It is not hard to secure your Wi-Fi connection. It takes changing a setting in the router and entering a password. Many, though, are not even aware that their connection is open, never mind that there are ways to secure it.

Cyber-attack and identity theft are only the most obvious dangers of having an open Wi-Fi connection. But there is another serious danger. If your connection is open and available to be stolen, the chances are good that someone is stealing it. The least malignant implication of this is that your neighbors will be watching Netflix on your connection, slowing you down and bringing a bandwidth cap that much closer.

But the real danger to you comes when your neighbors aren’t just watching Netflix. What if they’re doing something less reputable? What if they’re pirating music or engaging in illegal activities?

The RIAA and other organizations have been pushing courts to try people based on their IP addresses. There have been over 100000 law suits in the United States alone in the last year whose purpose was to obtain personal information on subscribers from ISPs in order to force the person to come to a settlement that ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars. If your IP address has been tracked downloading music, etc, then you are obviously guilty, right? Well, not exactly. If your Wi-Fi connection is open, then anyone accessing the internet through it will have your IP address. Your neighbor could be the one who was tracked, or even someone driving down the street sniffing for open connections.

For this reason, people have been trying to get the justice system to understand for some time that an IP is not a valid way to determine whether or not a person has been engaging in piracy.

Finally, one judge seems to understand. Judge Herold Baker refused to allow a Canadian adult film site to subpoena ISPs for the personal information of subscribers. He said that an IP address does not equal a person. The fact that this case involves porn means that the judge felt he needed to handle it delicately. A wrongful conviction in a case like this could be even more damaging to a person than it otherwise would be.

Baker then went on to cite a recent mistaken child porn raid, where an IP address was turned into a name–but the named person hadn’t committed the crime. “The list of IP addresses attached to VPR’s complaint suggests, in at least some instances, a similar disconnect between IP subscriber and copyright infringer… The infringer might be the subscriber, someone in the subscriber’s household, a visitor with her laptop, a neighbor, or someone parked on the street at any given moment.”

This case is not a precedent setting case for the United States as a whole, per se. Still, it will be interesting to see if others follow Judge Baker’s reasoning. It’s refreshing to see that a judge seems to understand something about technology. It’s nice to see that the court isn’t totally ruled by the big corporations. I’m not in support of piracy, don’t get me wrong. But I am in support of decisions based on logic and proper information. Hopefully, the trend will spread…

What do you think of the judge’s decision? Do you support it? Do you think other judges will follow suit?

Today, TechCrunch ran the follow up story citing a second source and offering some clarification why the Last.fm staff members denied the leak. According to the story it was CBS, not Last.fm directly, that leaked the data dump to the RIAA, or as is suggested one of the music labels.

CBS seems to have given in to the demand because of fear that the streaming rates could be negatively impacted if they did not.

We believe CBS lied to us when they denied sending the data to the RIAA, and that they subsequently asked us to attribute the quote to Last.fm to make the statement defensible. Last.fm’s denials were strictly speaking correct, but they ignored the underlying truth of the situation, that their parent company supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users. We believe that the outrage they aimed at us for reporting the story, which was materially correct, should have been aimed at CBS instead. But Last.fm never spoke publicly of the real facts of the story.

If data has been leaked – and the article speaks of IP addresses and usage data – then this could very well be a privacy disaster for Last.fm and CBS.

Muxtape provided a great way to upload mp3 songs to their website creating a mixtape like song collection on the website. It had some limits like a maximum song size of 10 Megabytes and only one mixtape per account but what made it great was the ability to share the mixtape with friends.

The music collection was publicly accessible which was probably the main reason the RIAA stepped in although I cannot find a difference between listening to music on a website and listening to music on Radio or Youtube.

If you open Muxtape right now you notice only one sentence and no way to access any of the services of the website: “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.”

No, I won’t reveal my methods to you or anyone else. The evidence is solid and you have to take my word for it, and remember, I’m in high standing and trusted. My commercial interests do not play a role, I work thoroughly..

While this could look like a joke it is unfortunately reality in several parts of the world. Last to join the party are users from the United Kingdom who will receive warning letters send from their Internet Service Providers who received the information from the British Phonographic Industry who do not disclose the process of gathering the data in first place.

Scientific studies have shown that the data gathering process of most organizations that send out DMCA notices is flawed and provided access to several methods that explained why. One of the methods was to actively frame other users and they managed to get DCMA takedown notices for one of their network printers to prove the point.

