2. 2—WASHINGTON INTERNET DAILY WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 2009
additional five more than five days after clearing. The site doesn’t indicate whether it was linked to by the White
House. Some of the bills that didn’t meet the five-day posting pledge could qualify as emergencies, particularly if
Congress waits until the last moment to pass legislation: A bill extending authorization for programs under the
Small Business Act was signed the same day the old authorizations expired. Other bills that didn’t meet the five-
day promise include the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Credit CARD Act. One bill passed by Congress and
presented to the president remains unsigned: HR-131, which would establish a Ronald Reagan Centennial Com-
mission. That bill doesn’t seem to be on the White House site.
Having bills posted for five days before being signed would be great, but it would be even better if
Congress would post bills for a time before voting on them, said Heather West, a policy analyst at the Center
for Democracy & Technology. She said Data.gov and the requests for comments on Regulations.gov and
opengov.ideascale.com, which is hosting the public comments that will be incorporated into an Open Govern-
ment Directive issued by OMB, are good starts. She said she’s excited about the possibility of Regula-
tions.gov finally changing. West said that of the three efforts, “in the long run, it may be the most useful, be-
cause it will have very concrete results.”
Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation, is ready to see results from Data.gov.
“Sunlight isn’t demanding that the government change overnight,” he said: “We’re not crazy. And we don’t have
unrealistic expectations.” If someone wanted to mash up data from multiple agencies, it might be possible -- but
because the data isn’t in a standard format, the person has to write code for each agency separately. Imagine, he
said, if one could write an app and access all federal information with one line of code.
Data.gov offers 47 data feeds, almost half of them GIS data -- “stuff on a map,” Johnson said. He’d like
information from the foreign agent registration database, lists of people serving on federal advisory committees,
and eventually Congressional data. He’d also like Data.gov to be a true repository. Now it’s a catalog that points
to the data on agency Web sites, which gets to the nonstandardized format problem.
Johnson likes the comments process on opengov.ideascale.com. “I think it’s a great initiative,” he said.
The site takes suggestions in several open government categories and allows people to vote yea or nay. The
comment period will be followed by a deeper discussion period and a wiki directive-writing period. Right now
the top vote-getter on the site is Minority Leader John Boehner, who advocated a 72-hour mandatory public
review on major spending bills, an idea initially promoted by open government advocates like the Sunlight
Foundation. Boehner’s idea got 632 yea votes and 58 nays. Among other ideas: a suggestion to disclose UFO
presence and end the truth embargo on the presence of extraterrestrials. The idea received seven votes for and
24 against. -- Leslie Cantu
IMPACT Expanding
Multilateral Cybersecurity Group Ready to Sign Up Nations
GENEVA -- Countries are in talks to join a multilateral initiative aimed at fighting global cyberterror-
ism, cyberwarfare and other online threats by better linking experts, governments and Computer Emergency
Response Teams, officials said at a technical demonstration last week at the ITU. The International Multilat-
eral Partnership Against Cyber-Threats aims quot;to build a value proposition for countries to our services,quot; said
IMPACT Chairman Mohd Noor Amin.
Other global organizations are doing the same task, but not on a global basis, Amin said. North Atlantic
Treaty Organization activities are confined to NATO countries, he said, and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
3. WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 2009 WASHINGTON INTERNET DAILY—3
initiatives are confined to APEC countries. Other initiatives in Europe, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
and the Organization of American States are likewise confined, he said.
Counties with no protection become safe havens for criminals and an online menace, Amin said. Many of
the command and control botnets and servers used for cybercriminal payments are in small countries with very lit-
tle regulation and protection, he said. IMPACT wants to partner with governments, major security vendors, Inter-
pol and certain experts, said IMPACT technical consultant Mitthiran Raman.
quot;The Global Response Center is meant to be a coordinated bodyquot; to mitigate and prevent cyberterrorism,
said Raman, the center's architect. IMPACT has a center for training and skills development, research and develop-
ment, global response and policy coordination, Raman said. An Electronically Secure Collaboration Application
for Experts has social networking links to experts, he said. A July upgrade will add incident logging, Raman said.
Many CERTs supported the idea of going beyond ticket-based systems already in place, he said. The cross-CERT
compliant upgrade will look for relevant people to address the problem, Raman said. The system will use VoIP,
instant messaging or chat tools to connect the parties in real time, he said. Vulnerability information could then be
disseminated to all CERTS, Raman said. Case management for cyber-attacks could be routed through law enforce-
ment or other governmental authorities, he said.
