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The Swedish telecom operator Tele 2 plans to erase all data identifying its 600,000 customers, a decision that will undermine the new IPRED law and make the hunt for internet scofflaws more difficult.
Starting on Tuesday, Tele 2 will destroy records of IP addresses after they’ve been processed for internal use. It’s a way to secure the customers’ privacy — and, the company likely hopes, to strengthen the ISP’s market position.
“This is a strong wish from our customers and therefore we’ve decided to no longer keep records of customers’ IP addresses,” Tele2’s CEO in Sweden, Niclas Palmstierna, told the Swedish news agency TT. “We do this to strengthen the protection of customer privacy.”
“We’ve analyzed the legislation carefully and found that we have no obligations at all to store information about our customers’ IP addresses,” he continued.
The IPRED law went into effect on April 1 in Sweden and allows courts to order ISP’s to hand over details that can identify suspected illegal file sharers. Previously, the only option for copyright holders was to report alleged infringement to the police.
Tele 2 is following the example of Bahnhof and Alltele, smaller Swedish internet operators that declared early on that they would no longer store users’ IP addresses. But the announcement from Tele 2 is of considerably greater significance, since the company is one of Sweden’s main telecom providers and boasts a giant customer base.
With no data to reveal, the new law will be ineffective.
Henrik Pontén of the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau is very critical of the operators’ decision.
“This will cause a huge problem for the police in their investigations of severe internet crimes, such as child pornography,” he told Threat Level. “I think it’s a shame that a company puts its profit interest ahead of their customers’ safety. This will open the door to crime.”
A police official told TT that this could have a serious impact, not only on law enforcement’s bid to crack down on internet pirates, but also on other criminal investigations.
“In some cases, this will make an investigation impossible,” said Stefan Kronkvist, the head of Swedish police’s internet crime unit.
The police are now waiting for a new legislation implementing the European Union’s data retention directive, which would force ISPs to store electronic data for a minimum of six months. That law is planned to come into force this fall.
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Today brings more news of hacking at the hands of Pirate Bay fans endeavoring to show support and solidarity. Is anyone surprised?
While last week brought news of DDoS attacks on the main website of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, ifpi.org, which rendered the site sluggish and slow for most of Monday, there was no mention of similar attacks directed at lawyers representing the music, movie and game industries. It seemed the lawyers on the prosecuting side of the Pirate Bay case had made it away unscathed, but not so.
According to TorrentFreak, this past weekend brought similar troubles for Monique Wadsted, a lawyer who represented several major movie studios and called for a “very significant” prison sentence for the defendants during the Pirate Bay Trial. The movie industry lawyer’s site, MAQS, was targeted and yesterday the site displayed a notice informing visitors it was under attack.
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There are tons of ways to download files, be it pictures of last Christmas party, or that new cinema flick. Amongst them are the conventional direct download, FTP, and of course Peer-to-Peer.
BitTorrent, an example of P2P, is a great, perhaps even the best way to download files, both in concept as in use - that is, once you’ve got the hang of it.
Because all of it seems pretty abstract to innitiates, many people experience difficulties at the start. Even those that would call themselves ‘advanced users’ often don’t know even half of what’s possible.
MakeUseOf proudly presents to you The Big Book of BitTorrent. All you think you should know, and more.
In 28 illustrated pages, Saikat Basu from The Things I Do takes newcomers by the hand and guides them in their first steps. Initiates, but also the more experienced users get their fair share of information.
Read how to start, and advance is the world of BitTorrent. Download The Big Book of BitTorrent here for free, in PDF.
Please pass this manual around and help us spread the word.
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The storage advance, which G.E. is announcing on Monday, is just a laboratory success at this stage. The new technology must be made to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices.
But optical storage experts and industry analysts who were told of the development said it held the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses in commercial, scientific and consumer markets.
“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.
The promising work by the G.E. researchers is in the field of holographic storage. Holography is an optical process that stores not only three-dimensional images like the ones placed on many credit cards for security purposes, but the 1’s and 0’s of digital data as well.
