370 Russian Bloggers Registered Under New Law

Back in 2014, Russia enforced a new “bloggers” law, which requires bloggers and social media users who have over 3,000 daily visitors to register with the government. As a result, Intel had shut down its Russian forums and blogs. Despite the fact that the law was enforced quite a lot of time ago, only less than 370 blogs and social media accounts have currently registered.

When asked why bloggers would want to register, Russian authorities claimed that registering could help attract more advertising dollars. In the meantime, the blogger law is intended to improve the quality of Russian blogging, by lowering the amount of profanity, unverified information, and libel. However, the critics believe that the law is aimed at silencing criticism.

Another interesting fact is that 3 of the 370 blogs on the registry contain the word “fuck” in their names: one of them is the community “Fuckbet,” a sports analysis website, another is “Fuck_Humor”, a group specializing in amusing memes.

Back in 2014, Russian officials threatened to block social networks like Twitter and 

Facebook

 for not cooperating with the new registry plans. The most hilarious move of the authorities was the following: since Twitter fails to cooperate on the registry requirement, Russian Twitter users were asked to post screenshots of their analytics page to show that they're getting too many visitors. This doesn’t seem to help, because the 10 Twitter users who are currently on the blogger registry are pro-Kremlin media figures and Internet celebrities.

At the moment, it remains unknown what Russia will do with bloggers who have failed to register. Anyway, the bloggers law is still concerning for supporters of free speech.

Silk Road Trial Started

Ross William Ulbricht is accused of murder-for-hire, with the Silk Road trial finally starting for a San Francisco man charged with operating an Internet black market where drugs were traded.

US district judge overruled defense objections, concluding that prosecutors could provide evidence about 6 murder plots into the trial. In respond, prosecutors claim that Ulbricht operated an underground online portal known as Silk Road, where over 100,000 customers purchased hundreds of kilograms of cocaine, heroin and other drugs. Ross Ulbricht has pleaded not guilty and denies that he was known as “Dread Pirate Roberts” online.

The government alleges that Ross Ulbricht tried to protect his illegal business by asking others to kill people who posed a threat to the Silk Road. The judge admitted that the evidence was prejudicial to the defendant and injects an element of violence into the case, but that prejudicial effect was reduced by the government’s stipulation that no actual murders happened.

In the meantime, the judge added that the charges in the case were very serious, because Ross Ulbricht was charged not with just taking part in drug distribution conspiracy, but with creating and running an Internet criminal entity of a huge scale, which could bring him tens of millions of dollars in fees. This means that evidence that Ross was trying to protect this sprawling business by soliciting murders-for-hire is therefore not unduly prejudicial.

Silk Road operator was arrested by FBI more than a year ago at a public library, where agents seized his computer. According to the government, Ross launched an online black market four years ago, claiming that he wanted to design a place for people to buy anything anonymously. The government pointed out that a spreadsheet found on Ulbricht’s computer listed “sr inc” as an asset worth $104 million.

Ross William Ulbricht was charged in Manhattan with conspiring to commit drugs trafficking, as well as with conspiring to commit computer hacking and money laundering. The prosecution claims that this scheme has been working for two and a half years. Ulbricht is also charged in federal court in Baltimore.

The industry observers admit that if convicted in both cases, Ross could face up to life sentence.

Internet in Australia Gets Slower

Australia was supposed to develop its broadband infrastructure further, along with other developed nations, but the country somehow found itself dropping well in terms of Internet speeds.

The country’s average connection speeds is only on the 44 place, down 4 lines from the 2013 report which estimated online connection speeds and broadband uptake worldwide. Some believe that the drop-off is the result of delay, indecision and policy change on the national broadband network, which is the fibre optic network implemented nationally. The observers complain that each policy change with respect to the national broadband network resulted in a 2-year delay in infrastructure being rolled out.

With the Labor government, the initial intention was to create a fibre-to-the-node network, but then the plans changed to fibre-to-the-premise broadband. Since the national network couldn’t use Telstra’s copper network, it had to build its own network, and this could take another four years. However, when the country had a change of government, the approach to Internet also changed to the initial plan.

