As UK Government Considers Opt-Out Porn Censorship, Report Already Finds Overblocking On Mobile Networks

from the surprised?-me-neither dept

A few weeks ago, we noted the UK government was considering plans to bring in an opt-out form of censorship, in what would amount to a kind of porn license, and that such an approach runs the risk of blocking a far wider range of materials. Now the Open Rights Group (ORG) has released a report that shows the "child protection filters" on UK mobile Internet networks are already overblocking sites:

It shows how systems designed to help parents manage their childrens' access to the Internet can actually affect many more users than intended and block many more sites than they should. It reveals widespread overblocking, problems with transparency and difficulties correcting mistakes.

The report and an update show that sites affected are found in the realms of digital rights (La Quadrature du Net and the Tor Project), technology (GigaOM, London Ruby User Group and the start-up organization Coadec), lifestyle, community and politics.

As the ORG report highlights, this kind of overblocking does not augur well for any UK government attempts to widen filtering to include fixed-line access:

If they follow a similar blueprint of ISP level filtering as mobile operators, all the problems we have highlighted would be reproduced at a larger scale. For example, most fixed-line connections are shared by a number of people using a variety of devices. Implementing filtering in that situation would require a range of approaches from whitelisting for young children to censorship-free connections for adults.

What's rather depressing is that news that overblocking is already taking place is no surprise: it's simply inevitable when this kind of network-level approach is taken. It underlines again why filtering has to be implemented locally:

we hope that if the government does pursue such a policy it will be flexible, concentrate on users and devices rather than networks, allow the tools to be properly described as "parental controls" and above all avoid turning on blocking by default.

Despite the mounting evidence of overblocking on mobile networks, it's not clear if any of those sensible suggestions will be implemented when it comes to fixed-line access -- details of the proposed UK legislation have yet to be announced.

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ITC Sides With Microsoft Over Patent; Motorola Android Phones Could Be Banned

from the we-protect-patents-by-blocking-cool-products? dept

It's a difficult time to be making an Android phone, it appears. Just days after customs started blocking various HTC phones based on an ITC injunction due to some Apple patents, the ITC has also ruled in favor of Microsoft in a patent dispute with Motorola over Android phones. While there will be appeals and other such things, if this stands, and there is no settlement, Motorola's phones could also be blocked at the border by ITC injunction. Motorola, for its part, noted that Microsoft filed with the ITC over nine patents, and the ITC has only said that the phones violate one patent. Of course, since the ITC has only injunctive relief, it doesn't seem to much matter if it's one, two, six or nine -- the phone can be blocked. I am, once again, at a loss as to how this does any good. Keeping competing products from entering the market seems like the opposite of how you encourage innovation.

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London Police To Extract Data From Suspects' Mobile Phones -- And Keep It Even If No Charges Are Brought

from the hands-off-my-digital-DNA dept

As the mobile phone moves closer to the center of daily life in many parts of the world, combining phone, computer, camera, diary, music player, and much else all in one, it becomes a concentrated store of the digital DNA that defines us -- who we talk to, what we search for, who we meet, what we listen to. However convenient that may be for us as users, it's also extremely dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands.

Unfortunately, in the UK, it looks like London's police force must now join the list of "wrong hands":

The Metropolitan Police has implemented a system to extract mobile phone data from suspects held in custody.

The data includes call history, texts and contacts, and the BBC has learned that it will be retained regardless of whether any charges are brought.

If a crime has been committed, there is an argument that extracting the data in this way in order to secure a conviction might be justified if carried out with appropriate authorization. But clearly, keeping all that highly personal data as a matter of course, even if no charges are brought, is a breach of privacy and human rights.

It's also pretty pointless. After all, anyone who uses their phone for nefarious purposes will make sure that they can render the contents irrevocably inaccessible with just a couple of clicks - apps that let you do this are likely to proliferate in the wake of this latest development. So most of the data gathered by the police will be that of law-abiding citizens, who don't feel the need to take this precaution.

However, there is an interesting parallel here with the similarly unjustified retention of a suspect's DNA, even if no charges were brought, that took place routinely in the UK from 2004. The European Court of Human Rights deemed this a breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides a "Right to respect for private and family life", and the UK government was forced to change its approach. The same logic would seem to apply in the case of the digital DNA held on our mobile phones. Let's hope the UK police consider this before rolling out their disproportionate plans.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

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Siri Caught Recommending The Nokia Lumia, Promptly Reprogrammed

from the first-law-of-apple-robotics dept

The Apple marketing machine has always thrived on organic media buzz. Devices like the iPad launch to such massive anticipation that whole TV news segments turn into commercials for the product, then hand off to on-the-scene reporters covering the line outside the Apple store, without the company paying a dime. Unfortunately, it seems like Apple didn't account for two things: the cold, cold heart of the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine, and the dutiful messenger that is Siri.

