Blackhacker

BetaNews | iTunes may finally get The Beatles
United Press International posted a report on Saturday stating that a $400 million agreement had been reached between ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and Apple’s iTunes over the distribution of The Beatles’ back catalog.

Profits made from the deal and subsequent sales will be split between McCartney, Ringo Starr, the estates of George Harrison and John Lennon, Sony, EMI, and pop star Michael Jackson, each of whom owns some form of rights to the songs, be it in publishing, recording, or reproduction.

The battle between “Apple Computers” now called Apple Inc. and Paul McCartney’s Apple Corps Ltd., of the trademark “Apple” was the STUPIDEST feuds in the history of Intellectual Property. At the time, the two Apples where no where NEAR each other core businesses, and and all it did was cause bad blood between the two organizations that delayed the largest distributor of digital music from providing to the public one of the most recognizable and sough after collection of music.

I’m not much of a Beatles fan, I just hate stupidity. I’m sure there are many people who want to buy their music. I’m also sure iTunes wants to sell it to them and it would make Paul, Ringo and the Estates of the John, and George a a lot of money. That’s why its stupid. It’s an obvious win for everybody, so why can’t they just get together to make a few million dollars. I guess when you are a billionaire, you don’t bother stoop down to pick a few million dollars, when you don’t have too.

A lack of peers leads AllPeers to close up shop
P2P startup AllPeers announced today that it would be closing its doors due to insufficient growth. “We are tremendously proud of the product that our team has built, and we remain convinced of the potential of adding social features like file-sharing to the web browser,” the company wrote on its blog today. “However, we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service.”

I had high hopes for this when it started but fell out of love pretty soon after it launched. Oh well “Allpeers! We barely knew thee !!”

US seizes domain name of Spanish company selling Cuba trips
If the US intends to continue presenting itself as the guardian of Internet rights, situations like this require a bit more delicacy. By effectively shutting down Marshall’s business, the United States has committed the censorship it condemns in other nations. Even worse, the Department of Treasury effectively shut down an international business without any type of due process. Both France and Germany followed a court process when investigating Yahoo for alleged improprieties, and the company in question (Yahoo) had the opportunity to respond to the charges in a court of law. Marshall was afforded no such luxury.

While the Internet may be global in nature, foreign companies may very well limit their use of US registrars and hosting services out of concern that activities targeted at other countries could be shut down here.

Couple of points:

Cuba is not a threat and as not been since the fall of the USSR. I also think that our policy towards Cuba, only plays in to keeping the ‘Castos’ (I see that the Raul Castro as an extension of the Fidel regime) staying in power. If we established relations and lift the embargo, and softened our policy to a nation that is NO military threat to us what so ever, Castro’s supporters would quickly see what a raw deal they where getting, and would inspire there own revolt. The hard line only supplies a villain for Castro rhetoric for propaganda.

While the Internet was born in the US it is a GLOBAL entity. If it is to remain global it cannot be used as instrument of US policy. There is no medium MORE capable of giving voice to the concerns of ALL people without respect of person than the Internet. Not only that we put at risk the very reason why the Internet is so successful as a platform for innovation, it’s openess.

BetaNews | EC clears Google + DoubleClick merger
The two largest players in the Internet advertising industry are now officially one this morning, as the final hurdle to their merger has been cleared, and the final lines on the papers have officially been signed, according to Google’s CEO.

In the meantime, we do have a statement from the EC, which includes the following: “The Commission’s in-depth market investigation found that Google and DoubleClick were not exerting major competitive constraints on each other’s activities and could, therefore, not be considered as competitors at the moment. Even if DoubleClick could become an effective competitor in online intermediation services, it is likely that other competitors would continue to exert sufficient competitive pressure after the merger. The Commission therefore concluded that the elimination of DoubleClick as a potential competitor would not have an adverse impact on competition in the online intermediation advertising services market.”

emphasis mine
All I can say that Google must have GREAT lobbyists.

You end up with crap like this coming out of Kentucky.

Lawmaker’s attempt to criminalize anonymous posting doomed
Kentucky lawmaker Tim Couch has proposed a bill that would criminalize anonymous Internet posting. Web site and forum operators would be forced to collect and publicly disclose identifying information about all of the visitors who post content on their sites. Failing to do so would lead to a fine of $500 for the first offense and $1,000 for each subsequent offense.

The bill, which extends Chapter 369 of the Kentucky Revised Statutes, would mandate collection of the complete name, mailing address, and e-mail address of all visitors who post Internet content. Web sites would have to display names next to all relevant content and establish procedures that enable anyone to obtain the rest of the information. The bill stipulates that mailing address and e-mail address only have to be supplied to supplicants in cases where someone has posted “false or defamatory” information.

I think the main problem is that people, especially those who seek to regulate the Internet, don’t understand that all things are different where the Internet is concerned. While I do think it is a good attempt to try to try to control those would defame, and libel others on the Internet. Such a law, even if it where constitutional, would have absolutely no teeth. Fact the WORLD WIDE WEB is bigger than Kentucky. How many web hosts are based in, or even have a presence in Kentucky? I don’t think it is that many.

Before we where consumed with Elliot Spitzer’s sexual appetites, and is apparent indiscretions, the following was the top story of the day running page one, column one above the fold of the WSJ:

NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data - WSJ.com
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. If there is such thing as a scary Government Agency, none fit the profile better than the NSA. Its entire reason for existing is eavesdropping. But it was created to spy on our enemies. Not us. But not anymore:

Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item — and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city — for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans — the government’s spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.

So they ID A possible terrorist and they monitor the and ENTIRE CITY.

That’s not only a flagrant a total side step of the constitutional rights, it is also the STUPIDEST way to to find the related terrorist. As programmer who has written a program or two that needed to process large amounts of data: the easiest way to find a needle in a haystack is ID the hay and get rid of it, not pile on more hay.

Anyway in case you have for gotten this is the law of the land:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Just to be clear I consider who I talk to, on the phone, and the Internet also part of my effects. I just wish the supreme court agreed with me.

PayPal to Safari users: ‘Ditch it’
While current browser share estimates for Apple’s Safari web browser hover somewhere in the 4.5 percent range, Safari is attracting some unwanted attention from PayPal, the eBay-owned payment company. PayPal is urging its users to ditch Safari and instead use alternative browsers such as Internet Explorer 7, IE 8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, or even Opera.

This I feel is unfair to Safari. The problem here is not that the browser is particularly insecure, but lacks the capability to check URLs against phishing databases, which is not a core function of browsers, in my opinion, but it is an important one. Camino, another Mozilla browser for Mac, also has this problem. Switching to Firefox, or Opera, is the prefered way to handle this problem.

You could also, if you know what you are doing, update the DNS settings in your network config, to use opendns, when you browser reaches out to find the IP of an URL open DNS will sheck ti against its database of phishing sites. This should work in most cases except where the host in link is given as IP. The browser won’t do a DNS lookup in that case. Even if you are using a firefox an other browser that provides phishing protection, I still think you should you openDNS as your primary DNS. There are a host of benefits to doing this, add prhish protection, I mentioned, as well blocking of porn and adult sites(if you like), faster dnslookup which wil increase the over all net web experience.