- Hundreds of US file-swappers subpoenaed
File-sharers' screennames are appearing on a lot
of subpoenas these days - probably more than 1,000, as of this writing.
"The music industry has issued at least 871 federal subpoenas against
computer users this month suspected of illegally sharing music files on
the Internet, with roughly 75 new subpoenas being approved each day,"
the Associated
Press reported late last week, citing court officials' statements.
The subpoenas involve people of all ages, the BBC
reports; and parents are being subpoenaed for their children's file-sharing
activities, Wired
News reports.
As for the ISPs receiving the subpoenas, Verizon's
Internet service, for example, has put several employees in charge of
doing nothing but processing the subpoenas it gets, USAToday reports. Boston College and MIT this week were
the first two schools to challenge the file-sharing subpoenas they've
received, CNET reports.
(ISPs and schools receiving the subpoenas are required to turn over the
names and contact info associated with the screennames cited in the documents.)
The US federal court that's been handling the RIAA subpoenas has a search
service for people who want to find out if they'd been subpoenaed,
USAToday reports in the article mentioned above. "Users must first apply
for an account; confirmation comes a week later in the mail; and there
are fees for documents." But the Electronic Frontier Foundation hopes
to provide a much more accessible, searchable list on the Web soon, USAToday
added. Late in the week TechTV.com
posted a preliminary list of Kazaa screennames subpoenaed.
Tech counter-measures are in the works, of course.
Here are ZDNet
and the Associated
Press on privacy mechanisms some of the file-sharing services are
putting into their software to make it tough for music-industry litigators
to find file-sharers.
- Law proposed to protect child file-sharers
New legislation being considered on Capitol Hill
would require file-sharing services to obtain parental consent before
allowing children to use their software, the Washington Post reports. Some 57 million
Americans swap files on these services, the Post piece adds, citing the
latest Yankee Group research, and 40% of them are children.
The Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography
Act is designed to prevent kids from downloading the pornography widely
available on peer-to-peer services such as Morpheus
and Kazaa. In an interesting tech development,
"besides requiring parental consent, the bill would allow parents to install
'beacons' on their computers that signal their desire to not have file-sharing
software. If a child tries to download the software, networks would have
to refuse when they see the beacon," according to the Post (the technology
would be developed by the FTC and the Commerce Department). "The bill
also would require file-sharing networks to warn users about the dangers
of file sharing."
- 4,000 file-sharers in Spain to be sued
Our first reaction when we read this news was,
"Wow! And we thought efforts to fight file-sharing in the US were getting
heavy-handed." A Spanish law firm plans to file a lawsuit against 4,000
individuals in Spain whom it alleges illegally swapped files over peer-to-peer
networks. More than 30 Spanish software and media companies are behind
the suit, which is being called the largest of its kind yet, Wired
News reports. The law firm said it would seek jail sentences of up
to four years for each convicted "software pirate." It had "pinpointed
the IP addresses of 95,000 Spaniards using [file-sharing] programs to
exchange copyright material, but narrowed the complaint to 4,000 individuals
who had downloaded the most illegal files," according to Wired News.
- Child images database launched
This week UK police unveiled "Childbase," a database
and software that "can identify paedophiles and their victims within seconds,"
according to the BBC.
It compares the faces of people in new images with those in pictures that
have already been collected. "If someone puts on weight or changes their
hairstyle [the system] can still recognise them and has already been able
to identify the brothers and sisters of abuse victims. By using the system
to check whether there is a new victim or abuser, police believe it will
help them focus on the most urgent cases," the BBC adds. A lot of detectives
in this line of work must be feeling a measure of relief because, until
Childbase became available, they "faced the slow and often traumatic process
of looking through thousands of images" for matches. Not that this eliminates
the need for human investigators, but anything that makes their work easier
is most welcome. Childbase joins databases in Germany, Britain, Sweden,
the Netherlands, and at Interpol, and it was reported earlier this year
that the US's FBI is working on a similar project (see "A tool for the
child- porn battle," 2/14).
