Apple, Intel, Samsung petition congress for more spectrum in search of faster wireless

As more wireless devices like smartphones and tablets are sold and used, the current infrastructure becomes substantially more taxed. Compression and caching technologies help a good bit, but as we use more data wirelessly, the only way forward is by allotting more wireless spectrum to telcos and device manufacturers. Yesterday, a letter from Alcatel-Lucent, Apple, Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research In Motion and Samsung was sent to US Congress in hopes of fast-tracking more spectrum to be freed up for purchase.

In the letter, of which excerpts have been published, the alliance says that “we joined this debate because policymakers need to know that we cannot simply engineer our way out of this problem.” Despite increasing moves to auction off more television spectrum, that’s not enough for these companies. They want access to the much coveted parts of the radio spectrum held by the federal government. In a less than subtle manner, the letter essentially accuses federal agencies of being inefficient and lazy with their prime cut of radio frequencies. They want federal agencies to increase efficiency, share bands with each other instead of using separate bands, and to lease the underutilized parts of their assigned spectrum.

Amusingly, the companies also attempt to link this spectrum crisis to the fiscal crisis that the government is facing with the so-called “fiscal cliff.” While requiring federal agencies to optimize their use of frequencies would obviously cause some serious friction and short-term costs, it would truly benefit the US government to lease more of its spectrum to the highest bidder. Everyone wins in this scenario. The government gets some cold hard cash, the telcos and device manufacturers get more wiggle room, and users get faster wireless connections and better coverage.

Emergency frequencies, like those used by police and fire companies, obviously shouldn’t be compromised by cell phone companies. However, the majority of that spectrum is used and partly controlled at the state and county level, so that would be difficult to manipulate or sell on a national level no matter what. It’s not at all impossible to sell that spectrum, but there is a lot of lower hanging fruit to be picked. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Office of Spectrum Management (OSM) has a huge PDF summary all about federal spectrum use. Without a doubt, congress and the OSM will be able to find nice big chunks to lease out to the telcos. It will take a bit of finagling to get everything right and to calm the nerves of those losing the spectrum, but it will benefit us all in the long run.

[Image credit: Karl Baron]

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Internet Explorer flaw lets websites track your every mouse movement, and MS refuses to fix it

Security flaws are inevitable in operating systems and applications. Modern software is incredibly complex, and even the best developers in the world aren’t perfect. How the public responds to security flaws largely depends on how the developer reacts to the exploit. If it responds quickly with a promise to patch the flaw, and then delivers the fix in a timely manner, all is forgiven most of the time. Sadly, an exploit found in Internet Explorer that tracks mouse movement and certain key presses — even when IE is minimized, or the tab is in the background — isn’t getting patched by Microsoft.

A web analytics company alerted Microsoft to this quirk back in October. The security vulnerability affects all versions of Internet Explorer from version 6 through 10. While Microsoft has acknowledged the issue, it isn’t going to be patched in the near future. This is a problem, not only for the obvious privacy concerns, but also for security. Some people use software keyboards on their screen specifically to reduce the chance of their passwords being tracked by a keylogger. With this flaw, unscrupulous people could record the mouse movements used for entering a password just by having a web page loaded in the background. Microsoft even advocates the security benefits of using mice-based password systems with its picture password feature in Windows 8. Yikes.

In this demo, the possibilities for mapping cursor movement are shown quite clearly. The video below even shows how some simple analysis of mouse movements can be used to gather private information like passwords or phone numbers. Even scarier is the revelation that at least two ad analytics companies are already using this exploit to track users. If you weren’t freaked out about advertisers tracking you before, now is the time to think again. The site that revealed the flaw even has a challenge posted for people to try to decipher tracked mouse movements. The leader board shows that it takes less than half an hour for someone to figure out what was being typed on a software keyboard. It’s very scary stuff.

