November 2008

How con artists use psychology to work

1 Comment / business, science, security / /

From Paul J. Zak’s “How to Run a Con” (Psychology Today: 13 November 2008):

When I was in high school, I took a job at an ARCO gas station on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California. At the time, I drove a 1967 Mustang hotrod and thought I might pick up some tips and cheap parts by working around cars after school. You see a lot of interesting things working the night shift in a sketchy neighborhood. I constantly saw people making bad decisions: drunk drivers, gang members, unhappy cops, and con men. In fact, I was the victim of a classic con called “The Pigeon Drop.” If we humans have such big brains, how can we get conned?

Here’s what happened to me. One slow Sunday afternoon, a man comes out of the restroom with a pearl necklace in his hand. “Found it on the bathroom floor” he says. He followed with “Geez, looks nice-I wonder who lost it?” Just then, the gas station’s phone rings and a man asked if anyone found a pearl necklace that he had purchased as a gift for his wife. He offers a $200 reward for the necklace’s return. I tell him that a customer found it. “OK” he says, “I’ll be there in 30 minutes.” I give him the ARCO address and he gives me his phone number. The man who found the necklace hears all this but tells me he is running late for a job interview and cannot wait for the other man to arrive.

Huum, what to do? The man with the necklace said “Why don’t I give you the necklace and we split the reward?” The greed-o-meter goes off in my head, suppressing all rational thought. “Yeah, you give me the necklace to hold and I’ll give you $100” I suggest. He agrees. Since high school kids working at gas stations don’t have $100, I take money out of the cash drawer to complete the transaction.

You can guess the rest. The man with the lost necklace doesn’t come and never answers my many calls. After about an hour, I call the police. The “pearl” necklace was a two dollar fake and the number I was calling went to a pay phone nearby. I had to fess up to my boss and pay back the money with my next paycheck.

Why did this con work? Let’s do some neuroscience. While the primary motivator from my perspective was greed, the pigeon drop cleverly engages THOMAS (The Human Oxytocin Mediated Attachment System). … THOMAS is a powerful brain circuit that releases the neurochemical oxytocin when we are trusted and induces a desire to reciprocate the trust we have been shown–even with strangers.

The key to a con is not that you trust the conman, but that he shows he trusts you. Conmen ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable. Because of THOMAS, the human brain makes us feel good when we help others–this is the basis for attachment to family and friends and cooperation with strangers. “I need your help” is a potent stimulus for action.

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A botnet with a contingency plan

business, law, security, tech in changing society / /

From Gregg Keizer’s “Massive botnet returns from the dead, starts spamming” (Computerworld: 26 November 2008):

A big spam-spewing botnet shut down two weeks ago has been resurrected, security researchers said today, and is again under the control of criminals.

The “Srizbi” botnet returned from the dead late Tuesday, said Fengmin Gong, chief security content officer at FireEye Inc., when the infected PCs were able to successfully reconnect with new command-and-control servers, which are now based in Estonia.

Srizbi was knocked out more than two weeks ago when McColo Corp., a hosting company that had been accused of harboring a wide range of criminal activities, was yanked off the Internet by its upstream service providers. With McColo down, PCs infected with Srizbi and other bot Trojan horses were unable to communicate with their command servers, which had been hosted by McColo. As a result, spam levels dropped precipitously.

But as other researchers noted last week, Srizbi had a fallback strategy. In the end, that strategy paid off for the criminals who control the botnet.

According to Gong, when Srizbi bots were unable to connect with the command-and-control servers hosted by McColo, they tried to connect with new servers via domains that were generated on the fly by an internal algorithm. FireEye reverse-engineered Srizbi, rooted out that algorithm and used it to predict, then preemptively register, several hundred of the possible routing domains.

The domain names, said Gong, were generated on a three-day cycle, and for a while, FireEye was able to keep up — and effectively block Srizbi’s handlers from regaining control.

“We have registered a couple hundred domains,” Gong said, “but we made the decision that we cannot afford to spend so much money to keep registering so many [domain] names.”

Once FireEye stopped preempting Srizbi’s makers, the latter swooped in and registered the five domains in the next cycle. Those domains, in turn, pointed Srizbi bots to the new command-and-control servers, which then immediately updated the infected machines to a new version of the malware.

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1st label with more than half of sales from digital

art, business, tech in changing society / /

From Tim Arango’s “Digital Sales Surpass CDs at Atlantic” (The New York Times: 25 November 2008):

Atlantic, a unit of Warner Music Group, says it has reached a milestone that no other major record label has hit: more than half of its music sales in the United States are now from digital products, like downloads on iTunes and ring tones for cellphones.

…

At the Warner Music Group, Atlantic’s parent company, digital represented 27 percent of its American recorded-music revenue during the fourth quarter. (Warner does not break out financial data for its labels, but Atlantic said that digital sales accounted for about 51 percent of its revenue.)

With the milestone comes a sobering reality already familiar to newspapers and television producers. While digital delivery is becoming a bigger slice of the pie, the overall pie is shrinking fast. Analysts at Forrester Research estimate that music sales in the United States will decline to $9.2 billion in 2013, from $10.1 billion this year. That compares with $14.6 billion in 1999, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

As a result, the hope that digital revenue will eventually compensate for declining sales of CDs — and usher in overall growth — have largely been dashed.

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Why American car companies are in trouble

business, history, tech in changing society / /

From Paul Ingrassia’s “How Detroit Drove Into a Ditch” (The Wall Street Journal: 25 October 2008):

This situation doesn’t stem from the recent meltdown in banking and the markets. GM, Ford and Chrysler have been losing billions since 2005, when the U.S. economy was still healthy. The financial crisis does, however, greatly exacerbate Detroit’s woes. As car sales plunge — both in the U.S. and in Detroit’s once-booming overseas markets — it’s becoming nearly impossible for the companies to cut costs fast enough to keep pace with the evaporation of their revenue. All three companies, once the very symbol of American economic might, need new capital, but their options for raising it are limited.

