German Court Rules Against YouTube in Copyright Case

A German court ruled Friday that Google Inc.’s subsidiary YouTube LLC must pay compensation after users uploaded several videos of performances by singer Sarah Brightman in violation of copyright laws.



The Hamburg state court said the standardized question to users about whether they have the necessary rights to publish material is not enough to relieve YouTube of the legal responsibility for the content, especially because the platform can be used anonymously.



The wording of the court statement appears to be a major blow to YouTube’s business model, but Google Germany spokesman Henning Dorstewitz told The Associated Press YouTube will appeal the decision detailed in the 60-page ruling.

YouTube must not publish those videos any more and provide information to settle the amount of compensation in at least three cases in which Brightman videos were uploaded, the court said.

Arnd Haller, director of legal affairs at Google Germany, said the court ruling disregards the current e-commerce directive of the European Union.



“This decision results in a substantial legal uncertainty for all providers of video platforms, opinion forums, social communities, blogs and many other Internet services in Germany,” Haller said in a statement.

The plaintiff was not identified and a court spokesman could not be reached for comment. The court statement only said the plaintiff has claimed to be the copyright holder for several of Sarah Brightman’s performances.



Google said in a statement that the plaintiff was Frank Peterson. He is a German composer and producer for Brightman and other artists, according to his website.

Craigslist Drops Adult Listings Amid Legal Fears

Craigslist has removed it's adult service listings from the site after being a target of the U.S. state attorney general.



Craigslist.com has dropped its “adult services” listings, which have become the target of U.S. state attorneys general who say the much-visited online classified ad site is not doing enough to quash prostitution.

Last year, Craigslist replaced its “erotic services” ads with a new “adult” category it said would be closely screened.

The move came after a masseuse who offered her services on Craigslist was killed and a client was charged with her murder. The man charged in the case committed suicide last month in a Boston prison cell.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is co-leading a group of states attorneys general looking into the company’s efforts to purge illegal ads from it site.

The private company could be earning $36.3 million or more a year from prostitution and human trafficking, Blumenthal said at the time, citing published reports.

In a May blog post, Craigslist Chief Executive Jim Buckmaster wrote that “… Craigslist has gone beyond fulfilling its legal obligations, far beyond classifieds industry norms, has more than lived up to any promises it made, andworking together with its partners is in fact a leader in the fight against human trafficking and exploitation.”



Company spokespeople could not immediately be reached for comment on Saturday.

Craigslist has said it had donated all revenues from its “erotic services” listings to charity. When it switched to its “adult services” listings last year it said it would make no commitment to how those revenues would be used.



The online site says it is used by over 50 million people in the United States, with over 20 billion monthly page views.

Buckmaster has claimed Craigslist is unfairly targeted for its adult services advertisements while those posted in major newspapers are ignored.

EBay Inc is a part owner of Craigslist but the two companies are currently fighting over eBay’s true stake. EBay paid about $32 million for a 28.4 percent stake in Craigslist in 2004, but later accused the company of diluting its stake.

EBay and Craiglist are awaiting a ruling in that matter from the Delaware Chancery Court.

USB dongle 'jailbreaks' PS3

A hacker group is claiming to have effectively jailbroken the PlayStation 3, allowing gamers to play home-made or pirated games.

PSJailbreak says it's developed a USB dongle which allows users to save any PS3 game to the console's hard drive. If it's all true, it's the first time this has been possible. The device is even claimed to play backups from the hard drive twice as fast as from the Blu-ray drive.

It's being advertised by OzModChip, here, for AUS$170. The company says it'll be available this time next week, and works with both Slim and older models.

"Apparently 150 games have been tested, and they all work," says OzModChip. "If a game happens to have one file over 4GB the program will not be able to rip the game onto the hard drive. Apparently the word around is to dump it on an internal hard drive."

A YouTube video of the hack shows a user inserting a disc copy of God of War III into the console. The user then navigates to a backup manager on the PS3. He browses through a list of games on the hard drive and loads InFamous.

The software on the dongle apparently turns off a number of security features, but keeps the warranty seal intact.