The methodology of exploiting this flaw to track cursor movements and modifier key presses is out in the wild, and any generic ad on any trustworthy website can use it to track what you’re doing. If you don’t want to be tracked, you do have options available. Firstly, you can switch to a different browser. Chrome or Firefox are fantastic options, and they aren’t affected by this flaw. Secondly, you could turn off JavaScript in IE. While this does hinder the usefulness of most modern websites, it will prevent IE from passing on your mouse movements. These aren’t optimal solutions, but Microsoft has given us little choice in the matter. Unless it steps up and patches this flaw, it just isn’t safe to use IE withJavaScript turned on.

[Image Credit: Edith Soto]

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Nowhere to hide: Advertisers can now stalk you across multiple devices

Advertisers want to compile as much information about you as possible. Tracking where you go, what you click, and how you search is literally their business. They use that data to target ads directly to you, and feed relevant data to their partners. With the increasing use of tablets and smartphones in daily life, advertisers have been frustrated by a limited ability to correlate traffic from multiple devices to a single person. Well, there is some good news for advertisers, but bad news for privacy advocates. A company by the name of Drawbridge has developed a system that will analyze known data from devices surfing from the same location, and supposedly pick out which devices belong to which user.

The Drawbridge system allows the advertisers to target a single person with a specific advertising campaign, regardless of what device you happen to be using at the time. Using a hugely parallel Hadoop infrastructure, it takes the data it has about your online profiles and your known locations, and analyzes the probability that two devices are being used by the same user. If you looked up video games recently on your MacBook Pro in Chrome, you’ll get to see ads for Call of Duty on your iPhone.

Drawbridge specifically says that it doesn’t use personally identifiable information, but it ismatching first-party cookie data from all of your devices. There is quite a bit of semantic hairsplitting going on here around what “personally identifiable” means.

Research has been done about how much data popular websites send to third-party companies, and the results are staggering. “… the Journal examined what happens when people logged in to roughly 70 popular websites that request a login and found that more than a quarter of the time, the sites passed along a user’s real name, email address or other personal details, such as username, to third-party companies.” Filling out forms truthfully, even on relatively popular and “safe” sites, can be very bad for your privacy.

How to prevent third parties from tracking you

If you don’t want advertisers stalking your movements around the web and compiling a massive amount of data about you, you do have options. First off, there is the Do Not Track (DNT) header. Now available in most browsers, this feature puts a specific statement in its communication with web servers that asks advertisers to opt the user out. While there has been proposed legislation about DNT, there currently isn’t any enforcement of websites to obey the DNT header. Even if there was some sort of enforcement, the shadiest off-shore tracking and ad companies would still skirt around it.

A large amount of tracking is done via JavaScript and cookies. Extensions like NoScript for Firefox, NotScripts for Chrome, and JavaScript Blocker for Safari give you control over which websites are allowed to run JavaScript in your desktop browser. The selection of JavaScript blocking utilities are more limited on mobile devices, but even Apple’s locked-down Safari browser has the ability to toggle off JavaScript completely when needed. As for cookies, most browsers have the built-in ability to turn off third-party cookies, so you should always use that feature unless you have a specific reason not to.

If you’re really worried about being tracked, you can use a Tor proxy to mask your identity by obscuring your browsing activity. The use of VPNs from other parts of the world will help reduce the ability of the advertisers to use geolocation to target you effectively.

If you’re sick and tired of advertisers watching your every move, you can take these steps, and you’ll be in a much better situation. However, the most important way to keep your information out of the hands of these third parties is to refrain from giving it out in the first place. Whenever possible, use fake names and burner email addresses to keep accounts from being correlated with a single person. There’s no guarantee that the brilliant minds behind these analytics and advertising companies won’t be able to thwart your efforts, but these steps will make their jobs a lot harder.

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The battle for control of the internet is being waged in Dubai

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations, is meeting today in Dubai to plan the future of the internet. The World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) will take place from now until the 14th, and it will have serious implications for the entire internet. Russia has made its intentions clear: It wants UN members to control the internet instead of private organizations like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet Society (ISOC).

Companies like Google and Microsoft have been campaigning alongside well respected individuals like internet pioneer Vint Cerf and former US Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy David Gross. These companies, just like regular internet users, will be negatively impacted if a cabal of government entities wrestle away control of the internet from private organizations. If certain members of the United Nations have their way, it won’t be a stretch to imagine that countries like China and Iran will soon be pushing hard for world-wide censorship of the internet. Leaked proposals already show evidence of the potential for censorship.

