Rupert Murdoch: “Internet Will Soon Be Over”

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, May 7, 2009

Billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch gave a strange response when asked about plans for mainstream news websites to charge for content, declaring, “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”

He was making reference to the fact that corporate media websites cannot continue to survive under their current failing business model.

The establishment media is dying and advertising revenue has plummeted as people turn to blogs and the alternative media for their news in an environment of corporate lies and spin.

This has forced sectors of the corporate media to charge the dwindling number of loyal readers they have left for news content, a practice which is set to become widespread according to Murdoch. This will only send more people over to the alternative media as the old organs of de facto state-controlled propaganda wither and die.

“Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, (Murdoch) replied: “We’re absolutely looking at that,” reports the Guardian. “Taking questions on a conference call with reporters and analysts, he said that moves could begin “within the next 12 months‚” adding: “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”

Murdoch’s newspapers and TV networks, which include Fox News and the Asian Star Network, have seen profits plummet from $216m to just $7m year-on-year. MySpace.com is also floundering despite a recent move to replace the company’s entire management staff.

It was all but over for the Boston Globe this week, following a threat to close the 137-year-old publication after net losses of $85 million this year alone. Only a last minute cost-cutting agreement on behalf of its owner, The New York Times Company, and The Boston Newspaper Guild, saved the newspaper.

But it’s not just establishment newspapers that are struggling to survive - social networking websites like Twitter and corporate online video giant You Tube are also deep in the red. Apparently, paying out millions in server fees for half the population of the planet to watch clips of cute puppies isn’t a sustainable business model.

This is why You Tube is being forced to pursue lucrative partnerships with giant production studios and broadcasters, at the expense of user generated content which has been relegated to a sub-section of its website, taking the “You” out of You Tube altogether. Content that may be deemed harmful to You Tube’s corporate agenda and its multi-million dollar partnership deals, like The Alex Jones Channel, is being systematically erased from You Tube’s website under the pretext of flimsy copyright infringement claims.

The jig is up for the corporate media. If they continue to allow free access to their content they will go out of business because there’s not enough advertising revenue coming in, whereas if they charge for content they will lose a huge chunk of their audience and their influence in shaping the news agenda will wane completely.

This is the price the corporate media has paid for lying, spinning and obfuscating on behalf of the virulently corrupt power elite and expecting the population to eat it up without question.

The corporate media monopoly has terminal cancer and they are losing their power, which is why they are aggressively supporting moves to phase out the old Internet altogether and replace it with “Internet 2,” a highly regulated and controlled electronic Berlin wall, where alternative voices will be silenced and giant corporate propaganda organs will dominate once again.

This what Murdoch is really getting at when he assures us that, “The Internet will soon be over” and it’s down to us to stop that agenda from being realized.

China bans YouTube

China appears to be blocking all access to YouTube. Now, why in the world would it do something like that? I’ve got some theories. First, though, the facts: YouTube use from China started dropping off the map sometime Monday night, with traffic nearly reaching a standstill by Tuesday morning. Google (which owns YouTube) has confirmed the apparent ban, though its staff is not certain of the cause. “We do not know the reason for the blockage, and we’re working as quickly as possible to restore access to our users in China,” a spokesperson says. Google does believe the Chinese government knowingly cut the access. The spokesperson, however, questions why officials wouldn’t have just blocked a specific video, as they’ve done before, rather than nixing the entire site.

YouTube has been banned by other countries as well for allowing users to upload and share videos which foreign governments in Bangladesh, Thailand, Pakistan and Turkey found embarrassing to their political regimes. Google is working to restore access to the site for Chinese citizens. This is not the first instance in which Chinese users have been unable to access the video sharing site. China blocked YouTube during the Tibet riots in March 2008. During that time protesters were burning shops and vehicles in an attempt to protest the Han Chinese influence. The riots left 19 dead.

Setting the Stage for Obama’s Control Over the Internet: Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated by Spies

y SIOBHAN GORMAN

Associated Press

Robert Moran monitors an electric grid in Dallas. Such infrastructure grids across the country are vulnerable to cyberattacks.

WASHINGTON -- Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

"The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid," said a senior intelligence official. "So have the Russians."

The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn't target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. "There are intrusions, and they are growing," the former official said, referring to electrical systems. "There were a lot last year."

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Many of the intrusions were detected not by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said. Intelligence officials worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet.

Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, "If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on."

Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.

"Over the past several years, we have seen cyberattacks against critical infrastructures abroad, and many of our own infrastructures are as vulnerable as their foreign counterparts," Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair recently told lawmakers. "A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure."

Officials cautioned that the motivation of the cyberspies wasn't well understood, and they don't see an immediate danger. China, for example, has little incentive to disrupt the U.S. economy because it relies on American consumers and holds U.S. government debt.

But protecting the electrical grid and other infrastructure is a key part of the Obama administration's cybersecurity review, which is to be completed next week. Under the Bush administration, Congress approved $17 billion in secret funds to protect government networks, according to people familiar with the budget. The Obama administration is weighing whether to expand the program to address vulnerabilities in private computer networks, which would cost billions of dollars more. A senior Pentagon official said Tuesday the Pentagon has spent $100 million in the past six months repairing cyber damage.

U.S. Intelligence Detects Cyber Spies

1:54

WSJ's Intelligence Reporter Siobhan Gorman says that Intelligence officials have found cyber spies lurking in the U.S. electrical infrastructure.

