June 2014

US Goes Back to Publishers on Prices

Two years after three major book publishers settled a major civil antitrust lawsuit with the federal government, the Justice Department has gone back to the publishers asking about any recent pricing discussions they may have had with others in the industry, say people familiar with the situation.

The inquiries, made in recent weeks by letter to Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, CBS's Simon & Schuster and News Corp's HarperCollins Publishers, have created anxiety in the publishing industry.

The inquiries reopened a sensitive and costly issue that publishers thought they had resolved, and raised the possibility of additional constraints on how they do business. The department's latest move comes as Amazon is dominating sales of both print books online and e-books in large part through its discounting strategy.

The first of the publishers to renegotiate contract terms is Hachette, which is currently caught up in a bitter dispute with Amazon.com Inc. over e-book terms. As a result of the dispute, Amazon has delayed shipments of Hachette books and blocked preorders of new titles.

Precise terms being discussed aren't known, although Amazon is seeking a higher split of e-book prices, people familiar with the situation said. The significance of the Justice Department's latest move isn't clear. The inquiries don't necessarily mean any legal action is imminent or even likely, a person familiar with the situation said.

The three publishers the Justice Department has contacted are the ones who first settled the lawsuit. Two other publishers also named in the suit settled later. Apple went to trial, was found guilty of collusion and said it would appeal.

Free State: FCC Must Avoid Big is Bad Approach To Comcast/TWC

Seth Cooper, a senior adjunct fellow at the Free State Foundation, has some suggestions for how the Federal Communications Commission should, and should not, vet the proposed Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger if it is to conduct a consumer-focused and "principled" review and that includes not rejecting it on the "big is bad" theory.

In a new paper for the free market think tank, Cooper concedes it is possible that an economic examination of deal could produce anticompetitive concerns, but there needs to be "unmistakable" evidence.

The FCC's due diligence in that examination of the deal, Cooper says, must "disregard pleas for it to reject Comcast/TWC out of hand, based on appeals to emotional incredulity or 'big is bad' sloganeering; Stand firm against calls that, under the guise of protecting consumers, the agency impose conditions in order to protect market rivals...; reject dragging out its review process...; and avoid the imposition of any conditions on the merger unrelated to demonstrable concerns over market power and anticompetitive conduct."

NSA chief: Being anonymous an anachronism

The concept of total anonymity may be something of an anachronism, the head of the National Security Agency suggested. Adm Michael Rogers said anonymity is being sacrificed for technology, and his agency is caught in the tensions surrouding that shift.

“In the world we’re living in, increasingly by choice and by chance, we are forfeiting privacy at levels that as individuals I don't think we truly understand,” Adm Rogers said. “I’m the first to admit, the idea that you can be totally anonymous in the digital age is increasingly difficult to executive.”

The ability to completely disappear from the crowd may be a thing of the past, he said, given the ability of companies and governments to obtain vast amounts of information about people.

Adm Rogers's comments follow a series of reports detailing the insights companies and government agencies are gaining by watching people’s habits on the Internet and offline.

Reddit, Imgur and Boing Boing launch anti-NSA-surveillance campaign

Some of the world's largest websites are planning a coordinated day of action to oppose mass surveillance online. The sites, which include Reddit, Imgur and BoingBoing, will be taking part in the campaign, called "Reset the Net", in a number of ways.

Some will showing a splash screen to all users, reminiscent of the one used in the successful protests against Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA, the US copyright bill which many feared would damage the backbone of the Internet.

But rather than telling users to write to their electoral representatives, this protest will push more direct action, encouraging visitors to install privacy and encryption tools. Other sites have committed to improving their own privacy as part of the campaign, by enabling standards such as HTTPS, which prevents attackers from eavesdropping on visitors.

Such security standards are common in the world of ecommerce, but rarer for sites which don't think of themselves as holding sensitive information.

The campaign is being co-ordinated by Fight for the Future, whose co-founder Tiffiniy Cheng said "Now that we know how mass surveillance works, we know how to stop it. That’s why people all over the world are going to work together to use encryption everywhere and make it too hard for any government to conduct mass surveillance.

Algorithm searches for human actions in videos

An algorithm has been developed to automatically recognise human gestures or activities in videos in order to describe what is taking place.

MIT postdoc Hamed Pirsiavash and his former thesis advisor Deva Remanan from the University of California at Irvine have used natural language processing techniques in order to improve computers' ability to search for particular actions within videos -- whether it's making tea, playing tennis or weightlifting.

The activity-recognising algorithm is faster than previous versions and is able to make good guesses at partially completed actions, meaning it can handle streaming video. Natural language processing has been applied to computer vision in order to break down the different components involved in any action in the same way that sentences are divided down into different elements.

The researchers essentially came up with a type of grammar for human movement, dividing up one main action into a series of subactions. As a video plays, the algorithm constructs a set of hypotheses about which subactions are being depicted and where, and ranks them according to probability. As the video progresses, it can eliminate hypotheses that don't conform to the grammatical rules, which then dramatically reduces the number of possibilities.

