It should come as no surprise by now that I am not a huge fan of Apple, the company. I do think they make excellent hardware, and my laptop is a MacBook Air running Windows 7. Their business practices, however, are pretty shady, and it’s my opinion that they hold nothing but contempt for their customers.

A perfect example is the new malware attack against OSX, MACDefender. For years, OSX users have crowed about how they didn’t have to worry about viruses or malware, because mommy Apple kept them safe with an operating system that was immune to such things.

No, it was never immune. It was simply never on the radar of malware authors because it wasn’t financially attactive enough to attack. With the hundreds of millions of unprotected Windows installations, it didn’t make sense to bother. Well, there’s enough OSX users out there now to make it worthwhile, and the attacks are starting.

Apple’s response? Sticking its fingers in its ears and shouting “LALALALA! I can’t hear you!”

ZDnet’s Ed Bott interviewed an AppleCare representative, and was told that Apple’s official stance is that they not assist their customers in removing the malware. In fact, in a follow-up article, Ed shows an internal memo that tells Apple support reps to not even acknowledge the existence of the malware on their computer, nor provide them with further help or escalate to a higher support level.

This is atrocious. Even Microsoft, which has a long history of operating system exploits and malware issues, has acknowledged the problems and even provides anti-malware protection for free, as well as providing online and phone support for security issues.

Don’t expect Apple to change their stance until they are shamed into doing it. Because they already have your money. And they know that their diehard fans will swallow anything they tell them, even if it’s against their own best interests.

Burying your head in the sand is NOT a viable form of customer support.

Takeaway: At home you search for something on Google. Ten minutes later, at work, you enter the exact same query into Google, but get different results. Why?

December 4th, 2009 was a pivotal day for the Internet. Still, as Eli Pariser points out in his new book,The Filter Bubble , very few people noticed what the search giant Google had done. Fortunately:

“Search engine blogger Danny Sullivan pores over the items on Google’s blog, looking for clues about where the monolith is headed next, and to him, the post was a big deal. In fact, he wrote later that day , it was the biggest change that has ever happened in search engines.”

Filter bubble? What is it?

“The new generation of Internet filters looks at things you seem to like-the actual things you’ve done, or the things people like you like-and tries to extrapolate. They are prediction engines, constantly creating and refining a theory of who you are and what you’ll do and want next.

Together these engines create a unique universe of information for each of us-what I’ve come to call a filter bubble-which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas and information.”

What Google has known all along

Google uses the above data to provide customized-search results to signed-in account owners who give their permission .

What changed?

So what was this dramatic change? Google altered Personal Search, enabling it for everyone not just those logged on, by using what they call signed-out customization :

“When you’re not signed in, Google customizes your search experience based on past search information linked to your browser, using a cookie. Google stores up to 180 days of signed-out search activity linked to your browser’s cookie, including queries and results you click.”

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Turning Personal Search on for everyone concerned Mr. Sullivan. Calling it the “New Normal “, he explains:

“The days of ‘normal’ search results that everyone sees are now over. Personalized results are the ‘new normal,’ and the change is going to shift the search world and society in general in unpredictable ways.”

To put it another way, Mr. Sullivan mentions:

“Happy that you’re ranking in the top results for a term that’s important to you?

Look again. Turn off personalized search, and you might discover that your top billing is due to the way the personalized system is a huge ego search reinforcement tool. If you visit your own site often, your own site ranks better in your own results-but not for everyone else.”

And, here I thought my articles were getting high rankings because of their merit. Ouch.

PageRank and then some

PageRank is what made Google famous, more than a few people rich, and how Google rates web pages. In 2009, Google altered their holy grail, in order to revamp Personal Search. Mr. Pariser, in his book, points out that Google now uses 57 different variables or “signals” to create search results tailored specifically for you. Some of the known signals are:

• Search history
• Location
• Active browser
• Computer being used
• Language configured

I suspect the other 52 will remain secret, much like the formula for Coke.

What it all means

Ever have one of those feelings that something doesn’t seem right, but you can’t put your finger on it? I suspect that’s why it took me until now to realize the implication of Google’s Personal Search. And, why Mr. Pariser has spent a great deal of time and effort coming to his conclusions.

