Tag: portfolio-cond

Porn trolling mastermind is the world’s most evasive witness

Stefan Schlautmann On Wednesday we wrote about the elaborate chart defense attorney Morgan Pietz created to help Judge Otis Wright keep track of the many organizations associated with porn copyright trolling firm Prenda law, all of which seem to be run by the same half-dozen people. Pietz has now released a transcript of a remarkable deposition he took of Paul Hansmeier, who along with John Steele is widely regarded as the brains behind Prenda’s litigation campaign. Officially, a Prenda-linked shell company called “AF Holdings” is suing Pietz’s client for infringing copyright by downloading a pornographic film from BitTorrent. But in recent weeks, the focus of the litigation has shifted to alleged misconduct by Prenda, including whether the firm stole the identity of Minnesota resident Alan Cooper to use as an officer of AF Holdings. Judge Wright has scheduled a Monday hearing to get to the bottom of the allegations. Last month, we covered a filing by Prenda attorney Brett Gibbs, who insisted that all the important decisions had been made by “senior members of the law firms” connected to Prenda. Gibbs later identified these individuals as Hansmeier and Steele. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Porn trolling mastermind is the world’s most evasive witness

Bill would force cops to get a warrant before reading your e-mail

Last fall we wrote about how easy it probably was for the FBI to get the e-mails it needed to bring down CIA chief David Petraeus over allegations of infidelity. Under the ancient Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in 1986, the police can often obtain the contents of private e-mails without getting a warrant from a judge. A bipartisan group of legislators has introduced a bill to the House of Representatives to change that. The bill would require the police to get warrants before reading users’ e-mails in most circumstances and would also repudiate the view, advanced by the Obama administration last year, that the police can obtain information about the historical location of your cell phone without a warrant. The new legislation , proposed by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and supported by Reps. Ted Poe (R-TX) and Suzan DelBene (D-WA), would extend privacy protections for both e-mail and location privacy. “Fourth Amendment protections don’t stop at the Internet,” Lofgren said in an e-mailed statement. “Establishing a warrant standard for government access to cloud and geolocation provides Americans with the privacy protections they expect, and would enable service providers to foster greater trust with their users and international trading partners.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bill would force cops to get a warrant before reading your e-mail

Newly spotted miles-wide comet bearing down on Mars

A comet spotted earlier this year may pass close enough for Mars to feel the rock’s hot breath down its neck, according to new reports that surfaced Monday and Tuesday. The comet, named C/2013 A1, may pass within a few tens of thousands of miles of Mars’ center, with a remote chance that the miles-wide comet will collide with the planet. C/2013 A1 “Siding Spring,” a comet between 5 and 30 miles wide, was spotted January 3 by astronomer Robert H. McNaught. Researchers were able to look back in the image history of the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona and spot signs of the comet as early as December 8, 2012. NASA states that other archives have traced sightings back to October 4, 2012. According to scientists at NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office , Siding Spring originates from the Oort Cloud of our Solar System and has been journeying to this point for more than a million years. In less than two years, around October 19, 2014, the comet will pass very close to Mars. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Newly spotted miles-wide comet bearing down on Mars

VMware will hate this: Amazon slashes cloud prices up to 28 percent

OH MY GOD, Amazon’s having a FIRE… sale . This is bad for business! 20th Century Fox Television Last week, VMware’s top executives displayed just how worried they are about the competitive threat posed by Amazon’s cloud computing service. With customers able to spin up virtual machines in Amazon data centers, VMware is concerned fewer people will buy its virtualization tools. According to CRN , VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told service partners at the company’s Partner Exchange Conference that if “a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever.” VMware COO Carl Eschenbach jumped on the Amazon theme, saying, “I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books.” Given VMware’s view of Amazon, Gelsinger and Eschenbach won’t like the latest news from the “bookseller,” which also happens to be a large IT services provider. Amazon today announced price reductions of up to 27.7 percent for Elastic Compute Cloud Reserved Instances running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Reserved instances requiring up-front payments already provide discounts over “on-demand instances,” which can be spun up and down at will. Using reserved instances requires a little more advance planning to make sure you get the most bang for your buck—although customers who buy more than they need can sell excess capacity on Amazon’s Reserved Instance Marketplace . Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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VMware will hate this: Amazon slashes cloud prices up to 28 percent

Outages result in gray skies for iCloud users

Apple’s System Status page offers some info, but no expectation of when the services will be back up. If you’re a regular Photo Stream or Documents in the Cloud user, this morning’s iCloud outage is probably already giving you hives. The entire service isn’t down, but key parts of it are. Users can still make use of Find My Friends, iTunes Match, and Contact, Calendar, Reminders, and Notes syncing, but iOS device backups, document syncing, and Photo Stream have been down for (as of this writing) almost seven hours and counting. Apple’s System Status page , which was revamped last December to offer more information to users, shows that the three iCloud services have been down since just after 3am CST. Apple claims “less than 3%” of users are affected by this outage, though such a claim seems disingenuous—at the very least, there’s a hefty portion of iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users who back up their devices to the cloud, and tons of others sync documents over iCloud through various apps. (And, as noted by 9to5Mac earlier, some users on Twitter are reporting other iCloud services being down that Apple has not indicated on the status page.) iCloud outages are, unfortunately, nothing new. Still, they rarely last this long. There’s no indication when these services will be back up; we’ve reached out for comment, but Apple has yet to respond. We’ll update this article if we hear anything back. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Outages result in gray skies for iCloud users

Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33

After rising steadily over the last several months, Bitcoin has reached an all-time high according to data on Bitcoin Charts . As of this writing, Mt. Gox , the most popular Bitcoin trading site (which announced on Wednesday that  its operations  would move to Silicon Valley), recorded a high price of $33.22 per Bitcoin. There’s no single explanation as to why Bitcoin has continued to rise, accelerating particularly over the last month. That said, it’s been clear that interest in the digital currency has been rapidly rising, as any regular reader of Ars knows. It’s likely that online gambling has played a part. As we’ve reported earlier this year, one Bitcoin-based site took in $500,000 in profit in just six months in 2012—and Bitcoin gambling is set to get even bigger . For now, gambling with the cryptocurrency, like using Bitcoins in general, remains in a legal grey area  (which may be part of the appeal as well). Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33

The Pirate Bay leaves Sweden for friendlier waters

The Swedish Pirate Party has stopped hosting the notorious website The Pirate Bay, according to TorrentFreak. While no one knows where the site is actually run from, Web-hosting services have been provided through the Swedish Pirate Party for a few years now. Now, the site’s hosting will be taken care of by the Pirate Parties in Norway and Sweden. TPB is being forced to move because the Swedish Pirate Party is under pressure from Rights Alliance, a Swedish anti-piracy group representing large music and movie interests. Rights Alliance threatened legal action against the Pirate Party if the group didn’t stop hosting the site by tomorrow. Spain in particular could turn out to be a safe haven for the piracy-driven website, since judges in that country have found simply linking to other infringing sites is not a basis for copyright liability. The sports-streaming site Rojadirecta, for example, was exonerated after legal action against it was initiated in Spain. (That didn’t stop it from having its domain name grabbed by a US agency, before being given back last summer.) Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The Pirate Bay leaves Sweden for friendlier waters

Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

Yes, this library has a Cisco 3945 router. Marmet, West Virginia is a town of 1,500 people living in a thin ribbon along the banks of the Kanawha River just below Charleston. The town’s public library is only open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. It’s housed in a small building the size of a trailer, which the state of West Virginia describes as an “extremely small facility with only one Internet connection.” Which is why it’s such a surprise to learn the Marmet Public Library runs this connection through a $15,000 to $20,000 Cisco 3945 router intended for “mid-size to large deployments,” according to Cisco. In an absolutely scathing report  (PDF) just released by the state’s Legislative Auditor, West Virginia officials are accused of overspending at least $5 million of federal money on such routers, installed indiscriminately in both large institutions and one-room libraries across the state. The routers were purchased without ever asking the state’s libraries, cops, and schools what they needed. And when distributed, the expensive routers were passed out without much apparent care. The small town of Clay received seven of them to serve a total population of 491 people… and all seven routers were installed within only .44 miles of each other at a total cost of more than $100,000. In total, $24 million was spent on the routers through a not-very-open bidding process under which non-Cisco router manufacturers such as Juniper and Alcatel-Lucent were not “given notice or any opportunity to bid.” As for Cisco, which helped put the massive package together, the Legislative Auditor concluded that the company “had a moral responsibility to propose a plan which reasonably complied with Cisco’s own engineering standards” but that instead “Cisco representatives showed a wanton indifference to the interests of the public in recommending using $24 million of public funds to purchase 1,164 Cisco model 3945 branch routers.” Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

Sony patent application measures load times to detect pirated games

Sony seems prepared to unleash a new tool in its never-ending battle against game pirates, using measured load times, of all things, to detect certain illegitimate copies of its games. Sony’s patent for “Benchmark measurement for legitimate duplication validation” was filed way back in August 2011, but it was only published by the US patent office late last week. The patent describes a method for a system that would measure load times for games loaded into a system against a previously measured threshold for what those load times ought to be on a standard, unmodified game and system: For example, if an authentic game title is distributed exclusively on [Blu-ray discs] having a total benchmark load time of 45 seconds on a game console BD drive, the acceptable range of load times could be from 40 to 50 seconds. Thus, a total measured title load time of four seconds would be outside of the acceptable range of total load times for a legitimate media type. Even if the pirated media results in similar overall load times to the original media (if a hacker added an intentional delay, for instance, or if a pirated game on a hard drive loaded similarly to an authentic game on a flash drive), the method described in the patent also measures load times for individual segments of the game code to detect fraudulent copies. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony patent application measures load times to detect pirated games

Sexy scammers entice men into stripping on webcam, then blackmail them

Police in Singapore have issued an alert citing a dramatic rise in the number of “cyber blackmail” cases being reported. But unlike many cases that target women or teenagers , this latest rash of crimes targets men through social media sites. The Singapore Police Force reports that there have been more than 50 reported cases in the last year where “foreign” women have lured men through invitations on social networks, such as Facebook and Tagged.com, into video sex sessions that are recorded for blackmail purposes. The women “initiate cybersex” with the men over video chat, stripping for them and then encouraging them to do the same. The men are told to perform sex acts on camera for the women, and the video feeds are recorded. The men are then contacted later and told that the videos will be posted in public if the victims don’t wire money to the scammers. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sexy scammers entice men into stripping on webcam, then blackmail them