In all this lies a tale of hubris, missed opportunities, disastrous decisions and flawed leadership of almost biblical proportions. In fact, for the last 30 years Detroit has gone astray, repented, gone astray and repented again in a cycle not unlike the Israelites in the Book of Exodus.

…

Detroit failed to grasp — or at least to address — the fundamental nature of its Japanese competition. Japan’s car companies, and more recently the Germans and Koreans, gained a competitive advantage largely by forging an alliance with American workers.

Detroit, meanwhile, has remained mired in mutual mistrust with the United Auto Workers union. While the suspicion has abated somewhat in recent years, it never has disappeared — which is why Detroit’s factories remain vastly more cumbersome to manage than the factories of foreign car companies in the U.S.

…

Two incidents in 1936 and 1937 formed this lasting labor-management divide: the sit-down strike at GM’s factories in Flint, Mich., and the Battle of the Overpass in Detroit, in which Ford goons beat up union organizers. But the United Auto Workers prevailed, and as the GM-Ford-Chrysler oligopoly emerged in the 1940s, the union gained a labor monopoly in American auto factories. As costs increased, the companies routinely passed them on to U.S. consumers, who had virtually no alternatives in buying cars.

…

Nissan, Toyota and other Japanese car companies soon started building factories in America, followed by German and Korean auto makers. There are now 16 foreign-owned assembly plants in the U.S., and many more that build engines, transmissions and other components.

…

Several years ago Ford even considered dropping cars altogether because they weren’t profitable, and focusing entirely on trucks. Then in 2005, Hurricane Katrina and growing oil demand from China and India sent gasoline prices soaring and SUV sales plunging. GM lost $10.6 billion that year. Ford topped that by losing $12.7 billion in 2006. Last summer Daimler gave up on Chrysler, selling it to private-equity powerhouse Cerberus for about one-fourth of what it had paid to buy Chrysler. Last fall the UAW approved significant wage and benefit concessions, but they won’t kick in until 2010. That might be too late. GM lost $15.5 billion in this year’s second quarter, Ford lost $8.7 billion, and further losses are coming. (Closely held Chrysler, of course, doesn’t report financial results.)

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The NSA and threats to privacy

history, law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From James Bamford’s “Big Brother Is Listening” (The Atlantic: April 2006):

This legislation, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, established the FISA court—made up of eleven judges handpicked by the chief justice of the United States—as a secret part of the federal judiciary. The court’s job is to decide whether to grant warrants requested by the NSA or the FBI to monitor communications of American citizens and legal residents. The law allows the government up to three days after it starts eavesdropping to ask for a warrant; every violation of FISA carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. Between May 18, 1979, when the court opened for business, until the end of 2004, it granted 18,742 NSA and FBI applications; it turned down only four outright.

Such facts worry Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who worked for the NSA as an intern while in law school in the 1980s. The FISA “courtroom,” hidden away on the top floor of the Justice Department building (because even its location is supposed to be secret), is actually a heavily protected, windowless, bug-proof installation known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF.

…

It is true that the court has been getting tougher. From 1979 through 2000, it modified only two out of 13,087 warrant requests. But from the start of the Bush administration, in 2001, the number of modifications increased to 179 out of 5,645 requests. Most of those—173—involved what the court terms “substantive modifications.”

…

Contrary to popular perception, the NSA does not engage in “wiretapping”; it collects signals intelligence, or “sigint.” In contrast to the image we have from movies and television of an FBI agent placing a listening device on a target’s phone line, the NSA intercepts entire streams of electronic communications containing millions of telephone calls and e-mails. It runs the intercepts through very powerful computers that screen them for particular names, telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and trigger words or phrases. Any communications containing flagged information are forwarded by the computer for further analysis.

…

Names and information on the watch lists are shared with the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and foreign intelligence services. Once a person’s name is in the files, even if nothing incriminating ever turns up, it will likely remain there forever. There is no way to request removal, because there is no way to confirm that a name is on the list.

In December of 1997, in a small factory outside the southern French city of Toulouse, a salesman got caught in the NSA’s electronic web. Agents working for the NSA’s British partner, the Government Communications Headquarters, learned of a letter of credit, valued at more than $1.1 million, issued by Iran’s defense ministry to the French company Microturbo. According to NSA documents, both the NSA and the GCHQ concluded that Iran was attempting to secretly buy from Microturbo an engine for the embargoed C-802 anti-ship missile. Faxes zapping back and forth between Toulouse and Tehran were intercepted by the GCHQ, which sent them on not just to the NSA but also to the Canadian and Australian sigint agencies, as well as to Britain’s MI6. The NSA then sent the reports on the salesman making the Iranian deal to a number of CIA stations around the world, including those in Paris and Bonn, and to the U.S. Commerce Department and the Customs Service. Probably several hundred people in at least four countries were reading the company’s communications.

…

Such events are central to the current debate involving the potential harm caused by the NSA’s warrantless domestic eavesdropping operation. Even though the salesman did nothing wrong, his name made its way into the computers and onto the watch lists of intelligence, customs, and other secret and law-enforcement organizations around the world. Maybe nothing will come of it. Maybe the next time he tries to enter the United States or Britain he will be denied, without explanation. Maybe he will be arrested. As the domestic eavesdropping program continues to grow, such uncertainties may plague innocent Americans whose names are being run through the supercomputers even though the NSA has not met the established legal standard for a search warrant. It is only when such citizens are turned down while applying for a job with the federal government—or refused when seeking a Small Business Administration loan, or turned back by British customs agents when flying to London on vacation, or even placed on a “no-fly” list—that they will realize that something is very wrong. But they will never learn why.