I’m glad I read the book. Understanding Mr. Pariser’s concerns will help me gage search results more realistically. For the time-challenged, Mike Elgan offers a synopsis of the book, in his blog post, How to pop your Internet ‘filter bubble’ :

“In this column, I’m going to tell you how personalization works, why you may not want it, and also how to pop the bubble and opt out of a system that censors your Internet based on stereotyping.”

I found the following tips by Mr. Elgan useful:

• Deliberately click on links that make it hard for the personalization engines to pigeonhole you. Make yourself difficult to stereotype.
• Erase your browser history and cookies from time to time.
• Use an “incognito” window for exploring content you don’t want too much of later.
• Use Twitter instead of Facebook for news. (Twitter doesn’t personalize.)

Update: As for Twitter and Facebook, I just read a Yahoo Finance article prepared by WSJ and felt compelled to share it with you. The article refers to the Facebook “Like” button and Twitter’s “Tweet” button that is displayed on web pages:

“These so-called social widgets, which appear atop stories on news sites or alongside products on retail sites, notify Facebook and Twitter that a person visited those sites even when users don’t click on the buttons, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal.”

The article goes on to explain something that may surprise you:

“For this to work, a person only needs to have logged into Facebook or Twitter once in the past month. The sites will continue to collect browsing data, even if the person closes their browser or turns off their computers, until that person explicitly logs out of their Facebook or Twitter accounts.”

How about that?

An afterthought

The advantage afforded those with the ability to manipulate search-engine results is huge. And, I was interested in learning what Mr. Pariser and Mr. Sullivan thought about that. Time did not allow Mr. Pariser to respond. Mr. Sullivan did.

Kassner: Ultimately, my concern is how do we know that queried search results are not forced biases leading us to follow someone else’s agenda?

Sullivan: I think despite personalization, the search results still reflect lots of diversity. I also think that results are only the start of research into a new area. Wherever you end up, you’ll probably get some pointers to other material-and that also leads to greater diversity.

I also think it’s easy to assume the worse. My friends are all liberal (let’s say), so I’ll never see anything but a liberal view of the world. Perhaps. But the reality is that some of your friends will probably point toward some anti-liberal material, as part of their discussions. And that’s exposing you to more diversity.

Assuming the worse, Google could intentionally try to bias its search results to a particular view. But that assumes there’s a particular view on literally billions of unique searches that are done each month. There’s just not. Some of them have no particular slant one way or another. But even if you managed it, as I said, some of those resources (just like your friends) will point toward content they don’t agree with.

The challenge isn’t that we won’t get exposed to contrary statements. The challenge is that people are seemingly more and more happy to ignore contrary material and create their own beliefs without any critical thinking. “True Enough ” is a good book on this topic. Perhaps this really isn’t something new but rather has always been there. But it sure feels new to me.

Kassner:I am seeing people preferring to use links mentioned by Twitter and Facebook. They trust those opinions over the search engines. Are you seeing that as well? Do you see this as a growing trend?

Sullivan: I do see it growing, and it’s because our social networks offline have “caught up” to being as accessible as search engines for quick answers. We can ask many people for answers to anything, and that’s particularly attractive for subjective questions where there’s no right answer, where we want opinions from those we know.

Kassner: What is your opinion on the general health of search today?

Sullivan: I think the general health is actually pretty good. We should look for search engines to do more to increase quality, which means probably relying less on the link-based systems of ranking that worked in the past and more toward using social signals as well as our own behavior.

Kassner: Good advice. I intend on heeding it.

Final thoughts

My goal is to make you aware of what Mr. Pariser calls the filter bubble. And, explain why my Internet is different from your Internet. Just knowing search customization is happening is more than half the battle.

I learned a great deal from Mr. Sullivan about a subject I thought I understood. I was wrong and I thank him for his help.

Judicial decisions are starting to come fast and furious in the movie copyright troll cases – and the trend is mixed but promising for those of us who care about protecting due process.