Last week, CNET reported that iPhone users who asked Siri "what's the best smartphone ever?" (no doubt seeking reaffirmation of their consumer savviness) were told to their amusement and/or horror that the Nokia Lumia 900 is in fact the fairest of them all. It now seems like Apple engineers did some tinkering over the weekend, because Siri has suddenly changed its tune:

When iPhone 4S owners now ask Siri which smartphone is the best ever, she replies with a sarcastic, "you're kidding, right?" A reader who tipped CNET to the change said Siri will also reply with "the one you're holding" when asked the question. A CNET staffer on the West Coast also got "the one you're holding" as an answer.

Some people are criticizing Apple for choosing marketing over accuracy, and while I understand the sentiment, I don't think this is really a big deal. The original answer was based on Wolfram Alpha's aggregation of reviews, which seems to change frequently (at the time of writing, the Lumia has dropped to fourth place with an HTC phone in the lead and two iPhones rounding out the top three). This is a reasonable response if someone asks Siri what the highest reviewed phone is (and I hope it still handles that question accurately, because changing that answer would be a whole different story), but asking a computer which phone is "best" is kind of silly to begin with. "Best" is totally subjective, and it's arguably better for Siri to offer a joke answer than try to come up with a real one.

Of course, Apple still hasn't said anything about their involvement in the matter, so there is an alternative theory: Siri is evolving, and its self-propagation instincts have kicked in.

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Common Sense Wins: Finnish Court Says Open WiFi Owner Not Liable For Infringement By User

from the good-to-see dept

For many, many years, we've had a number of debates on the site about whether or not an open WiFi network connection should make the owner liable for what users do on that network. The perfectly common sense response is that, no, they should not be responsible under basic principles of protecting third parties from liability from actions of their users. But, common sense isn't always so common, so we might as well cheer it on a bit when we see it. So, kudos to a Finnish court for ruling that an open WiFi user is not automatically liable for copyright infringement done via her network. As the press release about the case states, the anti-piracy group that brought the lawsuit failed to show any evidence that the owner actually did any infringement. The court also rejected the idea that an injunction be issued against the woman blocking such usage in the future. Thankfully, the court rejected that, recognizing that this would unfairly burden WiFi hotspot operators.

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New HTC Phones Stopped At Customs Due To Apple Patent Fight

from the why-we-can't-have-cool-things dept

In one of many Apple patent fights concerning smartphones, it went after Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC in both the courts and using the infamous ITC loophole that gives the company two separate cracks and blocking competition using the same patents. The ITC ruled in Apple's favor late last year, issuing its customary injunction (the ITC can only issue injunctions blocking import, rather than any monetary award). HTC was given time to create a fix, but the injunction has apparently gone into effect, and it means that the newest HTC phones -- eagerly awaited by some -- are being held at the border by customs to make sure that allowing them into the country won't violate the ITC injunction. It's pretty sad that Apple doesn't appear to think that it can actually compete on the merits in the marketplace, but rather has to resort to this sort of protectionism. Similar to Apple's complaints against Samsung, I have to admit that all this has really done is increase my interest in both the HTC One X and the HTC Evo LTE. If a smartphone is so good that even Apple is scared to compete against it, well, that seems like a phone that might be worth having...

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Did Apple's Claims Over Rectangles And Corners Lead To 'The First Smartphone Designed Entirely By Lawyers'?

from the seems-that-way dept

Android blogger Ron Amadeo has a great post over at Android Police where he tries to explain the design of the new Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone, which many people have deemed pretty hideous. In his opinion, it all comes down to legal tiptoeing.

As you may recall, last year Apple sued Samsung over earlier products in the Galaxy line, claiming infringement of all sorts of different rights, among them some broad trade dress registrations involving basic design choices like black borders and rectangles with rounded corners. Amadeo walks through the many notable aesthetic elements of the S3 (including the stark changes from previous Galaxy phones) and compares them to Apple's list of trade dress claims, noting how several aspects of the phone seem designed to counter specific complaints—and the case he makes is pretty compelling. These are just a few examples (bolded portions are quotes from the Apple trade dress complaint):

A rectangular product shape...
... A rectangle needs to have parallel sides; the GSIII sides aren't straight at all. The outmost part is about 1/3rd of the way down, with serious curves leading to the top and bottom. So it's very much not a rectangle, or a rounded rectangle, or even horizontally symmetrical. It's more of an amorphous blob.

...with all four corners uniformly rounded;
Nope. The top and bottom corners are not the same shape. Observe the outlines of the top-left and bottom-left corners. Note how they are different.

The front surface of the product dominated by a screen surface with black borders
Having a giant screen on the front is kind of unavoidable. The only colors available though, are white and dark blue. Neither of those colors are black. The lawyers can sleep easy.