…

General Michael Hayden, director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005 and now principal deputy director of national intelligence, noted in 2002 that during the 1990s, e-communications “surpassed traditional communications. That is the same decade when mobile cell phones increased from 16 million to 741 million—an increase of nearly 50 times. That is the same decade when Internet users went from about 4 million to 361 million—an increase of over 90 times. Half as many land lines were laid in the last six years of the 1990s as in the whole previous history of the world. In that same decade of the 1990s, international telephone traffic went from 38 billion minutes to over 100 billion. This year, the world’s population will spend over 180 billion minutes on the phone in international calls alone.”

Intercepting communications carried by satellite is fairly simple for the NSA. The key conduits are the thirty Intelsat satellites that ring the Earth, 22,300 miles above the equator. Many communications from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to the eastern half of the United States, for example, are first uplinked to an Intelsat satellite and then downlinked to AT&T’s ground station in Etam, West Virginia. From there, phone calls, e-mails, and other communications travel on to various parts of the country. To listen in on that rich stream of information, the NSA built a listening post fifty miles away, near Sugar Grove, West Virginia. Consisting of a group of very large parabolic dishes, hidden in a heavily forested valley and surrounded by tall hills, the post can easily intercept the millions of calls and messages flowing every hour into the Etam station. On the West Coast, high on the edge of a bluff overlooking the Okanogan River, near Brewster, Washington, is the major commercial downlink for communications to and from Asia and the Pacific. Consisting of forty parabolic dishes, it is reportedly the largest satellite antenna farm in the Western Hemisphere. A hundred miles to the south, collecting every whisper, is the NSA’s western listening post, hidden away on a 324,000-acre Army base in Yakima, Washington. The NSA posts collect the international traffic beamed down from the Intelsat satellites over the Atlantic and Pacific. But each also has a number of dishes that appear to be directed at domestic telecommunications satellites.

Until recently, most international telecommunications flowing into and out of the United States traveled by satellite. But faster, more reliable undersea fiber-optic cables have taken the lead, and the NSA has adapted. The agency taps into the cables that don’t reach our shores by using specially designed submarines, such as the USS Jimmy Carter, to attach a complex “bug” to the cable itself. This is difficult, however, and undersea taps are short-lived because the batteries last only a limited time. The fiber-optic transmission cables that enter the United States from Europe and Asia can be tapped more easily at the landing stations where they come ashore. With the acquiescence of the telecommunications companies, it is possible for the NSA to attach monitoring equipment inside the landing station and then run a buried encrypted fiber-optic “backhaul” line to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, where the river of data can be analyzed by supercomputers in near real time.

Tapping into the fiber-optic network that carries the nation’s Internet communications is even easier, as much of the information transits through just a few “switches” (similar to the satellite downlinks). Among the busiest are MAE East (Metropolitan Area Ethernet), in Vienna, Virginia, and MAE West, in San Jose, California, both owned by Verizon. By accessing the switch, the NSA can see who’s e-mailing with whom over the Internet cables and can copy entire messages. Last September, the Federal Communications Commission further opened the door for the agency. The 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act required telephone companies to rewire their networks to provide the government with secret access. The FCC has now extended the act to cover “any type of broadband Internet access service” and the new Internet phone services—and ordered company officials never to discuss any aspect of the program.

…

The National Security Agency was born in absolute secrecy. Unlike the CIA, which was created publicly by a congressional act, the NSA was brought to life by a top-secret memorandum signed by President Truman in 1952, consolidating the country’s various military sigint operations into a single agency. Even its name was secret, and only a few members of Congress were informed of its existence—and they received no information about some of its most important activities. Such secrecy has lent itself to abuse.

During the Vietnam War, for instance, the agency was heavily involved in spying on the domestic opposition to the government. Many of the Americans on the watch lists of that era were there solely for having protested against the war. … Even so much as writing about the NSA could land a person a place on a watch list.

…

For instance, during World War I, the government read and censored thousands of telegrams—the e-mail of the day—sent hourly by telegraph companies. Though the end of the war brought with it a reversion to the Radio Act of 1912, which guaranteed the secrecy of communications, the State and War Departments nevertheless joined together in May of 1919 to create America’s first civilian eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, nicknamed the Black Chamber. By arrangement, messengers visited the telegraph companies each morning and took bundles of hard-copy telegrams to the agency’s offices across town. These copies were returned before the close of business that day.

A similar tale followed the end of World War II. In August of 1945, President Truman ordered an end to censorship. That left the Signal Security Agency (the military successor to the Black Chamber, which was shut down in 1929) without its raw intelligence—the telegrams provided by the telegraph companies. The director of the SSA sought access to cable traffic through a secret arrangement with the heads of the three major telegraph companies. The companies agreed to turn all telegrams over to the SSA, under a plan code-named Operation Shamrock. It ran until the government’s domestic spying programs were publicly revealed, in the mid-1970s.

…

Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who led the first probe into the National Security Agency, warned in 1975 that the agency’s capabilities

“could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it is done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capacity of this technology.”

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Blue for girls and pink for boys

history, language & literature / /

From Allen Abel and Madeleine Czigler’s “Boys, despair and aristocrats” (National Post: 24 June 2008):

Blue clothing for girls and pink for boys — and not the reverse — was the custom in North America for much of the 20th century. “The reason,” according to the Ladies Home Journal in 1918, “is that pink being a more decided and stronger colour is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Not until the 1950s did the reverse become entrenched.

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The importance of booze to the Pilgrims

history / /

From Sam Anderson’s “A History of Hooch“, a review of Iain Gately’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (6 July 2008):

Elizabethan England had a pub for every 187 people. (By 2004, the country was down to one for every 529 people.) The Pilgrims’ Mayflower was actually “a claret ship from the Bordeaux wine trade,” and a group of settlers who came over to join them brought 20,000 gallons of beer and wine but only 3,000 gallons of water.