Attempting to assume control of the internet isn’t the only item on the docket, however. Some relatively benign negotiations are being held as well. Improving access to the internet for disabled, elderly, and economically disadvantaged people is obviously something we can all get behind, and the ITU will be working on ways for the UN members to make that happen.

Also on the table is the more controversial discussion about using a “sender pays” or “zero-rated data” model — especially in new markets and the mobile web due to the infrastructure costs. This would mean that websites like YouTube would end up paying twice: once for the data connection to the internet, and again for sending data to the consumer. On the other hand, the consumer and infrastructure owners would end up paying less. These topics deserve to be discussed, but they just don’t have the same amount of impact associated with them. They take a back seat to the potential internet takeover.

The WCIT isn’t inherently a bad idea. Having world leaders come together to discuss the major issues relating to the future of the web is actually a really good thing. Sadly, the interests motivating some of the UN members participating in the WCIT are worrisome. The internet isn’t perfect, but it has been able to flourish because of the relatively little restrictions placed upon it. On a smaller scale, it is easy to see the dangers when interest groups like the MPAA and RIAA try to break the internet for their own gain. For years, Islamic-dominated countries have been trying to influence the UN to condemn blasphemy. Without a doubt, a reality where the internet is controlled directly by the UN is dangerous for the open web and freedom of speech. These next few days have the potential to completely change the way the internet works, and that is terrifying.

[Image credit: Blaise Alleyne & Julian Burgess]

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Smartphones become capable of sensing human emotion

Smartphones are amazing. They tell us where we’re going, let us know if it’s going to rain, and even act like personal assistants. Now, a new research project out of the University of Rochester aims to make your phone capable of sensing your emotions just from measuring how you’re speaking — not based on what you’re saying.

This research, titled the Bridge Project, focuses on small changes in the human voice. Rather than using the traditional methodology of self-reporting and monitoring body language, this new method is based on automatic passive emotion detection. This technology can always be listening and monitoring a patient’s emotional state without any work on his or her part — providing a bigger picture on the patient’s entire status.

The basics of the system involve measuring twelve different aspects of speech, and then mapping the data onto six different emotions. Wendi Heinzelman, professor of electrical and computer engineering, said that the project analyzed completely emotionless phrases of speech, such as saying dates of the month. Impressively, they are able to reach an 81% accuracy rating with this model while previous attempts were only around 55%. By having actors read scripts with certain performances, the researchers are able to tweak their algorithm to associate certain pitches, volumes, and harmonics to a specific emotional state.

While this is undoubtedly an invaluable tool for psychologists and medical researchers, it also has huge potential for consumers. Take a look at Apple’s Siri. It’s designed to appear more human-like by offering humorous answers, apologizing, and using more realistic speech, like “Let’s hear some Beatles,” instead of something with less flare, like “Now playing: The Beatles, track one.” This gives us a better experience because it mimics human interaction. Now, think about this technology integrated into Siri. When you’re getting frustrated, it could offer simple hints on how to interact better. When you’re sad, it could throw in compliments.

In Dr. Oliver Sacks’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, he tells a story about a group of patients suffering from aphasia — an inability to understand words. In the story, he details how very capable these patients are in detecting emotion through speech. In fact, they are able to use sound cues to effectively communicate with their loved ones and doctors despite not being able to understand the words directly. He even notes that it is extremely difficult to execute a lie in front of an aphasiac because they are so adept at picking up the hidden emotion. This story truly illustrates how much of our emotional states are expressed verbally, and just how useful this research really is.

[Image credit: Lara604 & William Gunn]

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Thanks to ISP/Hollywood ‘six strikes’ rules, I’m now using a VPN

The six strikes policy we covered earlier this month has been somewhat delayed, and is now scheduled for early 2013, but the agreement between the entertainment industry and ISPs is still going to be implemented. The policy, dubbed “six strikes,” is the result of over a year of negotiation between ISPs and the movie/music studios. I’ve read the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that came out of that process. As we previously discussed, it’s a smart, balanced document. It emphasizes education and notification over draconian tactics; it comes down hard on the side of users and grants ISPs substantial leeway to deal with copyright infringers.

