Author: KS

ISPs Removing Their Customers’ Email Encryption

Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer’s web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their customers’ data to strip a security flag—called STARTTLS—from email traffic. The STARTTLS flag is an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.1

By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the servers will proceed to send email unencrypted. Some firewalls, including Cisco’s PIX/ASA firewall do this in order to monitor for spam originating from within their network and prevent it from being sent. Unfortunately, this causes collateral damage: the sending server will proceed to transmit plaintext email over the public Internet, where it is subject to eavesdropping and interception.

Link (EFF)

If You’re Going To Complain About Spotify Payments, At Least Understand A Little Economics First

To sum it up, the main problem with artists not earning a lot from Spotify and other streaming services isn’t the money paid from Spotify. It’s the fact that record companies take most of the money for themselves, leaving little for the artists.

Spotify currently pays about 70% of its revenue to rightsholders. That typically goes to middlemen — publishers for the musical work copyright, who then pay a portion to the songwriters, and record labels for the sound recording copyright, who then pay a portion to the musicians.

VC David Pakman (who testified in November 2012 before the House Judiciary IP Subcommittee about why the current music licensing scheme deters VC investment in new music services) recently analyzed data from middlemen in a few industries and found that many legacy middlemen are not earning the large share they take from creators in the digital age. Record labels, for example, contributed a lot more value when they coordinated and financed studio time (which can now be done with a basic computer and Internet connection, and possibly a Kickstarter campaign), manufacturing records and CDs and got them to retailers (which is no longer the primary way of selling music), and marketing (which can be done online with free services). Now, in the digital age, many of these services are no longer needed or performed.

In remarks last week at the Web Summit Conference in Dublin, Bono explained that rather than fighting against streaming, artists should be fighting for transparency

Link (Techdirt)

An Innocent Man, Tortured by the U.S., Asks the U.N.: Where’s the Accountability?

U.S. officials are in for a serious grilling on Wednesday as they get hauled before the U.N. Committee against Torture and questioned about about a multitude of ways in which the U.S. appears to be failing to comply with the anti-torture treaty it ratified 20 years ago.

As Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU Human Rights Program noted on Monday:

This marks the first U.N. review of the United States’ torture record since President Obama took office in 2009, and much is at stake. The review will test the pledges President Obama made to reverse disastrous Bush-era policies that led to gross violations of human rights, like torture, secret and incommunicado detention, “extraordinary renditions,” unfair trials, and more. It is also likely to examine practices that emerged or became entrenched during Obama’s time in office, such as indefinite detention at Guantánamo, immigration detention and deportations, and the militarization of the police, as witnessed by the world during this summer’s events in Ferguson.

Link (The Intercept)

Three Ways Courts Screw the Innocent Into Pleading Guilty

You should go read Jed A. Rakoff’s essay in The New York Review of Books, in which the senior federal district judge tries to explain why innocent people so often plead guilty.

But even if you have better things to do this weekend than digest Rakoff’s thorough, convincing, 4,400-word essay, it’s still worth considering why at least 20,000 people have pled guilty to and gone to jail for felonies they did not commit — if you very conservatively take criminologists’ lowest estimates, and cut them in half.

Rakoff identifies three ways the criminal justice system obstructs its own “truth seeking mechanism,” a trial by jury, which Rakoff calls a “shield against tyranny” and which Thomas Jefferson famously called “the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”

Link (The Intercept)

Sending Liability Up The Stack: Domain Registrars Potentially Liable For Infringement By End Users

It seems that in Germany, domain registrars are now liable for infringement caused by users of sites, which themselves host no infringing content what so ever:

That’s why a recent court ruling in Germany is so problematic. It’s the followup to an earlier ruling that found a domain registrar, Key-Systems, liable for actions done by the users of a torrent tracking site H33T. H33T just hosted the torrent (which, we should remind you, is not the actual infringing file), and some users used that tracker to torrent the album Blurred Lines. When H33T failed to respond to a takedown notice, Universal Music went after the registrar, and the court said it was Key-System’s responsibility to stop the infringement. Of course, the only way for the registrar to do that is to yank the entire domain.

The case was appealed, but the appeals court upheld the lower court ruling. Even though the registrar pointed out (accurately) that it had no way of knowing if the torrent was actually infringing, the court said that the registrar was responsible for assuming it must be infringing once it had contacted the domain owners and not received a response.

Link (Techdirt)

The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare

She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore.

“It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit by any longer.'”

Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She’s had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.

Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.

Link (Rolling Stone)

BRITISH SPIES ARE FREE TO TARGET LAWYERS AND JOURNALISTS

British spies have been granted the authority to secretly eavesdrop on legally privileged attorney-client communications, according to newly released documents.

On Thursday, a series of previously classified policies confirmed for the first time that the U.K.’s top surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters (pictured above) has advised its employees: “You may in principle target the communications of lawyers.”

The U.K.’s other major security and intelligence agencies—MI5 and MI6—have adopted similar policies, the documents show. The guidelines also appear to permit surveillance of journalists and others deemed to work in “sensitive professions” handling confidential information.

Link (The Intercept)