Pirsiavesh believes that the system may have medical applications, including checking that physiotherapy exercises are being carried out correctly or the extent to which motor function in patients with neurological damage has returned.

Google, the fight to forget, and the right to remember

[Commentary] A major assault on the past is underway in Europe where tens of thousands are seizing on a landmark court ruling to demand Google remove search results they dislike.

As a result, people on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and even within Europe, could soon see very different versions of the Internet as Google’s listings become riddled with blank spaces where information once stood. This is dangerous.

Europe’s past is replete with governments that scrubbed history to suit their own ends. The new Google rules could not only provide a new way for the powerful to purge the past, but also help legitimize censorship in other countries.

This doesn’t mean that there is no place for forgetting or deleting data -- indeed, history also shows that forgetting can be as important to a society as remembering. But the removal rules, as they are now constructed, threaten to do more harm than good.

China Escalating Attack on Google

The authorities in China have made Google’s services largely inaccessible in recent days, a move most likely related to the government’s broad efforts to stifle discussion of the 25th anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 3 and 4, 1989.

In addition to Google’s search engines being blocked, the company’s products, including Gmail, Calendar and Translate, have been affected.

“This is by far the biggest attack on Google that’s ever taken place in China,” said a co-founder of GreatFire.org, who asked to remain anonymous to prevent retaliation by the authorities. “Probably the only thing comparable is when the Chinese government first started blocking websites in the 1990s.”

While Internet users in mainland China could reach international versions of Google search until a few days ago, “all Google services in all countries, encrypted or not, are now blocked in China,” GreatFire.org wrote. These include the Chinese-language version based in Hong Kong, Google.hk, and Google.com, Google Australia and others. Unlike the websites of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and The New York Times, which are reliably blocked by the authorities, Google services are being disrupted in a way that affects about 9 out of 10 Chinese users, according to GreatFire.org.

By allowing some access, “the Chinese government is trying to pin the blame on Google,” the GreatFire co-founder said. Google says that it is not the problem. “We’ve checked extensively, and there are no technical problems on our side,” said a Google spokeswoman, who declined to elaborate. Google’s traffic from China on all its services just fell 50 percent, according to the company’s transparency report.

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From Times Reporter Over Refusal to Identify Source

The Supreme Court has turned down an appeal from James Risen, a reporter for The New York Times facing jail for refusing to identify a confidential source.

The court’s one-line order gave no reasons but effectively sided with the government in a confrontation between what prosecutors said was an imperative to secure evidence in a national security prosecution and what journalists said was an intolerable infringement of press freedom.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond (VA), ordered Risen to comply with the subpoena. Risen has said he will refuse. “I will continue to fight,” Risen said.

His lawyer, Joel Kurtzberg, urged the Justice Department to hold its fire. “The ball is now in the government’s court,” Kurtzberg wrote. “The government can choose not to pursue Mr. Risen’s testimony if it wants to. We can only hope now that the government will not seek to have him held in contempt for doing nothing more than reporting the news and keeping his promises” to his sources.

Apple dives into 'Internet of Things'

The “Internet of Things” is about to go mainstream, with some help from Apple. The company has unveiled plans to let people use their iPhones and iPads to control an array of Internet-connected devices in their homes, from door locks to lightbulbs.

In doing so, the company brought the emerging sector of “smart” appliances to a much wider base of consumers.

Apple’s move could also have implications for Washington regulators, who are just beginning to grapple with the Internet of Things. Such technologies -- from wired cars to toothbrushes -- raise new privacy and security implications as everyday objects get connected to the Internet, and amass data on users, in unprecedented ways.

“We thought we could bring some rationality to this space,” Apple Senior Vice President Craig Federighi said. “You could say something like ‘Get ready for bed’ and be assured your garage door is closed, your door is locked, the thermostat is lowered and your lights are dimmed,” he said.

Apple said people would be able to control the home appliances through a single app. It released a software kit to give developers a common set of standards for building and connecting Internet-enabled devices.

Is Apple finally relaxing its stance on Bitcoin apps?

In a potential course correction, Apple is opening to the idea of letting iPhone users make payments with bitcoins and other alternate currencies.

The company's updated its developer guidelines to allow apps that "facilitate" transactions made with "approved" cryptocurrencies: “Apps may facilitate transmission of approved virtual currencies provided that they do so in compliance with all state and federal laws for the territories in which the app functions.”

That Apple is addressing virtual currencies explicitly is another indication that Bitcoin and the like are becoming increasingly mainstream, even if the company is reserving a huge amount of say over what it'll allow on the app store. It's also possible that Apple will continue to keep Bitcoin apps off-limits, as it requires developers to be legally compliant in "all territories" -- which, considering how many regulators are still struggling to understand the technology, might restrict developers for a long time.

Benton

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