There is definitely a problem with the system if the British Phonographic Industry has the unchallenged might and right to notify the Internet Service Providers of copyright infringements and make them send out warning letters to their customers.

This is another classic case where the industry is punishing their legit customers and not the ones who copy and download the media. It’s the same case with copy protections and DRM. The only ones who have to cope with those things are the customers who purchase the products, never heard of any copy protections or DRM in movies, games or music that were available in P2P networks.

The commenters at Boing-Boing write about 3-6 random sound drops for a few seconds. Now that would really make me angry and I would definitely ask for a refund on my way out. What’s their next ingenious move, blank out a few scenes ? The cinemas themselves do not seem to have a say in the matter.

I would bet that the movie that is available on P2P networks does not have those sound gaps. Wanna bet ?

I’m feeling like the protagonist in Orwell’s 1984 only that we do not have a though police yet. The so called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was leaked to the Wikileaks website yesterday which would expand the role of Canadian border guards to search electronic devices for copyright infringing material. This includes searching notebooks, PDAs, mobile phones and mp3 player. I’m not yet sure how someone would be able to judge if a song was copied from an illegal source or legal source to the mp3 player but those that proposed this agreement surely think that this would be possible.

This new agreement is not practicable at all. Besides the problem of identifying copyright infringements in the first place this would also mean a serious delay for everyone travelling to Canada carrying an electronic device. I find it unbelievable that the music and movie industry is pressuring politicians into making such laws and that politicians are giving in to these demands.

Pennywise is the latest band to release a music album for free. Their album Reason to Believe is available at Myspace at a bitrate of 320 kbit/s including the pdf booklet and jpg cover. All that needs to be done is to add the user Textango as a friend at Myspace who will send a message that includes the download link. The music is DRM free.

Textango seems to be a mobile music distributor according to Wikipedia. Pennywise is a Punk-Rock band in case you have not heard of them before, comparable to Bad Religion in many aspects.

The album Reason to Believe will also be sold in stores in Europe and America.

Common sense tells us that the IP address is the major information needed to identify a user, but there are other information available to other users of P2P networks that can be used to track users even if the IP address changes. Those are, among other data the software and version used as well as the MAC address of the computer.

These two values are used to generate a hash that identifies the user even if his IP changes because the IP is not relevant for tracking users over a period of time. It is still recorded though with additional information like shared files, date and time, servers and all other information available.

It could be that even more information are used to calculate the hash value. Everything that is not changed regularly could be possible. The hash value of a new user is then compared to a database table that contains the hash values of users that have been using the P2P network and linked if a match is found.

So, what he suggests is that everyone has to use filters on their computers to prevent copyrighted material from being listened to and traded. He knows that users would not want that kind of filtering on their computers but he thinks that they would accept it if the benefits would outweigh that disadvantage.

Basically he wants that everyone helps them to filter every user on earth to prevent unauthorized listening and spreading of copyrighted music. Here are some quotes taken directly from the video..

Filters can be put in the applications for example. You know, one could have a filter on the end user’s computer that would actually eliminate any benefit from…encryption because if you want to hear it, you’d have to decrypt it, and at that point the filter could work.

When people start moving to encryption and so on, they know that they are engaging in illegal conduct..

via Public Knowledge

I really enjoyed reading the article, how all those small record companies were bought by the majors, how artists had to sign deals that put them at a serious disadvantage if they wanted to sell records, how 2/3 of all Radio stations in the United States were controlled to only play music that was sanctioned and so on.

He is describing the changes that take place these days, that artists sign up at independent labels that give them better contracts and more rights. Wonderful article, really worth a read but be prepared, it’s a long one.

But out of every 10 signed nine will fail. A contract with a major record company was always a 90 per cent guarantee of failure. In the boardroom the talk was never of music, only of units sold. Artists were never the product; the product was discs – 10 cents’ worth of vinyl selling for $10 – 10,000 per cent profit – the highest mark-up in all of retail marketing. Artists were simply an ingredient, without even the basic rights of employees.

Imagine the outcry if people working in a factory were told that the cost of the products they were making would be deducted from their wages, which anyway would only be paid if the company managed to sell the products. Or that they would have to work for the company for a minimum of 10 years and, at the company’s discretion, could be transferred to any other company at any time.

The last big innovation for the Music Industry was the CD and that is where they are stuck with. They cling on that CD no matter what and fail to realize that there another revolution and a shift that has happened in the last years. It’s called digital music. They do not want to accept that digital music will be the successor of the CD.

