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Submission + - A Supreme Court win for Aereo would take the fight out of broadcasters (networkworld.com)

Submitted by smaxp
smaxp writes: Broadcasters can't stop Aereo without hurting themselves, Broadcasters have threatened to stop over-the-air OTA broadcasting. if Aereo prevails before the Supreme Court. Its all bark and no bite because the broadcasters will lose advertising dollars by cutting off OTA viewers.

Aereo and Netflix provides "good enough television" that will convince aspiring cord-cutters to finally cut the cord. Why pay $70 per month for cable when $18 provides Netflix, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and PBS — news, prime-time TV, some sports and reality TV.

Broadcasters will lose retransmission fees, but for the bulk of their advertising revenues will follow the the cord cutters from cable and satellite to Aereo. Aereo may be able to deliver better analytics than the cable and satellite providers and Nielsen, and that will help broadcasters in their negotiations with sponsors to increase adverting revenues.

Submission + - NOAA implicated in global temperature data fabrication (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Christopher Booker writes in The Telegraph

Uncovered by Steven Goddard, and published in his blog Real Science. Mr. Goddard demonstrates how shamelessly manipulated one of the world’s most influential climate records has been, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data.

Submission + - Citing "Terrorism," Illinois spent $250k on Stingray to fight regular crime

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: New documents released on MuckRock show the Illinois State Police crying "Terrorist" in order to get funding and approval for a $250,000 Stingray cell snooping system, even though, as Mike Masnick at Techdirt notes, the technology is being used to fight regular crime. The ToS on the device actually prevent officers from seeking a warrant to use it, because doing so would disclose the device's use to the courts. MuckRock currently has a crowdfunding campaign to fund similar requests across the country.

Submission + - Google Wants to Help You Tiptoe Around the NSA & The Great Firewall of China

Submitted by Kyle Jacoby
Kyle Jacoby writes: The NSA was right when it postulated that the mere knowledge of the existence of their program could weaken its ability to function. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which serve to mask the source and destination of data by routing it through a 3rd party server, have been a popular method for maintaining internet anonymity for the paranoid and prudent. However, the all-but-silent fall of secure email server Lavabit, and VPN provider CryptoSeal, have shown us just how pervasive the government's eye on our communications is. These companies chose to fold rather than to divulge customer data entrusted to them, which begs the million-dollar question: how many have chosen to remain open and silently hand over the keys to your data?

Google has decided to put the private back in VPN by supporting uProxy, a project developed at the University of Washington with help from Brave New Software. Still using a VPN schema, their aim is to keep the VPN amongst friends (literally). Of course, you'll need a friend who is willing to let you route your net through their tubes. Their simple integration into Firefox and Chrome will lower the barrier creating a decentralized VPN architecture would make sweeping pen register orders more difficult, and would also make blocking VPNs a rather difficult task for countries like China, who block citizens' access to numerous websites.

On a related note, when will the public finally demand that communications which pass through a third party, encrypted, still retain an reasonable expectation of privacy (rendering them pen register order-resistant)?

Submission + - Google's 'Project Shield' Will Offer Cyberattack Protection to At-Risk Web Sites

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Forbes Magazine reports that Google will offer free protection for websites serving media, elections and human rights related content against so-called “distributed denial-of-service” cyberattacks that flood them with junk traffic from hundreds or thousands of computers, taking them offline. The project, which is part of the company’s Google Ideas initiative to take on global problems, has already been working for months with at-risk sites around the world in countries like Iran, Syria, Burma and other places where sites with political content are often subject to attack, and will expand in its initial phase to hundreds of sites. “We’re able to take the people who face the greatest threats to [distributed denial of service] attacks and get them behind our protection,” says CJ Adams. “If they face an attack, it has to get through us first, and after years of working on this we’re pretty good at stopping these attacks.” The service is currently invite-only and is accepting applications from websites serving news, human rights or elections-related content. In addition to the Shield protection service, Google is also launching a digital attack map to show real-time cyberattacks around the world, pulling data from the DDOS analysis service Arbor Networks. Among the beta users of Project Shield are the Persian-language political blog Balatarin, a Syrian website called Aymta that provides early warnings of scud missile launches, and an election monitoring website in Kenya called the Independent Electoral and Boundary Commission. “The thing that can take many of these sites offline is so small to us. We can absorb it,” says Adams. “That’s made this something we can provide fairly easily. It has a huge impact for them, and we can take the hit.”
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Submission + - DMCA exemption ends on Jan 26th. Unlocking a cellphone becomes illegal (mashable.com)

Submitted by Acapulco
Acapulco writes: Apparently an exemption to the DMCA, determined by the Librarian of Congress will expire this Saturday, January 26th, which will make unlocking phones illegal (although not jailbreaking).

From the article:

"The new rule against unlocking phones won't be a problem for everybody, though. For example, Verizon's iPhone 5 comes out of the box already unlocked, and AT&T will unlock a phone once it is out of contract."

And:

"Advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) questions whether the DMCA has the right to determine who can unlock a phone. In an email to TechNewsDaily, EFF attorney Mitch Stoltz said, "Arguably, locking phone users into one carrier is not at all what the DMCA was meant to do. It's up to the courts to decide." "

Also:

"Christopher S. Reed from the U.S. Copyright Office noted in an email to TechNewsDaily that "only a consumer, who is also the owner of the copy of software on the handset under the law, may unlock the handset." "
Security

Submission + - Nike+ FuelBand: One Big Security Hole For Your Life (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Nike+ FuelBand, a $149 wristband with LED display that tracks your daily activity, tells you how many calories you've burned, lets you know how much fuel you have left in the tank (seriously), and basically keeps track of "every move you make." If you think that sounds like a privacy nightmare waiting to happen, it pretty much is. A source directly connected to Nike reported an amusing, albeit startling anecdote about a guy who got caught cheating on his girlfriend because of the Nike+ FuelBand. "They shared their activity between each other and she noticed he was active at 1-2AM, when he was supposed to be home." That's just one scenario. What if the wristband gets lost or stolen? How much data is actually stored on these sorts of devices?"
Security

Submission + - 35% Of Americans Would Wear "Electric Shock Bracelet" in Order to Fly (infowars.com) 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Infowars.com reports: 'A survey commissioned by Infowars and conducted by Harris Interactive has found that 35% of American adults would be willing to wear an electric shock bracelet in order to fly, another startling example of how many Americans are willing to give up their rights in the name of safety. The idea of mandating travelers to wear an electric shock bracelet sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, but the proposal was seriously considered and very nearly implemented by the Department of Homeland Security back in 2008. As the linked Youtube video highlights, not only would the bracelets have been used to deliver incapacitating electric shocks to suspected terrorists, they would also have contained tracking technology to spy on the wearer.
Android

Submission + - Why You Can't Build Your Own Smarthphone: Patents (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "In the mid-00s, more and more people started learning about Android, a Linux-based smartphone OS. Open source advocates in particular thought they could be seeing the mobile equivalent of Linux — something you could download, tinker with, and sell. Today, though, the Android market is dominated by Google and the usual suspects in the handset business. The reason nobody's been able to launch an Android empire from the garage is fairly straightforward: the average smartphone is covered by over 250,000 patents."

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