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Chinese folklore and the colors green, white, red, yellow, and black

history / /

From Allen Abel and Madeleine Czigler’s “Ireland, Islam and envy” (National Post: 24 June 2008):

According to a Chinese folk tale, there once was a turtle whose wife fell in love with a snake. Too humiliated to watch their pan-reptilian canoodling, the turtle pulled a large green leaf over his eyes. Hence the usage, still current, of “green hat” in Chinese parlance as the connotation of a cuckold.

…

To the Chinese, in the same immemorial way, white is sadness, red is happiness, yellow is thoughtfulness and black is fear.

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George Clinton and the sample troll

art, business, history, law, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Tim Wu’s “On Copyright’s Authorship Policy” (Internet Archive: 2007):

On May 4, 2001, a one-man corporation named Bridgeport Music, Inc. launched over 500 counts of copyright infringement against more than 800 different artists and labels.1 Bridgeport Music has no employees, and other than copyrights, no reported assets.2 Technically, Bridgeport is a “catalogue company.” Others call it a “sample troll.”

Bridgeport is the owner of valuable copyrights, including many of funk singer George Clinton’s most famous songs – songs which are sampled in a good amount of rap music.3 Bridgeport located every sample of Clinton’s and other copyrights it owned, and sued based on the legal position that any sampling of a sound recording, no matter how minimal or unnoticeable, is still an infringement.

During the course of Bridgeport’s campaign, it has won two important victories. First, the Sixth Circuit, the appellate court for Nashville adopted Bridgeport’s theory of infringement. In Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films,4 the defendants sampled a single chord from the George Clinton tune “Get Off Your Ass and Jam,” changed the pitch, and looped the sound. Despite the plausible defense that one note is but a de minimus use of the work, the Sixth Circuit ruled for Bridgeport and created a stark rule: any sampling, no matter how minimal or undetectable, is a copyright infringement. Said the court in Bridgeport, “Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way.”5 In 2006 Bridgeport convinced a district court to enjoin the sales of the bestselling Notorious B.I.G. album, Ready to Die, for “illegal sampling.”6 A jury then awarded Bridgeport more than four million dollars in damages.7

The Bridgeport cases have been heavily criticized, and taken as a prime example of copyright’s excesses.8 Yet the deeper problem with the Bridgeport litigation is not necessarily a problem of too much copyright. It can be equally concluded that the ownership of the relevant rights is the root of the problem. George Clinton, the actual composer and recording artist, takes a much different approach to sampling. “When hip-hop came out,” said Clinton in an interview with journalist Rick Karr, “I was glad to hear it, especially when it was our songs – it was a way to get back on the radio.”9 Clinton accepts sampling of his work, and has released a three CD collection of his sounds for just that purpose.10 The problem is that he doesn’t own many of his most important copyrights. Instead, it is Bridgeport, the one-man company, that owns the rights to Clinton’s work. In the 1970s Bridgeport, through its owner Armen Boladian, managed to seize most of George Clinton’s copyrights and many other valuable rights. In at least a few cases, Boladian assigned the copyrights to Bridgeport by writing a contract and then faking Clinton’s signature.11 As Clinton puts it “he just stole ‘em.”12 With the copyrights to Clinton’s songs in the hands of Bridgeport – an entity with no vested interest in the works beyond their sheer economic value – the targeting of sampling is not surprising.

1 Tim Wu, Jay-Z Versus the Sample Troll, Slate Magazine, Nov. 16, 2006, http://www.slate.com/id/2153961/.

2 See Bridgeport Music, Inc.’s corporate entity details, Michigan Department of Labor & Economic Growth, available at http://www.dleg.state.mi.us/bcs_corp/dt_corp.asp?id_nbr=190824&name_entity=BRIDGEPORT%20MUSIC,%20INC (last visited Mar. 18, 2007).

3 See Wu, supra note 1.

4 410 F.3d 792 (6th Cir. 2005).

5 Id. at 801.

6 Jeff Leeds, Judge Freezes Notorious B.I.G. Album, N.Y. Times, Mar. 21, 2006, at E2.

7 Id.

8 See, e.g., Matthew R. Broodin, Comment, Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films: The Death of the Substantial Similarity Test in Digital Samping Copyright Infringemnt Claims—The Sixth Circuit’s Flawed Attempt at a Bright Line Rule, 6 Minn. J. L. Sci. & Tech. 825 (2005); Jeffrey F. Kersting, Comment, Singing a Different Tune: Was the Sixth Circuit Justified in Changing the Protection of Sound Recordings in Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films?, 74 U. Cin. L. Rev. 663 (2005) (answering the title question in the negative); John Schietinger, Note, Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films: How the Sixth Circuit Missed a Beat on Digital Music Sampling, 55 DePaul L. Rev. 209 (2005).

9 Interview by Rick Karr with George Clinton, at the 5th Annual Future of Music Policy Summit, Wash. D.C. (Sept. 12, 2005), video clip available at http://www.tvworldwide.com/showclip.cfm?ID=6128&clip=2 [hereinafter Clinton Interview].

10 George Clinton, Sample Some of Disc, Sample Some of D.A.T., Vols. 1-3 (1993-94).

11 Sound Generator, George Clinton awarded Funkadelic master recordings (Jun. 6, 2005), http://www.soundgenerator.com/news/showarticle.cfm?articleid=5555.

12 Clinton Interview, supra note 9.

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George Clinton and the sample troll

1 Comment / art, business, history, law, tech in changing society / /

From Tim Wu’s “On Copyright’s Authorship Policy” (Internet Archive: 2007):

On May 4, 2001, a one-man corporation named Bridgeport Music, Inc. launched over 500 counts of copyright infringement against more than 800 different artists and labels.1 Bridgeport Music has no employees, and other than copyrights, no reported assets.2 Technically, Bridgeport is a “catalogue company.” Others call it a “sample troll.”