It’s also the reason why, as of Tuesday night, I’m now a VPN (virtual private network) customer. VPN’s are services that anonymize your browsing and/or P2P traffic, in exchange for a monthly fee. What I want to talk about is the reason why I decided to subscribe to a VPN.

The laughable case for trusting the entertainment industry

The tone and statements of the MoU stand in stark contrast to the vindictive practices and bombastic rhetoric both the MPAA and RIAA have leveled at the public for the past twelve years. SOPA and PIPA weren’t unusual, one-time blips; they were the latest in a series of sustained efforts to grant unprecedented enforcement authority to corporations in the name of stopping piracy. When they failed, former senator and current MPAA president Chris Dodd threw a temper tantrum that would’ve embarrassed a bratty toddler.

I don’t want to have meaningful discourse. You guys cheated!

For more than a decade, the RIAA, MPAA, and sister organizations like the IFPI have lobbied for harsher punishments and greater ISP snooping. Earlier this year, Dodd claimed that Google’s filtering in China proved the company could monitor and filter results in the US as well. Speaking of Google, the amount of vitriol directed at the company from Capitol Hill has been astonishing. There’s been a concerted push to dismiss the censorship and monitoring concerns of Google and other organizations/companies as nothing more than a smokescreen that cloaks the earnings these companies make from piracy.

After SOPA and PIPA failed, RIAA CEO Cary Sherman claimed that Google and Wikipedia “purport to be neutral sources of information, but then exploit their stature to present information that is not only not neutral but affirmatively incomplete and misleading.” Dodd explicitly threatened to cut donations to politicians who refused to vote the way the MPAA thought they should.

After all the secret treaties, scare tactics, reports that claimed that online piracy funds terrorism, ridiculously inflated loss projections, and concerted efforts to hold pirates accountable for ludicrously huge infringement awards, we’re supposed to believe that the RIAA and MPAA have turned over a new, reasonable leaf?

No way.

The diminishing barrier of ISP protection

Once upon a time, ISPs could generally be counted on to fight efforts to unmask and sue various users. Mergers, purchases, and changing roles have significantly diminished the interest ISPs have in maintaining such safeguards. Comcast doesn’t want its ISP customers to flee to another carrier, but Comcast now owns NBC Universal. The company has made it clear that it doesn’t want to be a dumb pipe utility; it wants to sell premium content to its own users, and it’s willing to flaunt net neutrality agreements to do so.

It’s not hard to see where the bread is buttered here

Verizon, AT&T, and Time Warner Cable don’t own the media properties that Comcast does, but all of these corporations see premium content agreements as the lifeblood of their futures. Most US broadband markets are monopolies or duopolies, which limits the chances that customers will bolt for a different provider. Service contracts with high termination fees are another barrier.

The six strikes MoU doesn’t make bedfellows of the various ISPs and the entertainment industry, but it aligns their interests more closely than before.

The unclear arbitration process

One of the things we know about the ISP notification process is that end-users will be able to pay a $35 fee and dispute the claim of infringement via arbitration. That’s virtually the only thing we know. Arbitration can cover a huge number of scenarios, from sitting down at a table, to a phone call, to an automatic reconsideration of the facts with little to no ability to submit additional evidence or argue one’s case.

The CCI (Center for Copyright Information) has stated that it believes the total number of arbitrations will be low, because hey, these are just warnings. It’s no big deal — assuming you trust the entertainment industry to live up to the spirit of the MoU. Then again, the number of people the RIAA took to court was much, much lower than the number of people it threatened with lawsuits unless they settled with it and agreed to pay damages.

Predictable treachery, without concern for fair use

The detection software to be used is known as MarkMonitor. It was evaluated once, by Stroz Friedberg, which turned out to have done extensive lobbying for the RIAA once upon a time. The RIAA neglected to disclose this pertinent fact to anyone else, which led the CCI to agree to a second audit. The results of that audit have not yet been released.