In the meantime, the creators of the national network and the government also face pressure from the United States that pushes to change the definition of broadband. The definition of broadband Internet was suggested to change from 4Mbps download and 1Mbps upload to 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up. This change would raise more doubts if the network is not engineered correctly.

To help Australia to move its broadband rankings to at least the top 10, the country needs to get on and do it, because any more delay would have just the opposite effect. In the meantime, many industry observers are critical of the initial approach, saying that copper could slow broadband connection speeds by up to 50%.

Google Received 345m Takedown Notices in 2014

The tech giant was required to take down 345 million links to copyrighted material last year, which is almost double the amount requested the year before. Over 17% of those requests came from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the collective body for the British music business – this entity submitted over 60 million notices.

According to the media reports, most of those notices were honored, and the requested links have been removed from Google’s search results. But not in all cases – sometimes Google takes no action if it decides that the links do not lead to any copyright infringement or they have already been taken down.

According to the statistics, most takedown notices were provided for three domains: rapidgator.net, 4shared.com, and uploaded.net – each of them accounted for over 5 million requests.

Google admitted that online piracy still remains a challenge, and the company takes it seriously, developing and deploying anti-piracy solutions. In response, the BPI claims that when people search for music or video, they should get legal results and nothing else. The agency insists that Google’s efforts should guide more consumers to such legitimate services as Spotify, Deezer and iTunes, not to fraudulent torrent or hosting services. In this case, such efforts would represent a step forward for musicians, labels and other content creators. This is why the British Phonographic Industry will continue negotiations with the search engines and government to make sure such measures bring result. However, the anti-piracy outfit recognized that Google does realize the need to take further action.

Apparently, the entertainment industry believes that Google goes not far enough, because it refuses to automatically delist such illegal services as The Pirate Bay.

Netflix Can’t Block VPN Users

Apparently, Netflix appeared to have hefty financial incentive not to block members using VPN services. The matter is that over 30 million of its subscribers live in countries where Netflix is actually unavailable if not for the use of location-masking software. This is how many people have to opt for the technological loophole in order to watch material not licensed for their country.

According to statistics, the streaming video provider has over 20m users in China alone, although Netflix has not yet launched in that country. This means that all those users have to connect via VPNs. However, not every Netflix “user” is a subscriber to the service, because many people watch it at a friend’s house or share a username with others. A few months ago, Netflix had 16 million international members, which is far less than the total number of users of the service. Anyway, the service won’t block considerable levels of traffic coming from outside their official countries, as it still earns money from it.

And Netflix has already denied the claims that it has changed its policy on VPN, though it can’t officially welcome VPN users either, because its fraught relationship with content providers hinges on them enforcing international restrictions. People who had troubles with accessing the service via VPNs were told that nothing has changed in Netflix policy.

In the meantime, the recent hack of the Sony Pictures movie studio showed just how much Hollywood studios care about VPN usage, because emails from 2013 showed a Sony executive complaining that Netflix fails to closely monitor where some of its subscribers are registering from. Beside, Netflix was accused of taking no steps to tackle circumvention websites that allow users to subscribe illegally. Australia and South Africa were mentioned as countries with high Netflix penetration despite absence of legal Netflix services. The statistics show that 5% of online users in those nations used Netflix in December 2014.

It is believed that accessing better entertainment content is the most common reason for using virtual private networks. Besides, accessing social networks is big in such regions as China. Finally, quite a lot of people use them to hide their identity, especially in France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

iOS Developers Criticized Apple

The new app of the digital rights group EFF was released only for Android smartphones, because its developers criticized the terms of Apple’s developer agreement. The Alerts app of the Electronic Frontier Foundation will show news on its campaigns and encourage users to take action by sharing it online or emailing politicians.

The EFF developers claimed they could not agree to the outrageous terms in Apple’s Developer Agreement and the company’s DRM requirements, as they are bad for developers and users alike.

