But Nagaraj found was that the availability of public domain material dramatically improved the article's images. Before the digitization, players from between '44 and '64 had an average of .183 pictures on their articles. The '64 to '84 group had about .158 pictures. But after digitization, those numbers dramatically changed: there were 1.15 pictures on each of the older group's articles -- but only .667 in the new group. More recent players, covered by privately-owned parts of Baseball Digest, had half as many images on their pages as did old-timers.

And the effects of this -- of just having an image on the page -- cascaded to other metrics. "Out-of-copyright" players's pages saw a significant boost in traffic. Articles from the pre-'64 that were already in the top 10 percent saw their hits increase more than 70 percent. Articles from that group in the least-popular ten percent saw traffic to their articles increase by 25 percent. Those pages were more frequently edited across the board, too. And this makes sense: Google rewards updated content, and it rewards images. The out-of-copyright players provided more of both.

Ah, the internet. Also: ah, social media. Powerful tools, which in the right hands, can turn unknowns into legends and overstepping entities into Wikipedia entries. However, in the fumbling hands of mega-corporations, these same tools become about as unwieldy as a screwdriver being used to hammer in nails. By a bear.

When these tools are put to "use" in amateurish ways, there's always the chance that they will be re-purposed for the amusement of internet natives, who know exactly how to turn these primitive tools into weapons of mass destruction/hilarity. Anyone remember Time Magazines' ill-fated effort to crowdsource the Most Influential in the World? Long story short: thanks to a combination of Time Mag's incompetence and No One's Personal Army suddenly cohering into one man's personal army, 4chan's moot ended up topping the list of names.

David Thorpe, writer for the Boston Phoenix and... wait for it... SomethingAwful, saw an opportunity too big to pass up when Wal-Mart announced (in conjunction with something called "Sheets Energy Strips") its plan to have Miami rapper Pitbull make a personal appearance at whichever Wal-Mart store could hoover up the most "Likes." Thorpe immediately mobilized his troops, (possibly with the help of Pitbull's Energy Strips) including other SomethingAwful contributors, in order to send the man of the hour to the most remote Walmart location in the US.'

Enter Boston Phoenix writer David Thorpe, a man so put off by celebrity marketing stunts that he rallied Web troops to"Help us help Wal-Mart exile Pitbull to Alaska."
"As of now, the Kodiak Walmart has over 22,000 new 'likes' on Facebook, putting it far ahead of any other Walmart in the nation - far ahead of Kodiak's actual population, in fact," Thorpe wrote.

By Pitbull's deadline, more than 70,000 users had liked the store, located on a southern isle of the Frontier State with a population of about 6,200.

In an email to The Associated Press, Thorpe said it's "very likely" he'll be in Kodiak. Thorpe said he had to "raise the funds to get to Kodiak on my own, since Pitbull's invitation doesn't include actually getting me there."

Thorpe said he doesn't really have anything against Pitbull, and instead saw this as a way "to disrupt a corporate social media campaign, since they really set themselves up for it."

They say that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on, and the same seems to be true about Internet policy: the bad ideas spread like wildfire, while the good ones languish in obscurity. Snooping on the Net activity of an entire population is the latest example: now Australia wants to join the club that currently consists of the US and UK, with Canada waiting in the wings. Here's part of the EFF's excellent summary of what the Australian government is proposing:

Last week, Australian Attorney General Nicola Roxon submitted to Parliament a package of proposals intended to advance a National Security Inquiry in an effort to expand governmental surveillance powers. In a 60-page discussion paper, Roxon calls for making it easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to spy on Twitter and Facebook users, which would likely be achieved by compelling companies to create backdoors to enable surveillance. The proposals also revive a controversial data retention regime. And an especially problematic proposal would go so far as to establish a new crime: failure to assist law enforcement in the decryption of communications.

But just because something can be done, doesn't mean that it should. Exactly the same argument could be made about installing CCTV in everyone's home: with the falling cost of cameras, and the availability of the Internet, that's now a realistic option. It would also ensure that those same terrorists and pedophiles couldn't use advanced technology like curtains to thwart the forces of law and order.

And yet nobody would seriously suggest bringing in such a scheme, because it is recognized as a step too far, and that there are other ways of catching criminals without recourse to such extreme measures -- using traditional police and intelligence techniques that aren't dependent on deploying technology, but build on basic human skills and professional experience. So why is it suddenly acceptable to bring in the digital equivalent of CCTVs that record our every online move?

One reason is probably because governments can point to each others' plans to show that "everyone" is doing it, which means it is "obviously" a reasonable thing to do. That makes the latest announcement of snooping plans bad not just for Australians, but for everyone else too, since it bolsters the argument that total Net surveillance is the new normal.