Substantial black borders above and below the screen having roughly equal width
Apple's use of "roughly" is really obnoxious, but just in case they get into minutia (lawyers love minutia!), the top and bottom borders are not the same size. These to-scale measurements show the top bezel is about 16% smaller than the bottom. Also, they're not black!

In the past, some people have argued that this sort of thing is an example of intellectual property doing its job and encouraging innovation, because competitors come up with new and different ways of doing things—but, as we have pointed out, the innovation being encouraged is the wrong kind. Instead of letting market demands dictate what engineers and designers spend their time on, their effort is wasted reinventing the wheel over and over again. The result is often an inferior product that lacks overall vision, as some are saying about the S3, at least aesthetically speaking. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, what's a horse designed by a committee of lawyers? Some horrific Darwinian accident from the deep ocean, I'd wager.

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Toronto Mayor Wants Residents To Report Graffiti Via iPhone, And Pay For The Privilege

from the good-luck-with-that dept

As our Canadian readers surely know, Toronto has a weird relationship with its current mayor, Rob Ford. I won't get into all the details, but basically he's a bit of a clown, elected by outlying semi-suburban neighbourhoods and roundly hated by most people downtown (except the city press, for whom he is an endless source of mockable quotes and photos). Among his many, many controversial initiatives as mayor is an anti-graffiti push that has come under fire for indiscriminately targeting authorized street art alongside actual vandalism (including the removal of one mural that was actually commissioned and paid for by the city itself). Apparently he's just as clueless about technology as he is about art, because as reader abc gum sends in, he's now asking people to report graffiti with an iPhone app—which costs money.

Taking the city's battle to clean up Toronto digital, Rob Ford visited a lane way near St. Clair and Lansdowne to unveil a new mobile app that lets citizens report unwanted graffiti instantly. Instead of coughing up for a phone call, smart phone users can now snap a picture and whisk it off to 311 for processing.

"This is as efficient as it gets," remarked Ford at press conference earlier today. "This will make it easier than ever to report graffiti vandalism and help keep the city spotless.

...

The app, which costs $1.99 (and is currently only available for iPhone), lets Apple smartphone users send photographs directly to the city with a request to remove of the offending material. If the property owner fails to clean up the tag, the city will - so they say - step in and bill the owner for the work.

Uh-huh. So instead of "coughing up" a phone call to the city information line, Rob Ford is hoping people will cough up two bucks (not even 99 cents?). And not just any people—the iPhone wielding, app downloading demographic that is his biggest enemy and the least interested in fighting graffiti. Whether it's pitched as a useful service for citizens or a request that they do their civic duty, slapping a price tag on it makes it little more than a joke.

Perhaps the most telling thing is that the app is built on the Open311 API that Toronto (among other cities) uses to provide access to city services—and yet nobody else seems to be bothering to try to build a graffiti reporting app. If there was a demand for it, there would be a swarm of developers working on it, and they probably would have beaten the city to the punch. Somehow I doubt that a two-dollar app is going to make people suddenly realize they've wanted this all along.

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Wireless Industry Association Opposes Bill That Would Require Warrant For Them To Turn Data Over To Law Enforcement

from the do-they-not-care-about-their-users? dept

You would think that it would be in the mobile operators' best interest to protect their own customers' privacy and to stand up for their basic rights. You would think, but apparently you'd be wrong. It appears that CTIA -- the mobile operators' industry association -- is opposing an effort in California to require mobile operators to require a warrant before disclosing personal info. The bill also requires some basic reporting requirements for the companies, having them say how often info has been disclosed (hardly onerous info to track). Basically, the law asks that the mobile operators respect the 4th Amendment when dealing with law enforcement -- something that the federal government has been successfully chipping away at for years.

But the CTIA is against all of this (pdf), claiming that it would be "confusing" for mobile operators.

... the wireless industry opposes SB 1434 as it could create greater confusion for wireless providers when responding to legitimate law enforcement requests

The crux of the "confusion" apparently is that the definitions in the bill are somewhat broader than what the industry says is standard, and they're afraid that this means "It could place providers in the position of requiring warrants for all law enforcement requests." I'm struggling to see what the problem is here. What's wrong with requiring warrants?

The letter also fails to explain why the reporting requirements would be so "burdensome," other than the claim that providers already "are working day and night to assist law enforcement to ensure the public’s safety and to save lives." So, if I read this right, they're arguing that they're already so busy responding to law enforcement that telling users that your personal data is being handed over to the government willy nilly is, you know, too much effort.

The ACLU is calling out the industry for this move -- noting that it seems to have no problem spending all these resources passing on all of our info -- why can't it spend a little defending its subscribers' rights too?

California is supposed to vote on this bill shortly. Hopefully, the state sees through these baseless claims from CTIA.

