Articles by Angela Gunn

Jury arrives at $675K fine for student's music downloading, $22,500 per track

By Angela Gunn on July 31, 2009, 9:46 PM

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The jury in the Joel Tenenbaum case has fined the Boston College University student $675,000 for copyright infringement of 30 songs, or $22,500 per track. The award is radically smaller than the $80,000 per track levied against Jammie Thomas-Rasset in a similar infringement trial earlier this year.

The jury was out, according to Copyright & Campaigns' Ben Sheffner, between two and three hours. Judge Nancy Gertner has already announced that she'll review the award to ensure that it does not violate the Constitution's due-process clauses. As for Mr. Tenenbaum, he told Mr. Sheffner that he plans to file for bankruptcy if the award amount stands, as the doctoral candidate (in physics) has no way of paying the fine.

After Tenenbaum, who will take back the music industry from the RIAA?

By Angela Gunn on July 31, 2009, 9:00 PM

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Because the Joel Tenenbaum trial hasn't been maddening enough, Engadget yesterday had a little item on how the RIAA is claiming that customers ought to just suck it up and accept that DRMed tracks will go poof even if they've been paid for, since no other products or service providers are expected to "provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works." That's interesting coming from a group that claims that alone of all industries, copyright holders somehow deserve to get paid in perpetuity for their output. I guess forever looks a lot longer when it includes server-maintenance duties.

If anyone's got a more enlightened response than "oy" to the Tenenbaum trial's result, I'm all ears. I respect Professor Nesson's legal acumen, and having fair use taken off the table just hours before the trial was probably not a setback from which any legal team could have recovered, but looking over the past year's proceedings -- the defense's push to make its processes open and transparent, the sustained effort to get the trial shown live on the Web, all that -- I wonder if we'd all have have been better off if both Tenenbaum, and Jammie Thomas before him, had simply rolled over.

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British hacker will be extradited to US for trial

By Angela Gunn on July 31, 2009, 9:52 AM

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A British hacker who broke into 97 military and NASA computer systems -- looking, he claims, for evidence about UFOs -- will be tried in America, where if convicted he may face a sentence of up to 70 years. Gary McKinnon has been appealing in the British judicial system to avoid extradition to these shores.

Mr. McKinnon doesn't deny that he hacked into the computers in 2001-02, but has stated that he wasn't attempting to compromise US security but to find secret information on unidentified flying objects -- a particular obsession for the 43-year-old man, who has been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. He asked instead for trial in the UK, stating that trial and incarceration in the US could be highly debilitating due to his condition.

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Amazon's Orwell deletion garners a lawsuit

By Angela Gunn on July 31, 2009, 9:29 AM

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A Michigan teen has filed suit in Seattle against Amazon, maker of the Kindle eReader, for deleting a copy of 1984 on which he was keeping notes for his AP English coursework. Justin Gawronski is suing in order to impress on Amazon the importance of not simply deleting purchased texts -- whatever their copyright or licensing status.

The suit, which seeks class-action status for those affected by the deletion several weeks ago, also names Antoine J. Bruguier, a Kindle owner from Milpitas, California. KamberEdelson is the Chicago-based legal team handling the suit.

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Joel Tenenbaum admits downloading music, found guilty of copyright infringement

By Angela Gunn on July 31, 2009, 9:27 AM

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Thursday was a far more lively day in the Joel Tenenbaum copyright infringement case, as the defendant admitted that he had downloaded -- and that he had not been forthright in his written discovery responses about having done so. Mr. Tenenbaum also took responsibility for uploading and downloading from multiple peer-to-peer services, confirmed that he'd listened to all 30 now-no-longer-contested songs (nuking his own legal team's earlier assertion that some of the 30 might have been spoofed files), and suggested that his mom -- a lawyer -- might have given him some shaky advice on how to answer RIAA fact-finding efforts.

It was, in other words, defeat-- defeat to such a degree that the Joel Fights Back group blog run by the defense team is currently headed by a post titled "Joel FOUGHT back." In that post, Debbie Rosenbaum, one of the students who stuck with the case to its bitter end, writes that "Although we could not win this case, we are proud to have highlighted the abuses and the inefficiency with which the music industry burdens the court system."

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Is Apple attending CES or not? (Well, not.)

By Angela Gunn on July 31, 2009, 5:14 AM

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January's Consumer Electronics Show books up fast, as would-be congregants know well. But it seems that one potential attendee is still not committed as we roll into August -- interesting, since the world already knows what the fellow won't be attending in early 2010.

The erstwhile guest is Steve Jobs, of course, and with Apple already declining to take part in MacWorld next January, speculation has been rampant that Apple and its rock-star CEO would make the jaunt to Vegas. That speculation seemed to be strengthened by a post by Ben Charny for the Wall Street Journal, which claimed that Mr. Jobs would be not just attending but speaking.