Many of MarkMonitor’s detection and evaluation steps are handled by humans. That’s a good thing, particularly given the well-publicized screw-ups of automatic systems in the past few months, but MarkMonitor’s ability to evaluate whether or not files are being used for scenarios that fall under fair use is limited.

And let’s be clear — they don’t have to. According to the Library of Congress, while it’s legal to decrypt a DVD in certain cases, none of those cases apply to space shifting (moving multimedia from one format to another). It’s illegal for you to buy a DVD and then rip it to copy to your iPad or tablet. It’s therefore also illegal for you to buy a movie and then download a copy of it rather than going to the trouble of ripping and encoding a digital version.

The MPAA recommends that customers facing such issues buy the content again.

The DMCA has neatly snared users in a Catch-22. The Library of Congress says no court case has taken up the issue of space shifting, and it would be improper for it to change its ruling on the issue. No court case has taken up the issue of space shifting because the DMCA mandates that circumventing any copy protection scheme, even a horribly broken one, is automatically illegal. Since ripping a DVD is automatically illegal, fair use cannot be a defense.

Peace of mind is worth a few bucks a month

The MPAA and RIAA cannot be trusted. ISPs have conflicting interests and Americans are often restricted to 1-2 ISPs. In my case, Time Warner Cable is the only option. The arbitration process is an unknown, and the MPAA has openly lobbied against the kinds of common sense space shifting that people expect when they buy a DVD or Blu-ray disc.

The entertainment industry has taken every opportunity to demonstrate that it has no interest in dialog, measured response, or careful deliberation. Men like Chris Dodd and Cary Sherman have pulled every string and played every card with the goal of hammering people and businesses into compliance, regardless of the collateral damage.

So I’m done. I’m opting out. If my current service isn’t sufficient to the task, I’ll find another service (Tor? A private VPS?) that is. $9.95 a month is a small price to pay compared to the headache of tussling with my ISP over potential piracy notifications.

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Court rejects DOJ’s argument, will hear appeal from Megaupload’s innocent bystanders

When the US Department of Justice and New Zealand police seizedMegaupload’s servers and arrested its founder, Kim Dotcom, they struck a blow for copyright enforcement. Unfortunately, they also effectively seized the assets of Megaupload customers who never infringed anyone’s copyright and had no knowledge of such activity. Kyle Goodwin was one of these users, and he’s been fighting since January to have his data returned.

The court has now agreed to hold a hearing to address Goodwin’s situation. The EFF reports that the hearing will determine where Goodwin’s data currently is, what happened to it when the government executed its search warrant and denied him access, and whether or not he can get it back. It’s entirely possible that the court will rule that Goodwin has no right to access or retrieve his information; it’s simply agreed to consider the issue.

Still, this is a major success. The US Department of Justice fought Goodwin’s request for ahearing tooth and nail. In its filing, the government argued that it never actually seized Goodwin’s data — it copied certain other information and ordered the servers taken offline. According to the DOJ, Goodwin wasn’t entitled to a hearing because the government hadn’t actually done anything that could be construed as seizure. As for the loss of access to his data, it suggested he take that up with Carpathia Hosting, perhaps as an unsecured creditor might seek reimbursement from a bankruptcy.

Carpathia Hosting has asked what, exactly, it’s supposed to do with petabytes of data it can’t delete and isn’t paid for.

The irony of the Megaupload case is that the tone and nature of the government’s filings have had a significant impact on the development of our own Cloud Bill of Rights. Kim Dotcom isn’t a particularly sympathetic figure, and Megaupload was a well-known source of stolen, pirated material. As time as passed, it’s become increasingly clear that the Department of Justice pushed the New Zealand police to execute an improper warrant, deliberately staged an over-the-top seizure designed to intimidate and threaten Dotcom’s safety, and executed its own warrants with no regard for collatoral damage. Worse, the DOJ’s legal position is that it doesn’t have to respect citizen property because access to digital data isn’t an important facet of ownership in criminal cases.