Bridgeport is the owner of valuable copyrights, including many of funk singer George Clinton’s most famous songs – songs which are sampled in a good amount of rap music.3 Bridgeport located every sample of Clinton’s and other copyrights it owned, and sued based on the legal position that any sampling of a sound recording, no matter how minimal or unnoticeable, is still an infringement.

During the course of Bridgeport’s campaign, it has won two important victories. First, the Sixth Circuit, the appellate court for Nashville adopted Bridgeport’s theory of infringement. In Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films,4 the defendants sampled a single chord from the George Clinton tune “Get Off Your Ass and Jam,” changed the pitch, and looped the sound. Despite the plausible defense that one note is but a de minimus use of the work, the Sixth Circuit ruled for Bridgeport and created a stark rule: any sampling, no matter how minimal or undetectable, is a copyright infringement. Said the court in Bridgeport, “Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way.”5 In 2006 Bridgeport convinced a district court to enjoin the sales of the bestselling Notorious B.I.G. album, Ready to Die, for “illegal sampling.”6 A jury then awarded Bridgeport more than four million dollars in damages.7

The Bridgeport cases have been heavily criticized, and taken as a prime example of copyright’s excesses.8 Yet the deeper problem with the Bridgeport litigation is not necessarily a problem of too much copyright. It can be equally concluded that the ownership of the relevant rights is the root of the problem. George Clinton, the actual composer and recording artist, takes a much different approach to sampling. “When hip-hop came out,” said Clinton in an interview with journalist Rick Karr, “I was glad to hear it, especially when it was our songs – it was a way to get back on the radio.”9 Clinton accepts sampling of his work, and has released a three CD collection of his sounds for just that purpose.10 The problem is that he doesn’t own many of his most important copyrights. Instead, it is Bridgeport, the one-man company, that owns the rights to Clinton’s work. In the 1970s Bridgeport, through its owner Armen Boladian, managed to seize most of George Clinton’s copyrights and many other valuable rights. In at least a few cases, Boladian assigned the copyrights to Bridgeport by writing a contract and then faking Clinton’s signature.11 As Clinton puts it “he just stole ‘em.”12 With the copyrights to Clinton’s songs in the hands of Bridgeport – an entity with no vested interest in the works beyond their sheer economic value – the targeting of sampling is not surprising.

1 Tim Wu, Jay-Z Versus the Sample Troll, Slate Magazine, Nov. 16, 2006, http://www.slate.com/id/2153961/.

2 See Bridgeport Music, Inc.’s corporate entity details, Michigan Department of Labor & Economic Growth, available at http://www.dleg.state.mi.us/bcs_corp/dt_corp.asp?id_nbr=190824&name_entity=BRI DGEPORT%20MUSIC,%20INC (last visited Mar. 18, 2007).

3 See Wu, supra note 1.

4 410 F.3d 792 (6th Cir. 2005).

5 Id. at 801.

6 Jeff Leeds, Judge Freezes Notorious B.I.G. Album, N.Y. Times, Mar. 21, 2006, at E2.

7 Id.

8 See, e.g., Matthew R. Broodin, Comment, Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films: The Death of the Substantial Similarity Test in Digital Samping Copyright Infringemnt Claims—The Sixth Circuit’s Flawed Attempt at a Bright Line Rule, 6 Minn. J. L. Sci. & Tech. 825 (2005); Jeffrey F. Kersting, Comment, Singing a Different Tune: Was the Sixth Circuit Justified in Changing the Protection of Sound Recordings in Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films?, 74 U. Cin. L. Rev. 663 (2005) (answering the title question in the negative); John Schietinger, Note, Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films: How the Sixth Circuit Missed a Beat on Digital Music Sampling, 55 DePaul L. Rev. 209 (2005).

9 Interview by Rick Karr with George Clinton, at the 5th Annual Future of Music Policy Summit, Wash. D.C. (Sept. 12, 2005), video clip available at http://www.tvworldwide.com/showclip.cfm?ID=6128&clip=2 [hereinafter Clinton Interview].

10 George Clinton, Sample Some of Disc, Sample Some of D.A.T., Vols. 1-3 (1993-94).

11 Sound Generator, George Clinton awarded Funkadelic master recordings (Jun. 6, 2005), http://www.soundgenerator.com/news/showarticle.cfm?articleid=5555.

12 Clinton Interview, supra note 9.

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Presidential campaigns, campaign bios, & history

history, politics / /

From Jill Lepore’s “Bound for Glory” (The New Yorker: 20 October 2008):

The biography was published in 1817 as “The Life of Andrew Jackson.” The next year, Eaton was rewarded with an appointment to a vacant seat in the United States Senate. In 1823, Jackson was elected as the other senator from Tennessee, and followed his biographer and friend to the nation’s capital. The two men took lodgings at the same Washington boarding house. The following year, Jackson was a candidate for the Presidency. Eaton headed his campaign. Jackson’s opponent John Quincy Adams refused to campaign at all. In keeping with the tradition of the first five American Presidents, Adams considered currying favor with voters to be beneath the dignity of the office, and believed that any man who craved the Presidency ought not to have it. Adams called this his Macbeth policy: “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me, / Without my stir.” Jackson’s supporters leaned more toward Lady Macbeth’s point of view. They had no choice but to stir: their candidate was, otherwise, unelectable. How they stirred has shaped American politics ever since. They told a story, the story of Andrew Jackson’s life. In 1824, Eaton published a revised “Life of Jackson,” founding a genre, the campaign biography. At its heart lies a single, telling anecdote. In 1781, when Jackson was fourteen and fighting in the American Revolution, he was captured. A British officer, whose boots had got muddy, ordered the boy to clean them: Jackson refused, and the officer beat him, badly, with a sword. All his life, he bore the scars. Andrew Jackson would not kneel before a tyrant.

Since 1824, no Presidential election year has passed without a campaign biography, printed about the time a candidate is nominated, chiefly for the purpose of getting him elected. (Although, since Reagan’s “A New Beginning,” in 1984, the campaign biography, as book, has been supplanted somewhat by the campaign film, screened at the nominating Convention.)