The Network Early Warning System uses scraped data from certain places in the network, Raman said.
NEWS uses a data surveillance concept for creating an early warning system, he said. IMPACT is working
with 18 commercial security vendors to get data, Raman said, and the number is expected to rise to at least 30.
A quot;mash-up enginequot; aggregates real-time data into an anonymous feed, he said. Scraped data from command
and control servers is also provided by Shadow Server Foundation, SRI International's Malware Threat Center,
Arbor Networks' ATLAS, Honeynet Project and SANS Institute's Internet storm center, Raman said. The next
phase will be gathering data from Kaspersky's secure network, Semantec's Deep Site network, Global Intelli-
gence Network and F-Secure, Raman said.
Most attack-marker sources pointed to China one day last week, a demonstration of the system showed.
About 939,000 incidents of malicious probing had been logged during the day's aggregated feed, Raman said. Indi-
cations of the threat were corroborated by the various feeds reporting similar data, he said. Data on other threat
categories is aggregated from different sources, Raman said. Secunia provides a vulnerabilities list, he said.
Security vendors will provide operating system and application vulnerabilities, Raman said. Lists of vi-
ruses, spyware and phishing come from different specialized sources, he said. Countries can also submit malware
samples for automatic analysis and possible information distribution within IMPACT's membership, Raman said.
Anti-virus vendors liked the idea of getting information from the submission facility, he said.
Access to IMPACT's information isn't yet defined, Raman said. None of the countries are yet onboard, he
said. Nations are still in talks with IMPACT, with registration likely to begin in June or July after data center con-
struction and testing are finished, Raman said.
IMPACT was formed quot;quite independentlyquot; of the ITU, Amin said. IMPACT's four focus areas match rec-
ommendations in the ITU Global Cybersecurity Agenda, which was prompted by the World Summit on the Infor-
mation Society. ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure felt IMPACT could be the operations center for the
GCA, Amin said, referring to more than 100 experts' group recommendations. Malaysia incubated IMPACT with
$13 million, Amin said. The organization is quot;supposed to be self sufficientquot; afterward, he said.
An International Advisory Board meeting is tentatively planned for the third quarter, Amin said. Board
members include Google’s Vint Cerf, Eugene Kaspersky of Kaspersky Lab, former White House cybersecurity ad-
visor Howard Schmidt, Symantec Chairman John Tompson, Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure, Toure and others, the
IMPACT Web site said. -- Scott Billquist
4. 4—WASHINGTON INTERNET DAILY WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 2009
White House
The “persistent cookie” policy set in the Clinton administration has harmed the federal government’s ability
to offer “usable and citizen-friendly” Web sites, said a report the Information Technology and Innovation Founda-
tion released on Tuesday. It recommended creation of standard privacy-policy language across federal sites, a spe-
cific list of approved and prohibited activities on such sites, and regularly-updated guidelines from the Office of
Management and Budget on the use of persistent cookies, such as their maximum lifespan. OMB guidance from
2000 that generally restricts the use of cookies has remained through an explosion of popular Web sites using per-
sistent cookies, from Google to Wikipedia to eBay, most of which tell users how to control cookies in their browser
settings, the report said. Only four of the 10 most popular federal Web sites -- USPS.com, NIH.gov, NASA.gov
and CDC.gov -- use persistent cookies, whereas several state government sites use them to offer greater functional-
ity. Michigan and Idaho, for example, which use the cookies, were the top ranked states for e-government in a Na-
tional Policy Research Council report in 2006, the report said. “Government agencies cannot implement many of
the common features the public has come to expect ... such as personalization,” leading users to visit private-sector
and nonprofit sites that give users more convenient access to government data, like OpenSecrets.org. OMB should
be directed to allow persistent cookies on government sites and set specific permitted uses, the report said.
Agencies
Facebook settled with a company trying to cancel the social networking site's trademark on the term
quot;Facebook.quot; Think Computer, founded by a Harvard University classmate of Facebook CEO Mark Zucker-
berg, created a Web-based student portal on campus called houseSYSTEM that included a section called quot;The
Universal Face Book,quot; the companies said in a written statement. Zuckerberg was a member of houseSYS-
TEM, which didn't offer member profiles when it started in 2003 quot;due to security concerns.quot; Think CEO
Aaron Greenspan added profiles after Facebook launched in 2004. Think has filed petitions at the Patent and
Trademark Office in April 2008 and March 2009 to cancel Facebook's trademark. The company has promised
to drop its legal effort. The settlement terms weren’t released. quot;I am glad that my contributions have been
recognized by Facebook,quot; Greenspan said.
