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Archive for » May 2nd, 2012«

After court ruling Pirate Bay Enjoys 12 Million Traffic Boost, Shares Unblocking Tips

02
May 2012

 

@torrentfreak

Last Friday the UK High Court ruled that several of country’s leading ISPs must censor The Pirate Bay website having ruled in February that the site and its users breach copyright on a grand scale.

The blocks – to be implemented by Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media (BT are still considering their position) – are designed to cut off all but the most determined file-sharers from the world’s most popular torrent site.

On hearing the news a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak that the measure will do very little to stop people accessing the site and predicted that “the free advertising” would only increase traffic levels.

It’s not possible to buy advertising “articles” from leading UK publications such as the BBC, Guardian and Telegraph, but yesterday The Pirate Bay news was spread across all of them and dozens beside, for free. The news was repeated around the UK, across Europe and around the world reaching millions of people. The results for the site were dramatic.

“Thanks to the High Court and the fact that the news was on the BBC, we had 12 MILLION more visitors yesterday than we had ever had before,” a Pirate Bay insider informed TorrentFreak today.

“We should write a thank you note to the BPI,” he added.

The blockade, which was not contested by any of the ISPs listed above, will be implemented during the course of the next few weeks. While that time counts down, The Pirate Bay say they are viewing the interim period as an opportunity to educate site visitors on how to deal with censorship by bypassing it.

“Another thing that’s good with the traffic surge is that we now have time to teach even more people how to circumvent Internet censorship,” the insider added.

In court papers released today, Mr Justice Arnold said that since the terms of the court order (how the blocks would be implemented technically) had been agreed to by the ISPs in question, there was no need for him to detail them in his ruling. However, The Pirate Bay told us that by taking a range of measures, any blocking technique employed by any ISP can be overcome.

First off they advise that the most simple solution is to use a VPN, such as iPredator or other similar services that carry no logs.

These VPN providers cost money but there are free solutions too. Companies such as VPNReactor offer a free service that is time limited to around 30 mins per session, but that’s plenty of time for users to get on Pirate Bay and download the torrent files they need. Once users have the torrents in their client, the blocking has been bypassed and even with the VPN turned off, downloads will still complete.

Pirate Bay are also recommending the use of TOR but only for the initial accessing of their website and the downloading of the .torrent files. Torrent clients themselves should never be run over TOR, the system isn’t designed for it and besides, transfers will be pitifully slow. TPB also point to I2P as a further unblocking option.

While the above options will cut straight through any kind of blocking with zero problems, Pirate Bay are also advising people to change their DNS provider. By permanently switching to a DNS offered by the likes of OpenDNS and Google, users of UK ISPs that censor The Pirate Bay purely by DNS will have a free and effective work around.

As readers will recall, there are other simple unblocking solutions where domain names are blocked by ISPs but their related IP addresses remain unfiltered. These include the MAFIAAFire plugin and the simple action of typing a site’s IP address directly into a browser. However, in this UK case there is a problem with these solutions.

According to court papers made available today, it seems that on the advice of an expert and after being agreed to by the ISPs in question, IP address blocking of The Pirate Bay is now part of the injunction. This means that the techniques in the above paragraph simply won’t work.

To circumvent this kind of problem, The Pirate Bay can be accessed via a 3rd party – a so-called ‘proxy’. One of these purely for the job is being operated by the UK Pirate Party.

Quite how long this particular proxy stays up remains to be seen though. The Dutch Pirates tried a similar thing and were quickly pursued by rights holders. Nevertheless, there are countless free proxies online that can do the job just as well.

In just a few weeks the block of The Pirate Bay will be implemented and despite all the coverage and millions of extra visitors to the site, thousands of users will remain unprepared. Those patient enough to type a question into a search engine will regain access to the site in a few minutes.

But will the impatient start pumping more money into the pockets of the BPI? That’s the big question.

Update: Virgin Media just started blocking The Pirate Bay.

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Solar realignment could spell decades of cooler temperatures on Earth

02
May 2012

By SEIJI TANAKA @asahi

The sun may be entering a period of reduced activity that could result in lower temperatures on Earth, according to Japanese researchers.

Officials of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Riken research foundation said on April 19 that the activity of sunspots appeared to resemble a 70-year period in the 17th century in which London’s Thames froze over and cherry blossoms bloomed later than usual in Kyoto.

In that era, known as the Maunder Minimum, temperatures are estimated to have been about 2.5 degrees lower than in the second half of the 20th century.

The Japanese study found that the trend of current sunspot activity is similar to records from that period.

