Cyberculture roundup: LSE research shows piracy isn’t killing big content…Twitter IPO… Anonymous members indicted…

 

London School of Economics: piracy isn’t killing big content; government needs to be skeptical of entertainment industry claims


Copyright and Creation, a policy brief from a collection of respected scholars at the rock-ribbed London School of Economics, argues that the evidence shows that piracy isn’t causing any grave harm to the entertainment industry, and that anti-piracy measures like the three-strikes provision in Britain’s Digital Economy Act don’t work. They call on lawmakers to take an evidence-led approach to Internet and copyright law, and to consider the interests of the public and not just big entertainment companies looking for legal backstops to their profit-maximisation strategies.

Piracy Isn?t Killing The Entertainment Industry, Scholars Show

Over the past years there have been ample research reports showing that file-sharing can have positive effects on the entertainment industries.

Industry lobbyists are often quick to dismiss these findings as incidents or weak research, and counter them with expensive studies they have commissioned themselves.

The Silk Road Is Dead. But Bitcoin Lives On

Nobody really knew how big a part of the Bitcoin economy the Silk Road really played. But then the feds shuttered the Silk Road this past Wednesday, and now it’s pretty clear, thanks to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Christopher Tarbell, the special agent who signed the complaint against alleged Silk Road mastermind, Ross Ulbricht.

Feds Bust the Amazon of Drugs, Seize Its Untraceable Loot

It was the Amazon.com of the illegal drug trade. An online black market in which cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and LSD were bought and sold by anonymous customers and dealers, using untraceable digital currency. U.S. authorities called it “the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet…” And today, they announced they’ve taken it down.

DOJ Rejects Request For More Transparency By Facebook, Others

DOJThe Department of Justice rejected motions made by Facebook and other tech companies that would allow them to share more details with users on the frequency and types of requests the government makes under its surveillance programs, according to AllThingsD. The DOJ petition was filed with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court earlier this week.

Google nears EU antitrust deal

A deal between the EU and Google edges closer after the US search engine makes concessions related to how its software links to rival services

 Twitter Opens the Books, But Facebook’s IPO Looked So Much Better

Twitter had as much time to bulk up for its IPO as Facebook. So why are its revenues, earnings, and user base so much weaker?

The Big Data Conundrum: How to Define It?

Big Data is revolutionising 21st-century business without anybody knowing what it actually means. Now computer scientists have come up with a definition they hope everyone can agree on.

US jury indicts Anonymous members

Aljazeera.com

The indictment said that from September 2010 to January 2011,Anonymous members participated in a campaign using software known as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon to flood websites with huge amounts of internet traffic to shut them down. They used what are …

Thirteen suspected members of Anonymous indicted

US indicts 13 Anonymous members for DDoS attacks

Feds Charge 13 Members Of Anonymous In ‘Operation Payback’ Attacks

EFF: the NSA has endangered us all by sabotaging security

The Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s Cindy Cohn and Trevor Timm look at the NSA’s Bullrun program, through which the US and UK governments have spent $250M/year sabotaging computer security. Cindy is the lawyer who argued the Bernstein case, which legalized civilian access to strong cryptography — in other words, it’s her work that gave us all the ability to communicate securely online. And so she’s very well-situated to comment on what it means to learn that the NSA has deliberately weakened the security that ensures the integrity of the banking system, aviation control, embedded systems in everything from cars to implanted defibrillators, as well as network infrastructure, desktop computers, cloud servers, laptops, phones, tablets, TVs, and other devices.

Adobe?s network compromised: 2.9 million customer names, encrypted credit and debit card numbers, and source code

Software firm Adobe today revealed its network was compromised. Information that was leaked included 2.9 million customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and ?other information relating to customer orders.?

Twitter by the numbers

By now you know that Twitter has revealed what?s under the hood for its public offering. But while you can dig through the S-1 filing on you own, we thought we?d help out by highlighting some of the most interesting figures. So here are the numbers you need to know about Twitter?s IPO:

How Twitter’s Business Compares to Facebook’s

Twitter12

Ever since Twitter revealed last month that it had filed confidential paperwork to go public, the company has been compared to what is arguably its biggest competitor, Facebook. However, the S-1 form that the company filed Thursday shows that the two companies are in fact miles apart ? for better or worse.

 

Anonymous Members Indicted for DDoSing Pirate Bay Enemies

anonymousIn early September 2010, a little known anti-piracy company admitted that in the course of their work they sometimes go the extra mile to end copyright infringement.

India-based AiPlex Software said that when faced with uncooperative torrent sites they ?flood the website with requests, which results in database error.? The admission, that the company engaged in what amounts to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, started off a momentous chain of events.

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