---
The FCC is asking other countries to supply broadband data to help it develop a national broadband
plan. Tuesday, the FCC released letters sent earlier this month by the International Bureau to Canada, Austra-
lia, Nigeria, South Africa, Singapore, Korea, Japan and Hong Kong. The commission is required by the
Broadband Data Improvement Act to do an international comparison of broadband speeds and prices. “We
hope to learn from the experiences of others in meeting the shared challenge of delivering broadband to all of
our citizens,” the bureau wrote. “While some national level data is available through institutions like the Or-
ganisation [for] Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Telecommunications
Union (ITU), we are interested in obtaining broadband data at more granular levels -- for example, by city,
county, state, province or prefecture. Similarly, we are interested in demographic and socioeconomic data at
comparable unit levels.” More letters are expected to appear on the FCC’s Web site in the next few days, a
commission official said, but the total is unclear. -- AB
---
The NTIA and the RUS should balance the needs to stimulate broadband supply and demand in giving
out grants and loans, Intel Executive Vice President Sean Maloney said in an interview. Calling WiMAX a
broadband technology that makes efficient use of spectrum and uses an all-IP network, he said he hopes the
technology will help the U.S., which lags in GSM and 3G, take the lead in 4G. A balanced program combing
broadband connectivity and computer education and ownership is critical in distributing the stimulus funds,
Maloney said, supporting tax incentives. He said countries like China, India, Portugal and Australia are trying
5. WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 2009 WASHINGTON INTERNET DAILY—5
to spur broadband demand by providing subsidies, rebates, and tax refunds for computer purchases by consum-
ers and small- and mid-sized businesses. In a recent filing with the NTIA and the RUS, Intel asked the agen-
cies to base the choice among applicants on tests aimed at the mix of capabilities, cost and price that will best
meet the broadband needs of the area to be served. All applications should be required to specify “what their
projected cost per subscriber will be for their scheduled deployment at one, two and three years assuming a 25,
50 and 100 percent penetration,” Peter Pitsch, Intel executive director of communications, wrote on the com-
pany’s policy blog. There’s no reason for the U.S. to lag behind the rest of the world in 4G adoption, Maloney
said, noting rapid WiMAX deployment in countries like Japan and South Korea. He touted the 2.5 GHz spec-
trum, used by WiMAX operator Clearwire, as the right band for a nationwide 4G network. But some analysts
said the U.S. WiMAX adoption may be handicapped by its limited number of operators and the lack of access
to the 3.5 GHz band, used by some Asian and European operators. Netbooks and notebooks with embedded
WiMAX chips will be the target of Intel’s WiMAX offerings for now, Maloney said. But WiMAX will be in-
tegrated into a wide range of devices, including smartphones, PDAs and cameras, he said. Intel isn’t scaling
back its investments this year, Maloney said. “If you back off investment in recession, you are threatening
your economic future,” he said. -- YW
Courts
Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has handled few communications matters as a federal appeals or
district court judge. She did write the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals opinion in a 2008 case upholding a district
judge’s ruling that a Kansas man had no claim against the reorganized MCI for pre-bankruptcy claims. In that case,
In re: WorldCom Inc., Victor Browning sued MCI, saying the company had been unjustly enriched by installing
without permission telecom cables in a railroad right of way across land he owned. Sotomayor, as a district court
judge, had ruled in New York Times Co. v. Tasini that publishers could license the work of freelance journalists
when their work was sold for inclusion in an electronic databases such as LexisNexis. The decision was ultimately
overturned by the Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision. As a lawyer at New York’s Pavia & Harcourt in the 1980s, So-
tomayor specialized in part in intellectual-property law.
