The Obama administration is prepping a new digital security plan, and it is: We need to retrofit the Internet for the FBI.

Long gone are the days when law enforcement could easy tap into land line telephones to monitor nefarious conversations. Those nefarious conversations have moved online, and increasingly to social networks like Facebook, peer-to-peer services like Skype, and elsewhere on the Web. In an effort to catch up, The New York Times reports, the administration will submit new legislation that would require companies to build in back doors for law enforcement.

New rules

The new regulations that would be sent to Congress next year would affect American and foreign companies that provide communications services inside the U.S. It would require service providers to make the plain text of encrypted conversations — over the phone, computer or e-mail — readily available to law enforcement, according to federal officials and analysts. [AP]

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There may never have been this many people this excited about white space.

Today the commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission agreed to the rules that will allow unlicensed use of the empty space between TV channels (available now that TV has gone totally digital), and opens the door to super wi-fi networks whose reach could be measured in miles.

Unlike current Wi-Fi airwaves, whose reach can be measured in feet, the spectrum that would carry Super Wi-Fi would be able to travel for several miles because of that lower frequency. Through brick walls, even—something your Linksys really struggles with. [Gizmodo]

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The software tool called Haystack was supposed to protect dissidents in Iran who wanted to use the Internet free of the government’s censorship. If third-party software testers are correct, though, flaws in the system meant to help those dissidents could have led authorities right to them. The Censorship Research Center, the San Francisco-based organization that created Haystack, has now pulled it back and asked users to destroy the existing copies.

“We have halted ongoing testing of Haystack in Iran pending a security review,” HaystackNetwork.com said in a brief statement. “If you have a copy of the test program, please refrain from using it.” [AFP]

Jacob Appelbaum, a security expert who volunteers with WikiLeaks, sounded the alarm.

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Yesterday, Google and Verizon posted their joint policy proposal for internet regulation. The proposal suggests a legislative framework for Congress regarding our current “open internet.” An open internet means all bits are treated the same: internet service providers process every internet content provider’s information at the same speed–YouTube or Hulu, Wikipedia or Britannica. Though the Google Verizon plan is titled “a joint policy proposal for an open Internet,” it leaves some internet neutrality champions concerned; the plan does not address wireless service regulation and allows exceptions to the open internet standard for special broadband services.

We’ll break down the possible implications of this move, but first, a briefing on the basics.

What is an example of an alternative to our open internet? Internet content providers could pay more to get their information to you more quickly–like paying for a plane ticket instead of taking the bus. Since October of 2009, Verizon and Google have issued a shared statement of principles, submitted a joint filing to the FCC, and published a joint op-ed on net neutrality. But after talks between the two companies, a New York Times article and others asked if Google–a self-proclaimed proponent of net neutrality–might pay Verizon to get information to users more quickly, thus ending our net neutral system.

In April, a federal appeals court ruled that the FCC–which can regulate interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable–cannot regulate the way internet service providers conduct business. So instead the FCC, which has said it’s in favor of the current open internet, invited major internet players to a series of meetings to devise an agreement. But after weeks of private meetings, talks seem to be breaking down:

The F.C.C. in recent weeks has been trying to negotiate its own agreement in a series of private meetings with a group of big Internet service and content companies, including Google and Verizon, to ensure net neutrality. But the agency canceled a session scheduled for Thursday after the reports of the Google-Verizon talks. [An FCC spokesman] said in a statement that the effort “has been productive on several fronts, but has not generated a robust framework to preserve the openness and freedom of the Internet, one that drives innovation, investment, free speech and consumer choice.” [New York Times]

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The United Arab Emirates announced this weekend that all BlackBerry mobile services will be banned beginning in October, forcing users of the smartphone to find other ways to surf the web and send email and text messages. The decision will not only affect the U.A.E.’s half-million BlackBerry users, but also international visitors–which could lead to business travelers going into abrupt “crackberry” withdrawal as soon as they hit the Dubai airport. The reason for the ban:

The Emirates have been in a long dispute with Research In Motion, the smartphone’s producer, over the BlackBerry’s highly encrypted data system, which offers security to users but makes it more difficult for governments to monitor communications. [The New York Times]

Saudi Arabia is likely to take similar measures, and Kuwait and Bahrain may also follow suit. The Middle Eastern nations have singled out BlackBerry because of its distinct system for transmitting messages. When a BlackBerry user hits “send” on an email, the data is encrypted and sent to a local cell phone tower. From there, it’s routed through RIM’s private global network of servers, which puts the data out of reach for government snoops. Other smartphones send data through the open Internet and can be monitored relatively easily.

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It appears Google and China have reached a détente.

The world’s largest search engine and the world’s most populous country traded barbs and threats this spring when Google said it might leave the country over the Chinese government’s Internet censorship. That fight cooled to a simmer over the last few months. Today, Google announced on its official blog that China has renewed its content provider license, further defusing the tension between the two.