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VoloMedia claims it holds patent on podcasting, drawing howls of protest

By Angela Gunn on July 30, 2009, 11:40 AM

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A California company has announced that it has been awarded a patent for a "Method for Providing Episodic Media" on Tuesday. US Patent 7.568,213 was described by the firm as a "patent for podcasting," but company founder Murgesh Navar says the scope is actually broader than that.

Podcasting is generally thought of as RSS-based -- sign up and the episodes flow to your reader of choice. The patent doesn't specify RSS delivery, meaning that in theory other methods would fall under its purview.

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Study indicates that vulnerability management's getting no better

By Angela Gunn on July 30, 2009, 10:26 AM

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In the festivity and fun that is the annual Black Hat gathering (confidential to D. Tangent: okay, I give up, how did you manage to get it as warm in Seattle this week as it in in Vegas?), it's easy to miss some of the small but telling talks that frame the discussion. I'm the first to admit that I'm all atwitter waiting for Thursday's pwn-any-iPhone vulnerability reveal, but on Wednesday I'm sitting with Qualys's report on the state of vulnerabilites out in the world, enjoying it much as one enjoys the Up series of movies.

The Up documentary series, for those who haven't Netflixed it, is following 14 British kids through their lives, interviewing them at 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, and 49 so far. (The series started in 1964.) The concept is based on the old Jesuit saying, "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," and the filmmakers are watching to see if that's true -- if the rich kids stay rich, if the kids in unsettled homes grew up to have unsettled homes of their own, and so forth. If potentials are pronouncements, in other words.

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Facebook feeds faceplant in third-party status tsunami

By Angela Gunn on July 30, 2009, 1:14 AM

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An apparent glitch in Facebook's settings has taken to pulling in updates from users' other services -- FriendFeed, Twitter, Mafia Wars and perhaps others -- whether or not it has been authorized to do so. Only uninstalling the relevant Facebook applications seems to quell the flood.

Aghast users were reporting late Wednesday that feeds from multiple services were appearing on their Facebook walls no matter what the current privacy settings might be. It's a potential privacy nightmare for users such as Kyle Sellers, who commented on a message board that "I specifically keep my accounts separate so I don't overwhelm my family with my political rantings. I have never been so furious with a web service before. I understand a service failing, but this seems both sinister and dishonest."

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Day 2 of Tenenbaum trial sees industry folk, family on the stand

By Angela Gunn on July 29, 2009, 10:20 AM

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Opening arguments Tuesday in Joel Tenenbaum's file-sharing trial covered both the you-don't-know-he-did and the so-what-if-he-did angles the defense advanced in pre-trial discussions, with various witnesses testifying that they hadn't used the "sublimeguy14@KaZaA" account on Mr. Tenenbaum's machine even as defense lead Charles Neeson told the jury that "Everyone could download [songs] for free. And millions and millions did. Joel was one of those millions."

Writing for Recording Industry vs The People, Mark Bourgeois supplied detailed information on the five witnesses and two items of deposition testimony presented on Tuesday. The depositions were given by Mr. Tenenbaum's sisters, who spoke about their brother's music tastes and said they'd never downloaded from his machine.

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Microsoft and Yahoo have sealed the deal

By Angela Gunn on July 28, 2009, 9:13 PM

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UPDATE: Microsoft and Yahoo issued joint statements this morning announcing their search partnership. As expected, Bing will power Yahoo's search and Yahoo will deal with sales, advertisement and "providing consumers with great experiences with the world's favorite online destinations and Web products."

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, "This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness. Microsoft and Yahoo! know there's so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search."

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Once more into the courtroom with The Pirate Bay

By Angela Gunn on July 28, 2009, 6:25 PM

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It seems as if the high-profile trial of The Pirate Bay's operators hasn't really changed much at all in the eyes of Hollywood, as thirteen studios have banded together to sue the site into closing down.

The case was filed in Stockholm District Court on Monday and requests that the site cease and desist from pointing to copyrighted material. According to a Swedish news site given access to the documentation, about 100 movies and TV shows are listed in the complaint. The complaint asks for an injunction to keep the site from operating and mentions compensation for court costs.

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Could a standards body force the iTunes-Pre issue?

By Angela Gunn on July 28, 2009, 9:21 AM

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Palm's plea to the USB Implementers Forum -- the nonprofit group organized by the companies that developed the USB spec -- is an interesting but potentially dangerous gambit for the Pre's home team.

Engineers at Palm re-established via a firmware upgrade the Pre's ability to connect to iTunes late Thursday evening, to the continued annoyance of Apple's closed-source partisans -- especially, no doubt, since Palm's John Traynor made a point of prefacing the news with Steve Jobs' "and one more thing" catchphrase. As it did in the previous workaround, the Pre's firmware now passes to iTunes a Vendor ID indicating it's an Apple device, allowing the phone to download content legally purchased by its user.