…

The election of 1824 brought the first campaign buttons, the first public-opinion polls (undertaken by and published in pro-Jackson newspapers), and the first campaign biographies. Eaton’s “Life of Jackson” was the one that established the genre’s enduring conventions. When Eaton revised it in 1824, he turned what was a history, if a decidedly partial one, into political propaganda; his changes are carefully annotated by Frank Owsley, Jr., in a facsimile edition published by the University of Alabama Press. Eaton cut out or waved away everything compromising (the duels Jackson fought, a soldier he had executed), lingered longer over everything wondrous (battles, mainly), and converted into strengths what pundits had construed as weaknesses. Eaton’s Jackson wasn’t reckless; he was fearless. He had almost no political experience; he was, therefore, ideally suited to fight corruption. He lacked political pedigree; his father, a poor Scotch-Irish immigrant, died before he was born—but this only made Jackson more qualified for the White House, since he was, to use a phrase that was coined during his Presidency, a “self-made man.”

…

In 1834, Davy Crockett wrote the first Presidential campaign autobiography. Vying for the Whig nomination, he then wrote an ornery biography of his rival, upbraiding him for having traded his coonskin cap for a swankier hat. “Mr. Van Buren’s parents were humble, plain, and not much troubled with book knowledge, and so were mine,” Crockett allowed. But Van Buren had since put on airs: “He couldn’t bear his rise; I never minded mine.”

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How Obama raised money in Silicon Valley & using the Net

business, history, law, politics / /

From Joshua Green’s “The Amazing Money Machine” (The Atlantic: June 2008):

That early fund-raiser [in February 2007] and others like it were important to Obama in several respects. As someone attempting to build a campaign on the fly, he needed money to operate. As someone who dared challenge Hillary Clinton, he needed a considerable amount of it. And as a newcomer to national politics, though he had grassroots appeal, he needed to establish credibility by making inroads to major donors—most of whom, in California as elsewhere, had been locked down by the Clinton campaign.

Silicon Valley was a notable exception. The Internet was still in its infancy when Bill Clinton last ran for president, in 1996, and most of the immense fortunes had not yet come into being; the emerging tech class had not yet taken shape. So, unlike the magnates in California real estate (Walter Shorenstein), apparel (Esprit founder Susie Tompkins Buell), and entertainment (name your Hollywood celeb), who all had long-established loyalty to the Clintons, the tech community was up for grabs in 2007. In a colossal error of judgment, the Clinton campaign never made a serious approach, assuming that Obama would fade and that lack of money and cutting-edge technology couldn’t possibly factor into what was expected to be an easy race. Some of her staff tried to arrange “prospect meetings” in Silicon Valley, but they were overruled. “There was massive frustration about not being able to go out there and recruit people,” a Clinton consultant told me last year. As a result, the wealthiest region of the wealthiest state in the nation was left to Barack Obama.

Furthermore, in Silicon Valley’s unique reckoning, what everyone else considered to be Obama’s major shortcomings—his youth, his inexperience—here counted as prime assets.

[John Roos, Obama’s Northern California finance chair and the CEO of the Palo Alto law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati]: “… we recognize what great companies have been built on, and that’s ideas, talent, and inspirational leadership.”

…

The true killer app on My.BarackObama.com is the suite of fund-raising tools. You can, of course, click on a button and make a donation, or you can sign up for the subscription model, as thousands already have, and donate a little every month. You can set up your own page, establish your target number, pound your friends into submission with e-mails to pony up, and watch your personal fund-raising “thermometer” rise. “The idea,” [Joe Rospars, a veteran of Dean’s campaign who had gone on to found an Internet fund-raising company and became Obama’s new-media director] says, “is to give them the tools and have them go out and do all this on their own.”

…

“What’s amazing,” says Peter Leyden of the New Politics Institute, “is that Hillary built the best campaign that has ever been done in Democratic politics on the old model—she raised more money than anyone before her, she locked down all the party stalwarts, she assembled an all-star team of consultants, and she really mastered this top-down, command-and-control type of outfit. And yet, she’s getting beaten by this political start-up that is essentially a totally different model of the new politics.”

Before leaving Silicon Valley, I stopped by the local Obama headquarters. It was a Friday morning in early March, and the circus had passed through town more than a month earlier, after Obama lost the California primary by nine points. Yet his headquarters was not only open but jammed with volunteers. Soon after I arrived, everyone gathered around a speakerphone, and Obama himself, between votes on the Senate floor, gave a brief hortatory speech telling volunteers to call wavering Edwards delegates in Iowa before the county conventions that Saturday (they took place two months after the presidential caucuses). Afterward, people headed off to rows of computers, put on telephone headsets, and began punching up phone numbers on the Web site, ringing a desk bell after every successful call. The next day, Obama gained nine delegates, including a Clinton delegate.

The most striking thing about all this was that the headquarters is entirely self-sufficient—not a dime has come from the Obama campaign. Instead, everything from the computers to the telephones to the doughnuts and coffee—even the building’s rent and utilities—is user-generated, arranged and paid for by local volunteers. It is one of several such examples across the country, and no other campaign has put together anything that can match this level of self-sufficiency.

…

But while his rivals continued to depend on big givers, Obama gained more and more small donors, until they finally eclipsed the big ones altogether. In February, the Obama campaign reported that 94 percent of their donations came in increments of $200 or less, versus 26 percent for Clinton and 13 percent for McCain. Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors through March is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete; she stopped regularly providing her own number last year.

“If the typical Gore event was 20 people in a living room writing six-figure checks,” Gorenberg told me, “and the Kerry event was 2,000 people in a hotel ballroom writing four-figure checks, this year for Obama we have stadium rallies of 20,000 people who pay absolutely nothing, and then go home and contribute a few dollars online.” Obama himself shrewdly capitalizes on both the turnout and the connectivity of his stadium crowds by routinely asking them to hold up their cell phones and punch in a five-digit number to text their contact information to the campaign—to win their commitment right there on the spot.

