Ron Bowes, a security consultant at Nmap, has caused quite a turbulence in news earlier this week as he made available through file-sharing sites the public Facebook profiles of 100 million users of the social networking site which makes about 20% of the site's global membership.

Facebook hurried to smother worries saying that the information that has been gathered (around 2.8 gigabytes) is in the public domain and no confidential data has been compromised due to security breach.

"In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook", said the company in a statement.
According to The BBC newswire, Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, has warned a few times in the past about the risk of such exposure.

"Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it", BBC quotes him.

"It is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn't have imagined a trawl of this magnitude and there's an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with negligence", Davies added.

He continued by emphasizing how confused users of such social networking sites are, in fact, when it comes to privacy settings and pointed to the revision of Facebook's privacy settings a few months ago, saying"People did not understand the privacy settings and this is the result."

Industrial Light & Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks, two major companies in the visual effects business, have teamed up to launch an open-source software as a solution for sharing large, complex CG files.

The need for such a viable solution was dictated by the increasing difficulty in sharing digital files between various software, sites and vfx studios due to the growing in size and complexity of the files being shared. To this adds the fact complex visual effects projects make often the job of multiple f/x studios which makes the file sharing ability really imperative.

The fruit of the collaboration between the two giants is “Alembic” an ILM/SPI project, a file format developed to give sharing of complex images more speed and efficiency. The project was announced on Tuesday at the Siggraph computer graphics conference in Los Angeles by the chief technology officers of both companies, Richard Kerris of ILM and Rob Bredow of SPI.

The chief technology officers of the two companies, Richard Kerris of ILM and Rob Bredow of SPI, announced Alembic on Tuesday at the Siggraph computer graphics conference in Los Angeles.

"The goal is to have as many people involved as possible to do what's best for the industry," said Kerris, while according to Bredow, Imageworks is pretty happy with Alembic having tested it already on few productions.

Alembic will become available next month at alembic.io and via SPI's open-source software site.

Recently Motorola filed a patent which lets you believe that the company has been busy developing some sort of a cloud-based file sharing service.

The new tool called “Family Room” which some say could be an addition to the MOTOBLUR, the company’s software which provides social media updates in one collective space and also offers back up solution, is described by Motorola as follows:

“Cellular phone software that allows users to share digital content, including, but not limited to, content included on calendars, chat rooms, photo albums and shared music platforms”

At a first glance it seems Motorola might be working on a technology resembling that used on Microsoft’s defunct device, the KIN.

We’ll keep you updated.

While ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) lines up US as one of the advocates of severe copyright rules (abroad), it the laws surrounding anti-circumvention don’t seem just as tough.

The Courthouse News Service mentioned late last week that according to a court’s decision, the mere act of breaking a digital lock is not, in and of itself, an infringement.

The report says:
“Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the (Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s) anti-circumvention provision,” Judge Garza wrote for the New Orleans-based court.

“The DMCA prohibits only forms of access that would violate or impinge on the protections that the Copyright Act otherwise affords copyright owners.”

The new court rules issued by the Librarian of Congress at the US copyright office have caught everyone’s attention right away. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) hailed this development seen as a victory that will cut off the unjust source for so many lawsuits (six new classes of non-infringing activities have been designated):

(1) Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;

(ii) Documentary filmmaking;
(iii) Noncommercial videos

(2) Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset.

(3) Computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network, when circumvention is initiated by the owner of the copy of the computer program solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and access to the network is authorized by the operator of the network.

(4) Video games accessible on personal computers and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully obtained works, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing for, investigating, or correcting security flaws or vulnerabilities, if:

(i) The information derived from the security testing is used primarily to promote the security of the owner or operator of a computer, computer system, or computer network; and
(ii) The information derived from the security testing is used or maintained in a manner that does not facilitate copyright infringement or a violation of applicable law.

(5) Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete. A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace; and

(6) Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.

According to CrunchGear comments, the new stipulations allow you to bi-pass the CSS of a DVD for the purpose of Fair Use. The ruling was also interpreted as no longer interdicting the jail-break of your phone.

No doubt the new more tolerant stance will make Americans happy especially since it’s so rarely we see a copyright related ruling that doesn’t actually go against people narrowing their liberties even more.

(source: Zeropaid)

Some interesting news related to a lawsuit that has all the major US mobile carriers involved including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, & T-Mobile was picked up recently by Techdirt. According to the site, the company Luvdarts claims these providers are no better than file sharing networks that spread illegal content and goes as far as comparing them to Limewire and Gnutella.