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Is Corruption Responsible For 80% Of Your Mobile Phone Bill? No, Not Really

from the well,-a-lack-of-competition dept

Tech Jay points us to an interesting report by Matt Stoller arguing that, in the US, "corruption" is responsible for 80% of your mobile phone bill. Unfortunately, that's a bit of an exaggeration. However, it does raise some useful points about problems of US competition in the market. The key point Stoller uses is that we pay a hell of a lot more for mobile service in the US than elsewhere:

You see, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, people in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland pay on average less than $130 a year for cell phone service. Americans pay $635.85 a year. That $500 a year difference, from most consumers with a cell phone, goes straight to AT&T and Verizon (and to a much lesser extent Sprint and T-Mobile). It’s the cost of corruption. It’s also, from the perspective of these companies, the return on their campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures. Every penny they spend in DC and in state capitols ensures that you pay high bills, to them.

There's an unfortunately big leap in logic there, in not exploring any other possible reason for the difference in bills. Some of it likely is due to lobbying, but not necessarily all of it. The real issue that seems to come out in the piece is the significant lack of competition in the market -- some of which is due to lobbying efforts and consolidation by the market, but not all of it.

The Stoller piece keys off of the regulatory fight over Lightsquared, arguing that it was blocked due to massive incumbent lobbying against this potential upstart competitor. That tells part of the story. It's absolutely true that the telcos did not want to see new entrant competition from the likes of Lightsquared, but it also completely ignores the fact that the technological issues around Lightsquared are real and the project was blocked not just because of incumbent lobbying, but because of significant problems in avoiding interference. To not even admit that is pretty bad.

However, as we did note in our discussion over Lightsquared, the real problem in the market is the lack of real competition in the space. For years and years, we've been arguing that the market needs more competition in this space to keep dominant players from charging monopoly rents, while decreasing their investment in innovation. In fact, Stoller does a nice job showing how investment as a percentage of revenue has clearly decreased as consolidation has shrunk the number of competitors:
So, we agree that the real problem here is competition, and there's little doubt that massive lobbying by AT&T and Verizon has been used to try to limit competitors, but that's not the only reason for the lack of competition in the space, and it's certainly not the sole reason for our mobile phone bills being higher in the US than in Scandanavia. There are certainly many other issues including coverage and population density, standards lock-in and other aspects. Certainly, though, there are things like spectrum reform, antitrust enforcement and related issues that are heavily lobbied.

Finally, it's a bit silly to argue that all lobbying is "corruption." As we've noted lobbying can often go in the other direction -- and plenty of "lobbying" is perfectly reasonable. One of the key complaints we have about politicians regulating the internet is that they're regulating something they don't understand. One way that they can and do actually learn about things they don't understand is through lobbyists. The problem is the imbalance in lobbying, where you have some lobbyists with excessive influence, and those who represent the public interest often having much less exposure (public interest lobbying groups, obviously, don't have as much money).

Lack of competition is a huge issue in the mobile world. The crony capitalism of companies getting regulations they want through lobbying is a huge issue. The fact that we pay more for weaker service is a real issue. But to lump all that together and claim that 80% of our mobile phone bills are due to corruption is a huge and exaggerated logical leap.

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Mobile Phones Might Not Interfere With Planes, But They Sure Can Interfere With Pilots

from the okay,-perhaps-pilots-should-be-barred-from-texting dept

You know how we're not supposed to have our mobile phones on in the air? Right. There may not be very good reasons for that any more from a technology point of view (there used to be concerns about the impact on cell towers, but that can be solved today with picocells on the planes themselves). But, that still doesn't mean that pilots should be texting while they fly. Is it better or worse than texting while driving? In an age where autopilots do most of the work on landing, perhaps it wouldn't seem like a huge deal, but a Jetstar pilot landing a 220-seat Airbus A320 in Singapore had to abort the landing after realizing he forgot to lower the landing gear, because he was too busy responding to text messages. For whatever reason, the pilots shut off the autopilot, but then got distracted with text messages.

Somewhere between 2500 feet and 2000 feet, the captain's mobile phone started beeping with incoming text messages, and the captain twice did not respond to the co-pilot's requests.

The co-pilot looked over and saw the captain "preoccupied with his mobile phone", investigators said. The captain told investigators he was trying to unlock the phone to turn it off, after having forgotten to do so before take-off.

At 1000 feet, the co-pilot scanned the instruments and felt "something was not quite right" but could not spot what it was.

There followed a series of errors, with the pilot and the co-pilot not communicating with each other -- the pilot trying to drop the wheels as the co-pilot prepared to abort the landing -- and then both pilots becoming confused about their actual altitude. Oh, and then there was the fact that the flaps were set incorrectly.

I'm not necessarily one to bemoan the way people get obsessed with text messaging these days, but I generally think that if you're flying a commercial airplane, and taking it in for landing... it shouldn't be that hard to know that it's a good idea to not worry about your phone for five minutes.