Overseas examples show the potential havoc. In 2000, a disgruntled employee rigged a computerized control system at a water-treatment plant in Australia, releasing more than 200,000 gallons of sewage into parks, rivers and the grounds of a Hyatt hotel.

Last year, a senior Central Intelligence Agency official, Tom Donahue, told a meeting of utility company representatives in New Orleans that a cyberattack had taken out power equipment in multiple regions outside the U.S. The outage was followed with extortion demands, he said.

The U.S. electrical grid comprises three separate electric networks, covering the East, the West and Texas. Each includes many thousands of miles of transmission lines, power plants and substations. The flow of power is controlled by local utilities or regional transmission organizations. The growing reliance of utilities on Internet-based communication has increased the vulnerability of control systems to spies and hackers, according to government reports.

The sophistication of the U.S. intrusions -- which extend beyond electric to other key infrastructure systems -- suggests that China and Russia are mainly responsible, according to intelligence officials and cybersecurity specialists. While terrorist groups could develop the ability to penetrate U.S. infrastructure, they don't appear to have yet mounted attacks, these officials say.

It is nearly impossible to know whether or not an attack is government-sponsored because of the difficulty in tracking true identities in cyberspace. U.S. officials said investigators have followed electronic trails of stolen data to China and Russia.

Russian and Chinese officials have denied any wrongdoing. "These are pure speculations," said Yevgeniy Khorishko, a spokesman at the Russian Embassy. "Russia has nothing to do with the cyberattacks on the U.S. infrastructure, or on any infrastructure in any other country in the world."

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Wang Baodong, said the Chinese government "resolutely oppose[s] any crime, including hacking, that destroys the Internet or computer network" and has laws barring the practice. China was ready to cooperate with other countries to counter such attacks, he said, and added that "some people overseas with Cold War mentality are indulged in fabricating the sheer lies of the so-called cyberspies in China."

Utilities are reluctant to speak about the dangers. "Much of what we've done, we can't talk about," said Ray Dotter, a spokesman at PJM Interconnection LLC, which coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in 13 states and the District of Columbia. He said the organization has beefed up its security, in conformance with federal standards.

In January 2008, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved new protection measures that required improvements in the security of computer servers and better plans for handling attacks.

Last week, Senate Democrats introduced a proposal that would require all critical infrastructure companies to meet new cybersecurity standards and grant the president emergency powers over control of the grid systems and other infrastructure.

Specialists at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit research institute, said attack programs search for openings in a network, much as a thief tests locks on doors. Once inside, these programs and their human controllers can acquire the same access and powers as a systems administrator.

NERC Letter

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation on Tuesday warned its members that not all of them appear to be adhering to cybersecuirty requirements. Read the letter.

The White House review of cybersecurity programs is studying ways to shield the electrical grid from such attacks, said James Lewis, who directed a study for the Center for Strategic and International Studies and has met with White House reviewers.

The reliability of the grid is ultimately the responsibility of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., an independent standards-setting organization overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The NERC set standards last year requiring companies to designate "critical cyber assets." Companies, for example, must check the backgrounds of employees and install firewalls to separate administrative networks from those that control electricity flow. The group will begin auditing compliance in July.

—Rebecca Smith contributed to this article.

Corrections & Amplifications
Central Inteligence Agency official Tom Donahue's last name was misspelled in a previous version of this article.

Moldovans used Twitter to arrange protests

More than 10,000 young Moldovans came out to the streets on Tuesday to protest against Moldova’s Communist leadership. There began clashes with the police. People managed to gather a huge crowd in a short period of time using social messaging networks like Facebook and Twitter.

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The protesters created their own searchable tag on Twitter, rallying Moldovans to join and propelling events in this small former Soviet state onto a Twitter list of newly popular topics, so people around the world could keep track.

After hundreds of firsthand accounts flooded onto the Internet via Twitter, Internet service in Chisinau, the capital, was abruptly cut off, nytimes.com reports.

Police were unable to keep protesters from ransacking the building in the capital, Chisinau, that houses the legislature and storming the offices of President Vladimir Voronin. It was unclear whether Voronin was in the building at the time.

Fueling the violence were allegations made by opposition leaders that Voronin's Communist Party-led government had falsified legislative elections Sunday in a bid to hold on to power.

Legislative elections in Moldova are pivotal because the president is selected by lawmakers. Voronin, who became president in 2001, has served two terms and is legally barred from a third. But the results of Sunday's elections preserved his party as the dominant political force.

Election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said in preliminary findings that the vote was largely free and democratic, though it was marred by allegations of police intimidation of voters and candidates, latimes.com reports.

Opposition party leaders denounced the balloting as fraudulent, saying there was evidence of multiple voting. Demonstrators demanded a recount.

The worst violence to hit Moldova's capital in decades could complicate efforts to resolve the 18-year-old separatist rebellion in the Russian-speaking region of Transdniestria, where Russia has had troops since Soviet times.

Moldova, wedged between Ukraine and Romania on the edge of the European Union, is in what Russia sees as its sphere of influence. Moldova, which was once part of Romania, recalled its ambassador from Bucharest for consultations on the troubles.

Most of the protesters on the streets of Chisinau were students who say they see no future if Communists keep their hold on the ex-Soviet state of four million people, Reuters reports.

