ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Anonymous has begun publishing internal Bank of America emails that the group says document mortgage fraud at Bank of America. Anonymous initiated a series of actions against websites and corporations that assisted the US government’s attempt to isolate WikiLeaks, including PayPal, Visa, HBGary, and Bank of America. The source of the leaked documents is a former Balboa Insurance employee (Balboa Insurance is a subsidiary of Bank of America). Soon after the documents were published, the site hosting the documents was under a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), making some of the documents unavailable. The BBC is reporting a document it found on the website “appears to show an employee of Balboa Insurance asking a colleague to delete certain loan identifying numbers from their computer system.” It remains unknown if this document release is the same as the release planned by WikiLeaks.

Cryptography

RSA disclosed this week that it was subject to what it called an “extremely sophisticated attack” on its cryptography technology. One vector of the attack is apparently RSA’s SecurID technology, a token system that generates a new number every 30 seconds that is appended to a password for secure systems logins.

Internet

AT&T is implementing bandwidth caps on its broadband customers. DSL users will have bandwidth caps of 150GB per month; fiber customers will have a 250GB per month bandwidth cap. Overages will be charged at US$10 per month per 50 GB. With one side of its mouth, AT&T argues that only about two percent of its customers use this much bandwidth each month. If true, why in the world would AT&T go to the trouble and expense of implementing the bandwidth caps? This is the same reasoning behind AT&T’s decision to place bandwidth caps on its iPhone data plans. AT&T isn’t the first to implement broadband bandwidth caps on its customers. Comcast implemented 250GB bandwidth caps on its broadband customer shortly after it was caught throttling BitTorrent traffic on its network. As Janko Roettgers, writing for GigaOm, reports, the bandwidth caps will impact video streaming services like Netflix the most. A single 720p high-definition video uses about 3.5GB of bandwidth. Roettgers notes that watching high-definition video for about three hours per day is about all you’ll get.

The US military has spent US$2.7 million to contract with a startup—an “online persona management service”—to create fake online personae “sock puppets” to manipulate social media conversations by spreading pro-American, pro-military propaganda. The service will allow a single member of the US military services to control up to 10 fake identities. Because it’s illegal to address US audiences with the subterfuge, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and Pashto languages will be used.

Media

The New York Times rolled out its paywall to Canadians this week, with readers in other countries—including the US—subject to the new terms on 28 March. Home delivery subscribers get unlimited online and device access. Everyone can read up to 20 articles each month on the Times’ website free of charge. The “Top News” section on devices will remain free of charge; all of the other sections will require a digital subscription. There are three digital subscription levels available: The website and smartphone app access is US$15 every four weeks; The website and tablet app access is US$20 every four weeks; and complete digital access is US$35 every four weeks. What’s especially disturbing is that if you’re a print subscriber, you can get the digital subscriptions for one-third as much. That, friends, is an abject, perverses failure. Holes in the paywall exist. “Sidewall” access via search engines and social networking will be available free of charge, but access via Google links will be limited to five per day per individual. The only remaining question is how long before the Times is no longer the US paper of record. My guess is 29 March 2011. Cory Doctorow, writing for BoingBoing, outlines precisely why the Times paywall will fail: “No one will be able to figure out how it works.” An interesting side note is that I received an offer of free access through the rest of 2011 courtesy of Lincoln in a supposedly “exclusive” offer. When I clicked the link, the Times’ website reported that I had already received free access.

