Skype is Ruined by Advertisements

It seems that the popular P2P calls are no longer free, with the services offered by Skype being plagued by huge display adverts. The company is now bringing in the feature known as “Conversation Ads”, which will pop up within the calling window when you are talking to someone. Perhaps, the Skype marketing department believes that the users will see the ads and start talking about their content to the caller.

Actually, it’s something that advertising people always believe in – that their product is so good that the consumers will want to talk about it. However, in reality the callers will be swearing at the ad.

Skype admitted that the advertisements will be targeted at the consumers based on their location, gender and age. The representatives of the company explained that on a 1:1 audio call, the callers will see material that could spark additional topics of conversation, relevant to the users, as well as “highlight unique and local brand experiences”.

Apparently, people have nothing better to do in a consumption-based capitalism other than discussing the goods randomly flashed on their screens. Meanwhile, Skype marketing department believes that the advertising is a great way for the company to create interactivity between the users’ circle of friends and family and the brands they care about.

The experts suspect that the advertisements won’t be small as well, promising the display ads to be just as big as the picture of someone you are trying to talk to. Another hint the observers have made is that the adverts will pop up during Skype-to-Skype audio calls for Windows users. Nevertheless, only those will be affected who don’t have Skype Credit or subscriptions.

The company claims that there won’t be any degradation of the call quality and that the advertisements will be silent and non-expanding. In addition, the most discontent Skype users will be allowed to opt out of personalized advertisements, though it is a bit tricky to do. If you are one of them, then go to the Privacy menu in Tools and choose Options of Skype for Windows OS. Although you will still get advertisements, those will relate only to your location rather than hit your personal information.

Added: Tuesday, June 19th, 2012 Category: Recent Headlines Involving File Sharing > Ridiculous Criminal Trials Tags:ET, p2p, Torrent, Piracy, Peer To Peer, Network, Hackers, Internet,BitTorrent, Google, utorrent, bitcomet, extratorrent, 2010,www.extrattorrent.com

An American federal grand jury in Los Angeles believes that British justice won’t be enough for a 20-year-old hacker. A Grand jury has indicted Ryan Cleary on charges connected with the numerous attacks by the LulzSec hacktivists, whose victims were the Fox and PBS television networks, as well as Sony’s movie and TV studio.

Now the guy is awaiting prosecution over similar charges in his motherland, the UK. However, the America is worried that he won’t have to suffer from one of its backward trillion year prison sentences, while in the United States he could be locked up for 25 years.

The Grand Jury is the first step to get Cleary to the United States where he would face the music for crimes he’s done over the pond. Ryan is accused of using botnets in order to steal confidential data, deface websites, and attack servers.

The Feds told the press that the UK man is an experienced hacker, who was controlling his own botnet, using various sophisticated methods. Meanwhile, Ryan’s broad geographic scope affected a lot of organizations and individuals.

The charges of the United States are based on the evidence of a super-grass Hector Xavier Monsegur. The latter pleaded guilty to hacking-related charges and disclosed the FBI information on his fellow hackers. The FBI has released an indictment saying that Ryan Cleary and his unnamed accomplices have hacked into the web systems of News Corp (this one is really ironic), as well as of Sony Pictures Entertainment, where they stole confidential user data. Aside from this, Cleary is also charged with defacing the PBS site and starting DDoS attacks against one of the online gaming sites and UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency.

However, nobody can explain why exactly Ryan should be charged in an American court with hacking a UK website. The matter is that Cleary is already charged with that in the United Kingdom, so being punished twice for the same offence would be very unfair.

As for the FBI, they magnanimously admitted that the authorities of the United States would “allow the prosecution to take its course” against the hacker overseas prior to deciding whether to seek his extradition to the US. The experts guess that anything less than a British hanging is the request of the US for Cleary to be extradited. 

UK Privacy Outfits Opposed Communications Bill

UK government’s justification of the Communications Bill seems to have angered privacy groups. They claim that the plans will tarnish everyone with the same “guilty” brush.

Theresa May is expected today to push ahead with a draft of the legislation, which suggests to allow police access to people’s social networking and online activity, including emails, gaming and P2P phone calls. When outlining plans to store this data for a year, the Home Secretary claimed that it was necessary to help keep up and target criminals like terrorists and sex offenders.

Nevertheless, privacy groups explained that the legislation in question could violate human rights and tarnish everyone in the United Kingdom with the same “guilty” brush. The Open Rights Group believes that more consideration is necessary to make sure that the law is in line with human rights. As a result, the law could be challenged in a human rights court and pushed back in order to protect the public.