Late in the evening, about 600 people were still massed outside parliament. Some had waved European, Romanian and Moldovan flags from the roof of the president's offices.

Federal Authority Over the Internet? The Cybersecurity Act of 2009

There’s a new bill working its way through Congress that is cause for some alarm: the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 ( PDF summary here), introduced by Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME). The bill as it exists now risks giving the federal government unprecedented power over the Internet without necessarily improving security in the ways that matter most. It should be opposed or radically amended.

Essentially, the Act would federalize critical infrastructure security. Since many of our critical infrastructure systems (banks, telecommunications, energy) are in the hands of the private sector, the bill would create a major shift of power away from users and companies to the federal government. This is a potentially dangerous approach that favors the dramatic over the sober response.

One proposed provision gives the President unfettered authority to shut down Internet traffic in an emergency and disconnect critical infrastructure systems on national security grounds goes too far. Certainly there are times when a network owner must block harmful traffic, but the bill gives no guidance on when or how the President could responsibly pull the kill switch on privately-owned and operated networks.

Furthermore, the bill contains a particularly dangerous provision that could cripple privacy and security in one fell swoop:

The Secretary of Commerce— shall have access to all relevant data concerning (critical infrastructure) networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access…

In other words, the bill would give the Commerce Department absolute, non-emergency access to “all relevant data” without any privacy safeguards like standards or judicial review. The broad scope of this provision could eviscerate statutory protections for private information, such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Privacy Protection Act, or financial privacy regulations. Even worse, it isn’t clear whether this provision would require systems to be designed to enable access, essentially a back door for the Secretary of Commerce that would also establish a primrose path for any bad guy to merrily skip down as well. If the drafters meant to create a clearinghouse for system vulnerability information along the lines of a US/CERT mailing list, that could be useful, but that’s not what the bill’s current language does.

A privacy threat still in the cocoon is the provision mandating a study of the feasibility of an identity management and authentication program with just a nod to “appropriate civil liberties and privacy protections.” There’s reason to fear that this type of study is just a precursor to proposals to limit online anonymity. But anonymity isn’t inherently a security problem. What’s “secure” depends on the goals of the system. Do you need authentication, accountability, confidentiality, data integrity? Each goal suggests a different security architecture, some totally compatible with anonymity, privacy and civil liberties. In other words, no one “identity management and authentication program” is appropriate for all internet uses.

Whether the bill is amended or rejected, the question remains what kind of actions would help cybersecurity, and what role the federal government has to play. As security expert Bruce Schneier has pointed out, the true causes of government cyber-insecurity are rather mundane:

GAO reports indicate that government problems include insufficient access controls, a lack of encryption where necessary, poor network management, failure to install patches, inadequate audit procedures, and incomplete or ineffective information security programs.

The Cybersecurity Act is an example of the kind of dramatic proposal that doesn’t address the real problems of security, and can actually make matters worse by weakening existing privacy safeguards – as opposed to simpler, practical measures that create real security by encouraging better computer hygiene. We’ll be watching this bill carefully to ensure that it doesn’t pass in its present form.

Pirate Bay prosecution could spawn flurry of lawsuits. One Year in Prison for File-sharing

The entertainment industry yesterday hailed the successful prosecution of the four founders of the illegal file-sharing website Pirate Bay, as a major victory in its battle to recoup billions of pounds in lost revenue.

Lawyers believe that the sentencing of Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundström to a year in jail for breaching Swedish copyright law could lead to a flurry of similar lawsuits as Hollywood and the music industry battles to regain the upper hand in the war against file sharing.

Geoff Taylor, the chief executive of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), which represents the UK record industry, said: “We hope that this decision will encourage British music fans to steer clear of these parasitic illegal download services and support the future of British music by downloading legally.”

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The verdict represents a step change in the law’s attitude to copyright infringement as the men were found guilty of providing a conduit for others to break the law, rather than breaching copyright themselves. Until yesterday prosecutors had only acted against sites, such as Napster, which hosted copyrighted material.

Mark Harding, director of intellectual property at KPMG, said the verdict was a “big shot across the bows of file-sharing sites”. He expects the case will spur prosecutors across the globe, especially in the UK if proposed copyright laws come into force, to take a tougher stance against file-sharing websites. But warned that only a “sea change” in consumer’s attitude to downloading will put end to the practice.

Mark Mulligan, music analyst with Forrester Research warned that hundreds of new file-sharing websites will replace every site that is closed down. There are also concerns that copyrighted material can be transferred by instant messenger, email and blogs, making it very difficult to track down offenders.

Simon Levene, joint head of DLA Piper’s intellectual property division, warned that the ruling could also have implications for legitimate websites, including Google, Facebook and YouTube, which host or provide links to copyright material.

Senate Proposal Could Put Heavy Restrictions on Internet Freedoms

A proposed bill that would give the president widespread power to shut down the Internet in the event of a cyberattack could have sweeping implications on civil liberties.

The days of an open, largely unregulated Internet may soon come to an end.

A bill making its way through Congress proposes to give the U.S. government authority over all networks considered part of the nation's critical infrastructure. Under the proposed Cybersecurity Act of 2009, the president would have the authority to shut down Internet traffic to protect national security.

The government also would have access to digital data from a vast array of industries including banking, telecommunications and energy. A second bill, meanwhile, would create a national cybersecurity adviser -- commonly referred to as the cybersecurity czar -- within the White House to coordinate strategy with a wide range of federal agencies involved.