The good news is that judges continue to recognize the fundamental flaws in these cases. In the Northern District of Illinois, for example, Judge Blanche Manning recently severed Millennium v. Does 1-800, effectively dismissing the case against almost every Doe defendant. The court also suggested that the suit had been brought in the wrong place:

The plaintiff is a Hawaii corporation with its principal place of business in California. As far as the plaintiff knows, none of the defendants are located in Illinois and it merely alleged, without any basis the court can discern, that “on information and belief each Defendant may be found in this district and/or a substantial part of the acts of infringement complained of herein occurred in this District.” Amended Comp. at ¶7. Indeed, apparently none of the Doe defendants who have filed motions to quash are located in Illinois and it appears that easily accessible tools exist to verify the locations of the IP addresses of the other named Doe defendants, see, e.g.,http://whois.arin.net/ui/, many (if not all) of which are not located in Illinois.

Judge Manning has also ordered severance in Lightspeed v. Does 1-1000, on similar grounds.

Another Illinois federal judge has expressed not just skepticism but outrage at the tactics of one copyright troll. Calling the case of CP Productions v. 1-300 both “ill-fated’ and “ill-considered” he not only dismissed the case but read the riot act to the plaintiff’s attorney in open court, demanding to know why, if the case was properly filed in Illinois, he was getting motions to quash from defendants all over the country.

And, as we reported last week the judge in one mass copyright “reverse class action” in the Southern District of Illinois has stayed discovery while it considered whether the plaintiff should be allowed to subpoena the Does’ identities given the fundamental flaws in its case. A hearing on the issue is scheduled for Monday.

These views are not yet universal, however. In late March, Judge Beryl Howell issued an unfortunate decision on motions to quash discovery in three cases filed in the District of Columbia (the plaintiffs are all represented by the US Copyright Group). EFF participated as amicus in one of the cases, Call of the Wild Movie v. Does 1,062. The judge denied the motions, concluding, in essence, that it was too early in the litigation to address deep the procedural flaws in the plaintiffs’ cases. We are particularly disappointed that Judge Howell (1) accepted the idea that using BitTorrent to download the same movie was enough to establish a logical relationship between defendants; and (2) suggested that the Doe defendants are not harmed until they are actually named in a lawsuit, not withstanding the efforts of plaintiffs to extract settlements based, in part, on the coercive effect of being sued far from home with the threat of statutory damages of up to $150,000.

Since then, however, Judge Howell has indicated that she is keeping a close eye on USCG. For example, in one of the cases, Maverick v. Does 1-4350, Judge Howell has ordered the plaintiff to dismiss hundreds of Does where the plaintiff either does not intend to name and sue the Does in D.C. and/or the information for those Does is no longer available. The court noted that “since plaintiff filed its Complaint, it has not named a single defendant in this action” and that while plaintiff had stated it would dismiss numerous Does, it had not bothered to submit a proposed order to that effect, leaving those Does in limbo.

We'll continue to monitor these cases, and to get involved directly where we can.

Related Issues: Copyright Trolls

April 7th, 2011

Legal Attack on Online Video Site Could Throttle Innovation with Fears of Litigation

San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of advocacy groups have asked a federal appeals court to reject attempts to thwart federal copyright law and saddle online communities with new litigation fears in the appeal of Viacom v. YouTube.

In an amicus brief filed Thursday, EFF argues that the infringement claims made by Viacom and the other plaintiffs threaten to undermine the "safe harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) — safe harbors that have fostered free speech and innovation around the globe. Without the clear legal structure of the DMCA process, companies that host user-generated expression could be hit with potentially massive damage awards, which would encourage over-blocking of content or even the shutdown of services altogether.

"If the DMCA safe harbors are undermined in the way Viacom and the other content companies would like, the free flow of information will be seriously threatened," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Abigail Phillips. "Communications platforms like YouTube have enabled political and other speech to flourish online. We've all seen the critical role digital communications have been playing in protests across the Middle East. The safe harbors make posting of user-generated content like this possible."

At issue in this case is copyright infringement on YouTube before the online video service voluntarily implemented content filtering technologies in May of 2008. The district court correctly found that YouTube was shielded by the DMCA safe harbors, and Viacom and others appealed the ruling to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"All the online services you use every day — Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay — depend on the DMCA safe harbors in order to allow user-generated content on their sites," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry. "That's why Congress designed the safe harbors — to allow innovators to manage legal risk and develop new services without fear of devastating litigation, while offering copyright owners an expedited process for taking down infringing content. Viacom's arguments here misinterpret the law, with potentially disastrous results."