For example, the EFF disagrees with Apple’s bar on app makers making public statements about the terms, its ban on reverse engineering and the fact that Apple must approve any releases and can remotely disable applications. What the EFF didn’t like most was the requirement to include digital rights management in its iPhone app. Apparently, most of developers just have to sign the agreement because the Apple App store is a huge market and can hardly be ignored.

At the moment, Apple has over 9 million registered developers for its Mac and iOS platforms and 1.3m apps available on iOS’ App Store. The iOS developers have earned over $20bn so far, with iOS users spending over $10bn on apps and in-app purchases in 2013 alone. But now Apple faces more public criticism of its policies, with the iOS developers pointing to “the rapid decline of Apple’s software”.

In the meantime, other developers went public over approval issues with features in their iOS applications, sparking wider discussion about how the tech giant enforces its App Store policies. Apparently, the EFF continues this debate, being keen to pinpoint the individual clauses that may infringe developers’ digital rights.

4/5 of “Dark Net” Traffic Is to Child Abuse Portals!!

According to a study of Tor “hidden services” portals, over 80% of the “dark net” online traffic comes from sites that offer child-abuse content. For over 6 months, the researchers have analyzed traffic to websites through Tor’s technology, which is normally used to hide their addresses from search engines.

According to the findings, while sites with pedophile content make up only 2% of the estimated 45,000 hidden services websites on the Internet, they account for 83% of visits without considering automated “botnet” traffic. The research focuses on online portals that used Tor’s technology to hide themselves, not on the online behavior of individual Internet users who use Tor, as they don’t spend 84% of their time visiting child-abuse services.

It turned out that less than 1/6 of hidden services websites have been online for all six months of the study, which shows a short average lifetime for such online services. In the meantime, drug-related websites like Silk Road and Agora made up almost a quarter of the hidden service websites but 5% of overall traffic. As for whistleblower websites like SecureDrop and Globaleaks, they made up 5% of websites but less than 0.1% of website visits.

In response, Tor questioned the accuracy of the findings of the study, pointing out that the results may include visits to pedophilia sites from law enforcement and anti-abuse groups, along with DDoS attacks from hackers. Tor also emphasized that hidden services websites only account for 2% of total traffic with Tor’s anonymizing technology. In other words, you should not confuse websites hiding themselves with individual users who use Tor to surf the Internet anonymously.

One should admit that there are important uses for hidden services – for example, when human rights activists use them to visit Facebook or to blog anonymously. Some also suggest that the habits of people searching for child-abuse content on the Internet may also be a factor.

So, the findings of this recent research bring up new questions for Tor about how it could try to shut down the abusive websites and track their owners. The researchers have pointed out that Tor might be able to block access to such illegal services, but it is unknown whether Tor operators would bother doing this.

40% of Internet Users Suffered from Online Harassment

The results of the recent survey showed that almost 3/4 of the US Internet users claimed they have witnessed online harassment. 40% said they experienced it themselves. It was found out that young adults are most likely to have witnessed and experienced harassment on the Internet. Women aged 18-24 have experienced it disproportionately in comparison with other demographic groups.

About 3,000 Americans were interviewed for the study. Harassment was divided into two categories: “less severe”, including name-calling and attempts to embarrass people; and “more severe”, covering physical threats, stalking and sexual harassment.

According to the report, 73% of American Internet users have witnessed Internet harassment, with 40% having been its target. In the group of 18-29 year-olds, the figures rise to 92% and 65% accordingly.

Of people who’ve become a target of Internet harassment, 55% said it had exclusively been the less severe kind. Their share amounted to 22% of all users. In the meantime, 45% had also experienced more severe forms of harassment. Unsurprisingly, young women aged 18-24 were particular targets: more than ¼ of them say they have been stalked online, and the same number of them has been the target of sexual harassment.

As for male Internet users, they are more likely to have been physically threatened on the Internet: 26% compared with 23% of women aged 19-24. In total, men are more likely to experience any kind of online harassment: 44% compared with 37% of women.