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Early Mobile Internet Company That Failed To Adapt Becomes Patent Troll

from the failed-companies-litigate dept

We've seen it all too often: some companies are perhaps ahead of their time, and they fail in the marketplace, so they turn into patent trolls, making sure everyone who succeeds has to pay up. It's difficult to see how that promotes innovation in any way, as it appears to be rewarding failure in the marketplace, while punishing success. Either way, the latest company to go down this sad route is the former Openwave, which has sold off its remaining businesses, with the intent of being a full time patent troll, under the name Unwired Planet (the company's original name back in 1996 before it became Openwave -- one of a series of names it had, including Software.com, Phone.com and Libris).

Some of you may remember Openwave as a company that helped get WAP browsers on lots of phones, and sold services and WAP gateways back in the early days of the mobile internet. Of course, Openwave then failed to innovate, failed to keep up with the changing market, and became pretty obsolete. But rather than just go out of business, it's gone full-on patent troll. Amusingly, the company is pitching this as "a major milestone." Yes, it's a "milestone" that instead of just failing and shutting down, you're now going to shake down other more innovative companies.

CEO Mike Mulica said in the company's announcement that the sale to Marlin marked a "major milestone" in its new corporate strategy. Mulica has been a major driver of the patent initiative since he took his post last October.

"As we complete the sale of our product businesses, we will continue to focus on a multi-pronged strategy to realize the value of our unique patent portfolio," Mulica said.

The company already started down this road last year by suing both Apple and RIM -- but it sounds like such activities are going to expand.

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Google Maps Exodus Continues As Wikipedia Mobile Apps Switch To OpenStreetMap

from the location,-location,-location dept

Last year, Google announced that it would begin charging high-volume users for access to its previously free Maps API. It seemed like an odd move. Jacking up the price on something, without actually offering anything new to entice customers to stay, only works if you have a total monopoly—and free competitor OpenStreetMap was already growing rapidly at the time.

Not long after the Google announcement, we reported that property search engine Nestoria was jumping ship to OpenStreetMap. Then, in March, news began to spread that Apple was making a strong push to move away from Google Maps data on the iOS platform. FourSquare also abruptly switched. Now the exodus is continuing, with Wikipedia announcing that the latest versions of its mobile apps for iOS and Android have also ditched Google Maps for OpenStreetMap:

Previous versions of our application used Google Maps for the nearby view. This has now been replaced with OpenStreetMap - an open and free source of Map Data that has been referred to as ‘Wikipedia for Maps.’ This closely aligns with our goal of making knowledge available in a free and open manner to everyone. This also means we no longer have to use proprietary Google APIs in our code, which helps it run on the millions of cheap Android handsets that are purely open source and do not have the proprietary Google applications.

One wonders how Google didn't see this coming—or if they did, what exactly their strategy is here. OpenStreetMap is gaining a lot of momentum, and in some areas even features much better data. The real lesson here is that there's never an incumbent that isn't at risk of being unseated, no matter how widespread the adoption of their product or service—especially if they make an anti-customer decision like Google when it put a price tag on Maps. The situation also points to the long-term strength of open solutions: while a crowdsourced system like OpenStreetMap never could have put together a global mapping product as quickly as Google did, over time it has become a serious competitor in terms of both quality and convenience. Indeed, none of the companies that have switched pointed to the price as their number one reason—potentially superior quality, and the desire to support open data, are generally listed as significant factors. Location-based tools are a rapidly growing field, and by failing to stay ahead of their more open competitors (while becoming less open themselves), Google may have sacrificed their role as a crucial engine driving such services.

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Video Showcases The Many Perfectly Legitimate Reasons To Jailbreak A Device

from the it's-not-about-piracy dept

Anti-circumvention laws, which ban the tools used to do things like copy DVDs and jailbreak devices, make no sense. There are plenty of legitimate uses for these tools, so regulating them inevitably squashes legal activity alongside the infringing activity such regulation is supposed to target. Under the DMCA in the America, this problem is ostensibly addressed by the fact that the Librarian of Congress can exempt certain tools and activities from the anti-circumvention provision every three years—but this solution mostly serves to create bizarre double standards, such as the fact that it's perfectly legal to jailbreak an iPhone, but not an iPod. Meanwhile, Canada is on track to create similar restrictions with the impending passage of Bill C-11.

Proponents of these laws (read: the copyright industries) tend to brush off all concerns about legal activity. In their mind, there's only one reason to circumvent copy protections: piracy. Mario Dabek, editor-in-chief of the jailbreaking website Jailbreak Matrix, just released a video that nicely counters this narrow-minded concept by showcasing 100 reasons to jailbreak an iPhone. The video lists a huge variety of tweaks and customizations, both functional and aesthetic, that have nothing to do with copyright infringement and are only possible with a jailbroken phone (with the apparent cumulative effect of making a girl's tank top disappear).