The data is encoded in light patterns that are stored in light-sensitive material. The holograms act like microscopic mirrors that refract light patterns when a laser shines on them, and so each hologram’s recorded data can then be retrieved and deciphered.
Holographic storage has the potential to pack data far more densely than conventional optical technology, used in DVDs and the newer, high-capacity Blu-ray discs, in which information is stored as a pattern of marks across the surface of a disc. The potential of holographic technology has long been known. The first research papers were published in the early 1960s.
Many advances have been made over the years in the materials science, optics and applied physics needed to make holographic storage a practical, cost-effective technology. And this year, InPhase Technologies, a spinoff of Bell Labs of Alcatel-Lucent, plans to introduce a holographic storage system, using $18,000 machines and expensive discs, for specialized markets like video production and storing medical images.
To date, holographic storage has not been on a path to mainstream use. The G.E. development, however, could be that pioneering step, according to analysts and experts. The G.E. researchers have used a different approach than past efforts. It relies on smaller, less complex holograms — a technique called microholographic storage.
A crucial challenge for the team, which has been working on this project since 2003, has been to find the materials and techniques so that smaller holograms reflect enough light for their data patterns to be detected and retrieved.
The recent breakthrough by the team, working at the G.E. lab in Niskayuna, N.Y., north of Albany, was a 200-fold increase in the reflective power of their holograms, putting them at the bottom range of light reflections readable by current Blu-ray machines.
“We’re in the ballpark,” said Brian Lawrence, the scientist who leads G.E.’s holographic storage program. “We’ve crossed the threshold so we’re readable.”
In G.E.’s approach, the holograms are scattered across a disc in a way that is similar to the formats used in today’s CDs, conventional DVDs and Blu-ray discs. So a player that could read microholographic storage discs could also read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. But holographic discs, with the technology G.E. has attained, could hold 500 gigabytes of data. Blu-ray is available in 25-gigabyte and 50-gigabyte discs, and a standard DVD holds 5 gigabytes.
“If this can really be done, then G.E.’s work promises to be a huge advantage in commercializing holographic storage technology,” said Bert Hesselink, a professor at Stanford and an expert in the field.
The G.E. team plans to present its research data and lab results at an optical data storage conference in Orlando next month.
Yet, analysts say, the feasibility of G.E.’s technology remains unproved and the economics uncertain. “It’s always well to remember that the most important technical specification in any storage device, however impressive the science behind it, is price,” said James N. Porter, an independent analyst of the storage market.
When Blu-ray was introduced in late 2006, a 25-gigabyte disc cost nearly $1 a gigabyte, though it is about half that now. G.E. expects that when they are introduced, perhaps in 2011 or 2012, holographic discs using its technology will be less than 10 cents a gigabyte — and fall in the future.
“The price of storage per gigabyte is going to drop precipitously,” Mr. Lawrence said.
G.E. will first focus on selling the technology to commercial markets like movie studios, television networks, medical researchers and hospitals for holding data-intensive images like Hollywood films and brain scans. But selling to the broader corporate and consumer market is the larger goal.
To do that, G.E. will have to work with partners to license its holographic storage technology and expertise, and the company is already talking with major electronics and optical storage producers, said Bill Kernick, who leads G.E.’s technology sales unit. The holographic research was originally related to G.E.’s plastics business, which it sold two years ago to the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation for $11.6 billion.
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MOSCOW, April 21 (UPI) -- Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said the software giant would invest $300 million in Russia projects over the next three years.
Ballmer praised the Russian government's handling of the economy, the Moscow Times reported Tuesday.
At a news conference in Moscow, Ballmer said the Moscow government had done "amazing work … fighting the economic crisis and the measures it has taken with a view toward long-term growth through innovation and productivity."
Ballmer signed an agreement with the Space Research Institute to start a program to study climate change and pledged support for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
Microsoft intends to expand the Dream Spark program that provides software to Russian university students.