---
Customers of Hughes seek class-action status, alleging the reliability of the company's Internet service is
falsely advertised. Tina Walker and Christopher Bayless, both of California, said the company promised broad-
band speeds of 1-3 Mbps, but they received far slower service. In the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in
Oakland, Calif., Bayless and Walker seek to represent about 80,000 state residents who have subscribed to Hugh-
esNet since 2005. They seek $5 million in damages. The lawsuit comes weeks before the government begins to
allocate funds from the $7.2 billion broadband stimulus package. Hughes declined to discuss the lawsuit or
whether it would have any impact on it receiving stimulus funds. Lisa Scalpone, vice president of legal and gov-
ernment affairs for WildBlue, said her company quot;believes satellite broadband provides a reliable and cost-
effective broadband service to rural America.quot; She said WildBlue doesn't believe the litigation would have a
negative impact on the satellite broadband industry's chances of receiving funding. Andrea Maleter, technical
director for Futron Corp., said customers of terrestrial Internet providers have similar issues and quot;if such prob-
lems would be the basis for denying stimulus money to broadband providers, there would be no stimulus money
awarded at all.quot; This is the second suit against Hughes filed by the law firm of Pogust, Braslow and Millrood in
the past two years over Internet speed performance. In 2008, Pennsylvania resident David Scasta sought $75
million for himself and 400,000 Hughes customers over dissatisfaction with the Internet service, according to
legal documents filed in that state. A paralegal for the law firm said that case was withdrawn until a verdict is
reached in California, where consumers laws tend to be more quot;favorable.quot; -- VD
---
GraphOn said it settled a lawsuit against CareerBuilder and Classified Ventures on claims of infringing its
networked database-related patents (WID March 11/08 p6). Under a nondisclosure agreement, the terms weren’t
6. 6—WASHINGTON INTERNET DAILY WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 2009
released. The infringement suit continues in U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas, against remaining defendants
Yahoo, eHarmony, InterActiveCorp and IAC's dating site Match.com.
---
The retrial of P2P defendant Jammie Thomas will start June 15 in U.S. District Court, Minneapolis,
said Judge Michael Davis. Pretrial motions will be heard June 10. The judge threw out a $222,000 jury ver-
dict against Thomas last year, citing erroneous jury instructions that said making available a copyrighted work
constituted infringement in and of itself. The newly remarried Thomas-Rasset also got a new legal team, St.
Paul-based Garrett Blanchfield and Houston-based Kiwi Camara, who have ties to Harvard law Prof. Charles
Nesson, who is leading a quixotic fair-use defense in the Tenenbaum P2P case in Boston. Nesson and Camara
are also defending another P2P defendant and university student in UMG v. English in U.S. District Court,
Cleveland, in a case filed in March. The lawyers are asking the court there to declare unconstitutional statu-
tory damages of $150,000 per work and force the RIAA to return the damages it has collected from its
“unlawful campaign,” which they claim exceed $100 million.
International
Progress is being made toward pan-European online music licensing, European Competition Commissioner
Neelie Kroes said Tuesday. A report by the Online Commerce Roundtable that she set up in September 2008 found
that major players in Internet music distribution are willing to deal with the barriers to consumers’ enjoyment of
content offerings, Kroes said. SACEM, a French collecting society, said in principle its agreeable to pan-European
licensing of its repertory to other collecting societies, she said. And she said EMI is ready to allow rights managers
to offer its catalogue for the whole European Economic Area. Apple said that if iTunes can readily license rights
on a multiterritorial basis from publishers and collecting societies, it will consider making its content available to
all European consumers, including those in countries where iTunes isn't now available, she said. Kroes encouraged
players to quot;move quicklyquot; toward online licensing accords. Comments on possible licensing systems for online
music distribution are due June 30 -- Comp-Greffe-Antitrust@ec.europa.eu.
---
Australia’s first criminal copyright case to go to a verdict has ended with a finding of guilt. Jurors found
against Yong Hong Lin on 15 of 31 charges, said Music Industry Piracy Investigations and the Australian Federa-
tion Against Copyright Theft. A raid of a store that Lin owns found more than 16,000 unlicensed movie and music
discs from illegal Chinese manufacturing plants, plus “illegally burnt discs produced locally,” the groups said. Lin
will be sentenced Aug. 21 to as much as five years in prison and a $60,500 fine for each offense.
---
A charity single recorded by Italian artists to help victims of the April 21 earthquake in L’Aquila has
been illegally uploaded, said the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Three people in
Rome and Milan accused of uploading “Domani 21/04.09quot; have been arrested by the Italian Fiscal Police.
The artists on the track, made available through DirectConnect and file-hosting services including Rapid-
share, include opera singer Andrea Bocelli. Police seized hard drives with 1,300 GB of music files, the fed-
eration said. The suspects face up to four years in prison and administrative fines. The federation estimated
that the uploading cost one million euros in sales.