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50% of people infected with personality-changing brain parasites from cats

science, weird / /

From Carl Zimmer’s “The Return of the Puppet Masters” (Corante: 17 January 2006):

I was investigating the remarkable ability parasites have to manipulate the behavior of their hosts. The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, for example, forces its ant host to clamp itself to the tip of grass blades, where a grazing mammal might eat it. It’s in the fluke’s interest to get eaten, because only by getting into the gut of a sheep or some other grazer can it complete its life cycle. Another fluke, Euhaplorchis californiensis, causes infected fish to shimmy and jump, greatly increasing the chance that wading birds will grab them.

Those parasites were weird enough, but then I got to know Toxoplasma gondii. This single-celled parasite lives in the guts of cats, sheddding eggs that can be picked up by rats and other animals that can just so happen be eaten by cats. Toxoplasma forms cysts throughout its intermediate host’s body, including the brain. And yet a Toxoplasma-ridden rat is perfectly healthy. That makes good sense for the parasite, since a cat would not be particularly interested in eating a dead rat. But scientists at Oxford discovered that the parasite changes the rats in one subtle but vital way.

The scientists studied the rats in a six-foot by six-foot outdoor enclosure. They used bricks to turn it into a maze of paths and cells. In each corner of the enclosure they put a nest box along with a bowl of food and water. On each the nests they added a few drops of a particular odor. On one they added the scent of fresh straw bedding, on another the bedding from a rat’s nests, on another the scent of rabbit urine, on another, the urine of a cat. When they set healthy rats loose in the enclosure, the animals rooted around curiously and investigated the nests. But when they came across the cat odor, they shied away and never returned to that corner. This was no surprise: the odor of a cat triggers a sudden shift in the chemistry of rat brains that brings on intense anxiety. (When researchers test anti-anxiety drugs on rats, they use a whiff of cat urine to make them panic.) The anxiety attack made the healthy rats shy away from the odor and in general makes them leery of investigating new things. Better to lie low and stay alive.

Then the researchers put Toxoplasma-carrying rats in the enclosure. Rats carrying the parasite are for the most part indistinguishable from healthy ones. They can compete for mates just as well and have no trouble feeding themselves. The only difference, the researchers found, is that they are more likely to get themselves killed. The scent of a cat in the enclosure didn’t make them anxious, and they went about their business as if nothing was bothering them. They would explore around the odor at least as often as they did anywhere else in the enclosure. In some cases, they even took a special interest in the spot and came back to it over and over again.

The scientists speculated that Toxoplasma was secreted some substance that was altering the patterns of brain activity in the rats. This manipulation likely evolved through natural selection, since parasites that were more likely to end up in cats would leave more offpsring.

The Oxford scientists knew that humans can be hosts to Toxoplasma, too. People can become infected by its eggs by handling soil or kitty litter. For most people, the infection causes no harm. Only if a person’s immune system is weak does Toxoplasma grow uncontrollably. That’s why pregnant women are advised not to handle kitty litter, and why toxoplasmosis is a serious risk for people with AIDS. Otherwise, the parasite lives quietly in people’s bodies (and brains). It’s estimated that about half of all people on Earth are infected with Toxoplasma.

…

Parasitologist Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague administered psychological questionnaires to people infected with Toxoplasma and controls. Those infected, he found, show a small, but statistically significant, tendency to be more self-reproaching and insecure. Paradoxically, infected women, on average, tend to be more outgoing and warmhearted than controls, while infected men tend to be more jealous and suspicious.

… [E. Fuller Torrey of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland] and his colleagues had noticed some intriguing links between Toxoplasma and schizophrenia. Infection with the parasite has been associated with damage to a certain class of neurons (astrocytes). So has schizophrenia. Pregnant women with high levels of Toxoplasma antibodies in their blood were more likely to give birth to children who would later develop schizophrenia. Torrey lays out more links in this 2003 paper. While none is a smoking gun, they are certainly food for thought. It’s conceivable that exposure to Toxoplasma causes subtle changes in most people’s personality, but in a small minority, it has more devastating effects.

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The purpose of the Storm botnet? To send spam

business, security, tech in changing society / /

From Tim Wilson’s “Researchers Link Storm Botnet to Illegal Pharmaceutical Sales” (DarkReading: 11 June 2008):

“Our previous research revealed an extremely sophisticated supply chain behind the illegal pharmacy products shipped after orders were placed on botnet-spammed Canadian pharmacy Websites. But the relationship between the technology-focused botnet masters and the global supply chain organizations was murky until now,” said Patrick Peterson, vice president of technology at IronPort and a Cisco fellow.

“Our research has revealed a smoking gun that shows that Storm and other botnet spam generates commissionable orders, which are then fulfilled by the supply chains, generating revenue in excess of $150 million per year.”

In fact, the “Canadian Pharmacy” Website, which many Storm emails promote, is estimated to have sales of $150 million per year by itself, the report says. The site offers a customer service phone number that goes into voice mail and buyers usually do receive the drugs — but the shipments include counterfeit pharmaceuticals from China and India, rather than brand-name drugs from Canada, IronPort says.

IronPort’s research revealed that more than 80 percent of Storm botnet spam advertises online pharmacy brands. This spam is sent by millions of consumers’ PCs, which have been infected by the Storm worm via a multitude of sophisticated social engineering tricks and Web-based exploits. Further investigation revealed that spam templates, “spamvertized” URLs, Website designs, credit card processing, product fulfillment, and customer support were being provided by a Russian criminal organization that operates in conjunction with Storm, IronPort says.

…

However, IronPort-sponsored pharmacological testing revealed that two thirds of the shipments contained the active ingredient but were not the correct dosage, while the others were placebos.