Dream Spark will soon reach students in high schools and elementary schools, the Times said.
"There's massive opportunity in this market," said David Ferguson, a market analyst at Renaissance Capital.
"You probably have to give to receive, and investments of this kind are probably a way toward building a bridge," he said.
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Google is set to make changes to its search ranking algorithm to combat the spate of links leading to malicious web pages appearing at the top of Google’s search results, according to an inside source.
Over the past few months, cybercriminals have been using blackhat SEO techniques to manipulate search rankings. When it first began, they were marginally successful at following Google Trends to find buzzy search queries and elevating a newly created targeted webpage.
But after a short period of time, these same gangs appear to have become disturbingly effective. Last week, when researching a news story, I found the top five results all led to fake scareware pages.
Obviously if Google fails to do something about this manipulation, users will lose trust and the good ole days of Google will be over fast. A Googler speaking on condition of anonymity told WebProNews a ranking change is pending that tackles spam of this kind. Once the change goes live, users shouldn’t see it “nearly as often.”
A report from security company PandaLabs identified over a million links targeting malicious webpages ranking for auto part searches. Google noted that many of the phrases mentioned in the report were rare. A phrase like [1989 Nissan Pickup Truck Engine Check Light Troubleshooting], for example, only appears on attack sites set up by spammers, which explains why Google brought back so many attack sites in response to it and similar queries.
Google's response seems also an admission of how difficult it is to provide fresh, timely search results while simultaneously combating spammers. Part of the appeal of Twitter to many people is the platform’s ability to provide real-time information; the live Web works remarkably well there so far because Twitter’s set up isn’t very conducive to spam (yet). At least Twitter has to some extent control over accounts.
Google, on the other hand, cannot control for content appearing on the Web at large, and historically its famous algorithm performed better than any other at weeding out spammy webpages and malicious results. Unfortunately, that was a version of the Web that was more static. The live Web presents entirely new challenges manifesting as the first major weakness the search engine has faced.
The company naturally didn’t have a comment on the recently pondered “link velocity” ranking factor. Search engine optimization experts have identified the speed at which organic links appear as a possible important influence.
Link velocity therefore aids in explaining how blackhatters were able to manipulate search results by dropping enormous amounts of link spam into comment and discussion areas of social sites. The freshness or buzzy nature of a query also aided in this pursuit, and cybercriminals merely have to follow Google Trends and Google News to know which keywords and phrases to target.
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Youtube - You know that site with videos and all. Yeah! It turns out that its quite popular and you happen to visit and use it quite often. Instead of just searching and playing here are some top Youtube URL tricks that you should know about:
1. View high quality videos
Youtube gives you the option to switch to high quality videos for some of the videos, however you can check if a video is available in high quality format by appending ‘&fmt=18′(stereo, 480 x 270 resolution) or ‘&fmt=22′(stereo, 1280 x 720 resolution) for even higher quality.
While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed hig quality videos you need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ and “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ to the embed url.
Linking to a video where the real action starts at 3 minutes 22 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 03:22? You are in luck. All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL.
The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.
Just append ‘&start=30′ to skip first 30s of the video. In general you can modify the value after start= to the number of seconds you want to skip the video for.
Normally when you embed a Youtube video and load the page, the player is loaded and it sits there waiting for you to hit the play button. You can make the video play automatically by adding ‘&autoplay=1′ to the url part of the embed code.
Append ‘&loop=1′ to make the video start again without user intervention after it reaches the end.
Publishing your content in the form of Youtube video? Don’t want people to see other people’s content that may be related but may as well be in competition to you? Just add ‘&rel=0′ to the end of the url part of the embed code and you just turned off the related video suggestions!
Some videos are only available in certain parts of the world. Your IP Address is used to determine your location and then allow or deny access to the video. Change the url from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Do you know of some similar Youtube URL tricks and hacks? Fire them in comments!
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