---
Rogers Cable said it’s increasing the download speeds of its two most popular broadband offerings
this week. Express package speeds will rise 43 percent to 10 Mbps. Lite will triple to 3 Mbps. “Our cus-
tomers tell us that speed is one of the most important attributes of their Internet service,” said Chief Market-
ing Officer Steven Wagner.
---
Virgin Media is using Motorola gear to provide broadband speeds of up to 50 Mbps and can raise them to
as much as 200 Mbps, Motorola said. It said the U.K. cable operator is the first ISP there to deliver “ultra fast
broadband speeds.” Separately, Motorola said Telia Stofa will use the company’s EuroDocsis 3.0 cable modem for
super-fast broadband in Denmark. The terms of the deals weren’t released.
7. WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 2009 WASHINGTON INTERNET DAILY—7
Privacy
Last.fm is fighting back hard against new claims from tech blog TechCrunch that Last.fm parent CBS, not
the unit itself, violated European data protection laws by handing over Last.fm user data to the music industry to
track leaks of unreleased tracks (WID Feb 24 p6). The playlist and streaming site's fans are urging it to take legal
action against TechCrunch under the looser defamation laws of the U.K., where Last.fm is based. TechCrunch
founder Michael Arrington said Friday that the site's original inside source had been fired from CBS and
quot;threatened with legal actionquot; for leaking the news. A new source who has spoken to Last.fm employees confirmed
what the first source said quot;before CBS lawyers became involved,quot; Arrington said -- that CBS got the quot;scrobblingquot;
data from Last.fm under false pretenses and passed it to the RIAA or possibly one or more record labels. Last.fm
tracks scrobbling, song playing on PCs, to develop user recommendations and feed to a user's friends. quot;We be-
lieve ... that CBS lied to usquot; about not sending or intending to send user data to record labels, quot;and that they subse-
quently asked us to attribute the quote to Last.fm to make the statement defensible,quot; Arrington said. quot;Last.fm's de-
nials were, strictly speaking, correct, but they ignored the underlying truth of the situation.quot; Arrington offered the
fired CBS employee free legal help to challenge CBS through whistleblower protection laws. Last.fm developer
Russ Garrett agreed with Arrington over the weekend that such a transfer would violate EU laws, as Last.fm is
based in London. quot;Nobody at Last.fm knows anything about such a leak,quot; said Garrett in a post on Last.fm's user
forums. It's quot;just not possiblequot; that CBS could have obtained IP address data, which is quot;controlled tightly inside
Last.fm and is only stored for a short period of time. Any request for such data would have to be approved by my-
self first,quot; Garrett said. CBS more recently denied ever having given Last.fm user data to any third party, he added.
quot;I think someone is taking [TechCrunch] for a ride.quot; CBS and Last.fm should clarify any points that TechCrunch is
wrong on and stop issuing quot;blanket denials,” Arrington said in a follow-up post. “We have e-mails from Last.fm
and CBS employees that are saying quite the opposite from what you are.quot; Last.fm continues to direct inquiries to
its outsourced public relations firm, he said. quot;We remain open to on or off record conversations with Last.fm,
which has been our position throughout this story. The phones are ringing. They're just not answering.quot;
Security
An application-virtualization provider designed a “sandbox” for P2P software LimeWire to protect sensitive
information from being accidentally shared by LimeWire users. Xenocode said its P2P Sandbox runs LimeWire
through the Web, instead of its own software, “eliminating the danger of inadvertent leaks of confidential informa-
tion.” The company noted the leak of Marine One blueprints through unnamed P2P software in March (WID
March 3 p3). Xenocode’s application is free to download at www.xenocode.com/p2p.
Industry Notes
Nokia on Tuesday started its Ovi application store available online to more than 50 of the companies’ de-
vices including the forthcoming N97. AT&T plans to make the Ovi Store available to its U.S. customers this year.
Early reviews by some bloggers called the store disappointing. Nokia acknowledged performance problems in the
operation. “We immediately began to address this issue by adding servers, which resulted in intermittent perform-
ance improvements,” said Eric John, head of Ovi product marketing.
---
The telecom industry could get a major boost from Amazon's Kindle and other new revenue sources, Niel-
sen analyst Roger Entner said Tuesday. The Kindle quot;has been touted as a savior for the newspaper industry,quot; but it
quot;also represents the first example of the long-predicted ad hoc subscription model for Sprint, which provides the
wireless access for Kindle as subsidized by Amazon,quot; he said. Kindle sales accounted for most of Sprint's 394,000
