HomeWeekly News Roundup (1 May 2011)
Welcome to this glorious May Day comrades. But there is no rest for the proletariat, as we continue our weekly political studies. In today’s lesson, we cover the imperialist American bullying of neighbouring sovereign nations, in their greed motivated bid to help the corporate capitalist pigs oppress the people in the ongoing class warfare.
But seriously now, this hasn’t been a good week for corporations, sovereign nations starting with ‘C’ and ending with ‘anada’, and we also get serious dose of corporate backed government propaganda as well, so perhaps it is appropriate that we’re discussing all of this on May Day.
So, comrades, let’s start with copyright news. Before we get to the heavy stuff, we start with some funny, and also slightly disturbing news, to do with our old friends, Righthaven.
It appears that ever diligently pursing profits in the courts, Righthaven weren’t so diligent when it came to maintaining their WHOIS records for the domain name Righthaven.com. It’s actually against the rules to not have a properly maintained WHOIS record, which shows who owns which domain names, with contact details and so forth. So somebody thought it would be a good idea to point out that Righthaven’s own domain name did not have a proper WHOIS, and the report went all the way to Righthaven’s domain name provider, GoDaddy. GoDaddy took immediate actions and temporarily seized the domain name, taking Righthaven’s amateurishly produced website down. Righthaven, having frequently used domain name seizures as a threat in the past, finally got a taste of their own medicine. The disturbing part I mentioned about is how quickly GoDaddy took action, and really out of all the things related to domain names, having an inaccurate WHOIS record is a pretty light thing, and so to have the domain seized, is quite harsh of an action. I can only imagine what GoDaddy would do if there was a copyright related seizure, or even if Righthaven themselves lobbied GoDaddy to take down someone else’s domain due to a copyright dispute.
YouTube Rentals could reduce piracy and mean big money for studios, but some won't get on-board to protect, you guessed it, piracy
Moving onto slightly more depressing territory, it seems YouTube getting into the digital video rental/streaming business is a bit of a no brainer, and you would expect studios to be biting at the heels of the Google owned video giant to get in on the deal. Well, some studios are anyway. Warner Bros, Universal, and yes, even Sony has signed up to the latest attempt to monetize all that YouTube traffic, but the holdouts are Paramound, Disney, and of course, Fox (owned by News Corp, which does not consider Google, or even the Internet, a friend). And what’s the reason for not signing up? Could the deal that YouTube presented be not good enough, although it was apparently good enough for the likes of Warner/Universal/Sony? Paramount, whose parent Viacom is involved in a mega lawsuit against YouTube, is probably and understandable holdout, sources say they’re trying to get a similar deal going with anyone other than YouTube. But what of Disney and Fox? The reason, or rather the excuse, once again, is piracy. It appears that these studios are not happy that Google still isn’t blocking any keyword that may or may not have anything to do with piracy, and so, as a protest, they’re not going to sign up to a new innovative delivery mechanism which may just yet save their “struggling” businesses (their definition, not mine). Talk about cutting off the nose to spite the face, it seems Fox and Disney (and Paramount) are taking the ears off too in this one. I’ve long felt that innovation is the key to reducing piracy, and I’ve long known the entertainment industry is very much resistant to change, preferring to protect their dying business model through technical solutions (DRM) and political lobbying . But to actually turn down innovation that may reduce piracy and improve their revenue outlook, because of their fear of piracy? Well, that just takes the cake, and probably points to just why the industry is doomed if they don’t change their ways soon enough. Because the likes of iTunes, Netflix, and YouTube, won’t stand still and will take over and their worst fears will come true, if they haven’t already.
Speaking of reducing piracy through innovation and more legitimate sources for content on the Internet, and also speaking of Netflix, it seems it’s actually all working. Netflix now accounts for a huge percentage of Internet bandwidth usage, greatly eclipsing the bandwidth consumed by piracy related sources, such as BitTorrent (remembering that a lot of BitTorrent traffic is also legal). In fact, as Wired reports, Netflix now accounts for 20% of all web traffic in the US, compared to only 8% for BitTorrent. And in the evenings, Netflix accounts for over 40% of the traffic. And from another set of independently collected information, Netflix like real-time entertainment traffic accounted for 42.7% of all traffic, with P2P filesharing not even doing half as well, at 19.2%. This, for me, brings into the question of just how big the piracy problem is, and if a single legal service like Netflix can do so much to counter pirated usage, why isn’t the industry pouring money into supporting such services. I think just like iTunes and the music industry, perhaps the movie industry’s reluctance to accept change may see them missing out a huge chunk of profits. With the music industry, it was their preoccupation with DRM, with the movie industry, it’s DRM and also the political and legal lobbying. So while they were running around seizing domain names with ICE, Netflix and others were innovating their way to new sources of revenue, using the Internet to provide services to homes that were not possible before. And all while helping to fight piracy more effectively than any seizures or three-strikes or mass lawsuits can offer.