And digital music has it’s own laws that you have to cope with. You can’t just copy the marketing and business models that worked so well with the CD to digital music. Not working for several reasons. First is all digital music can be downloaded from the Internet without paying a cent.

That’s a major competitor to online sales. Instead of fighting it they should find ways to compete with it and make their digital music more attractive. It is just not explainable why a digital download costs almost as much as a CD that you would purchase in store.

Second there are lots of sources for free music on the Internet. You can listen to Internet Radio which is probably the only source that is also available in the CD world. But, the Internet offers so much more and everything is just a click away.

You get personalized portals like Last.fm where you can listen to any artist known to mankind, you can download free albums from sites like Jamendo which have some incredible works there, you can listen to personalized Internet Radio with Pandora, you can listen to all the music and view the videos on Youtube, you can rip most of the music without much efforts..

All of this is competition and the Music Industry has to face the facts. They can’t just ignore what is happening and hope for the best. It’s adapt or die in my opinion.

It is not a secret that online sales are on the rise and are highly profitable and that especially the games sector is seeing a huge rise in sales. I unfortunately do not have numbers for the games and movies sector and online music sales but I suspect if you take everything into account it will even out more or less.

The RIAA will surely whine about pirates once again and fail to see the obvious. I can only speak to myself but I did probably buy three or four albums in the last six years. My main reason is that there are not many releases that please my ear. The charts are dominated by one hit wonders and bands that reunite again to make just another album.

I prefer to listen to Internet radio when I work on my computer and would seriously pay a small amount of money for it. I do not purchase music at iTunes or similar stores because I do not like their pricing structure that much. It is to expensive in my opinion.

I prefer to download music from free sites like Jamendo and reward the artists directly. You will be surprised at the quality of some of the releases at Jamendo.

I did buy more DVDs and Games in that time though. I’d say I roughly bought 50 DVDs in the last two years and maybe 30 games. That’s where my money is going theses days and I suspect that many users are doing the same.

Did you buy music the last years ? Can you think of other reasons why the sales did drop that much ?

Usenet Providers provide access to the Usenet which offers discussion based groups as well as groups that offer file downloads. What the Music Industry does not like at all are those groups where music files are posted. While this is understandable it is not the task of the Usenet Provider to filter content on the Usenet which would a nearly impossible task anyway.

This would be like asking Internet Providers to ban certain websites from being accessible by their clients. Ups, did not they do that already ? The real question is another one. Who is actually responsible if copyrighted files are getting uploaded ? Should not they press charges against the users who are uploading those files instead ?

This however is not that possible because of the way the Usenet works unless you would get access to the Usenet Provider’s data. Even then it is not possible to know which user uploaded a specific file unless he did use this specific Usenet provider to do so.

What is your opinion in the matter ? Should they be able to sue Usenet Providers ? Internet Service Providers ? The Internet ?

Those bands are big and could influence others to try the same. I personally think it is time for a change. Bands earn (almost) nothing from record sales which is unexplainable to me. I read a nice essay from a music producer earlier who did produce a Nirvana record who said that while the Music Industry earned more than $1.5 Million from selling CDs the band actually made a minus from that.

I’m not an expert but I can predict that more artists will choose the risk of marketing albums on their own instead of making no money at all from it. The big ones will be first. Those who have enough fans and publicity to be able to do that.

But, musicians at the base are also already using the Internet to sell their records without Music Industry contracts. Marketplaces like eMusic or even Jamendo give them the publicity to reach an audience.

The question that arises is simply: Who needs the Record Companies ?

Read More:

Madonna dumps label in $134m deal
Nine Inch Nails
Oasis, Jamiroquai to follow Radiohead
Radiohead

The so called Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007 would for instance:

• Criminalize “attempting” to infringe copyright.
• Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software
• Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations
• Allow computers to be seized more readily
• Increase penalties for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anticircumvention regulations
• Add penalties for “intended” copyright crimes
• Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Association of America

You do find a in depth report by following the link mentioned above or read the summary of the act here. What’s next, Death Penalty for someone who copies the newest Britney Spears album ?

Thanks Jan for sending me the information per email.

Did you know that this was the processing key that ends with 63 56 88 C0 ? I did not until I read an article where the AACS sent some takedown notices to websites owners who mentioned the key. So, what is actually happening now is that this key will be reproduced on thousands of websites who report about this takedown notices, it will be available in caches, in forum entries and in many other places including custom created T-Shirts, Mugs and Mousepads. It seems that the takedown notice somehow backfired on the AACS, don’t you think ?