- Mobile Net bigger than PC one
"Fat phones" - next-generation cell phones with
color screens, large processors, lots of memory, and sometimes cameras
- "are flying off the shelves," reports a CNET
analysis piece. Given what people can do with these phones, no longer
limited to text on their screens, this is not just a business story; it's
a social one, drilling right down to parenting issues too (for examples,
see "The anthropology of teens & phones," 5/23
and "Picture phones & kids,"6/27,
and Childnet on Japan's young
cell-phone users, pp. 8-11).
But even as a business story the CNET article
merits our attention, because it says the US is quickly catching up with
the cell-phone wave we've witnessed for a while in Europe and Japan. And
that means we're all - worldwide - arriving at a socio-economic phenomenon
as big as the Web was in the mid-90s. Just look at the numbers CNET cites:
"Analysts peg the worldwide installed base of active PCs to be between
500 million and 750 million. However, the active installed base of cellular
phone users is, once again, approximately 1.3 billion. Looking forward,
this gap is likely to increase. The IDC-reported number for annual PC
sales is approximately 150 million. The current estimate for worldwide
cellular sales is more than 400 million. Turn your eye to developing countries
and the gap is even larger. In China, the installed base of cell phones,
at 200 million, is already 10 times the size of the installed base of
PCs."
- Teen charged with identity-theft scam
The 17-year-old Californian actually posed as
AOL and sent spam emails to people telling them they needed to update
their AOL billing accounts. The email told them to click on a link to
a Web page he created with AOL's logo and links to real AOL Web pages,
according to Reuters. On that page, "they were instructed to enter their
credit card numbers, along with mothers' maiden names, billing addresses,
social security numbers, bank routing numbers, credit limits, personal
identification numbers, and AOL screen names and passwords," Reuters adds.
He then went on an online shopping spree. The Federal Trade Commission
this week settled its case against the boy, who agreed to pay back the
$3,500 he'd stolen and never again to send out spam. According to the
Associated Press, this was the FTC's first
case against a scam of this sort, called "spoofing" or "carding," and
more are in the works. The FBI said that scams like this are part of the
explanation for a rise it's seeing in identity theft and credit card fraud.
Our thanks to BNA Internet Law for
pointing these reports out.
A recent Gartner
survey found that identity theft in the US has increased 79% since
February 2002, to 7 million victims (3.4% of US consumers). The 7 million
fell victim to identity theft over the year ending June 2003.
- Do-not-spam?
Americans love the federal list that tells telemarketers
not to call them (www.donotcall.gov). Some 26 million phone numbers were
on the list by early this week, and the Federal Trade Commission expects
the number to be 60 million by mid-2004, USAToday
reports. But the question DoNotCall's popularity raises is, to what
degree telemarketers will now just switch to email and send more spam.
Some are already increasing their email (and direct-mail) budgets, according
to USAToday. Citing Direct Marketing Association figures, the article
adds that do-not-call lists could be "the 'death knell' of the industry,
eliminating 25% to 50% of its 4.1 million jobs."
Americans also reportedly would like something
just like DoNotCall.gov to deal with the spam flooding their in-boxes.
Seventy-four percent of Americans favor a do-not-spam registry, according
to a recent national survey cited by Reuters.
But the idea's "critics say the list would be widely ignored by spammers
and would divert resources better spent tracking down those who peddle
dubious get-rich- quick schemes," Reuters adds. In other findings reported
by CNET, 79%
of Americans surveyed by ePrivacy said "they want laws to ban or limit
spam," 70% said it is "acceptable to receive email from companies they've
done business with offline," and 80% said it is "acceptable for such companies
to send them emails about order fulfillment." ZDNet
has a piece about why do-not-spam lists are a "bad idea" (for one thing,
such a registry could be used by a spammer as "another way of finding
active e-mail addresses").
- Disney films online
The most outspoken studio on Internet piracy has
announced it make 50 of its films available on the Web. According to the
San
Jose Mercury News, the move is a milestone for Movielink.com
(having upped its online catalog from 175 titles eight months ago to 400+
from six major studios now), as well as for Disney. It's "the first concrete
evidence of Disney's desire to recast itself as a leader in the digital
transformation of the entertainment industry." Disney's deal with Movielink
covers mostly grownup films, the Mercury News reports, but there will
be a limited amount of family content, such as "Monsters, Inc." and "The
Rookie," but not Disney classics like "Snow White." Here's Reuters
on the development.