By giving Goodwin a hearing, the court is at least acknowledging the need to consider these issues, and that’s considerably more than the government is comfortable with. It’s a small step forward, but an important one.

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Facebook has 1 billion users, it’s time to leave

Facebook has reached a milestone of 1 billion users worldwide. Once exclusive to college students, it is now used by anyone willing to give the company a bit of personal information. After that’s done you can join the social network and connect with just about everyone you’ve ever met.

The social networking giant is not without its issues, however. As Facebook literally runs out of new users to recruit, it has us wondering — Is it set to be the next Myspace as frustrated users move onto the next big thing? There are some clear reasons why it’s time to go…

Facebook is a huge target

It is no secret that Facebook has a massive amount of data. Contact, financial, and personal information is stored on the company’s servers, and with 1 billion identities behind all that, it is a serious target to hackers. In the past, the service has had to contend with various scams, phishing schemes, and likely an inordinate amount of spam. As the service grows, it is likely that such tactics will only increase in addition to a resurgence of direct attacks as hackers attempt to get at user information stored in Facebook’s databases.

A Facebook data breach would essentially be the holy grail of hacks. The attackers would have access to sensitive personal information as well as a great deal of data to sift through in order to create more efficient password crackers based on patterns (one reason whyrandomly generated pass phrases from a password manager are a good idea).

Network effect gone wild

Along with the security aspects, the sheer amount of users and data flowing through the service has become overwhelming for many users. Despite the new Timeline profiles and beefed up filtering options in the news feed, friends are inundated with posts from status updates and application spam notifications. If you are in a group of friends, Facebook will even happily flood the home page with conversations between other people that do not even involve you, at least if you are not on top of your filtering efforts.

Basically, at some point, there is just too much data to sift through, and people will get burnt out by the service as Facebook becomes less fun and more like work (that you aren’t getting paid for, mind you). At least, personally, I’ve stopped using Facebook for anything besides PMs, and the only thing keeping me doing that much is that it is easier for my family to use Facebook messages and IMs than to use email. A quick scroll through my news feed quickly reminds me why I stopped regularly checking in.

Obligatory friending/liking/sharing

With 1 billion users, you are now able to connect to family, friends, and everyone at your school or within your organization. Myspace was the go-to place years ago, but was overtaken by Facebook as it represented thing that seemed more exclusive. Your parents and co-workers (as great as they are) were not on it yet, so you were able to be a bit more relaxed with conversations and opinion sharing. Now the cycle is repeating, as everyone in your life moves over to Facebook to connect with you. In that respect, Facebook has lost a lot of its initial appeal and luster.

Slower moving and more corporate

When Facebook was a younger service without shareholders to please, it seemed like a more flexible company. Facebook was able to try out new things, quickly roll out new features, and re-invent itself to innovate and keep users happy. Flexibility does not seem to be a trait of Facebook anymore, however. The company’s last big news was Timeline and then their purchase of up-and-coming photo sharing service Instagram… six months ago. Yes, Facebook seemingly figuring out a good formula for keeping — and monetizing — users is a good thing for (stock ticker symbol) FB but that doesn’t mean it’s the best for users.

And there is a good deal of competition out there with Google+, Twitter, and an overhauled Myspace that is attempting to woo users back with touch friendly UI (OK, maybe that’s a less serious threat, but at least they are trying new things). Granted, these services are not quite ready to take on Facebook, but they are innovating and it is only a matter of time before users start taking notice. Along the same lines was Diaspora, which ended up being a spectacular failure, but not before garnering a huge amount of attention.

Facebook is the social networking giant today, but it’s possible that it’s grown too large to sustain itself. Is the social networking cycle due to come around again or has Facebook’s size and war chest mean that it’ll be on top for the foreseeable future?

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YouTube kicks copyright foxes out of henhouse, won’t admit it invited them

Automatic content filters have taken a hammering of late. False claims of copyright took down early footage of the Mars rover, Curiosity, cut off the Ustream broadcast of the 2012 Hugo awards, blocked footage of President Obama engaging in a bit of karaoke, and a great deal of other content. Yesterday YouTube announced that it would no longer completely automate the copyright claim/video removal process. As of today, eligible users will be able to dispute a copyright claim against their videos. If the copyright holder decides to push forward with their own allegations of infringement, they’ll have to file a formal DMCA notification.