The need for greater cybersecurity is obvious:

-- Canadian researchers recently discovered that computers in 103 countries, including those in facilities such as embassies and news media offices, were infected with software designed to steal network data.

-- A Seattle security analyst warned last month that the advancement of digital communication within the electrical grid, as promoted under President Obama's stimulus plan, would leave the nation's electrical supply dangerously vulnerable to hackers.

-- And on Tuesday the Wall Street Journal reported that computer spies had broken into the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project and had breached the Air Force's air-traffic-control system.

Nonetheless, the proposal to give the U.S. government the authority to regulate the Internet is sounding alarms among critics who say it's another case of big government getting bigger and more intrusive.

Silicon Valley executives are calling the bill vague and overly intrusive, and they are rebelling at the thought of increased and costly government regulations amid the global economic crisis.

Others are concerned about the potential erosion of civil liberties. "I'm scared of it," said Lee Tien, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group.

"It's really broad, and there are plenty of laws right now designed to prevent the government getting access to that kind of data. It's the same stuff we've been fighting on the warrantless wiretapping."

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va, who introduced the bill earlier this month with bipartisan support, is casting the legislation as critical to protecting everything from our water and electricity to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records.

"I know the threats we face." Rockefeller said in a prepared statement when the legislation was introduced. "Our enemies are real. They are sophisticated, they are determined and they will not rest."

The bill would allow the government to create a detailed set of standards for cybersecurity, as well as take over the process of certifying IT technicians. But many in the technology sector say the government is simply ill-equipped to get involved at the technical level, said Franck Journoud, a policy analyst with the Business Software Alliance.

"Simply put, who has the expertise?" he said. "It's the industry, not the government. We have a responsibility to increase and improve security. That responsibility cannot be captured in a government standard."

A spokeswoman from Rockefeller's office said neither he nor the two senators who co-sponsored the bill, Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Bill Nelson, D-Fla., will answer questions on cybersecurity until a later date.

Obama, meanwhile, is considering his own strategy on cybersecurity. On Friday, the White House completed a lengthy review of the nation's computer networks and their vulnerability to attack. An announcement is expected as early as this week.

"I kind of view [the Rockefeller bill] as an opening shot," said Tien. "The concept is cybersecurity. There's this 60-day review underway, and some people wanted to get in there and make their mark on the White House policy development."

IT leaders hope the president will consider their argument that their business is not only incredibly complex and static, but that it also spreads over the entire globe.

If the United States was to set its own standard for cybersecurity, they say, it would create a host of logistical challenges for technology companies, virtually all of which operate internationally.

"Any standards have to be set at an international level and be industry led," said Dale Curtis, a spokesman for the Business Software Alliance. "This industry moves so fast, and government just doesn't move that fast."

Many Silicon Valley executives remain hopeful that the White House's recommendations will be more industry-friendly, following what Journoud said was a good dialogue with former Bush administration official Melissa Hathaway, who is leading the White House review and is considered a likely candidate for cybersecurity czar.

New Military Command to Focus on Cybersecurity

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration plans to create a new military command to coordinate the defense of Pentagon computer networks and improve U.S. offensive capabilities in cyberwarfare, according to current and former officials familiar with the plans.

The initiative will reshape the military's efforts to protect its networks from attacks by hackers, especially those from countries such as China and Russia. The new command will be unveiled within the next few weeks, Pentagon officials said.

The move comes amid growing evidence that sophisticated cyberspies are attacking the U.S. electric grid and key defense programs. A page-one story in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday reported that hackers breached the Pentagon's biggest weapons program, the $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter, and stole data. Lawmakers on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee wrote to the defense secretary Tuesday requesting a briefing on the matter.

Lockheed Martin Corp., the project's lead contractor, said in a statement Tuesday that it believed the article "was incorrect in its representation of successful cyber attacks" on the F-35 program. "To our knowledge, there has never been any classified information breach," the statement said. The Journal story didn't say the stolen information was classified.

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President Barack Obama, when he was a candidate for the White House, pledged to elevate cybersecurity as a national-security issue, equating it in significance with nuclear and biological weapons. A White House team reviewing cybersecurity policy has completed its recommendations, including the creation of a top White House cyberpolicy official. Details of that and other proposals are still under debate. A final decision from the president is expected soon.

A draft of the White House review steps gingerly around the question of how to improve computer security in the private sector, especially key infrastructure such as telecommunications and the electricity grid. The document stresses the importance of working with the private sector and civil-liberties groups to craft a solution, but doesn't call for a specific government role, according to a person familiar with the draft.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates plans to announce the creation of a new military "cyber command" after the rollout of the White House review, according to military officials familiar with the plan.

The Pentagon has several command organizations structured according to both geography and operational responsibility. Central Command, for example, oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the Special Operations Command is responsible for operations involving elite operatives such as Navy Seals.

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Associated Press

Defense Secretary Robert Gates plans to announce the creation of a new military 'cyber command' after the rollout of a White House review.

The cyber command is likely to be led by a military official of four-star rank, according to officials familiar with the proposal. It would, at least initially, be part of the Pentagon's Strategic Command, which is currently responsible for computer-network security and other missions.