Also joining EFF's brief are the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Center for Democracy and Technology.

For the full amicus brief:
https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/viacom_v_youtube/ViacomvGoogleAmicus….

For more on this case:
http://www.eff.org/cases/viacom-v-youtube

Contacts:

Corynne McSherry
Intellectual Property Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
corynne@eff.org

Abigail Phillips
Senior Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
abigail@eff.org

Related Issues: DMCA, Intellectual Property

Related Cases: Viacom v. YouTube

“…Desktop computers will continue to evolve by becoming smaller, faster and more efficient.”

There’s no doubt about it, notebook computers surpassed their desktop computer counterparts in overall sales because of their mobility, small footprint and evolution into being virtually just as powerful. However, there are still several reasons to buy a desktop computer as they offer some fundamental aspects that are difficult for a notebook/ netbook / tablet to emulate. For example, desktop computers can have bigger screens, bigger storage capacity and can function as a centralized location, or a home base/dumping ground for your computing needs. Your desktop computer can also manage your home/office network, have more peripherals connected to it and can be upgraded with new parts in order to future-proof it.

Regardless of whether you are contemplating either a desktop or a notebook purchase, desktop computers continue to evolve and this Tech Tip will identify several trends that can give you additional information on what to look for so you can make an informed decision.

A Shrinking Footprint

One neat feature that computer makers are pushing more of is the need for a computer to occupy less space. Manufacturers realize that technology has advanced so much that many customers opt for more space-saving designs without sacrificing too much horsepower. For example, the Lenovo Ideacentre Q150 measures about 7” x 6” x 1” and weighs about 1 pound. Yet it boasts a 250 GB hard drive, Intel Atom 1.6ghz, built-in Wi-Fi and nVidia Ion graphics. The way PC makers pull this off is by including notebook computer parts that can fit in such a small chassis. A slightly larger variation (and growing in popularity) of this is the All-in-One PC concept where the guts of the computer are built inside the LCD monitor chassis such as the Dell Inspiron One 2305 or the Apple iMac.

More Beefy Hardware

Most desktop computers that are built now feature more generous hardware as standard such as 3-6GB RAM and 320GB-1 Terabyte (1 TB) hard drives. These were premium costs years ago. Also, more standard multimedia capabilities are included such as nVidia ION graphics and Intel’s Sandy Bridge platform (Core i7, i5, etc.), having built-in video graphics right inside the CPU for enhanced HD video playback and other multimedia tasks. In addition, triple and quad-core CPUs have become such a staple that you can pick up a reasonably-equipped quad-core such as the HP Pavilion P6650Z for a great price. Furthermore, amenities such as a multi-format memory card reader, DVD burner, 5.1-channel audio and built-in Wi-Fi have become desktop PC staple features.

Other more common features appearing on desktop computers are DVI ports if you want the option to connect a high-definition (HD) monitor, 4-6 USB ports, USB 3.0 ports and the phasing out of the older PS/2 connectors. (green-colored mouse connector & purple-colored keyboard connector) In addition, some manufacturers engineer their desktop computers to be able to function as a home media PC (HTPC). So it’s possible to connect your computer to your television and record/playback TV shows, connect and copy/save home movies from your camcorder and play it back on your TV.

More Beefy Hardware – Part Deux

As stated earlier that modern desktop computers are now configured with generous hardware, it is still possible to further upgrade a current desktop PC if you’re worried about obsolescence. For example, many new desktop computers have 4 GB CPU RAM standard and while this is plenty for most people, it can most likely be maxed out at 8-16 GB RAM. Granted, the only practical benefit for this type of upgrade investment would be if you plan to do CPU-intensive tasks like running multimedia applications like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro or computer simulations/calculations. That being said, you should perform due diligence on the prospective desktop computer(s) you’re considering and determine how well it can be upgraded (i. e. extra hard drive bays) if you anticipate your current and future computing needs will require it.

The Future

Desktop computers will continue to evolve by becoming smaller, faster and more efficient. Regardless of your reason for buying one, it is safe to say that the horsepower included with an average-priced desktop PC ($350-$700) is enough for most applications such as small business, school and simple everyday tasks.