The matter is that the authorities will be able to reveal the identities of whistleblowers, celebrities and journalists. Since it will all be through police will, the industry could be moving into very dangerous territory.

Meanwhile, the privacy campaign outfit Big Brother Watch shared the same concerns, saying that in our free society innocent people shouldn’t justify why the authorities can’t spy on them. In fact, the proposed legislation goes against the Coalition Agreement and Conservative pre-election policy. Moreover, it is called basically illiberal, intrusive and unable to improve national security.

Privacy International points out that in the United Kingdom, the industries have historically operated under the presumption that the authorities had no business peering into the lives of people unless there was good reason to do so. Now, the Communications Bill would reverse that presumption and change the relationship between people and authorities.

Thus far, police and security services are able to access details of online visits and other communications information only if it’s stored by phone or web companies. But the suggested legislation will provide automatic access to the police and many other agencies, including NHS trusts and the Environment Agency. All of them will be able to make a case before Parliament if they want to access this data.

চলে যাচ্ছেন ফেইসবুকের প্রযুক্তি প্রধান

বিশ্বের সবচেয়ে জনপ্রিয় সামাজিক যোগাযোগ ওয়েবসাইট ফেইসবুকের প্রযুক্তি বিষয়ক প্রধান ব্রিট টেইলর জানিয়েছেন, আসছে সপ্তায় তিনি পদত্যাগ করতে যাচ্ছেন। নতুন একটি কোম্পানির কাজ শুরু করার জন্যই তিনি ফেইসবুক ছাড়ছেন বলে বিবিসি জানিয়েছে। ফেইসবুক ছেড়ে যাওয়া প্রসেঙ্গ টেইলর বলেন, “চলে যেতে খুব খারাপ লাগছে, কিন্তু নতুন একটি প্রতিষ্ঠান (কোম্পানি) শুরু করার বিষয়ে আমি ভীষণ রোমাঞ্চিত হয়ে আছি।” তিনি আরো বলেন, “এ ধরনের প্রন্থান কখনোই খুব সহজ নয়। কিন্তু আমি এই দল (ফেইসবুক) এবং তার নেতৃত্বের বিষয়ে অত্যন্ত আত্মবিশ্বাসী।” টেইলরের চলে যাওয়ার ঘোষণার প্রতিক্রিয়ায় ফেইসবুকের প্রতিষ্ঠাতা মার্ক জুকারবার্গ বলেছেন, টেইলরের সঙ্গে কাজ করা অত্যন্ত আনন্দের অভিজ্ঞতা যা তিনি উপভোগ করেছেন। ফেইসবুকের জন্য টেইলর ও তার দল যে অবদান রেখেছেন তার জন্য কৃতজ্ঞতা প্রকাশ করার পাশাপাশি তাদের জন্য গর্ববোধ করার কথাও ব্যক্ত করেছেন জুকারবার্গ। গত মাসে ফেইসবুক তার কোম্পানির শেয়ার ছাড়ে নাসদাক পুঁজিবাজারে। এতে করে কোম্পানিটির অনেক কর্মকর্তাই রাতারাতি মিলিয়নিয়ারে পরিণত হয়েছেন। তখন পর্যবেক্ষকেরা ধারণা করেছিলেন, কেউ না কেউ বিষয়টিকে অন্যদিকে নিয়ে যাবেন। কিছু দিনের মধ্যেই ফেইসবুকের শেয়ারে পতন হয়। ৩৮ ডলারে বাজারে শেয়ার ছাড়ার পর এর বর্তমান মূল্য শেয়ার প্রতি ৩০ ডলারে নেমে এসেছে।

ISP To Challenge Pirate Bay Blocking Order In The Supreme Court

After being ordered to block its subscribers to block from accessing The Pirate Bay, ISP Elisa indicated it would fight the court ruling by taking it to appeal. Yesterday the Court of Appeal delivered an initial blow to the Finnish service provider by upholding the original ruling handed down in 2011. Undeterred, Elisa says it will take its case all the way to the country’s Supreme Court.

During May 2011, the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) and the Finnish branch of IFPI announced that they had filed a lawsuit at the District Court in Helsinki.

The action, against Finnish ISP Elisa, required a total blockade of The Pirate Bay and was yet another example of rightsholders attempting to shift the burden for copyright enforcement onto third parties in the technology sector.