Google has been waiting to hear back from Chinese authorities about its ICP license since the company filed for its renewal last week. The company’s license must be reviewed annually. Its renewal will allow the search giant to continue operating its China-based site, Google.cn. If Google had been unable to renew its license, it could have meant the end of the company’s operations in China [PC World].

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This week, the FBI arrested 11 alleged Russian spies living in New Jersey. How did they catch them? By digging through their photos.

These weren’t snapshots of covert meetings or secret handshakes, but–more likely–the quotidian: kittens and ice cream cones. They weren’t hidden in some obscure drop location, but viewable to the public, online. The pictures’ real importance was tucked inside, in encoded messages detailing secret meetings.

We aren’t talking Magic Eye–no mater how long you cross your eyes, staring at these pictures wouldn’t tell you where to drop off money or who to call. The alleged spies reportedly encoded the messages at the pixel level.

Every color on your computer screen is a combination of red, blue, and green–digitally represented as three numeric values. By making subtle changes to these numbers, the Russians hid binary code that someone–with the right software–could recombine into a message.

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The nation’s political focus this week is on the plodding confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan to become a  Supreme Court justice. But if you need a break from choreographed political spectacle, it’s a good time to remember that the man she would replace, Justice John Paul Stevens, casts a long shadow over science and tech.

Ars Technica revisits Justice Stevens’ legacy—he was a onetime Navy cryptographer who helped Internet freedom by ruling against parts of the Communications Decency Act and opposing software patents. And if you still have drawers full of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes you taped off TV, you have Stevens’ decision in Sony v. Universal to thank for that (as well as setting the precedent that stopped the music industry from suppressing mp3 players).

In that 1984 case, the Supreme Court came just one vote short of banning the Betamax VCR on the grounds that taping television shows off the air was an infringement of copyright. Justice Stevens wrote for a 5-4 majority that “time shifting”—the practice of recording shows for later viewing—was a fair use under copyright law. Stevens concluded that manufacturers were not liable for their customers’ infringement if their devices were capable of “substantial non-infringing use.” He noted that Congress was free to amend copyright law to give Hollywood control over VCR technology, but concluded that the courts shouldn’t do so unilaterally [Ars Technica].

You, sir, shall be missed.

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DISCOVER: The Intellectual Property Fight That Could Kill Millions

Image: Library of Congress

Remember the kerfuffle over “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The 2008 cover story in The Atlantic by Nicholas Carr contended that the barrage of information available on the Web is changing our brains, making us all shallow and deficient in our attention span. It also raised a ruckus across the blogosphere with Web users who didn’t like to be called “stupid.” Now, as if to challenge our cultural ADD, Carr has expanded that article into a book: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

In book reviewers, Carr finds a friendlier audience to his “more books and less Internet” thesis. The Boston Globe is impressed with the argument, if unimpressed with drawing out the argument to such a great length:

Carr’s argument rests on just three chapters (out of ten). He lays out, first, what we now know about the adult brain’s malleability, or “plasticity,’’ and then draws on a slew of recent studies to make the startling case that our increasingly heavy use of digital media is actually changing us physiologically — rewiring our neural pathways. And not necessarily for the better. “The possibility of intellectual decay,’’ Carr notes, “is inherent in the malleability of our brains.’’

Carr, promoting his book with a CNN essay, grabs neuroscience studies to bolster several claims: That people who multitask while online struggle to concentrate when they’re offline, that spending a lot of time on electronic devices hinders creative and critical thinking, and that students who surfed the Web during a lecture retained less information than those who listened with laptops closed. (That last one is kind of a “duh”—people who fill out Sudokus or read “Twilight” books during class probably don’t retain much, either.)

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As of this writing, the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” Facebook page has nearly 83,000 likes and is rising steadily. Presumably, none of those fans are in the government of Pakistan, as the page prompted the conservative Muslim country to block first Facebook, but then also YouTube, parts of Wikipedia, and other Web sites—more than 450 in all.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) keeps itself busy scanning the Internet for material that it says would offend its population, the second-largest Muslim population of any country. Two years ago it temporarily banned YouTube until the site removed cartoons of Mohammed. Typically the PTA bans particular links, but this week it complained that the amount of objectionable material on Web was increasing and decided to cut off it citizens from some of the biggest sites on the Web. The ban is said to run through the end of May, giving Web sites the chance to remove offending materials if they choose.

Social networking sites are extremely popular in Pakistan, a country of 170 million, where more than 60 percent of the population is under the age of 25. Pakistan has about 25 million Internet users, almost all of them young, according to Adnan Rehmat, a media analyst in Islamabad [The New York Times].

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Sticking accelerator pedals were just the beginning. Soon you might lose control of your car not because of a technical failure, but because someone hacked into it from afar.

Tomorrow at a security conference in California, Stefan Savage and his team will present their research showing how they used the computer systems that oversee different systems in a car to break in and take control—braking and accelerating against the driver’s will.

The researchers concentrated their attacks on the electronic control units (ECUs) scattered throughout modern vehicles which oversee the workings of many car components. It is thought that modern vehicles have about 100 megabytes of binary code spread across up to 70 ECUs [BBC News].