Politics

For the life of me, I’ll never understand aspirational politics. The Republicans have a bewildering aversion to making the rich pay their fair share of taxes that’s just infuriating. Dan Salomone, Minnesota’s acting revenue commissioner released a study showing that, as Baird Helgeson, writing for the Star Tribune, reports, “... 90 percent of the state’s earners paid an average of 12.3 percent of their income in state and local taxes in 2008. The wealthiest 10 percent of households earning more than US$130,000 paid an average of 10.3 percent.” The governor, Mark Dayton, campaigned on raising taxes on the rich, and he’s the one for whom the entire state voted. Salomone told Helgeson, “Minnesota’s tax system is more regressive than it was a decade ago.” Minnesota House Speaker Kurt Zellers (R-Maple Grove) tells Helgeson “... the answer is to lower taxes on those shouldering most of the burden rather than raising them at the high end.” At the same time the Republican-controlled state legislature is hell-bent on reducing aid for (mostly Democratic) cities while holding off on reducing aid for (mostly Republican) suburbs. It’s clearly time for the cities to start charging suburbanites for the services they use. Want to bring your suburban attack vehicle into the city? Fine, here’s what you’re going to pay. Oh, you want to park that monster? Great, here’s the fee.

Publishing

Traditional publishers have so far agreed to provide ebooks to libraries with an agreement that the title can be loaned an unlimited number of times. It makes sense—there are no bindings to break or pages to tear in an ebook. Julie Bosman, writing for the New York Times, reports HaperCollins has begun to enforce new restrictions on its ebooks, limiting the number of times each title can be loaned to 26. After a title has been checked out 26 times, the library must purchase a new copy, even though there’s nothing wrong with the existing one. Accordingly, librarians across the US are calling for a boycott of HarperCollins’ ebooks. “People just felt gobsmacked,” Anne Silvers Lee of the Free Library of Philadelphia, told Bosman. “We want ebooks in our collections, our customers are telling us they want ebooks, so I want to be able to get ebooks from all the publishers. I also need to do it in a way that is not going to be exorbitantly expensive.” The Free Library of Philadelphia has temporarily stopped buying HarperCollins ebooks. Meanwhile, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan avoid the situation altogether, refusing to provide ebooks to libraries at all.

Spirituality

Augustus Owsley Stanley III (“Bear”) died in a car accident near his home in Queensland, Australia. Bear was one of the most formidable people on the planet, in every possible meaning of the word. Immensely intelligent, intellectually ornery, and as far “out there” as anyone, Bear had one modality: Quietly, privately intense. Best known for creating the best, most pure lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on the planet, there was so very much more to Bear (Alembic’s Wall of Sound, anyone? How about Meyer Sound? How about actually understanding the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus‘s The Kybalion? And being able to make it relevant in terms of modern-day alchemy? The live show stereo mix? Stage monitors?). Seth Schiesel has a remarkable elegy for the New York Times. Joel Selvin’s 2007 piece for the San Francisco Chronicle is worth reading as, of course, is Robert Greenfield’s same-month profile for Rolling Stone. While you’re at it, kindly ignore Michael Walker’s misguided attempt in the New York Times to commodify both Bear and the movement of which he was a part. In all of his endeavors, Bear strived solely for quality, nothing else.

Technology

Third-party developers have accused Apple of intentionally slowing down web apps running on the company’s iOS devices. Most apps are written in Cocoa, Apple’s proprietary development platform. These apps are under Apple’s tight control and available only through Apple’s App Store. But web apps can also be written in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript outside of any overt Apple control. These apps run in the Safari web browser on iOS devices and in advanced browsers on other mobile platforms. The developers allege that when these web apps are added to the iOS home screen, they run significantly slower than as a browser bookmark. Apple has updated the JavaScript engine in mobile Safari but not in the general iOS, hence the discrepancy. For this we get charges of a conspiracy? For an updated browser and an attendant lag in the operating system? Really?

Cory Doctorow has written an exceptionally insightful column for the Guardian. In “Beware the spyware model of technology—its flaws are built in,” Doctorow argues that any regulation applied to a computing device applies to all computing devices. Similarly, advancement in one generalized area of computing usually migrates to all computing areas. Doctorow notes that the same holds true for “anything that harms general-purpose computers and networks has the knock-on effect of undermining all the disciplines that thrive on them.” The entertainment cartel’s attempt to extend copyright liability to intermediaries, for example. And it doesn’t stop there. Not nearly.