There's probably never a more appropriate occasion than today to bring out this gem of a poster again ...
But seizing domain names with ICE is only apparently part one of the plan. Part 2: propaganda! If you now visit and of the domain names seized as part of “Operations In Our Sites”, such as dvdcollects.com, you’ll be presented with the normal “this domain is seized blah blah blah” message, but there are now two new things. One, if you click on the seizure message, it takes you to a YouTube PSA video posted by ICE, and even if you don’t click, you’re automatically redirected to the fullscreen version of that video anyway. And if you viewed the video, you would probably get a sense of deja vu, and you would be correct, because it’s the video used as part of a tax payer funded anti-piracy campaign by the city of New York I mentioned back in January. It’s the same video, expect the end part that mentioned the NYC campaign has been ripped out and replaced by a message from ICE. Nice one ICE, didn’t even bother creating your own video, just copied someone else’s work, even if it was done with permission. That original video itself, which has only gotten 3000 views so far (that’s on average about 10,000 times worse than your average funny cat video – great way to spend tax payer money), was actually produced by a NBC Universal. So a corporate produced piece of propaganda, that is now not only used by city of New York, but also by a federal agency in peddling more myths about how piracy cost jobs, jobs like that of the boom mike operator lady used in the video. Remember that these are the same corporations who felt they didn’t really need to pay writers, you might say the true creators and copyright holders (not in a legal sense), to publish stuff written by these writers on the Internet. Who’s the pirate now? Who’s destroying jobs by being greedy and keeping a huge chunk of revenue, and not paying the people, like boom mike operators, the pay they deserve? Do I even need another rhetorical question to make my point any clearer?
And the best part? The ICE video has comments and ratings both disabled, obviously learning from NYC’s mistake. Democracy in action, because it’s obviously not democracy if people are allowed to comment on this corporation produced, government funded, piece of propaganda.
Before we get to the really depressing, and scary stuff, we have Facebook’s DMCA snafu this week, where the multi-billion giant was tricked by fake DMCA takedown notices and quickly, without question, took down the several legitimate Facebook pages, including the page of Ars Technica. They quickly reversed their error, and you can’t be too careful these days with Anonymous on the prowl, but it once again shows how flawed the DMCA is. Even Facebook, through an official statement, sorted of hinted at how companies like them struggle with “DMCA abuse”. The whole idea that the court is bypassed with DMCA takedowns, to speed things up, means that DMCA takedowns can be used for taking down anything you want to, referring back to last week’s “doctor use DMCA to take down bad reviews” thing. And then you have the totally fake DMCA notices too. The idea behind the DMCA was to take into account the Internet age, and how copyright infringement would go through the roof, which would overwhelm the courts. So the solution was to take the court and the entire legal system out of the equation, which is fair enough as the DMCA notice is only a notice, and not an actual claim of damages or even an intention to sue (it’s more of a warning of an intention to sue). But then, without the court’s involvement, it gets abused, and even when it’s not abused, copyright holders think it’s too much work to have to identify and proof their copyright has been infringed, and so the only obvious solution is to remove the copyright holder from the equation and put the onus on everyone else to “clean up the Internet”, which brings us to three-strikes, Google filters, and the next evolutionary step in the entertainment industry’s crusade against having to change their business model.
And now for the really scary stuff. We already know the entertainment industry and the copyright lobby already puts a lot of pressure, albeit some of it sweetened with the sweet smell of lobbying cash, on the US government. But where does that pressure end up, because science tells us that it has to end up somewhere. Apparently, it ends up in Canada. The Wikileaks cables has provided us with a lot of information, some useful, some not quite, and definitely not enough UFO stuff, but one thing it did provide is evidence of the US government’s ongoing bullying of Canada when it comes to copyright issues. Like most of the Wikileaks stuff, none of this is particularly surprising (we already know that the US has put Canada on the notorious piracy list, right below Blackbeard, and just above Henry Morgan, but it is nevertheless quite scary when you think of just how much copyright lobbying cash can buy these days. The cables show the persistent attack on the Canadians, pressuring them to do things the American way (American as in the last ‘A’ in RIAA and MPAA), or else, and with Canadian officials leaking information back to their US handlers as to the progress of the pressure. The questions that immediately pops up into my mind, not just why the US isn’t respecting the sovereignty of another country, an ally and neighbour to boot (unintentional Canadian accent joke), but it’s “aren’t there more important things than getting the Canadians their own DMCA”, the very DMCA that the RIAA and MPAA say that’s no longer good enough? And to see the Canadian PM reduced to almost begging, pleading, and promising the US that, “yes sir, something will happen soon, I promise, please don’t take my lunch money”, really, is just pathetic. And I’m sure the diplomatic cables will reveal more of the same in relation to other countries as well.