Nevertheless, the report showed that women suffer more after the event: 38% of harassed women said they found it very upsetting, compared with 17% of harassed men. 2/3 of those who have been harassed on the Internet said the most recent incident happened on a social networking website or application, 22% pointed at the comments section of a website; 16% at an online game; 16% at a personal email account; and 10% at a discussion service.

The study also tried to figure out how welcoming Internet services were towards men and women. Here the report shows that online gaming stands out: more than a half of respondents believed that online games websites were equally welcoming to both sexes, but 44% of them believed they were more welcoming towards men. However, the research was carried out before the explosion of the “Gamergate” controversy – it is known that he latter has included a heated debate about harassment of women in and around the games industry.

The respondents also told how they had responded to the harassment. 60% said they had ignored it. Of the rest, 47% confronted the person online, 44% unfriended or blocked them, and 22% reported them to the relevant service.

The research also revealed that 92% of people believe the Internet allows people to be more critical of others, while 68% agreed it allows to support others as well. The study only covered the US adults, but not the issues like cyberbullying for children up to the age of 18.

UK Is Seriously Worried about Cybercrime

Many UK citizens have become victims of cybercrime, including identity theft, hacking or abuse on social media. The losses of the country from online fraud exceeded £670 million per year (this is given that many cases go unreported), with the true cost likely to be much higher.

According to the recent research, where over 2,000 people were surveyed, more than 50% of them said they had been a victim of online crime. This category included online-based fraud, ID theft, hacking and Internet abuse. Of those, a half also said they felt violated by their ordeal.
In the meantime, the same research shows that only less than 1/3 of the cybercrime victims had reported the incident. Almost 50% of those affected had no idea who to report an online crime to. However, the experts say this figure is expected to fall as a result of the ongoing work of the national fraud reporting centre. The good thing is that UK citizens who had suffered cybercrime admitted that such experience had shocked them into changing their behavior for the better. For example, almost 50% of them immediately changed their passwords for stronger ones and 42% said they became more vigilant when shopping online.
The statistics showed that for the United Kingdom as a whole, over £670 million was lost to the ten most common online frauds within the last 12 months. These figures show how serious a toll cybercrime can take. This has been no more apparent than in the last weeks, when large-scale personal photo leaks of celebrities happened. Unfortunately, as out lives move to the online world, this is becoming more common.
The security experts explain that people can all take simple steps to protect themselves by such simple ways as putting a password on computers or mobile devices, forgetting about clicking on a link received from an unknown sender and always logging off from an account or website.
As for people who still do not know who to report cybercrime to, the UK authorities remind that if you think you have been a victim of online economic fraud (if you have lost money), you can report it to the organization called Action Fraud – online or by phone. Victims of online abuse or harassment can report it to their local police force. It is also recommended to read general advice on how to stay safe online at getsafeonline.org.

Cybercrime Can Be Reported by Mouse Click in Australia

According to the government program that is expected to be unveiled soon, reporting online crime could be as easy as clicking a mouse. The reports are that the national police information agency called Crimtrac is finishing the scheme dubbed the Australian Cybercrime Online Reporting Network, or Acorn.

The statistics said that cybercrime affects about 5.4 million Australians annually, and the losses incurred amount to $1 billion. It is not a secret that the criminals become more and more sophisticated and increasingly use global networks.

A few days ago, CrimTrac CEO told a parliamentary inquiry that the new Acorn scheme, which is expected to be launched “shortly”, is supposed to complement the work already done by the agency. At the moment, the agency holds, on behalf of all police forces, the national fingerprint and DNA collections, along with an 8.7 million-record police report database and national child offender records.

The Australian Cybercrime Online Reporting Network will enable the Aussie citizens to securely report cybercrime online, via a website form. There are many types of matters that people can report to the agency: suspicious texts, emails or phone calls that may trick them into giving away their personal or banking information, a computer virus attack or even online bullying. The agency will also be possible to report the discovery of unauthorized, banned or “objectionable” material on the Internet.

It will be up to the police to determine which particular matters to investigate. The support with intelligence gathering will be provided with the Australian Crime Commission, while the consideration is also being given to a “tech crime offenders registry”.