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Microsoft’s programmers, evaluated by an engineer

business, history, technology / /

From John Wharton’s “The Origins of DOS” (Microprocessor Report: 3 October 1994):

In August of 1981, soon after Microsoft had acquired full rights to 86-DOS, Bill Gates visited Santa Clara in an effort to persuade Intel to abandon a joint development project with DRI and endorse MS-DOS instead. It was I – the Intel applications engineer then responsible for iRMX-86 and other 16-bit operating systems – who was assigned the task of performing a technical evaluation of the 86- DOS software. It was I who first informed Gates that the software he just bought was not, in fact, fully compatible with CP/M 2.2. At the time I had the distinct impression that, until then, he’d thought the entire OS had been cloned.

…

The strong impression I drew 13 years ago was that Microsoft programmers were untrained, undisciplined, and content merely to replicate other people’s ideas, and that they did not seem to appreciate the importance of defining operating systems and user interfaces with an eye to the future.

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Offline copy protection in games

art, business, history, security, tech in changing society / /

From Adam Swiderski’s “A History of Copy Protection” (Edge: 9 June 2008):

Fortunately, the games industry is creative, and thus it was that the offline copy protection was born and flourished. One of its most prevalent forms was an in-game quiz that would require gamers to refer to the manual for specific information – you’d be asked, for example, to enter the third word in the fourth paragraph on page 14. Some titles took a punishing approach to this little Q & A: SSI’s Star Command required a documentation check prior to each in-game save, while Master of Orion would respond to a failed manual check by gradually becoming so difficult that it was impossible to win. Perhaps the most notorious example of this method is Sierra’s King’s Quest III, in which lengthy passages of potion recipes and other information had to be reproduced from the manual. One typo, and you were greeted with a “Game Over” screen.

Other developers eschewed straight manual checks for in-box tools and items that were more integrated into the games with which they shipped, especially once photocopiers became more accessible and allowed would-be pirates to quickly and easily duplicate documentation. LucasArts made a name for itself in this field, utilizing such gems as the Monkey Island series’ multi-level code wheels. Other games, like Maniac Mansion and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade shipped with the kind of color-masked text one would find in old-school decoder rings; the documents could not be reproduced by the photocopiers of the day and would require the application of a transparent red plastic filter in order to get at their contents.

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How movies are moved around on botnets

business, law, security, tech in changing society / /

From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):

Figure 2.11 illustrates the use of botnets for selling stolen intellectual property, in this case Movies, TV shows, or video. The diagram is based on information from the Pyramid of Internet Piracy created by Motion Picture Arts Association (MPAA) and an actual case. To start the process, a supplier rips a movie or software from an existing DVD or uses a camcorder to record a first run movie in the theaters. These are either burnt to DVDs to be sold on the black market or they are sold or provided to a Release Group. The Release Group is likely to be an organized crime group, excuse me, business associates who wish to invest in the entertainment industry. I am speculating that the Release Group engages (hires) a botnet operator that can meet their delivery and performance specifications. The botherder then commands the botnet clients to retrieve the media from the supplier and store it in a participating botnet client. These botnet clients may be qualified according to the system processor speed and the nature of the Internet connection. The huge Internet pipe, fast connection, and lax security at most universities make them a prime target for this form of botnet application. MPAA calls these clusters of high speed locations “Topsites.”

. . .

According to the MPAA, 44 percent of all movie piracy is attributed to college students. Therefore it makes sense that the Release Groups would try to use university botnet clients as Topsites. The next groups in the chain are called Facilitators. They operate Web sites and search engines and act as Internet directories. These may be Web sites for which you pay a monthly fee or a fee per download. Finally individuals download the films for their own use or they list them via Peer-to-Peer sharing applications like Gnutella, BitTorrent for download.

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Money involved in adware & clicks4hire schemes

business, security, tech in changing society / /

From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):

Dollar-Revenue and GimmyCash are two companies that have paid for installation of their Adware programs. Each has a pay rate formula based on the country of installation. Dollar-Revenue pays 30 cents for installing their adware in a U. S. Web site, 20 cents for a Canadian Web site, 10 cents for a U.K. Web site, 1 cent for a Chinese Web site, and 2 cents for all other Web sites. GimmyCash. com pays 40 cents for U. S. and Canadian Web site installs, 20 cents for 16 European countries, and 2 cents for everywhere else. In addition, GimmyCash pays 5 percent of the webmaster’s earnings that you refer to GimmyCash.

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The various participants in phishing schemes

business, law, security, tech in changing society / /

From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):

Christopher Abad provides insight into the phishing economy in an article published online by FirstMonday.org (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/ issue10_9/abad/). The article, “The economy of phishing: A survey of the operations of the phishing market,” reveals the final phase of the phishing life cycle, called cashing. These are usually not the botherders or the phishers. The phishers are simply providers of credential goods to the cashers. Cashers buy the credential goods from the phishers, either taking a commission on the funds extracted or earned based on the quality, completeness, which financial institution it is from, and the victim’s balance in the account. A high-balance, verified, full-credential account can be purchased for up to $100. Full creden- tials means that you have the credit card number, bank and routing numbers, the expiration date, the security verification code (cvv2) on the back of the card, the ATM pin number, and the current balance. Credit card numbers for a financial institution selected by the supplier can be bought for 50 cents per account. The casher’s commission of this transaction may run as much as 70 percent. When the deal calls for commissions to be paid in cash, the vehicle of choice is Western Union.

The continuation of phishing attacks depends largely on the ability of the casher’s to convert the information into cash. The preferred method is to use the credential information to create duplicate ATM cards and use the cards to withdraw cash from ATM terminals. Not surprisingly the demand for these cards leans heavily in favor of banks that provide inadequate protections of the ATM cards. Institutions like Bank of America are almost nonexistent in the phisher marketplace due to the strong encryption (triple DES) used to protect information on its ATM cards.

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