Pentagon officials said the front-runner to lead the new command is National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander, a three-star Army general. In a rare public appearance Tuesday at a cybersecurity conference in San Francisco, Gen. Alexander called for a "team" approach to cybersecurity that would give the NSA lead responsibility for protecting military and intelligence networks while the Department of Homeland Security worked to protect other government networks. His spokeswoman said he had no additional comment.

Former President George W. Bush's top intelligence adviser, Mike McConnell, first proposed the creation of a unified cyber command last fall. The military's cybersecurity efforts are currently divided between entities like the NSA and the Defense Information Systems Agency, which is responsible for ensuring secure and reliable communications for the military. The Air Force also runs a significant cybersecurity effort.

Advocates believe the new command will be able to avoid duplication and better leverage the technical expertise of the agencies and the military services' cyberwarriors.

Cyber defense is the Department of Homeland Security's responsibility, so the command would be charged with assisting that department's defense efforts. The relationship would be similar to the way Northern Command supports Homeland Security with rescue capabilities in natural disasters. The NSA, where much of the government's cybersecurity expertise is housed, established a similar relationship with Homeland Security through a cybersecurity initiative that the Bush administration began in its final year.

NSA's increasingly muscular role in domestic cybersecurity has raised alarms among some officials and on Capitol Hill. Rod Beckstrom, former chief of the National Cyber Security Center, which is charged with coordinating cybersecurity activities across the U.S. government, resigned last month after warning that the growing reliance on the NSA was a "bad strategy" that posed "threats to our democratic processes."

Gen. Alexander countered in his speech Tuesday that the NSA did "not want to run cybersecurity for the U.S. government."

—August Cole contributed to this article.

An invention that could change the internet for ever

Revolutionary new web software could put giants such as Google in the shade when it comes out later this month. Andrew Johnson reports. The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before.

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The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.

Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers.

Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. "It is really impressive and significant," he wrote. "In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.

Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: "What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly... I think this could be big."

Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as "how high is Mount Everest?", but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.

The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly", according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.

Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is "curated", meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.

"I've wanted to make the knowledge we've accumulated in our civilisation computable," he said last week. "I was not sure it was possible. I'm a little surprised it worked out so well."

Dr Wolfram, 49, who was educated at Eton and had completed his PhD in particle physics by the time he was 20, added that the launch of Wolfram Alpha later this month would be just the beginning of the project.

"It will understand what you are talking about," he said. "We are just at the beginning. I think we've got a reasonable start on 90 per cent of the shelves in a typical reference library."

The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. Dr Wolfram said he expected that about 1,000 people would be needed to keep its databases updated with the latest discoveries and information.

He also added that he would not go down the road of storing information on ordinary people, although he was aware that others might use the technology to do so.

Wolfram Alpha has been designed with professionals and academics in mind, so its grasp of popular culture is, at the moment, comparatively poor. The term "50 Cent" caused "absolute horror" in tests, for example, because it confused a discussion on currency with the American rap artist. For this reason alone it is unlikely to provide an immediate threat to Google, which is working on a similar type of search engine, a version of which it launched last week.

"We have a certain amount of popular culture information," Dr Wolfram said. "In some senses popular culture information is much more shallowly computable, so we can find out who's related to who and how tall people are. I fully expect we will have lots of popular culture information. There are linguistic horrors because if you put in books and music a lot of the names clash with other concepts."

He added that to help with that Wolfram Alpha would be using Wikipedia's popularity index to decide what users were likely to be interested in.

With Google now one of the world's top brands, worth $100bn, Wolfram Alpha has the potential to become one of the biggest names on the planet.

Dr Wolfram, however, did not rule out working with Google in the future, as well as Wikipedia. "We're working to partner with all possible organisations that make sense," he said. "Search, narrative, news are complementary to what we have. Hopefully there will be some great synergies."

What the experts say

"For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for."

Michael W Jones, Tech.blorge.com

"If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha."

Doug Lenat, Semanticuniverse.com

"It's like plugging into an electric brain."

Matt Marshall, Venturebeat.com

"This is like a Holy Grail... the ability to look inside data sources that can't easily be crawled and provide answers from them."

Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com

Worldwide network: A brief history of the internet

1969 The internet is created by the US Department of Defense with the networking of computers at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute.

1979 The British Post Office uses the technology to create the first international computer networks.

1980 Bill Gates's deal to put a Microsoft Operating System on IBM's computers paves the way for almost universal computer ownership.

1984 Apple launches the first successful 'modern' computer interface using graphics to represent files and folders, drop-down menus and, crucially, mouse control.

1989 Tim Berners-Lee creates the world wide web – using browsers, pages and links to make communication on the internet simple.

1996 Google begins as a research project at Stanford University. The company is formally founded two years later by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

2009 Dr Stephen Wolfram launches Wolfram Alpha.

EU Considers “Cyber Security Czar”

Editor’s note: Obama’s cyber security plan is mentioned in this article. As an example of the threat faced, the article mentions the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia. It should be noted that in response to coordinated DoS and botnet attacks, Estonia pulled the plug on the internet as a precautionary measure. Congress here in the United States is now talking seriously about allowing Obama to do the same.

During her last weekly video message, entitled “Europe must be prepared for cyber attacks,” the EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding, brought forward the idea of a “Mister Cyber Security.” The Commissioner wants such a position established as soon as possible, in order to better coordinate Europe’s cyber forces and develop practical defense plans.