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• Making bread in space isn't too easy, especially if you want it to have the same consistency as normal Earth-bound bread. A teenager has proposed a bread recipe for astronauts that involves low pressure aeration of flour dough and low temperature cooking. [url]
• NASA created specially-prepared food for Apollo astronauts in the 1960s. An example meal is on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, and it looks just as unappetizing as it did several decades ago. [url]
• University of Colorado Boulder students are working on a robotic farming system for growing food for astronauts in space. This project is meant to support long-term missions such as a journey to Mars, and the automated system will attempt to seed plants, monitor plant growth, harvest and process crop residues. [url]

"Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, has taken a keen interest in Mexico, where more than 47,500 people have been killed in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against the cartels in 2006. Schmidt recently visited most of Mexico's most violent cities, Ciudad Juarez, where civic leaders asked if he could help.

"Defeated, helpless, these people have been so hardened in their experience with cartels that they have lost battles and they have lost hope," Schmidt told a conference on international crime this week. "They were looking for a universal hammer to protect them. For me the answer was obvious. It was technology.""

""I think at the end of the day, there really are bad people, and you have to go in and arrest them and kill them," he said."

The provision of standard IT equipment to the IP offices of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Islamic Republic of Iran that occurred in the preceding years, within the context of the Organization’s business modernization program for IP Offices in developing countries, is being referred to the relevant UN Sanctions Committees for their information and guidance.

The initial steps are being undertaken for a full external and independent review of the technical assistance provided to countries subject to UN sanctions.

A new internal instruction has been issued ending any provision of IT hardware in any of WIPO’s technical assistance programs.

“There’s a relatively small number of countries who benefit from hardware as opposed to our complete software package,” Gurry said. “And since certain member states perceive that there is some ambiguity in the use of standard IT equipment – printers, cartridges, PCs and servers – we think the only complete answer we can give because of their perception of ambiguity is to say, we no longer do that.”

“We can argue for hours and hours and hours about the legal interpretation, that it’s only a few PCs, and so on,” he said. “But if there’s lingering doubt, let's eliminate it.”

Yesterday, Vint Cerf distributed an open letter regarding concerns about the Measuring Broadband America measurement infrastructure. We share the objectives of the letter writers that “Open data and an independent, transparent measurement framework must be the cornerstones of any scientifically credible broadband Internet access measurement program.” Unfortunately, the letter claims: “Specifically, that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering a proposal to replace the Measurement Lab server infrastructure with closed infrastructure, run by the participating Internet service providers (ISPs) whose own speeds are being measured.” This is false.

The FCC is not considering replacing the Measurement Labs infrastructure. As part of a consensus-based discussion in the Measurement Collaborative, a group of public interest, research and ISP representatives, we have discussed how to enhance the existing measurement infrastructure to ensure the validity of the measurement data. Any such enhancements would be implemented solely to provide additional resiliency for the measurement infrastructure, not to replace existing infrastructure. Any data gathered would be subject to the same standards of data access and openness.

Recently, Techdirt reported on the ruling by a German court on the issue of filtering -- whether Internet sites have a responsibility to block files continually if they have been notified about infringing materials once, sometimes called "Notice and Stay Down". The German court basically said they do, but the highest French court has taken a different view (French original.)

The Court of Appeal in Paris had ruled that Google had a duty to make sure that an unauthorized copy of a film was not re-posted to YouTube after it had been removed following a complaint. However, the Court of Cassation, the court of final appeal for civil and criminal matters in France, struck down this judgment. Its logic was as follows: if a Web site were expected to take down every future copy of a file that had been removed following a complaint, but without being told exactly where the new copies were located, the only way it could achieve that was by constantly monitoring all users to check that they were not uploading that file. That, the Court of Cassation ruled, was not proportionate and, furthermore, forbidden by European law (presumably a reference to the SABAM ruling from earlier this year.)

That's the good news. The bad news is that HADOPI threatens to rear its ugly head here. According to the same post on the French PC Inpact site, Article L336-2 of the HADOPI law introduced an extremely broad duty to do everything possible to stop copyright infringement. Quite what that means in practice has never been tested, but following the Court of Cassation's rejection of filtering, it seems likely that we shall find out soon enough.

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Last month I convened an emergency meeting of my cabinet and top homeland security, intelligence and defense officials. Across the country trains had derailed, including one carrying industrial chemicals that exploded into a toxic cloud. Water treatment plants in several states had shut down, contaminating drinking water and causing Americans to fall ill.

Our nation, it appeared, was under cyber attack. Unknown hackers, perhaps a world away, had inserted malicious software into the computer networks of private-sector companies that operate most of our transportation, water and other critical infrastructure systems.

Last year, a water plant in Texas disconnected its control system from the Internet after a hacker posted pictures of the facility's internal controls. More recently, hackers penetrated the networks of companies that operate our natural-gas pipelines

We recently wrote about the RIAA's latest target in their ongoing quest to kill any technology that could be used to infringe, regardless of its other purposes: sites that allow easy downloading of content from YouTube. We noted at the time how Google itself was participating in these efforts, and had blocked YouTube access by YouTube-MP3.org—a handy tool that quickly converted the audio track of any YouTube video into a downloadable mp3 (I've used it myself for plenty of legitimate purposes—most recently downloading a bunch of public domain tango classics). Of course, Google treats this as a terms of service issue, and even though it's likely that copyright pressure from the RIAA and others is a significant cause of their attitude towards such tools, they also have a motivation to keep users within the YouTube website.