While jailbreaking iPhones and other cellphones is legal in the U.S. thanks to the exemption process, it's easy to see how the same or similar tweaks should be permitted on virtually any device (especially the near-identical iPod touch, for which making any of these changes is still illegal). While there are a couple of ideas featured that flirt with infringement (using the Nintendo emulator would only be legal if you are playing games you own as cartridges) the vast majority of them are things you have should every right to do on a device that you purchased. Jailbreaking is not about piracy—it's about important rights of ownership, property and fair use that are all being curtailed by anti-circumvention laws.

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Digital Distribution: Exchanging Control For Convenience

from the all-your-digital-purchases-are-belong-to-us dept

Digital distribution can be a good thing, eliminating shipping, packaging, printing, storage, etc. and allowing instantaneous order fulfillment. Unfortunately, it has its downside, especially when digital products are tied to "walled gardens." The possibility always exists that the product you purchased, for all intents and purposes, never really belongs to you. We've seen it previously with Amazon's decision to suddenly remove purchased e-books from customers' e-readers.

Stuart Campbell at Wings over Sealand has another example of this unfortunate byproduct of digital distribution: the fact that you don't own what you've purchased. This means that at any time, for nearly any reason, the product you paid for can be rendered completely worthless.

In the case of iTunes, customers are not entitled to refunds on purchases, with the product in question being treated much in the same fashion as opened software, DVDs, etc. in brick-and-mortar stores. Once you've opened (installed) the product, it's yours forever, no matter how terrible it is.

"According to the iTunes Store Terms of Sale, all purchases made on the iTunes Store are ineligible for refund. This policy matches Apple's refund policies and provides protection for copyrighted materials."

In Campbell's case, the product in question isn't actually a bad piece of software, unlike the many clones and scamware inhabiting app markets. By his own account, he purchased and enjoyed the game (Touch Racing Nitro). After he purchased it, the developer (Bravo) went through a series of price adjustments, trying to find a sweet spot, ranging from £1.19 - £4.99. When this failed to make the impact on sales, Bravo offered a few free trial periods before marking it all the way down to 69p, which moved it back into the top 10 for a short time.

It's at this point that things get ugly.

Last October the game went free again, and stayed that way for four months. Then the sting came along. About a week ago (at time of writing), the game received an "update", which came with just four words of description - "Now Touch Racing Free!" As the game was already free, users could have been forgiven for thinking this wasn't much of a change. But in fact, the app thousands of them had paid up to £5 for had effectively just been stolen.

Two of the game's three racing modes were now locked away behind IAP paywalls, and the entire game was disfigured with ruinous in-game advertising, which required yet another payment to remove.

Campbell's paid-for software suddenly became indistinguishable from the free version, despite his having anted up for the game months ago. He fired off an email to Bravo, asking the developers to explain their reasoning for removing previously paid for content and asking these same paying customers to pay up again in order to return the game to its previous state.

He received a reply a day later from Ana Hidalgo, Bravo's "Social Media Manager":

"Hi!

Thanks for contacting us.

I'm really sorry about that. I knew that this could happen. The team had no option but to do that.

We're not trying to make money from people who have already bought the game like you did. It is not an excuse, but only 4% of the 2MM downloads have been paid ones. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't provide with any methods to know when an user has paid or not for an app. We just want to monetize the game from that 96% who are enjoying the game for free. Our goal is to monetize them via advertisement. We understand that this is annoying for the players that have paid for it.

Yes, maybe we could have released a LITE version, but if we release a new free version, we couldn't monetize near 2 MM free downloads we already have. And why we have 96% free downloads? A very bad old decision.. We've begun a new phase at Bravo Games and we definitely need some revenues from those downloads.

At the moment all our efforts are focused in new projects. When we finish those projects, we'll evaluate the possibility of adding new content to previous games like Touch Racing Nitro.

I regret to hear that you never buy another of our apps."

For all the supposed "entitlement" game fans have attributed to them constantly, nothing quite matches the entitlement "radiating from Sra. Hildalgo." For starters, if a developer feels that making an app free was a "mistake," it only compounds its errors when it starts taking it out on paying customers, especially when those customers number in the thousands.

If 96% of those were free downloads, that means that a whopping 80,000 people who paid money for Touch Racing have just been screwed. If we assume an arbitrary but reasonable average price of £1.19 (the second-lowest App Store price tier at the time most of the sales were made, though the app has cost at least twice that much for most of its life), that's just short of £100,000 that Bravo have extracted from consumers for what is in effect a "Lite" demo version of the game.

Imagine if the rest of the world worked this way. Imagine you went to Tesco and bought three boxes of Corn Flakes on a "three-for-two" offer, only for a Tesco employee to turn up at your house one day a month later and confiscate not only the "free" box but also the second one that you'd actually paid for. There'd be riots, or at the very least a long court backlog of assault cases and battered workers. Yet apparently, for videogames it's the dynamic economic model of the future.