Nothing much happening in HD/Blu-ray, so I’ll skip this and move straight onto the …
… gaming section. And as you would expect, the gaming related news this week all pretty much center on the PlayStation Network outage, but before we get to that, there’s the exciting news that in just over a month’s time, we’ll get to find out what the Wii 2 will be like.
Nintendo have officially announced the Wii 2, and it will be demoed at E3 in early June. Lots of rumours around, but the one I like the most is the one where the Wii will be X times more powerful than the Xbox 360, or the PS3, or even both combined! The Wii has been very much the small, malnourished, brother of the other two home based consoles, in terms of processing power, so for the Wii 2 to get one over the other two, just seemed interesting to me. Of course, this, like the “Wii 2 will be HD” rumour, isn’t so much of a rumour as “well, doh”, because are people really saying that the next-gen console will have hardware that’s crappier than something from 2005, the year in which the Xbox 360 and PS3 were designed in? And then only come in SD? The one thing I’m interested in though is how Nintendo will take the motion gaming thing forward, whether they learn from the PS Move, or maybe even Kinect (unlikely), or are they not putting so much emphasis on motion gaming, instead taking more of a focus on hardcore games?
And so onto the PSN outage. Oh boy, where to start. First of all, we finally did find out why the PSN was down, and it was as many had suspected, due to hacking. But it wasn’t the Anonymous inspired DDoS attack, as many had first suspected, but it was an actual hacking, with data stolen. A lot of data. The personal information of 77 million PSN users were accessed, and from the statements Sony made and later incidents, it appears they were downloaded as well, in what is one of the biggest security breaches of all time. And while Sony tried to calm the public by saying the credit card numbers were encrypted, and that they didn’t believe hackers had stolen them, then came the news from a security research firm that claims the attackers were selling credit card numbers, 2.2 million of them, and complete with CVV numbers that Sony first said that they didn’t request, then said that they did request, but didn’t store. PSN services are not expected to resume until next week.
So from what we know, are the attackers to blame, or are Sony? Well, why not blame both? Hackers will hack, but it appears that, given a leak of data of this magnitude, that Sony’s security was either very basic or very flawed. It took days for Sony to even discover that their system has been breached, and then when potentially GBs of data have been downloaded, only then did Sony realise something was up and pull the plug on everything. And then the lack of communication with users whose information has just been stolen, was unacceptable. Sony says they didn’t know what was stolen, which may be true, but that in itself is further evidence of the lack of security procedures and safeguards, because if you can’t keep hackers out, at the very least, you should record all actions so you can find out just what was accessed. That they had to bring in an outside security firm in, suggests that their internal security team weren’t up to the job, and this is probably the same team that designed the security system in the first place. Sony have since said that they have “added software monitoring, enhanced data protection and encryption as new security measures”, the AP reports, which suggest that they didn’t have any, or had very little of any of this, before, which is amazing for a network that is one of the largest holders of credit card information on the planet.
Sony executives apologise for PSN hack in typical Japanese fashion, but will it be enough?
And even after Sony decide to release more information, the information was inconsistent and incomplete, with many still no sure what has been stolen. And with no way to log back into PSN, there isn’t even a way to find out if people have provided their credit card numbers or not, and which credit card (although some say that if you did, you should have an email record that contains the last four digits of your card – so search through your email to be sure). And it appears the security hole was opened up thanks to the hack of the PS3, which was also due to a quite silly security flaw. And geohot, who many had blamed for the hacking, was correct in saying that this all started when Sony decided to alienate the hacking community, and blamed the Sony corporate culture for their lack of emphasis on security. “Notice it’s only PSN that gave away all your personal data, not Xbox Live when the 360 was hacked, not iTunes when the iPhone was jailbroken, and not GMail when Android was rooted. Because other companies aren’t crazy,” geohot, aka George Hotz, added.
Sony will say sorry to its users by, first bringing back the PSN, and then offering some freebies as compensation. I wonder if that will be enough to earn user’s trust back, or perhaps, as users, we shouldn’t be so trustful of any company with our personal details.
And this concludes quite a long edition of the WNR, nearly 3000 words already, so I better shut up and let you get on with your more important business. Until next week.