The researchers also found signs of unusual magnetic changes in the sun. Normally, the sun’s magnetic field flips about once every 11 years. In 2001, the sun’s magnetic north pole, which was in the northern hemisphere, flipped to the south.

While scientists had predicted that the next flip would begin from May 2013, the solar observation satellite Hinode found that the north pole of the sun had started flipping about a year earlier than expected. There was no noticeable change in the south pole.

If that trend continues, the north pole could complete its flip in May 2012 but create a four-pole magnetic structure in the sun, with two new poles created in the vicinity of the equator of our closest star.

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Mozilla is first major tech company to denounce CISPA

02
May 2012


by @cnet

Despite big name tech companies — such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle — supporting the controversial Internet surveillance bill that passed in the House last week, Mozilla has come out against the legislation.

“While we wholeheartedly support a more secure Internet, CISPA has a broad and alarming reach that goes far beyond Internet security,” the tech company wrote to Forbes reporter Andy Greenberg. “The bill infringes on our privacy, includes vague definitions of cybersecurity, and grants immunities to companies and government that are too broad around information misuse.”

Mozilla is the first major tech company to unreservedly speak out against the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA.

The day after the U.S. House of Representatives passed the bill in a 248-168 vote, Microsoft said that its support was abating and any new law must allow “us to honor the privacy and security promises we make to our customers.” However, it still hasn’t withdrawn support for the legislation.

Other tech companies that support the bill are Facebook, Oracle, Symantec, Verizon, AT&T, Intel, and trade association CTIA, which counts representatives of T-Mobile, Sybase, Nokia, and Qualcomm as board members.

If passed by the Senate, CISPA would not formally grant the NSA or Homeland Security any additional surveillance authority. But it would usher in a new era of information sharing between companies and government agencies — with limited oversight and privacy safeguards.

In its e-mail to Forbes, Mozilla wrote, “We hope the Senate takes the time to fully and openly consider these issues with stakeholder input before moving forward with this legislation.”

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Police lock student in holding cell with no food or water and forget about him for days

02
May 2012

By Eric W. Dolan @rawstory
Daniel Chong, a 24-year old student at UC San Diego, was taken into custody during a drug raid and abandoned in a holding cell for five days without food or water, according to NBC San Diego.

“They never came back, ignored all my cries and I still don’t know what happened,” he said. “I’m not sure how they could forget me.”

On April 21, Drug Enforcement Agents raided an apartment where Chong and his friends were smoking marijuana. Nine people were arrested and the agents reportedly seized ecstasy pills, marijuana, prescription medication, psychedelic mushrooms and weapons, according to CBS 8 News. Seven of those arrested were taken to jail and one was released.

Chong, however, was left handcuffed in a 5 ft. by 10 ft. holding cell.

Chong said he screamed and kicked the door, but to no avail. Eventually, he began hallucinating and drank his own urine in hopes of staying hydrated. After days without any human contact, he tried to kill himself by breaking his glasses with his teeth, and using the glass to cut himself.

Surprisingly, Chong allegedly found a bag of methamphetamine in the holding cell, which he used to stay awake.

After five days, a DEA worker heard noises coming from the holding cell and discovered him. Chong was taken to the hospital, where he spent three days in the intensive care unit.

The DEA has not apologized to Chong. He has not been charged with any crime.

Watch video, courtesy of NBC San Diego, below:

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Swedish workers goto raves on their lunchbreaks

02
May 2012

By @slate

When it comes to lunch breaks, the laissez-faire French like to take two hours out of their workday to savor their food in the company of colleagues while workaholic Americans prefer dining solo in front of their computers. Well, in Sweden we have a whole other vibe going. Here, more and more workers are foregoing both leisurely lunches and “al-desko” dining in favor of daytime raves.

It started in the fall of 2010 when 14 friends decided to dance their lunch breaks away in their office garage. They called their gathering “Lunch Beat.” As rumors about this literally underground movement spread, more and more people joined in. Today, Lunch Beat events are being arranged by a core group of organizers at venues around Sweden, attracting up to 600 people each time, and copycat clubs are popping up across Europe. Lunch Beat events can be arranged by any individual, group or company anywhere in the world as long as the organizers respect the founders’ Manifesto, a list of 10 rules specifying, for instance, that Lunch Beat discos must be nonprofit events, take place at lunch time, have 60-minute long DJ sets, and include a takeaway meal. In 2011, “lunch disco” was officially recognized as a new word by the Swedish Language Council.