Whatever Google's motivations, it should come as no surprise that the users—and providers—of such tools get pretty annoyed when they are blocked. Through PaidContent, we learn of a petition to Google launched by the founder of YouTube-MP3.org, asking the company to allow third-party recording tools. The petition, which is nearly at its goal of a million signatures, makes the case that this is how things have always been:

For decades people were allowed to take a private copy of a public broadcast. You could record the radio program with a cassette recorder or make a copy of your favorite movie by using a video recorder. All these techniques have been opposed heavily in its early years by the big media companies who didn't want the public to have such technology. They did describe such technology as criminal and as a threat to their business.

Several years later history is about to repeat: Google has teamed up with the RIAA to make the same claims against all sorts of online recording tools for their 21th century broadcasting service: YouTube ("Broadcast yourself"). Google is taking action against nearly every service that enables its users to create a private copy of a public YouTube broadcast while the RIAA is threatening news media like CNet for promoting such a software.

While I agree with the purpose of the petition, I actually think this description misses the mark. The real point is that recording is still entirely possible. With everything from screen capture software and programs like AudioHijack to the good old fashioned analog hole (where you could still use those same VCRs and cassette tapes if you wanted) there is just no way to stop it, which makes sense, because the simple fact is that the data is being transmitted to your computer. Your computer may be instructed to discard it soon after, and to not make it obvious where it's storing it in the mean time, but that data is still there and gets copied several times on the way from the server to your screen—it's just a matter of capturing and retaining one of those copies. Meanwhile, services like YouTube-MP3.org are not quite recording devices: rather than capture the data at the rate it is delivered to your computer for playback, they bypass the streaming interface to obtain a full copy of the source file. This is a technical distinction, but an important one—and it has potential legal implications, since the one way such a service could be seen to violate copyright law is under the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA.

That said, the fact that recording will always be possible highlights the silliness of blocking such tools and of anti-circumvention laws in general. The fact is that YouTube is making this data publicly available, and their servers obediently deliver the files. Blacklisting particular sites and citing "terms of service" is a weak response, and at its core is rather similar to websites that claim you need permission to link to them or to display them in an iframe within another website. Google knows as well as anyone that one of the true sources of the internet's potential is the ability to build on top of other services, and to build new services around other sources of data, so it's disappointing to see them block tools like this. Hopefully the growing response from users will spur them to rethink their position.

We all know that in a matter of weeks or even days, there will be streamed copies online. There could be hundreds and thousands of them. At first, the quality will be terrible. Later, the quality will improve. By this time next year, you will be able to download an HD copy of your own without too much trouble. And this is despite the millions and billions of dollars, and the gigantic apparatus of the state, plus all the warnings and jails, dedicated to preventing this inevitable thing.

And yet: what does it matter? “Dark Knight Rises” will still make a zillion dollars. I like millions of others will shell out to see it in the theater of course. Like everyone else, I want to consume it sooner rather than later. Sure, I could save $11 bucks by waiting but there’s a time-preference issue. The movie makers are going to make a mint with clever management, clever marketing, and a high-quality product. In other words, they will make money the old-fashioned way: getting people something they want in a form in which they want to consume it.

I can easily imagine that not much would be different about this scenario if there were no IP — except that a major element of fear and force would be purged from the system and consumers would no longer be treated as the thieving enemy.

“We were doing the Charleston,” Stern said. That’s when two police officers approached and pulled a “Footloose.”
“They said, ‘What are you doing?’ and we said, ‘We’re dancing,’ ” she recalled. “And they said, ‘You can’t do that on the platform.’ ”

And so, as their training manuals surely instructed them to do, the officers demanded to see their IDs. Because they were dancing. Where someone was playing the drums. In the most cosmopolitan and culturally-rich city in America. In any case, when Hess could only produce a credit card (which had his name and photo on it), this happened:

"The officers ordered the couple to go with them — even though the credit card had the dentist’s picture and signature. When Hess began trying to film the encounter, things got ugly, Stern said.“We brought out the camera, and that’s when they called backup,” she said. “That’s when eight ninja cops came from out of nowhere.”

The ninja cops then alledgedly tackled Hess to the floor, cuffed both of them, and detained the pair for twenty-three hours. The initial charge was apparently impeding the flow of traffic of what is reported to have been three other people on the platform. The police then added other charges, such as resisting arrest.

All charges were subsequently dropped when the paperwork was finally reviewed by the NYPD's Not Crazy Department. The couple are now suing in Manhattan courts, but maybe it's time a national memo went out to law enforcement agencies reminding them that dancing people with cameras don't necessarily need to be tackled?

The security of the App Store is incredibly important to us and the developer community. We take reports of fraudulent activity very seriously and we are investigating.

(A) Congressional Research Service Issue Briefs.

(B) Congressional Research Service Reports.

(C) Congressional Research Service Authorization of Appropriations Products and Appropriations Products.

(D) Materials intended or available for general congressional distribution that are the same or substantially similar in content to CRS Reports, Issue Briefs, and Appropriations Products.