All recent armed conflicts were backed up by informational attacks targeted at strategical online assets, such as the official communication channels. Even though all governments have rejected any accusations of involvement and claimed that these attacks were performed by popular cyber militias, professionals in the security industry say that the prospect of fully-blown cyberwars is near.

The United States are determined to take the necessary steps to ensure that their Internet infrastructure is properly protected against the numerous cyber espionage attempts or future attacks. The Obama administration has started by declaring the cyber infrastructure a strategic asset.

Ms. Reding feels that the European Union is falling behind, mostly because some member states are more prepared to fend off these threats than others. She exemplifies this with Estonia, which was the subject of such a co-ordinated cyber attack in 2007. As a result, “The websites of administrations, parliament, banks, newspapers and broadcasters were swamped.”

Read entire article

Stockholm court jails The Pirate Bay founders for a year

STOCKHOLM (AFP) — A Swedish court found four men guilty Friday of promoting copyright infringement by running The Pirate Bay, one of the world's top illegal filesharing websites, sentencing them to a year in prison in a landmark ruling.

The court also ordered the four -- Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstroem -- to pay damages of 30 million kronor (2.72 million euros, 3.56 million dollars) to the movie and recording industry, which hailed the conviction as a symbolic victory.

"The Stockholm district court has today convicted the four people charged with promoting other people's infringement of copyright laws," the court said in a statement.

"We are of course going to appeal," defence lawyer Per Samuelsson told Swedish Radio.

The effect the verdict will have on the website was not immediately known, but The Pirate Bay founders vowed to carry on.

"Don't worry, nothing will change for The Pirate Bay, neither for us nor for filesharing," Sunde wrote on the community website Twitter, Swedish news agency TT reported.

A comment posted on The Pirate Bay's website read: "As in all good movies, the heroes lose in the beginning but have an epic victory in the end anyhow. That's the only thing Hollywood ever taught us."

Representatives of the movie, music and video games industry had sought some 117 million kronor (10.6 million euros, 13.9 million dollars) in damages and interest for alleged losses incurred from tens of millions of illegal downloads facilitated by the site.

The verdict topped headlines around the world and immediately prompted a flurry of comments on Internet blogs and community websites.

Forrester Research analyst Mark Mulligan raised the possibility that the Swedish court's ruling could affect other websites including giant search engine Google.

"There are some interesting implications from this ruling, most notably the question of whether Google could now be held responsible for posting links to content that does not have copyright cleared," he wrote on The Music Ally blog.

Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay makes it possible to skirt copyright fees and share music, film and computer game files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site.

None of the material can thus be found on The Pirate Bay server itself.

The Pirate Bay claims to have some 22 million users worldwide.

"By providing a website with... well-developed search functions, easy uploading and storage possibilities, and with a tracker linked to the website, the accused have incited the crimes that the filesharers have committed," the court said in a statement to the media.

A filesharing researcher at Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology, Daniel Johansson, called it a landmark ruling.

"For Sweden and Europe it's the most important case ever when it comes to filesharing," he told AFP, recalling the Napster trial in the United States.

He added that the verdict could contribute to tighter controls on Internet usage.

IFPI, which represents the recording industry worldwide, hailed the court's decision.

"This is good news for everyone, in Sweden and internationally, who is making a living or a business from creative activity and who needs to know their rights will protected by law," IFPI chairman and chief executive John Kennedy said.

Mulligan however pointed out that file sharing will not go away with a new threat coming from non-network sharing via Instant Messenger, email, blogs and iPod ripping.

During the trial, the four had maintained that filesharing services can be used both legally and illegally.

One of the defence lawyers, Per Samuelsson, had argued that The Pirate Bay's services "can be compared to making cars that can be driven faster than the speed limit."

Another defence lawyer, Jonas Nilsson, had insisted that "the individual Internet users who use Pirate Bay services... must answer for the material they have in their possession or the files they might share with others."

Swedish police raided the company's offices several times and seized nearly 200 servers in 2006, temporarily shuttering the site. But it resurfaced a few days later with servers spread among different countries.

Internet Browser Wars - IE Losing To Safari, Firefox

The latest data from Net Applications shows Apple holding on to its market share online in April of 2009 with growth from its mobile devices. Windows and IE continue to fall, however.


Safari's slice of the browser pie hasn't notably changed since last month.

Net Applications

Net Applications has released its compiled browser use data for the month of April, and the news is pretty good for Apple. Despite an arguable small downtick in market share for the quarter as measured by unit sales, Net Applications shows the share of users using Safari or Mac OS X to surf the Web holding steady for the first month of this quarter. The iPhone OS platform continues to gain share online, while Windows and IE continue a slow but steady decline.

Net Applications recorded an 8.21 percent browser share for Safari for April, a hair lower than the 8.23 percent measured in March, but still higher than the 8.02 percent share from February. Both Firefox and Chrome saw upticks for the month, while Microsoft's browser saw a decline, even after the release of IE 8.

When measuring operating systems, Net Applications recorded a 9.73 percent share for Mac OS X—again, slightly lower than last month's 9.77 percent share. Apple has yet to officially crack the 10 percent mark on the desktop, and it may have to wait for the economy to recover some before that will happen. Linux gained a tenth of a percent, as did iPhone OS, which is in fourth place behind Linux (in third) by Net Applications' reckoning. Windows saw another decline, and has been steadily declining for the past year.