But unlike ISPs overseas such as Virgin Media and O2 in the UK, who recently blocked The Pirate Bay without even attempting a fight, Elisa was bullish from the start, describing the censorship strategy as “flawed.”

Elisa’s fight, however, had only just begun. In October 2011, the Helsinki District Courtordered the ISP to block the domain names and IP-addresses of the world’s most-visited torrent site. Elisa immediately announced an appeal, but in the meantime would still have to block The Pirate Bay or face a 100,000 euro fine.

Yesterday, Elisa received yet another blow. The Court of Appeal rejected the ISP’s application and upheld the District Court’s ruling from October 26 2011. The Pirate Bay will remain blocked to all Elisa customers, at least for now, but the road doesn’t end here. The ISP has announced that will take its case all the way to the country’s Supreme Court.

“It is legally very complex and difficult, so it is necessary to receive a preliminary ruling from the Supreme Court,” Elisa Business Director Henri Korpi said in a statement.

“We attach importance to intellectual property rights and the players should focus on measures that can truly reduce piracy in practice by distributing content on the web at a reasonable price and at the same time as the rest of their distribution.”

Elisa’s attitude of getting to the root of the problem rather than blocking it is shared by UK business ISP Fluidata. Yesterday their account manager Andi Soric wrote about the out-of-date and precarious position of the recording industry’s business model.

“Self-made artists can now upload audio and use media platforms such as YouTube and MySpace to broadcast their talent to millions of people at virtually no cost,” Soric wrote. “In my view, this can only be positive for music and society as a whole and makes you wonder how many stars have been missed in the last 50 years due to the costs attached to recording and distributing music.”

But even though systems like BitTorrent have driven distribution costs down to virtually nil, artists hoping to use torrent sites like The Pirate Bay as a springboard are increasingly finding their paths blocked by the recording and movie industries. That negative position will only get worse in the months to come.

Intelligent Cyber War Is on the Way

Last week, NATO's Cyber Defense Center held its 4rth annual conference, where it provided security experts with the unique chance to scare the bejesus out of military experts.

According to cyber experts’ reports, the rapid advances in digital war technology might result in a new generation of “intelligent cyber weapons”. Meanwhile, these new weapons can appear all but unstoppable. Enn Tyugu, the NATO IT expert, thinks that such new weapons won’t only be hard to stop, but also hard to be controlled by the users. As such, they may start living their own lives and that’s where fiction becomes reality. Nevertheless, the expert is talking not about Skynet, but about virus attacks like Stuxnet.

The experts explained that such malware is quite autonomous, and is able to operate independently in an unfriendly environment and may sometimes become almost impossible to control. That can result in cyber conflict launched by these agents themselves.

Ilmar Tamm, the head of the NATO Cyber Defense Center, emphasized that Stuxnet and Flame have indicated another form of cyber threats that is expected to bring many challenges to all security experts. In addition, the number of cyber conflicts is currently increasing and it’s important to understand how to classify events and participants.

Nevertheless, American cyber defense expert Kenneth Geers claimed during the conference that the most powerful cyber weapon today is a little bit more down to earth. In fact, it’s just good old propaganda, which can ruin the world just as super new cyber weapons.

MPAA vs. Google on Their Opening Celebration

The search giant Google was celebrating the opening of the first drive-in movie theater around seventy-nine years ago with one of its animated signatures. Of course, it became a perfect opportunity for the MPAA’s CEO to pick on Google again.

In his recent blog post, the MPAA’s chairman said that he applauds the tribute, but the search giant’s “love” for the entertainment industry should extend beyond doodles. Therefore, Google’s anti-piracy policies should be stricter. In other words, he didn’t say anything new to us. He claimed that every day the industry and search engine aren’t working toward a shared solution is just another day that the hard work and ingenuity of people working in the US movie and TV community is being ripped off by the criminals around over globe. In other words, it is just another day that the US ideas aren’t being protected.

The attempts of the MPAA’s head to protect intellectual property are named SOPA and PIPA – two bills that were strongly boycotted by many online giants, including Facebook, Google, and Wikipedia. The Internet corporations argued that the measures of both acts would definitely have a negative impact on free speech.

Ever since, the MPAA admitted that both suggested bills were “dead”, but still insisted that it would continue its efforts to improve the relationship between the largest studios and Silicon Valley. In his blog post, the outfit’s chairman cited Ari Emanuel who recently said that the search engine should be more serious about filtering illegal material. As Emanuel’s beloved on-screen alter-ego Ari Gold, who was brought to life by exactly the hard-working US citizens they aim to protect, would say: “let’s hug it out”.

thanks to TorrentFreak for the source of the article

Experts Warned of Cloud Complexity

One of the Yale researchers has warned that cloud-based systems might melt down with the systems becoming more and more complex.