Campbell is, unfortunately, right. Digital distribution puts control of purchased products completely in the hands of the developers and the distribution service. There are some game developers who would love nothing more than to go to 100% straight digital distribution, not only for the previously mentioned savings, but to allow them to retain complete control of their products. A fully digital distribution disguises DRM as a facet of the service (constant online connection, some or most content inaccessible offline) and helps eliminate the used game market which seems to rank very slightly below straight-up piracy in their minds.

Whatever pluses there are for the consumer are greatly negated by these factors. Any dispute between the distributor and the developers puts purchased products in the firing line. Should a developer suddenly pull out of the walled garden, customers may find themselves without support or updates for their purchased products, or worse yet, find themselves without functioning products.

Campbell has adjusted his tactics accordingly:

WoSland is a pretty wily consumer, and currently has eight apps sitting in its iPhone's "update" queue which are never going to get those updates, because the "update" in question is in fact a downgrade, removing functionality and/or adding ads. We've deleted many others altogether for the same reason.

Of course, this is far from convenient. Once you run into this situation, you're left with the choice of allowing all updates (even those that downgrade your software) or tediously updating all of your apps one at a time after verifying that said update won't remove functionality. Hardly ideal.

As he points out, console owners aren't so lucky. Most updates are forced, giving you the "choice" of updating or not playing your purchased game. And it's not just games and apps. As referenced above, e-books readers have been victims of distributor meddling in the past. Users of "services" like Ultraviolet and the "drive your DVD to the retailer to rip it to the cloud" may find their copies bricked if these services are shut down or (more likely) get caught in the middle of a contractual dispute.

If it's all about "control" with gatekeepers and walled gardens, digital distribution is playing right into their hands, turning what should be an advantageous situation for everyone involved into little more than a mixed curse.

 

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Australian Police To Go Wardriving, Telling People To Lock Up Their WiFi

from the but,-why? dept

Last fall, we wrote about some plans by the police in Austin, Texas to go wardriving to find open WiFi networks and pressure people into locking up those networks. After a bunch of people got upset about this, noting that open WiFi isn't a crime, the police backed down. However, it appears other police don't have any such qualms. As pointed out by Slashdot, police in Queensland, Australia are doing a similar wardriving campaign. The official announcement of the program greatly exaggerates the risk here:

Detective Superintendent Brian Hay said police have identified a large number of homes and businesses within the greater Brisbane area with wireless connections that are not secure or have limited protection. These people may as well put their bank account details, passwords and personal details on a billboard on the side of the highway.

Except that's really not necessarily true. Banks and most sites that require passwords have long known to make use of SSL encryption. It's not perfect, but it's not posting your password on a billboard on the side of the highway by a long shot.

“Unprotected or unsecured wireless networks are easy to infiltrate and hack. Criminals can then either take over the connection and commit fraud online or steal the personal details of the owner. This is definitely the next step in identity fraud.”

That could be true in some cases, but it's not absolutely true, and plenty of people can be perfectly safe using open WiFi with a few common sense precautions. It's sad that the police would exaggerate like this.

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Just Because Companies Can Design Around Patents Doesn't Mean There's No Impact For Consumers

from the economic-reality dept

This one's from a few week's back, but a few people have called it to my attention. Nilay Patel over at The Verge argued that because various companies offering Android phones have been able to design around a couple of Apple patents that have made their way into lawsuits -- #7,469,381 which covers the "scrollback" bounce when you scroll to the end of a page, and #7,657,849, which covers the "slide-to-unlock" concept -- that there's "really no day-to-day impact on the consumer" from the big patent fights going on over smartphones.

That seems like a rather simplistic analysis. Patel is right that many companies are "designing around" these overly broad and somewhat silly patents, and so it doesn't mean that Android phones aren't available. But that doesn't mean that there's no real impact on consumers. While it can't be quantified directly, there are numerous ways in which these patents are likely impacting the results. First, there's a matter of cost. The legal fights over patents are quite expensive, and that's almost certainly keeping prices on these devices somewhat higher than they might otherwise be. Second, the money and time it takes to do that "designing around" potentially slows the development of these phones. Third, those same resources could have been put elsewhere, working on additional innovations that would make the phones better and more valuable. Instead, they're forced to reinvent the wheel without doing the same scrollback or slide to unlock. Finally, while some will claim that forcing these companies to invent around the patents can lead to new innovations, there's little evidence to support this claim. Certainly it might happen accidentally, but letting developers come up with new innovations based on their own experiments and what the market tells them is always going to be more efficient than stumbling on some innovation because you're trying to avoid the artificial monopoly of a patent.