Luvdarts LLC, a multimedia messaging (MMS) content creator, is accusing the aforementioned carriers of copyright infringement because their customers have shared MMS content illegally. The company demands that wireless carriers, which fall outside the DMCA safe harbor protections as service providers (not exactly true), pay damage fines for 9,999-100,000 counts of copyright infringement (at $150,000 per infringement). Wow!

LuvDarts+Complaint+-+DocStoc –

Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor in "The Ghost Writer"

TorrentFreak has published the data they collected with the top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent for the week ended July 25. All the films included in this chart are DVDrips (unless mentioned otherwise).

Roman Polanski’s (brilliantly) return on the big screen, the thriller ‘The Ghost Writer’ is this week’s leader; the following two positions are occupied by two new entries ‘Operation Endgame’ and the highly anticipated ‘Inception’ (cam version for now).

The list also features a special p2p release of 'The Yes Men Fix The World' (courtesy of the P2P video distribution platform VODO.net) on #6.

(via TorrentFreak)

Tweet A Tune can act as a social linker, being a site where you can easily make new friends since finding someone tweeting passionately about the artist you also love could instantly raise your interest in that person (but I don’t have to tell you about that  )

It’s hard to guess the impact file sharing studies have on those interested in the issue but when a pretentious institute puts its endorsement on them it tends to give them more credibility. So many readers have come to accept statistics and data without questioning just because behind them there’s a imposing name.

According to a recent such industry-commissioned study conducted by the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory, "at least 89.9 percent" of the files currently on the Bittorrent scene are infringing copyright and there were 117.4 million seeds for the files that went through investigation. The research used data gathered from17 BitTorrent trackers and 1,000 popular torrent.

Luckily, there are some who don’t swallow information without chewing it a bit. Torrent Freak was prompt to debunk figures put forward by the researchers. "The real seed count at any given time lies between 10 and 20 million," says a post by Ernesto who points to misleading conclusions in the statistics due to "painfully inaccurate data".

What allows Torrent Freak access to reliable data is the fact the guys have their own machines working for them to dig out BitTorrent statistics.

OpenBitTorrent tracker was one of trackers featured in the study, which Ernesto said was one of the largest with currently almost 10 million seeds.

"This tracker tracks ~90% of all torrents, so an estimate of 20 million would be on the high end," he detailed.

Among the blatant errors of the study was also the naming of The Incredible Hulk as the most seeded file, supported by 1.1 million seeders: "We're not sure where these numbers originate from but the best seeded torrent at the moment only has 13,739 seeders, that's 1 percent of what the study reports," clarifies TorrentFreak.

What’s even worrying is that the Australian anti-piracy outfit AFACT might use this ‘realistic’ study in court to argue that the local ISP iiNet is liable for the copyright infringement activities of its subscribers.

Read the whole post here.

TorrentFreak has published the data they collected with the top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent for the week ended July 18. All the films included in this chart are DVDrips (unless mentioned otherwise).

A bit later this week than usual but here’s what’s been happening in our chart – ‘Clash Of The Titans’ still leader of the most pirated films followed by the one of the two new entries, ‘Death At A Funeral’ ( now even close to the original British version) and the sci-fi ‘Repo Man’.

(via TorrentFreak)

Bethany Hare abusing of copyright protected song

Bearing a delightfully straightforward motto “Helping ordinary people raise extraordinary amounts for charity is all we do, and we love it”, JustGiving is a popular, trusted online charity fundraising platform where people can create their own fundraising page or make donations.

Ten-year-old Bethany Hare used the site to make her own charity video and as an aspiring young actress she thought impersonating Charlie Chaplin would be great fun and a great tribute to her grandfather's love for the legendary comic.

But who would’ve thought the criminal potential of the apparently innocent Bethany? In her homemade film meant as a way to raise funds for a children’s hospice the girl had the audacity to sing the song 'Smile', for which she did not own the copyright! Can you imagine that?

Well, thank God, someone did. The New York-based publishing company who own the rights to the song (originally composed by Chaplin as an instrumental for his 1936 movie Modern Times) discovered the enormous copyright infringement act by the ten-year-old and demanded the removal of clip.

Now that’s vigilance!

According to DailyMail “After her mother Yvonne wrote to explain the background to the Chaplin video, the publishers said they could keep the song online for one year as long as they paid a $2,000 (£1,300) fee and a further $250 (£165) every time she performs the song in public.”

Now that’s generosity!

The demands were impossible to meet and Bethany has been forced to remove the words and music and running the video as a 'silent movie' instead.

While the Hare family had the total support of the Chaplin estate they failed to convince the Bourne Music Co of the noble cause.

However, Bethany, in spite of the copyright issues (the clips was run as a 'silent movie' eventually) still managed to raise £1,800 for Martin House Children's Hospice.

And they say music business has no heart!!!