- Cheap new music service for PCs
Apparently following a trail ably cleared by Apple
with its iTunes service, a
similar download store for PCs debuted this week. Along with pressplay.com
(soon to be renamed Napster), Rhapsody (listen.com),
MusicNow.com, and MusicNet.com,
the new service, BuyMusic.com, is
targeting the 97% of the computer market Apple doesn't command. It "boasts
the cheapest per-song rates yet," the Associated Press reports, beating out MusicNow for the cheapest
song download (at 70 cents a tune) and iTunes's full album price by about
$2 ($7.95 at BuyMusic). BuyMusic has about 100,000 more songs than iTunes
but also a lot more restrictions on copying - more like its competitors
on the PC side. Apple's licensing arrangements allow iTunes customers
to transfer the tunes they buy to multiple computers and portable devices
or burn them onto CDs. Here's CNET's
coverage of BuyMusic's unveiling. And Fast
Company magazine offers some context with its "Living in an iTunes
World" (as opposed to the free-music file-sharing world of now-defunct
Napster).
- Friendster's hot
It debuted in March and is still in beta but already
gets 1 million users a week and is growing at the rate of 20% a week,
Wired
News reports. The article cites one expert as saying Friendster.com
is the Google of online community, and Friendster networks are now appearing
for sale on eBay (pay to be part of "an exclusive network," goes the pitch).
The service calls itself "an online community
that connects people through networks of friends for dating or making
new friends." It differentiates itself from online dating services this
way: They "are based on searching through large numbers of anonymous profiles.
Friendster is based on networking through your friends. Your photo and
profile will be shown only to people in your personal network. You will
send and receive messages only with people connected to you through a
series of mutual friends. You will be able to see how you are connected
to people you are interested in, and either contact them directly, or
ask a friend to make an introduction." The basic service is free but after
beta will begin charging for premium services it doesn't yet describe
(it's barely keeping up with all its traffic right now). Friendster, which
targets 25-to-35- year-olds, is not alone; Wired News mentions four others
in "a wide array of systems for creating social networks from weblogs
to mailing lists."
- Libraries' filter deadline extended
US libraries have an extra year to install filters
in compliance with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), it was
announced this week. CNET
reports that "the Federal Communications Commission, which is responsible
for enforcing the law, set the deadline of July 1, 2004" for compliance
with the law, last month upheld by the Supreme Court (see our
coverage).
Meanwhile, in a surprise move, the American Library
Association canceled a meeting with Web filtering companies it had requested.
The ALA's 13-member executive board gave no reason for its decision, but
the Associated
Press cited a comment by the organization's immediate past president,
Mitch Freedman, on an internal email discussion listserv (for librarians
on the ALA Council). Freedman reportedly wrote that any discussion at
all with filtering companies legitimizes, "thus giving them a legitimacy
that ALA has never recognized."
- Online high school in Oregon
The Bend-LaPine School District this summer is
testing online courses with an eye to starting an all-online charter high
school, Distance-Educator.com
reports. The district has applied for a $50,000 planning grant to
move in that direction. There are plenty of college degree-earning online
programs in Oregon, but an online high school would be a first for the
region, the article adds. ""Nationally, about 18 states offer virtual
schools. Currently, Oregon has eight K-12 programs that allow students
to take remedial or advanced courses online," according to the Oregon
Network for Education.
- The e-rate's fraud problem
Congress is giving the e-rate another (close)
look, the Washington
Post reports. Because of "widespread claims of fraud" in the billion-dollar
federal program that aids school and library connectivity, members of
Congress are asking 15 companies, including SBC Communications and IBM,
for detailed records of the money they received and the services they
provided under the program. The House Energy and Commerce Committee will
hold a hearing on e-rate fraud in the fall, said its chairman, Rep. Billy
Tauzin (R) of Louisiana.