Net Applications also noted that the iPod touch has grown much faster than the iPhone over the last year or so, even though the iPhone still enjoys a larger share of 'Net traffic. The iPod touch's share grew about 300 percent since May 2008, while the iPhone grew about 244 percent for the same period. Collectively, the iPhone OS platform grew 268 percent share over the last year.

While Net Applications uses a different methodology than the typical unit sales numbers gathered by Gartner and IDC, the trends in its data are useful to show what browsers and OSes are being used regularly online. (Net Applications gathers browser use information from its member sites.) The numbers aren't exactly great for Safari and Mac OS X this month, but they are a lot more encouraging given the state of the economy.

Further reading:

• Net Applications' market share data is compiled monthly on its website.

Internet Pyramid, Ponzi Frauds, Schemes Rising

If it looks too good to be true, then it probably is, even if it is on the internet

Mike Harvey

A rise in pyramid and Ponzi fraud schemes in Britain and the United States is being spurred by the power of the internet, consumer and business groups fear, with old-fashioned cons repackaged as marketing enterprises backed by advertisements on Google, videos on YouTube and enticing websites. It is, they say, a fraud for the digital age.

Eight women have been arrested in connection with an £18 million pyramid scheme operating in the South West and South Wales, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) said at the weekend, warning of a resurgence in such crime as the recession deepens.

The OFT said that the scheme appeared to have been aimed at women. Thousands of people had been recruited since May last year, paying up to £3,000 each to join and each promising to recruit two more members.

Pyramid schemes, which are illegal, offer to pay high returns to people who pay a joining fee and recruit other members — but the payouts are generated from the joining fees and, when the scheme runs out of new recruits it collapses, leaving those who still belong to it out of pocket.

Related Links

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The scams, sometimes called cash-gifting programmes, target social groups, including church congregations, community groups or networks of friends and relatives. Some schemes are touted as fundraisers for a good cause or as an empowerment programme to help people to help themselves.

In America, the Better Business Bureau (BBB), which runs a network of regulation and advice offices across the country, has issued a warning about the return of Ponzi schemes as fraudsters target families struggling to make ends meet. It said that according to TubeMogul, an online video analyst, there are 22,974 cash-gifting videos on YouTube, adding up to 59,192,963 views. “Bernie Madoff isn't the only guy with a Ponzi scheme,” a BBB spokesman said, referring to the disgraced New York-based fraudster who has admitted running a $65 million investor fraud, the largest on record. “Money-making opportunities promising big returns for little work are all over the internet and are extremely enticing to millions of people struggling with today's economy.

“Anyone tempted by slick cash-gifting marketing appeals should run in the opposite direction, or they run the risk of being the next person ripped off by a pyramid scheme.”

Sophisticated fraudsters are buying advertisements using Google ad-serving technology. A search for the term “cash-gifting” produces dozens of sponsored links to websites announcing get-rich-quick schemes.

Heather Clayton, senior director of consumer protection at the OFT, said: “Scammers adapt to new circumstances and are tempting people feeling the pinch with false hopes of making easy money. Sadly, responding to these pyramid schemes will only leave participants worse off.”

The OFT estimates that such frauds cost Britons £420 million a year, with 480,000 people annually falling victim to the scams.

Trading standards officers in Birmingham have warned that pyramid sellers are targeting women in the area with promises that they can make a £21,000 profit within weeks.

Chris Neville, head of Birmingham Trading Standards, said that the scam resembled a scheme named Women Empowering Women, which cheated scores of people out of up to £3,000 between 2001 and 2003. “In this sort of economic climate, the chance to make money like this seems very attractive,” Mr Neville said.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) is investigating five other schemes and share scams that might total £170 million, Margaret Cole, its enforcement director, has said.

“In this economic environment, we might expect to continue to uncover more unauthorised business frauds. In the enforcement division we are in the process of doubling our number of unauthorised business teams and establishing a specialised unauthorised business department,” she said.

NEW SENATE BILLS: INVOLVES INTERNET SHUT DOWN

Bill S 773 http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-...
Bill S 778 http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-...

Rockefeller article: http://www.truthalliance.net/Archive/...
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Secret Black Box Probe Will Monitor Web Activity

SPY chiefs are pressing ahead with secret plans to monitor all internet use and telephone calls in Britain despite an announcement by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, of a ministerial climbdown over public surveillance.

GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, is developing classified technology to intercept and monitor all e-mails, website visits and social networking sessions in Britain. The agency will also be able to track telephone calls made over the internet, as well as all phone calls to land lines and mobiles.

The £1 billion snooping project — called Mastering the Internet (MTI) — will rely on thousands of “black box” probes being covertly inserted across online infrastructure.

The top-secret programme began to be implemented last year, but its existence has been inadvertently disclosed through a GCHQ job advertisement carried in the computer trade press.

Last week, in what appeared to be a concession to privacy campaigners, Smith announced that she was ditching controversial plans for a single “big brother” database to store centrally all communications data in Britain.

“The government recognised the privacy implications of the move [and] therefore does not propose to pursue this move,” she said.

Grabbing favourable headlines, Smith announced that up to £2 billion of public money would instead be spent helping private internet and telephone companies to retain information for up to 12 months in separate databases.

However, she failed to mention that substantial additional sums — amounting to more than £1 billion over three years — had already been allocated to GCHQ for its MTI programme.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said Smith’s announcement appeared to be a “smokescreen”.