The basic idea behind Lunch Beat is that workers take an hour out in the middle of the day to let loose in the company of fellow dance-enthusiasts. The founders have dubbed it “your week’s most important business lunch” and say that they want to create a sense of community among participants. But the discos are not meant to be crass networking opportunities. After all, the fourth rule of the manifesto is “You don’t talk about your job at Lunch Beat.” Instead, the aim is to embody “playfulness, participation and community,” the founders write. It’s intended almost to be a way of forgetting about your job, so you can feel energized and inspired when you get back to your desk.

With its strobe lights, smoke machines, funky wall projections, pounding techno music, and crowded dance floor filled with fist-pumping, sweat-dripping revelers, Lunch Beat recreates the atmosphere of nightclubs. Organizers look for spaces where there are not a lot of spectators or passers by, because they want dancers, not gawkers. The party starts promptly at noon and ends at 1 p.m. sharp. And while a sandwich, fruit, and water are included in the ticket price, drugs and alcohol are strictly forbidden.

I attended the latest Lunch Beat on April 24, in Stockholm. It took place in a room with blacked-out windows in Kulturhuset, a multipurpose cultural venue in the city’s commercial center. The party attracted all sorts of professionals: engineers, insurance brokers, designers, and charity workers. One of the Lunch Beat founders, Daniel Odelstad, said the parties “give the lie to the myth that Swedes never dance sober.” DJ Johannes Drakenberg agreed. “Everyone was dancing from the moment I started playing”, he said. “I hadn’t expected that the crowd would have so much energy to dance to tribal techno in the middle of a workday. This is much more fun than playing at nightclubs.”

Several people were on the dance floor before noon, waiting for the DJ to arrive. Eventually a big crowd arrived, with people from their 20s to their 50s. Once the dancing started, there was no standing around, no self-conscious mirror-checking. Few even took breaks to drink water, preferring instead to grab a drink and a sandwich on their way out. While some came alone, most people danced next to the colleagues they’d arrived with, but just like at other techno dance clubs, the crowd was facing the stage where the DJ was spinning his records rather than dancing in pairs or groups. The crowd cheered and whistled whenever the DJ revved up the music and over time the place got hot and sweaty, just like a real club. At the end of the hour, when we all dispersed, the crisp air and business-as-usual atmosphere outside felt surprising. Some dancers compared the Lunch Beat experience to an energizing workout, a fun alternative to the gym. Others felt it was more like a wholesome nightclub where everyone was focused on the music and on dancing instead of getting drunk or finding someone to hook up with. There was a distinct lack of sexual energy at the Stockholm Lunch Beat, which, coupled with the ban on alcohol and drugs, made the whole thing reminiscent of straight-edge, the 1980s subculture whose clean-living adherents refrained from alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs but still partied hard. Odelstad insists that Lunch Beat is not a “manifestation for soberness” but added that serving alcohol would not “fit with the concept. After all, this is Sweden,” he added, “and here we just don’t have a culture of drinking at lunch like they do in, say, Denmark or the Netherlands.”

We could see it as a sign of our uptight, health obsessed times that the wholesome version of the rave has replaced the real one. In the 1990s, techno clubs were seen as dangerous, morally deprived places. The Swedish police set up a special department to monitor the growing number of underground raves and carried out frequent raids to hunt for drugs. Now, a “rave” is the kind of event that companies officially sanction, purchasing Lunch Beat tickets for staff as a perk. Lunch Beat has been featured on Sunt Liv (meaning Healthy Life), a website set up by unions and local government employers which promotes public health and good work environments. The organizer of a Belgian version of Lunch Beat said that the European Community is planning to send a group of staff members along to the first event in Brussels. From pierced teenagers to European bureaucrats in only 20 years. What a long distance to travel.

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Burning Man looking for love from D.C.

02
May 2012

Burning Man is storming the Hill this week to talk to The Man.

Leaders of the anarchic festival in the Nevada desert — a tech-free gathering that Silicon Valley has increasingly embraced — were to meet with regulators and lawmakers Monday and Tuesday as they press their case that Burning Man needs some government love.

The organization hopes to dispel the tawdry image some have of the nation’s biggest outdoor arts event as a haven for drug-taking, clothing-optional participants who have group sex and dance to pulsating electronic music all night.

Burning Man instead is a cradle of American innovation and creativity, the event’s organizers plan to tell Washington. There’s a serious side to the event: Internet companies have increasingly flocked there to make deals and launch businesses — with some companies now viewing it as an annual retreat.

“We’re a nexus of creativity,” said Marian Goodell, director of business and communications at Burning Man. “Now we want to talk about innovation.”