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This Wednesday, the United States District Court in Manhattan came down in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in its case against the file-sharing service LimeWire, and founder Mark Gorton, over copyright infringement.

In a fairly unusual move, Judge Wood held Gorton personally liable. “The evidence establishes that Gorton directed and benefited from many of the activities that gave rise to LW’s liability,” she wrote [Wall Street Journal].

The decision was a long time in coming. Nine years have passed (seriously, nine years) since the federal ruling against Napster back in 2001. Most file-sharing services gave up after the 2005 decision against Grokster, the Journal says, but LimeWire held out. So the record companies sued in 2006, and finally won.

This looks like the end for LimeWire.

“It is obviously a fairly fatal decision for them,” said Michael Page, the San Francisco lawyer who represented file sharing service Grokster in the landmark case, MGM Studios vs. Grokster, and also represented LimeWire’s former CTO in the company’s most recent copyright case. “If they don’t shut down, the other side will likely make a request for an injunction and there’s nothing left but to go on to calculating damages” [CNET].

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So you already spend all your time on Facebook—that’s not enough for the social networking giant. Soon, it will want to know where you spend all your time (in the real world).

Over the weekend, TechCrunch identified a glitch in Facebook’s mobile site that allowed them to see a space for a new feature called “places” being built in the code.

Based on the code, this is what it seems that Facebook is about to launch: A mobile version of the site using the HTML5 location component to grab your location information from your phone. Once it does that, you’re taken to this new Places area of Facebook that presumably will have a list of venues around you. From here you can click a button to check-in. Yes, there will be check-ins [TechCrunch].

It appears that Facebook plans to jump into the world of being a location-based service in the vein of Foursquare or Gowalla. But rather than launching its own service to crush the two smaller companies, Facebook may consider buying up Foursquare. Rumors to that effect circulated this weekend because in addition to the code leak, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg paid a visit to Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley.

The possibilities are tantalizing, especially because we think if Foursquare really wants to sell, Facebook would be its best buyer. We’re also pretty sure Facebook has interest in Foursquare at the right price. Remember, a few months ago there were some rumors that Facebook kicked the tires on Foursquare rival Gowalla [San Francisco Chronicle].

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With so much personal information floating around the Internet, managing an online reputation can be a challenge, especially for people looking for a job or hoping for a promotion. Professional networking sites like LinkedIn have helped people manage their reputations by allowing them to post tightly controlled professional profiles–on LinkedIn, users can request recommendations from colleagues, which they can first approve before posting them on their profiles. But while those profiles are useful, some people see them as a little more than organized puffery.

Soon, however, more daring professionals can also use the services of Unvarnished–a controversial new Web site where users can leave anonymous reviews of a person’s work. Billed as Yelp for people, the site is built on user-generated reviews, and it aims to present an “unvarished” picture of a worker’s strengths or weaknesses. So far, the reviews of the beta version of the site have been scathing. Apart from being named “2010′s worst startup” [Econsultancy], the site has also been described as a “clean, well-lighted place for defamation” [TechCrunch].

The site, created by Peter Kazanjy, is currently available by invitation-only and was released in its beta form a few days ago. You can either join a waiting list or wait for someone to send you an invite via Facebook, asking for a review. Once you connect, you have to submit a review for your account to be activated; that allows you to “claim” your profile–because if someone has already submitted a review of you, your profile already exists. Once your profile exists you can request reviews of your work. And of course, you can submit as many anonymous reviews as you like.

If someone posts a nasty review of your work, however, the site does not allow you the option of removing the post or deleting your profile, leading some to worry that the anonymous reviews opens the forum up to personal vendettas and amplifies everything that is awful about the web right now: anonymous, drive-by, ad hominem attacks that can’t be erased or edited and that live in search forever [CNET].

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In the latest episode of the ongoing Google-Beijing dispute, Google’s attempt to bypass Chinese censors by sending Chinese users of its search engine to an uncensored Hong Kong-based site seems to have failed.

Within 24 hours of the rerouting, Beijing has clamped down, restricting mainland users’ access to the uncensored content on the Hong Kong site. Mainland Chinese users on Tuesday could not see uncensored Hong Kong content because government computers either disabled searches for objectionable content completely or blocked links to certain results [The New York Times]. Earlier, the Chinese government described Google’s move to redirect users to the Hong Kong site as “totally wrong.”

The clash comes two months after Google and China began a bitter standoff over internet censorship on the mainland. Instead of exiting the country entirely, Google has taken on Beijing by defying its censorship controls and sending mainland users to its Hong Kong site, where censorship rules are more lenient.

While the move seemed provocative, Google’s founders at first seemed to think that this redirection would be acceptable to the Chinese government. “We got reasonable indications that this was O.K.,” Sergey Brin, a Google founder and its president of technology, said. “We can’t be completely confident” [The New York Times]. Google said that while the search operations were being redirected to Hong Kong, it would continue to host its maps and music search service in China. However, it now seems that the company misjudged the Chinese government’s mood.

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