MeroPalo

The 48-pages long white paper titled “The United States vs. You”, signed and written by Kim Dotcom, is breaking the MegaUpload case into small pieces, once again. The paper is Dotcom’s story on how the US decided to seize his file-sharing service MegaUpload. Kim claims that the story represents one of the clearest examples of prosecutorial overreach in recent history.

The white paper reminds everyone about the failure of SOPA, and how the American government chose MegaUpload as a target. It tells about a legal precedent, when a month ago a court ruled that YouTube holds no responsibility for what its users upload, and for some reason the same clemency hasn’t been given to MegaUpload last year.

Dotcom points out that the government’s prosecution of MegaUpload shows the implications of the government acting as a proxy for large corporations. He says that the government is using its enforcement powers to accomplish what rightsholders haven’t been willing to do in civil court (for example, sue MegaUpload for copyright violation). Kim Dotcom admits he made a terrible mistake when deciding to collaborate with American authorities in another case. It later turned out that the US investigators were collecting incriminating data on Kim’s file-sharing service, ultimately leading to the controversial seizure of the domain.

“The United States vs. You” contains a lot of interesting details about the whole fiasco and suggests a number of really wild ideas about why MegaUpload was targeted by the US authorities and not Rapidshare instead. In addition, the paper reminds everyone about Aaron Swartz, a young genius who killed himself under US authorities’ pressure.

Aaron was a young online entrepreneur, he was known worldwide as a founder of Infogami, co-founder of Reddit and RSS co-developer, as well as an activist for government reform, digital rights and civil liberties. The young man was indicted back in 2011 for allegedly stealing MIT’s articles from an archive of academic journals.

Tragically, Aaron took his own life this past January, about a fortnight before a significant evidence suppression hearing in his case. It turned out that the investigators offered Aaron Swartz 4 to 6 months in prison for a guilty plea and threatened to seek more than 7 years jail time if he chose to go to trial.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for the source of the article

By:
SaM

In the annual report Pentagon presents to Congress, it has again accused China of hacking the establishments of the United States in an attempt to gain industrial and defense secrets.

According to the report, China strives to build up its technology base by borrowing tech of the United States. Moreover, China seems to be trying to understand how the American government feels about it internally. This is hardly surprising taking into account the hundreds of billions of dollars the United States owes to China. Maybe they just want to make sure the US isn’t a deadbeat who will skip town and stick Canada with the bill.

Despite the fact that the United States has previously accused China of hacking, this is the first time the Pentagon has made such a direct allegation. Its report claims that the country is using its computer network exploitation capability to support intelligence collection against the America’s diplomatic, economic, and defense industrial base sectors which support the national defense programs of the country.

In the meantime, media reports point out that despite defense contractors top the Pentagon’s list of concerns, China tends hacking tech firms and media like the New York Times.

By:
SaM

It seems that Apple’s attempts to take control of its accessories market by switching from a 30-pin connector to the Lightning connector have failed. As you know, Apple hacked off a lot of its accessory partners after revealing that iPhone 5 wouldn’t have the 30 pin connector. In other words, if users upgraded they would have to spend money on new accessories. Of course, consumers were not so happy to hear that.

After the hardware giant announced this news, industry experts suggested that the change would cause problems for Apple, and now they have been vindicated. The warnings were that the peripheral market’s commitment to the device’s 30-pin connector was a huge competitive advantage for the manufacturer, because being the single device able to attach directly to external speakers, clocks, stands and chargers added an extra helping of utility for its devices.

However, today Apple’s aggressive shift to Lightning for its devices chased a lot of manufacturers to find more open means of connecting devices. This normally means choosing phone produced by Apple’s rivals.

For example, Logitech and Geneva Lab don’t use Apple connectors in their devices any longer. Instead, they are more interested in Bluetooth, and so iHome does – one of the largest manufacturers of iPhone clock radios and other Apple audio accessories. iHome also introduced more Bluetooth technology, because it allows electronic accessories to easily connect to a lot of different devices.

Apple didn’t give a sign it is bothered, at least officially. Its representatives pointed out that Bluetooth devices would connect to iOS just as easily as to Android devices, for instance. The suggestions are that this move was a spectacular own goal – the matter is that Apple had an iron grip on the digital accessories market and today it is starting to slip. Indeed, you can see how the industry is moving to wireless connectors anyway, so Apple devices have the technology to benefit from that. However, the matter is that until now the company dominated hard-wired connections, while Wi-Fi isn’t an area where it has complete control. Although Apple could have easily milked the market until everyone switched to Wi-Fi, it just forced the industry to change.

By:
SaM