireless Charging and Data Transfer

Isis Innovation has recently introduced a simple, safe and inexpensive way to power and charge various electrical devices, at the same time exchanging information without any cables.

This technology was created in Oxford and is claimed to allow people to wirelessly power and exchange information over distance through very simple and inexpensive engineering. The technology relates to magneto-inductive waves and is said to allow the rapid transfer of both power and data between devices without any wires.

The advantages of this technology include no wires combined with a cheap and unsophisticated manufacturing process. According to the researchers, there can be unlimited number of connected devices without any vulnerable connectors to disconnect.

The developers assure that the technology in question is entirely weatherproof and can be woven into flexible materials or integrated into furniture. It can be incorporated behind the screen of a PC monitor to allow the user transfer digital files, pictures and music to and from a flash drive by tapping it against the relevant on-screen icon. They also point out that laptops, mobiles, and other electronic devices like cameras and printers can all charge and communicate from a table top integrated with the technology.

Due to its limitless operation, the technology is claimed to prove very efficient in offices, homes, medical devices and even social outlets. The idea is that the architecture of PCs and other electrical devices that operate on microprocessors and circuit boards can be re engineered with interchangeable parts made as self-contained units. As such, the product life will increase while the cost will decrease.

At the moment, Isis Innovation is considering the idea of licensing the technology.

Facebook Revealed Users’ “Likes” to Advertisers

Once again, the world’s largest social network has sailed into a new privacy storm, because it became known that Facebook was providing some of its advertisers with the information on members’ “likes”.

Local media confirmed that Facebook allowed its favored advertisers to use an internal instrument which shows them what other pages their own fans like. In other words, the “priority” advertising companies now know what films their fans like, which products they buy and what music they listen to. This was discovered by AdWeek which made it public that extra special business partners of the social network were allowed to access the instrument in question for now.

In response, Facebook claimed that this instrument can help marketers create better advertising campaigns. The representatives of the company admit that Facebook does offer aggregated insights to some advertisers which can allow them understand trends about their fan bases. However, the social network doesn’t give away all the personal details of its users: the instrument doesn’t provide the advertisers with any information about their rivals’ fan bases. Still, the tool allows them to gather collective data. Today, the company demands that the marketers should come to their offices to access this data.

Facebook explains that in the event that the instrument goes mainstream it will just help the advertisers decide which film to advertise on or which music to use in a commercial. The company didn’t reveal its plans over the tool – whether it is going to offer it to all its clients or only favored ones. Anyway, this tool could prove to be just another valuable source of revenue for Facebook if it did.

America Looking for a Cyber Reason to Invade Iran

Desperate to find a reason to get involved, the military establishment of the United States decided to use its latest bugbear of cyber warfare as its latest pretext. The country is now claiming that Iran is going to fire cyber weapons of mass distraction.

A week ago, the American military issued the warning, saying that they might have to take an action to stop a cyber war. In the meantime, the Defense Secretary also claimed that the country faced a risk of a so-called “cyber-Pearl Harbor”. These claims were made after the last year mutterings that cyber war might be countered with conventional weaponry.

According to the press reports of the last week, the United States has claimed that Iran has launched a serious wave of hacker attacks which crippled the machines throughout the Saudi oil industry along with some financial institutions in America.

It seems that the United States chose another tactics and has focused on a cybercorps created by Iran last year instead of paying attention to weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps, this was done in response to the US and Israeli hacker attacks on the local nuclear enrichment plant.

Although the cyber attacks originating from Iran have actually been modest and the country is definitely much weaker than, for instance, China or Russia, the United States doesn’t want desperately to go to war with those countries.

Nevertheless, the United States believes that it should get involved anytime that oil is mentioned. It turned out that the biggest attack was that of Saudi Aramco, the largest oil company in the world. Everyone knows that the War on Iraq was started against the Saudi’s enemies and an oil rival, and it is clear now that the Saudis don’t like Iran either.