OzModChip says that users can still play online games - although it warns that Sony could turn off this ability at any time.

In addition, the company warns, Sony will almost certainly disable the dongle through future firmware updates. However, the device is claimed to disable forced updates.

But, warns OzModChip, "This is made to work with 3.41. If you happen to download an install an update which is higher then this then it is your doing."

Rule 34 validated again, the worlds first IMAX 3D porn created

If something exist, there is a porn of it. If there isn’t it will be made. We’re actually surprised –also shocked, amused, and horrified– that it took so much time, but the world finally has an IMAX porn film, that too in 3D!

The $3 million ‘3-D Sex & Zen: Extreme Ecstasy’, is Stephen Shiu’s attempt to bring “the wow factor” to pornography, but we think most people will just have to suffice with “the WHOA factor”.

Watching a film in IMAX is already a rather overpowering experience, staring at the majestic huge screen. Add to that the 3D experience and the director’s vision of “explicit and sometimes violent” sex scenes, with “many close-ups”, and result doesn’t really play to the benefits of IMAX’s larger-than-life depiction.

Reminds us of the trauma humanity went through in Isaac Asimov’s story Nightfall. Has it been 2049 years already?

Dating site claims "iPhone users have more sex" than other smartphone users

OkCupid, an American dating site, claims to have statistical information that shows iPhone users have twice as much sex as Android users. It claims this after correlating information from over half a million profile images uploaded on the site, and the 11.4 million responses generated by them. Confused as to the link between a particular smartphone’s user’s sex life and the camera used to take the user’s profile picture? Join the club, and make insightful remarks about correlation not being synonymous with causation, in the below comments section.

Instead of focussing on the context of the profile photo, OkCupid has used flash, focus, aperture, and time of day as parameters of measurement. Here are the steps of their ‘experiment’, paraphrased by us:

1. Collected 552,000 example user pictures.

2. Paired them up (randomly?) and asked users to make snap judgments, like so:3. Collated millions of judgments with EXIF data of the photograph, including flash, focus, aperture, and time of day

4. Made rather uncontrolled statistical statements, without ensuring other variables remain the same, or if causation is actually equal to correlation in this case.

These are their findings:

Panasonic > Canon > Nikon

(type and brand of camera you use have an effect on how attractive you look)

Okay, so as OkCupid claims is evident by the graph, better cameras make you look better! Or maybe, if you are better looking you sailed through life with a smile and so could afford a better camera? Or if you are better looking, you are able to snag a partner with enough money to buy a better camera? Seem absolutely ludicrous? That’s the problem with such stats. They don’t prove anything except the ingenuity of the human mind. Using three pictures of one user taken by three different classes does NOT eliminate all other variables. EXIF data, the entire basis of their statistical avalanche, is by itself considered error-ridden!

How did OkCupid hit upon this amazing statistic? Let’s just see shall we? Using the same age group for the data of all three major phone brands, of 30 years, OkCupid used the above photo- attractiveness data, and then “crossed all kinds of user behaviours with the camera models, and found [they] had data on the number of sexual partners for 9,785 people with smartphones. We dropped what we found into Excel, and voila.” Yes, that explanation really helps us understand how the site went from photo-attractiveness of the profile images clicked by each camera phone to the number of sexual partners per smartphone user. In fact, if one looks at the photo-attractiveness by camera brand and class graph again, we see that amongst the three major smartphone brands, BlackBerry phones take the least attractive photos, iPhones take the most attractive, while Android phones fall somewhere in between. The number of sexual partners per smartphone user graph however (above), shows Android below BlackBerry in numbers. Puzzling, and again begging the question: exactly what other data they used to collate the results?

Perhaps the most telling mistake about the post and the statistics is: even if we accept iPhone users have more sexual partners than Android or BlackBerry users, this does not mean they have “more sex”. Without being overly elaborate and risk offending our more sensitive readers, we can safely say promiscuity is not directly related to frequency. In fact, the title of the post, the wording of the inference, and even the axes of the graph, are misnamed: ‘Sexual Activity’ is once again not directly proportional to ‘avg. number of sexual partners’. Yes, even if you ARE aged 30.