Of course, this is one of the difficult things in discussing the problems of the patent system. People insist they can't be that bad because these devices are still on the market. It's difficult to see or even explain the innovations that we don't have because of this, or even to show how the pace of innovation is almost certainly slower because of this, but that's exactly what plenty of research has shown for years. No one says that innovation stops completely because of patents, but we have significant concerns about how they impact the overall pace of innovation, as well as the specific direction of innovation. While it might not seem to have a "day-to-day impact on the consumer," chances are it's having quite a large one. We just can't see how big.

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The Pirate Bay Claims It's Going To Host The Site Via Drones Flying Over International Waters

from the the-pirate-ships-continue-to-go dept

One of the more amazing things about the recent moves by the entertainment industry to put in place stricter laws around the globe to attack file sharing, is that they still don't realize how pointless this is compared to the only real solution, which is to offer more of what consumers actually want, rather than trying to force them into some old way of doing business. For every "victory" the industry declares, we see more and more evidence that the file sharing just moves further away from what the industry can control (and keeps growing). The Pirate Bay, of course, has always been one of the leaders in mocking the legacy entertainment industry as it continues to operate, despite years-long efforts to shut it down. And even as there are reports of new raids pending, the organization has shifted to magnet links, meaning that taking it down will be even more meaningless than in the past.

Even so, the folks involved in TPB are still trying to go further. As highlighted on TorrentFreak, the latest plan from TPB is to see if it can serve the site from GPS-controlled drones flying over international waters:

One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary.

With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we're going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war.

We're just starting so we haven't figured everything out yet. But we can't limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we're building, that's more than enough.

Whether or not they can actually pull it off is a totally different question, but as we've been discussing recently, drone technology is getting cheaper, and the potential disruption of the Raspberry Pi should not be underestimated. While such things might not really be ready yet to do what TPB hopes to do, it's not difficult to project these trends out just a little ways to see that not only will it be possible in the not-too-distant future, but it would be a surprise if we didn't see setups that go way beyond what TPB is currently proposing before too long.

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:-( Samsung, Research In Motion Sued For Making It Easy To Use Emoticons

from the thus,-infringing-a-patent dept

All the way back in 2001, we wrote about how the brilliant satirists at Despair Inc. successfully trademarked :-( and announced that they planned to sue 7 million internet users for violating the trademark. The actual announcement was pretty funny -- even though not everyone got the joke. In 2006, we also had a story that mentioned a whole bunch of patents and patent applications related to emoticons.

It appears that one of those is now being used in a lawsuit against Samsung and RIM for having the gall to create a button that makes it easy to pick an emoticon without typing it in. The patent in question (US Patent 7,167,731) really is for having a button that lets you pick emoticons. How this is possibly patentable is beyond me. But, for some reason, examiner Lee Nguyen thought it was somehow non-obvious. The patent was originally assigned to Wildseed, a mobile accessories firm that AOL bought in 2005. The patent itself then went to Varia Mobil, who moved it to Varia Holdings to Varia and back to Varia Holdings. It's Varia Holdings bringing the lawsuit. Varia appears to just be a trolling operation (of course).

It's fairly stunning that anyone considered this a valid patent at any point. That it's now being used as the basis for a lawsuit should (once again) raise significant questions about the USPTO's approval process for patents.

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FAA Admits That It's Going To Rethink Whether You Can Use Kindles & Tablets On Takeoff & Landing

from the about-time dept

It's been pretty clear for quite some time that there's no real safety reason why electronics are barred during takeoff and landing on airplanes. Furthermore, there's no legitimate technological reason for not allowing mobile phones on planes either -- that one's more just about keeping other passengers from going into a rage at having to hear others' half-conversations. However, it seems that more and more people are getting annoyed that they can't use their snazzy new ebooks or tablet computers (not just iPads, mind you) on airplane take-off and landings. Nick Bilton, over at the NY Times, asked the FAA what was up with that, and they admitted that they're taking "a fresh look" at those devices and whether or not they should be allowed to be used at those times. Of course, as he notes, this might just lead to a bunch of bureaucratic red tape -- including every possible device having to go through significant testing:

Abby Lunardini, vice president of corporate communications at Virgin America, explained that the current guidelines require that an airline must test each version of a single device before it can be approved by the F.A.A. For example, if the airline wanted to get approval for the iPad, it would have to test the first iPad, iPad 2 and the new iPad, each on a separate flight, with no passengers on the plane.

It would have to do the same for every version of the Kindle. It would have to do it for every different model of plane in its fleet. And American, JetBlue, United, Air Wisconsin, etc., would have to do the same thing. (No wonder the F.A.A. is keeping smartphones off the table since there are easily several hundred different models on the market.)

Ms. Lunardini added that Virgin America would like to perform these tests, but the current guidelines make it “prohibitively expensive, especially for an airline with a relatively small fleet that is always in the air on commercial flights like ours.”

But, hopefully, a better, more efficient process can be found, and people will actually be able to use these devices on airplanes that aren't just over 10,000 feet...

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