They also want to talk about its arrangement with the Bureau of Land Management, which has since 1990 permitted the event on BLM land 110 miles north of Reno.

The festival gets its name for the burning of a stories-high effigy of a man.

The event — with its principles of “radical inclusion,” “decommodification,” and “radical self-expression” — has swollen to more than 50,000 people who bring their own food and water and manage to leave little trace. Burning Man sold out last year and demand remains high this year.

The bulk of this year’s tickets were sold in a random drawing, leaving long-time “burners,” as they are called, without tickets. Organizers want a five-year permit from the bureau and they want to take the event up to 70,000 participants.

“We’re an antidote to everything else happening in the world,” Goodell said. “There is no Internet connection. Cellphones don’t work. It is an economy of creativity and self-expression that you can’t get anywhere else.”

Meanwhile, the bureau for the first time put the event on probation for going over the attendee limit of 53,000 during two days of last year’s event.

While Burning Man has appealed the decision and Black Rock City will still rise in the desert from Aug. 27 through Sept. 3 this year, the probation status has put a damper on the mood of self-expression clique.

It’s also thrown a wrench in the organization’s efforts to win a five-year permit from Uncle Sam.

If Burning Man is put on probation again this year, the event’s permit could be jeopardized, said Gene Seidlitz, the BLM district manager for the region. The population caps are important as they make it possible for law enforcement and other services to plan, he said.

Burning Man’s Goodell said that being put on probation “is not jeopardizing our survival.”

As part of its federal outreach, Goodell and Larry Harvey, the founding director of the event, will visit offices of lawmakers from California and Nevada as well as the BLM and the Department of the Interior. They will also hold a cocktail party for congressional staffers and others. The organization declined to say exactly which lawmakers and agencies it plans to visit.

The event has evolved since its first bonfire on a San Francisco beach in 1986. The man then was just 8 feet. Now, it attracts multi-generations and people from all over the world, some of whom dress in costume or engage in performance art on a dry lake bed known as La Playa.

The average burner has gone for 10 years. The average annual salary of a burner is $50,000 to $70,000.

So entwined is the event with the tech community that the Google doodle on Google’s home page got its start during Burning Man. In 1998, Google’s founders put a stick figure on the home page when they attended the event to let users know where they were should the site crash.

Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, went to Burning Man first in 1999 and has gone back five times. “It was like a blank visual canvass,” he said.

“It’s a place to revel in the kind of life I very much enjoy leading and to be inspired by people’s collective ability to make a lot of stuff without supervision or direction,” said Rosedale, now a co-founder of Coffee and Power, a marketplace and tech firm for people to work together. “Technology is putting us in the same kind of desert as Burning Man. It has leveled the playing field. Building something in a totally new space, that’s what Burning Man is about.”

Academics study the culture of “gifting” at Burning Man (no money exchanges hands); books have been written about it. Local lawmakers, medical staff and law enforcement are given tours of the events. While business may be conducted as people bike around the desert, the organization doesn’t allow corporate sponsors or marketing. When RockStar offered drinks to Burning Man staff one year, it had to cover up logos on its vehicle in order to enter the event grounds.

In the past year, Black Rock LLC, the firm that runs the celebration, has launched a nonprofit firm, the Burning Man Project, with the aim of spreading the Burning Man culture beyond the event. In March, Burning Man helped with an event in Las Vegas with Tony Hsieh, the chief executive of Internet retailer Zappos. They burned a 20-foot-high effigy of a showgirl, Lucky Lady Lucy, as part of a revival of a dormant arts festival.

This year’s art theme is Fertility 2.0., “wherein we contemplate the tendency of any being or living system to create abundant life.”

“People are realizing it’s not just a party in the desert,” Goodell said. “It’s become a culture.”

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School police shoot 14 year old boy during alleged break-in

02
May 2012


PASADENA, Texas (AP) — A police officer at a Houston-area school has shot a 14-year-old student who allegedly was trying to break into a portable building.

Pasadena Independent School District Superintendent Kirk Lewis says the shooting happened hours before classes Tuesday at Miller Intermediate School. The boy is hospitalized in critical condition. He’s an 8th grader at the school.

Lewis says the officer was not hurt in the incident shortly before 1 a.m. Tuesday.

Lewis says an alarm went off and a window was discovered broken in the building, where computers are located. He says the officer opened fire after feeling threatened while confronting the boy, who had a backpack and allegedly refused to stop.

The teen’s name and further details about him were not immediately released.

Classes were scheduled as usual Tuesday.

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