Bryan Ford has written a paper, which he is going to present to the USENIX HotCloud 2012 conference soon. The paper says that with the use of cloud computing now becoming more mainstream, major operational “meltdowns” might arise. The matter is that everything will get quite complex, and complexity will cause an accident.

Ford explained that as diverse cloud services share more fluidly and aggressively multiplexed hardware resource pools, the probability arises that unexpected things will happen, including unpredictable interactions between load-balancing and other reactive mechanisms. This may result in dynamic instabilities, also known as “meltdowns”.

According to the experts report, it was a little like the intertwining, complex relationships and structures which could promote global financial crisis. He pointed out that new cloud services may emerge, which actually resell, trade, or speculate on complex “'derivatives” like financial trading industries.

Such components will be maintained and deployed by different companies, which, due competition, won’t share details (if possible) about the internal operation of its services. As a result, the cloud industry might face speculative bubbles. The experts predict occasional large-scale failures due to composite cloud services which have weaknesses that do not reveal until those bubbles burst.

Meanwhile, there’s no solution to the problem. The only advice that the experts can give is that providers should release detailed data about their system dependencies to some special 3rd party that offers cloud reliability analysis services.

Flame and Stuxnet Worms Were Brothers

According to Kaspersky’s security labs, the Flame and Stuxnet worms, both developed to tear apart critical IT infrastructure in the countries opposed to American interests, shared the same platform,at least once, in the early stages.

Kaspersky’s research discovered that Flame and Stuxnet worms were actually related. Although it is unclear whether they were separated brothers or distant cousins, they definitely originated from the same source in the early stages.

Kaspersky discovered that a module from an early version of Stuxnet warm (Resource 207) was a Flame plugin – an encrypted DLL file with an executable file similar to Flame's code. Then the Duqu Trojan emerged in reports, though it was developed as a backdoor rather than to hack infrastructure. Kaspersky noted similarities between Duqu and Stuxnet and concluded that they were both made with the same attack platform – the Tilded.

In other words, when Stuxnet was created in 2009, Flame already existed, and at least one of its modules was used in Stuxnet – the one designed to spread the infection by USB. Kaspersky confirmed that it was identical in both viruses. However, the plugin module in question was later removed from the worm and replaced by the one exploiting different vulnerabilities. This proves that there were two development teams working independently, but some experts believe that the cooperation could have continued.

According to Kaspersky’s chief security expert, they are confident that Flame and Tilded were different platforms used to create multiple cyber weapons. Despite the fact that they had different architectures, the teams are believed to share source code in the early stages of development. The Democrats were strangely enthusiastic to admit Stuxnet’s responsibility, but Israeli officials claimed that Israeli intelligence started a cyber campaign several years earlier, in order to damage Iran’s nuclear program.

Meanwhile, the press pointed out that its sources understood the sensitivity and the timing of the matter, perhaps giving a nod to the election campaign. Therefore, no-one from the researchers and reporters isn’t going to be dragged into a battle over taking credit.

Subtitles Might Be Illegal

One may be very surprised when asked whether the movie subtitles may be illegal, but the industry now sees a new debate here. The matter is that an individual operating a subtitle file-sharing portal was scoped by the law a while ago.

Norsub.com is a website which used to provide subtitles for films and TV shows. However, a Norwegian court of law believes that the website comes in conflict with copyright legislation.

The court ruled that the site operator has to close down the website and pay $2,500 for copyright violation, according to industry report. This precedent can show how the United States treat film and music studios subtitles as well. For some reason, the American entertainment industries subtitles are also falling under copyright legislation, because they are regarded as film scripts. As you might know, film subtitles in the file-sharing community usually come in the form of text files.

Worse still, these user-generated movie subtitles are regarded as the ones that infringe the copyrighted material, like any type of BitTorrent material today. In other words, if someone has decided somehow to translate a film in a language which is not currently available, he or she will be treated as a pirate and might face a lawsuit. Nevertheless, such cases were reported to be very rare until now.

By the way, a similar case actually reached the courts of the United States. This means that you should better think twice before translating a movie and create subtitles to help other nations understand the movie you like. Unfortunately, the courts seem to lack common sense.

thanks to TorrentFreak for the source of the article