“We opposed the big brother database because it gave the state direct access to everybody’s communications. But this network of black boxes achieves the same thing via the back door,” Chakrabarti said.

Informed sources have revealed that a £200m contract has been awarded to Lockheed Martin, the American defence giant.

A second contract has been given to Detica, the British IT firm which has close ties to the intelligence agencies.

The sources said Iain Lobban, the GCHQ director, is overseeing the construction of a massive new complex inside the agency’s “doughnut” headquarters on the outskirts of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

A huge room of super-computers will help the agency to monitor — and record — data passing through black-box probes placed at critical traffic junctions with internet service providers and telephone companies, allowing GCHQ to spy at will.

An industry insider, who has been briefed on GCHQ’s plans, said he could not discuss the programme because he had signed the Official Secrets Act. However, he admitted that the project would mark a step change in the agency’s powers of surveillance.

At the moment the agency is able to use probes to monitor the content of calls and e-mails sent by specific individuals who are the subject of police or security service investigations.

Every interception must be authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or a minister of equivalent rank.

The new GCHQ internet-monitoring network will shift the focus of the surveillance state away from a few hundred targeted people to everyone in the UK.

“Although the paper [work] does not say it, its clear implication is that those kinds of probes should be extended to cover the entire population for the purposes of monitoring communications data,” said the industry source.

GCHQ placed an advertisement in the specialist IT press for a head of major contracts to be given “operational responsibility for the ‘Mastering the Internet’ (MTI) contract”. The senior official, to be paid an annual salary of up to £100,000, would lead the procurement of the hardware and the analysis tools needed to build and run the system.

Ministers have said they do not intend to snoop on the actual content of e-mails or telephone calls. The monitoring will instead focus on who an individual is communicating with or which websites and chat rooms they are visiting.

Advocates of the black-box system say it is essential if the authorities are to keep pace with the communications revolution. They say terrorists are stateless, highly mobile and their communications are difficult to detect among the billions of pieces of data passing through the internet.

Last year about 14% of telephone calls were made using voice over internet protocol (Voip) systems such as Skype. A report by a group of privy counsellors predicts that most calls will be made via the internet within five years. GCHQ said it did not want to discuss how the data it gathered would be used.

David Leppard and Chris Williams

Unknown internet 2: Could the net become self-aware?

• 30 April 2009 by Michael Brooks
• Magazine issue 2706. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

Read more: Eight things you didn't know about the internet

Yes, if we play our cards right - or wrong, depending on your perspective.

In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. "The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind," says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. "It might already have a degree of consciousness".

Not that it will necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans: it is unlikely to be wondering who it is, for instance. To Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium, consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain's processes get the most resources. "Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control... than a jump to a wholly different level," Heylighen says.

How might this manifest itself? Heylighen speculates that it might turn the internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganising itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.

If it is not already semiconscious, we could do various things to help wake it up, such as requiring the net to monitor its own knowledge gaps and do something about them. It shouldn't be something to fear, says Goertzel: "The outlook for humanity is probably better in the case that an emergent, coherent and purposeful internet mind develops."

Heylighen agrees, but warns that we might find it a little disappointing. "We probably would not notice a whole lot of a difference, initially," he says.

And when might this begin? According to Heylighen, it all depends on internet fashion trends. If the effort that has gone into developing social networking sites goes into developing internet consciousness, it could happen within a decade, he says.

Eurojust supports wire-tapping of Skype conversations, skype conversations recorded

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – EU's judicial cooperation agency Eurojust will take the lead in finding ways to help police and prosecutors across Europe to wiretap computer-to-computer phone conversations enabled by programs such as Skype.

"We will sit together with all member states to see how this can be done technically and legally," Joannes Thuy, Eurojust spokesman told this website.

The EU wants to eavesdrop internet calls. (Photo: European Commission)

Mr Thuy stressed that the wiretapping would not affect "normal users", but would have to be carried out only as part of a criminal investigation.

Eurojust's talks with prosecutors and police officials from member states, as well as legal experts would be led by Italian prosecutor Carmen Manfreda.

"There are 30 different legal systems all across the EU, so we expect the talks to take several months before first results are presented," Mr Thuy added.

Skype, an Danish-Swedish business developed by Estonian programmers that was sold to E-Bay in 2005 and has over 350 million customers worldwide, is said to be un-spyable by intelligence services.

In its press release, Eurojust says that "Skype has so far refused to share its encryption system with national authorities."

However, Skype claims that it has "extensively debriefed Eurojust on our law enforcement programme and capabilities."

"Skype cooperates with law enforcement where legally and technically possible. Skype remains interested in working with Eurojust despite the fact that they chose not to contact us before issuing this inaccurate report," Brian O'Shaughnessy, head of corporate communications at Skype said in a statement.

The Italian anti-mafia prosecutors requested Eurojust to coordinate this initiative, pointing that criminals in Italy were increasingly making phone calls over the internet in order to avoid getting caught through mobile wiretapping.

Bavarian authorities allegedly also attempted to wiretap Skype conversations and commissioned an IT firm to do this, but were not successful, according to documents obtained by Piraten Party, a movement promoting Internet freedom.

According to Eurojust, customs and tax police in Milan have overheard a suspected cocaine trafficker telling an accomplice to switch to Skype in order to get details of a 2kg drug consignment.