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Tenenbaum trial kicks off in Boston, sans fair use

By Angela Gunn on July 28, 2009, 9:17 AM

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A pre-trial ruling by the judge hearing the RIAA's case against Joel Tenenbaum -- only just pre-trial -- threw the defense's strategy in the copyright-infringement case into serious disarray just seven and a half hours before proceedings kicked off Monday morning.

The defense in Joel Tenenbaum's case, which is led by Charles Neeson of Harvard, has made it clear that they'd be arguing that Mr. Tenenbaum engaged in fair use when he shared on KaZaA the 30 songs at the heart of the trial. The RIAA moved to disallow that line of defense, and Judge Nancy Gertner agreed to think it over... which she did until early Monday morning. Concerned parties received an e-mail with her ruling at 1:37am.

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Associated Press takes heat for article-tagging plan

By Angela Gunn on July 27, 2009, 4:08 PM

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A week in the blogosphere without a teapot-sized tempest is a week without... well, probably electrical power if not gravity. Last week's target for tumult was the Associated Press, which announced Thursday that it would implement a new system to detect unlicensed use of its content and promptly fell into a swamp of blogger fury, with all parties eventually screaming "fair use!" -- to the amusement and edification of absolutely no one.

The AP's news registry project, which is slated to roll out in November, will add an "informational wrapper" to its material, designed to alert the service to wholesale grabs by other web sites. Text content will be wrapped first, followed by photos and video.

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After 9-year cookie ban, US Government wants to start tracking you online again

By Angela Gunn on July 27, 2009, 3:10 PM

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Nine years ago, the Office of Management and Budget issued a directive banning Federal agencies from dropping cookies on visitors' computers. On Friday, the White House called for public discussion about whether that policy should continue. Whether you see that as a nod to improved privacy protections and a smarter userbase, or sigh at the encroachments tracking tech has made in a decade, is perhaps a matter of perspective.

The announcement, blogged on the White House site by federal CIO Vivek Kundra and OMB associate administrator for information and regulatory affairs Michael Fitzpatrick and reproduced nearly verbatim in the proposal's listing in the Federal Register (PDF available), says that the point of the policy review is "to develop a new policy that allows the Federal Government to continue to protect the privacy of people who visit Federal websites while, at the same time, making these websites more user-friendly, providing better customer service, and allowing for enhanced web analytics."

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Live long, Prosper...and crunch those numbers

By Angela Gunn on July 24, 2009, 10:29 AM

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This episode of Recovery is brought to you -- literally -- by the free Wi-Fi at the Sacramento Amtrak station. Isn't it funny how the train station can offer it but most airports don't. Funny. Ha.

I spent some time this week bopping around Prosper, the peer-to-peer lending site. I'd signed up with them several years back, intending to test the system for a write-up at Another Publication. I liked what I saw so much so that I stuck with it until economic events last year caused the service to go temporarily dormant. They're back now and I thought I'd see how my people were doing.

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What's Now: Apple covers up its 'FirePod' problem, backs off its Bluwiki threats

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff on July 23, 2009, 9:17 AM

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Apple flambé? Exploding iPod reports hushed up

July 23, 2009 • They got that boom boom OW! -- After years of trouble and seven months of investigation, a report by KIRO-TV reporter Amy Clancy unearthed an 800-page Consumer Product Safety Commission report detailing a disturbing number of iPods that overheated and either burst into flames or started smoking.

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Security jujitsu, or, How to improve your odds despite your users

By Angela Gunn on July 22, 2009, 7:09 PM

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A friend and I were talking the other day about how people are by and large not just oblivious to, but downright hostile about, the simplest security practices -- in fact, the simpler the request, the greater the level of grumbling. What to do, besides don a bandolier of tasers and a t-shirt that says "GO AHEAD, ASK ME AGAIN WHY YOU CAN'T MAKE YOUR PASSWORD THE SAME AS YOUR USERNAME?"

To cheer me up (yes, I have been troubleshooting a family member's computer; how did you guess?), my friend told me about a corporate-cultural tradition at a firm at which he recently consulted. The rules around that office require that anyone leaving their desk log out of the system. And if they don't? Their machine is fair game for co-workers, who by tradition go into the culprit's e-mail and send out a "cc:all" message announcing that they're going out for tacos, and would anybody else like some?

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What's Now: Microsoft confirms Windows 7 three-license discount 'family pack'

By Angela Gunn and the Betanews Staff on July 22, 2009, 9:30 AM

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Your reporter has a theory about suicide, which goes: No one knows why the hell anyone does anything. That said, if your employer searches your home, puts you in solitary confinement, and uses "inappropriate interrogation techniques" on you, maybe 25-year-old Sun Danyong's decision to jump off a 12-story building makes sense to you. And if you're the company (Foxconn) and the alleged infraction involves a missing top-secret iPhone prototype, well... A little Foxconn history in a moment, but first, gather the family 'round the PC.

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