That sounds great, but as Patrick McKay, founder of FairUseTube.org points out, that’s how the system was already supposed to work. According to McKay, YouTube’s new policy is actually a return to the company’s old policy — a policy it never admitted that it stopped using.

YouTube’s blog post yesterday partially confirms McKay’s previous allegations that the company had adopted policies that left contributors with no way to reclaim their own work. The post’s author, Thabet Alfishawi, stated that “Prior to today, if a content owner rejected that dispute, the user was left with no recourse for certain types of Content ID claims (e.g., monetize claims).” In other words, a company could walk in and claim copyright on a personal video in order to make money off it, while the uploader/creator was left holding the bag.

According to YouTube’s content dispute page, only eligible uploaders may appeal a copyright decision. Eligibility is determined by being in “good copyright standing,” the date of the dispute, and “other factors.” If an uploader appeals and the alleged copyright owner chooses to file a DMCA notice, the uploader still receives a copyright strike. Three strikes, and you’re out — regardless of whether the company filing the DMCA notification prevails in a court of law.

Still, this change is an improvement, and McKay describes himself as “cautiously optimistic.” Hopefully this announcement actually heralds real positive change rather than serving as an admission of lousy policy. YouTube’s promise that it cares about user feedback would ring truer if the company had simultaneously instituted a policy of requiring copyright holders to be in good standing in order to assert ownership or have their DMCA notifications count against a user’s account. Foreign companies have little reason to fear the consequences of filing DMCA notifications in bad faith, while legitimate uploaders can have their accounts shut off.

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Firefox 15 available to download, finally fixes add-on memory leak

Mozilla has released Firefox 15 for PCs, smartphones, and tablets. The most standout features are a completely silent background updater (like Chrome), significant memory footprint improvements, a built-in PDF reader, better SPDY protocol support, and a new native UI for Firefox Mobile on Android tablets.

Mozilla debuted an early version of the background updater in Firefox 12, but it still harried the user with various pop-ups. With Firefox 15, the browser now downloads and applies updates in the background, and then switches to the new version the next time you open the browser — just like Google Chrome.

The Firefox add-on memory leak has finally been fixed. For almost as long as I can remember, the only surefire way to reduce Firefox’s bloated memory footprint was to close it down. In theory, closing tabs should have the same effect — forcing add-ons to relinquish their memory allocations — but until now it hasn’t. Your mileage will vary, depending on which add-ons you use, but in general you should notice quite a big reduction.

The built-in PDF reader (pictured below), provided by PDF.js, is turned off by default but can be turned on by visiting about:config and setting pdfjs.disabled to false. After some preliminary testing, it seems about as capable as Chrome’s built-in PDF reader, but a bit slower. This is just a preliminary implementation though — it might speed up by the time final code ships in a later version.

The update to SPDY v3 brings Firefox 15 back into line with Chrome, which rolled out SPDY v3 in Chrome 19. SPDY is Google’s updated version of HTTP, and a direct competitor of Microsoft’s HTTP S&M. Both SPDY and S&M bring new and much-needed functionality to the very old HTTP spec, such as multiplexing, improved security, and modes that better support mobile devices. SPDY is an open source spec that can speed up surfing by up to 50%, but at the moment it’s only really used by Google’s web properties — still, you definitely notice the difference when using search or YouTube.

Finally, the desktop version of Firefox 15 has improved WebGL support (and a very cool playable FPS demo, if you want to appreciate what WebGL could do for browser-based games) — and the tablet version of Firefox Mobile has had its interface completely reworked (pictured above). If you don’t have WebGL enabled (if you use IE, for example), check out the video below.

For a complete list of changes, hit up the changelogs for Desktop Firefox 15 and Mobile Firefox 15.

Download Firefox 15 for Windows, Mac, or Linux. (Android link will follow soon, once the Play Store updates.)

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