Call it a publicity stunt of unknown dimensions, a bold move or going with the time it all comes down to the following. Nine Inch Nails will get a huge publicity boost mainly from Internet sites that report about this. They will rise in popularity especially among filesharers and advocates of DRM free music that could very well use the move from NiN to show the world that the new album from Nine Inch Nails is selling well even though it was pre-released on major torrent sites. (not by them of course).

It would be very interesting to analyze the sales of their newest record before and after uploading the three songs to the Piratebay. Nine Inch Nails are the prime example of a band that is not fighting against the new trends of distributing media but use it to their advantage. They realized that the music is no longer the most important factor to decide whether to buy a CD or download it but the additional value that comes with a purchase.

Their newest CD is black at the beginning but becomes white after being played. They hide bonus tracks in encrypted messages on the Cds and offer a great booklet. I was always very disappointed about the booklets of most new CDs and I think this is one of the reasons why people don’t think that buying CDs would give them an additional value. (if you don’t care about the legal – illegal point of view)

I already started editing all existing anti-drm, anti-RIAA and anti-Everything posts here at Ghacks to please my new king. I managed to convince them to send me a truckload of records that I always wanted to listen to. It is indeed very nice of them to send me 3-4 copies of every records because I told them that I needed to listen to the music on my computer, my mp3 player and my car radio. I did not want to break DRM to be able to do so and they fully understood that.

See, they are nice guys. I may not talk about the price that they paid for making me their slave but hej, it is more than I would ever earn in my whole life. That is a lots of icecream !

Service Announcement:

The new Elton John CD is available for only $16.99 at your local CD retailer. Go buy a copy now !

There are absolutely no ill effects for Ghacks. I was even allowed to add those nice announcements to all of my posts. I’m sure everyone will profit from those.

Well, I’m off again. Have to listen to all those new shiny records I got. See ya.

Their latest stunt ? New royalty fees for Internet Radio stations. The price per performance rose from $0.0007 in 2006 to $0.0011 in 2007 which is a mighty increase. This means that radio stations have to pay $0.0011 per song that has a listener. This does not seem much but if you do some basic math you soon find out that this is indeed to much for many small radio stations.

Let us assume that a radio station plays 20 songs in an hour. This would mean that they would pay 0.0011 * 20 each hour multiplied by the number of listeners per hour. A station with only 100 listeners would have to pay $2.2 per hour, $52,8 per day and $19272 per year. Keep in mind that this are only the costs for the rights to play the songs, this does not cover bandwidth and other expenses.

The costs per performance are going to be raised to $0.0014 in 2008 and $0.0018 in 2009. The site Save Internet Radio states that over-the-air stations do not pay such a fee for performance rights.

I could continue writing about other things but thankfully a blog called the Wandering Student has expressed everything that I wanted to write down. Pay him a visit and read what he has to say, it is well worth the time.

So, what is the consequence of the boycott ? I will not purchase music that is published by a member of the RIAA. This includes online sales, eBay and all other forms. I will support local bands, independent bands, DRM and RIAA free websites, free internet radio stations and every other possibility that supports independent music.

“Following the acquisition, patented content delivery innovations made by BitTorrent, Inc. will be integrated in the µTorrent client in a manner that will remain seamless to the community of users. Ultimately, the integration of best-of-breed BitTorrent technology will result in an improved client and an enhanced user experience. It will also accelerate BitTorrent’s plans to provide high-performance content delivery services that power websites seeking the most efficient platform for distributing large, high-quality files. Lastly, the incorporation of µTorrent’s lightweight codebase strengthens the adoption of BitTorrent technology in embedded systems, including televisions, mobile phones and other non-PC platforms.”

Utorrent on the other hand does not seem to be the only bittorent client which seems to be affliated with the content industry. There are at least rumors that Azureus was sending stats of your sessions over the network as well. And finally a photo appeared on Flickr that shows the author of Bitcomet and Aswhin Navin of Bittorrent.

Alternatives:

Some users prefer to switch clients based on those rumors which is totally understandable. But which clients can be used except the most popular ones ? Here is a list of alternatives.

• ABC (Open source)
• BitBuddy (freeware)
• BitSpirit (down atm)
• BitTornado (Open Source, one torrent per window)
• gTorrent (Open Source, Linux)
• Halite (still in early development, Open Source)
• XBT (Open Source)

It will be hard for every client in that list and possible future clients to come close to the excellent functionality and performance of uTorrent.