The rest of the post was more information correlating different camera parameters and the photo- attractiveness, from time of day to flash and aperture range. The post ends by advising you to buy a better camera, take pictures in soft light - pictures which focus on you more than the background - without flash, preferably in the afternoon (though if the charts are anything to go by, then take pictures at either 6AM or 5PM), and then post those as your profile pictures. And then, inexplicably but predictably, it asks you to go buy an iPhone.

Apparently OkCupid has a daughter site called OkTrends, which compiles such data regularly, and presumably ( if the above claim is anything to go by) every so often announces some rather arousing inferences. Maybe they should stick to making dates, not data. You say the world doesn’t need another statistician? We ask - just how many is too many?

General says cyber attacks must be stopped

Former NATO commander General Wesley Clark has confirmed a "growing number" of severe cyber attacks against US government and commercial installations.

According to Clark, the US currently possesses both the technology and "means" to stop the unrelenting cyber offensive."The job now is to deploy these assets as soon as possible," Clark told an audience of security specialists at the National Press Club.

He noted that thousands of cyber attacks that already have been launched against such key government agencies as the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury & Commerce. 



Coordinated strikes have also targeted various electric grids and other critical infrastructure across the continental United States.

"[Clearly], the nation's security and economy are at risk of being 'closed down' or seriously compromised at any moment.

"This would be a major disaster for the United States and our allies throughout the world. We have no time to waste. The time for action is now."

Clark - who chairs the advisory board of InZero Systems - urged the rapid adoption of the company's heavily armored hardware platform, which has reportedly rebuffed "millions" of sophisticated cyber attacks.

"Nothing gets through...In test after test, it has proven to be totally unhackable," claimed Clark.

"We know this technology works and is relatively economical...But equally important, it is readily available. We should be installing it as widely as possible before that disaster strikes."

Hacker Charged with Malware Extortion Plot

A California man is being accused of extortion through hacking. Luis Mijangos found victims on peer-to-peer networks, sending out files disguised as popular songs that contained malicious computer code. Mijangos threatened to distribute victims' sexually explicit videos to their computer contacts unless they made additional videos for him.
A hacker took over more than 100 computers and used them to extort sexually explicit videos from women and teenage girls by threatening to release their personal data Relevant Products/Services, federal prosecutors charged Tuesday.

Luis Mijangos, 31, was arrested at his home by FBI agents and was scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday afternoon on a charge of extortion that carries a maximum federal prison sentence of two years, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney's office Relevant Products/Services.

A telephone listing for Mijangos could not be immediately located.

The scheme was sophisticated, U.S. attorney's spokesman Thom Mrozek said.

"He did have technical proficiency," Mrozek said.

Some victims have been identified and most are believed to be in Southern California, but some could be elsewhere in the world, he said.

Federal investigators contend that Mijangos found victims on peer-to-peer networks, in which several computer users share files and communication pathways.

According to an affidavit, Mijangos sent out files disguised as popular songs that contained malicious computer code. The malware infected the victims' computers and was passed to their friends' and relatives' machines in the form of infected instant messages, authorities said.

"Once he had control of a computer, Mijangos searched for sexually explicit or intimate images and videos of women, typically young women and girls in various states of undress or engaged in sexual acts with their partners," according to the statement.

He also hacked e-mail accounts and, posing as some victims' boyfriends, asked them to make pornographic videos, authorities said.

Occasionally, Mijangos was able to remotely turn on some victims' webcams to catch them in "intimate situations," the U.S. attorney's statement said.

Prosecutors contend that Mijangos contacted some victims and threatened to distribute their sexually explicit videos to their computer contacts unless they made additional videos for him or if they went to the police.

He infected more than 100 computers that were used by about 230 people, including at least 44 who were minors, the FBI said.

The FBI investigation began after police received a victim's complaint.

Mijangos acknowledged to FBI agents that he hacked the computers but said he did so at the request of the victims' boyfriends and husband to determine whether the victims were cheating on them, authorities alleged.