Girl starved to death while parents played online game

Korean couple became obsessed with raising virtual baby while their real infant daughter lay abandoned and unfed

• Mark Tran
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 March 2010 17.03 GMT
• Article history

South Korean police have arrested a couple for starving their three-month-old daughter to death while they devoted hours to playing a computer game that involved raising a virtual character of a young girl.

The 41-year-old man and 25-year-old woman, who met through a chat website, reportedly left their infant unattended while they went to internet cafes. They only occasionally dropped by to feed her powdered milk.

"I am sorry for what I did and hope that my daughter does not suffer any more in heaven," the husband is quoted as saying on the asiaone website.

According to the Yonhap news agency, South Korean police said the couple had become obsessed with raising a virtual girl called Anima in the popular role-playing game Prius Online. The game, similar to Second Life, allows players to create another existence for themselves in a virtual world, including getting a job, interacting with other users and earning an extra avatar to nurture once they reach a certain level.

"The couple seemed to have lost their will to live a normal life because they didn't have jobs and gave birth to a premature baby," Chung Jin-Won, a police officer, told Yonhap. "They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby."

Last September after a 12-hour gaming-session the couple came home in the morning to find their daughter dead. The baby's malnourished body aroused police suspicions of neglect that were was confirmed after an autopsy.

The couple fled to the wife's parents' house in Yangju, Gyeonggi province, but were picked up on Monday. The case has shocked South Korea and once again highlighted obsessive behaviour related to the internet.

A 22-year-old Korean man was charged last month with murdering his mother because she nagged him for spending too much time playing games. After killing her the man went to a nearby internet cafe and continued with his game, said officials. In 2005 a young man collapsed in an internet cafe in the city of Taegu after playing the game StarCraft almost continuously for 50 hours. He went into cardiac arrest and died at a local hospital.

Lee Joung-sun, an MP from the ruling Grand National party, last month submitted a bill restricting the hours offered to online gamers. Several bills are pending in the national assembly suggesting restrictions on teenagers' use of internet cafes and games.

Research published last month in the UK showed evidence of a link between excessive internet use and depression. Leeds University researchers, writing in the Psychopathology journal, said a small proportion of internet users were classed as internet addicts and that people in this group were more likely to be depressed than non-addicted users.

Monday March 01, 2010

On the heels of the leak of various country positions on ACTA transparency, today an even bigger leak has hit the Internet.  A new European Union document prepared several weeks ago canvasses the Internet and Civil Enforcement chapters, disclosing in complete detail the proposals from the U.S., the counter-proposals from the EU, Japan, and other ACTA participants.  The 44-page document also highlights specific concerns of individual countries on a wide range of issues including ISP liability, anti-circumvention rules, and the scope of the treaty.  This is probably the most significant leak to-date since it goes even beyond the transparency debate by including specific country positions and proposals. The document highlights significant disagreement on a range of issues.  For example, on the issue of anti-circumvention legislation and access controls, the U.S. wants it included per the DCMA, but many other countries, including the EU, Japan, and New Zealand do not, noting that the WIPO Internet treaties do not require it. A brief summary of the key findings are posted here, but much more study is needed.

Mandelson could decide length of internet suspensions for filesharers

Minister – rather than Parliament – to determine timeframe for 'temporary suspension', leading to fears of indefinite bans

• Charles Arthur
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 February 2010 18.09 GMT
• Article history

A government minister, not parliament, will decide on the maximum period for which people found guilty of illicit filesharing can have their accounts suspended if the Digital Economy bill becomes law.

Although the government insists that it would only implement "temporary suspension" of internet accounts of people deemed to have broken copyright law, it has not defined how long "temporary" is – and the definition does not appear in the bill now before Parliament.

Instead, the secretary of state at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS) will decide on how long it should be, based on a recommendations from the Ofcom, although the regulator's suggestions are not binding.

Presently, the person responsible would be Lord Mandelson, who has been particularly vociferous about the need to take action against persistent illicit use of the net.

The only brake on the "temporary" suspension being of unlimited length would be the Human Rights Act – whose applicability to internet access is untested – and the definition offered by DBIS was that "temporary suspension can't effectively mean termination of an internet connection". But there is no definition in the bill of what marks the legal difference between "suspension" and "termination".

On Monday the Guardian noted that Downing Street had responded to a petition calling on it to reject plans to disconnect people found guilty of illicit file sharing by saying: "We will not terminate the accounts of infringers ... [but] ... We added account suspension to the list of possible technical measures which might be considered."

The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS) on Tuesday said that "suspension" meant "temporary suspension".

But the Open Rights Group said that this was "semantics" and that the government had simply chosen a different form of words to mean the same thing.

Asked for clarification, a DBIS spokesperson said: "Any move to using technical measures on internet connections would only be made as a last resort and only if our initial measures to deal with unlawful filesharing did not have the desired effect.

"If government decides to use technical measures the Secretary of State would be required to consider an independent report from Ofcom on whether they should be imposed, and on the most effective and proportionate measures."

The secretary of state would then decide the upper limit for a "temporary" suspension – which the DBIS indicated would be at least a few days.

The implementation of the upper limit would then be laid before parliament in the form of an order constituting secondary legislation amending what would be the Digital Economy act.

However, an Order cannot be amended by parliament; it can only be accepted or rejected. Any government with a working majority will be able to get an order passed – and so would be able to implement a "temporary" suspension of indeterminate length without any legislative review.

Ministers have repeatedly referred to "temporary suspension" rather than cutting off internet abusers, for example in a speech by Treasury secretary Stephen Timms on 21 January at the Oxford Media Convention.

TalkTalk, the ISP which has been most vocal in its opposition to the government plans over filesharing penalties, said on Tuesday: "The government's latest announcement on its copyright protection proposals is nothing more than semantics.

"It is still the case that on the say-so of record labels and film studios people will have their internet connections suspended (ie disconnected). All that the Government seems to be saying is that permanent disconnection will be reserved for the very worst offenders. But they have been saying that since day one. There is no change.

"This is simply spin which masks the real issue. The detection system will implicate innocent people whose connections have been hacked into. They will still be deemed 'guilty' and then have to prove their innocence.

"The Digital Economy Bill will give rights holders the power to act as a judge and jury, allowing them to demand that ISPs disconnect their customers without having to prove their case in a court of law. TalkTalk is the only major ISP that has said it will simply refuse to do this and will fight its case in every court in the land and in Europe if it has to.

"The proposed copyright protection measures are utterly futile. Determined filesharers will find other, undetectable ways to access material, leaving innocent people to bear the brunt of this oppressive legislation."

By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:38 AM February 17, 2010

A Duke University study analyzed data from 22,000 online daters and found that "women put a premium on income and height when deciding which men to contact."

For example, the study showed a 5-foot-9-inch man needs to make $30,000 more than a 5-foot-10-inch one to be as successful in the dating pool.

From Professor Mark J. Perry's Blog for Economics and Finance

Copyright may not be perfect, but when applied with common sense, it's the best system we've got

Cory Doctorow

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 January 2010 16.40 GMT

Article history

Tyre tracks in the snow – not the Peter Zabulis version. Photograph: Graham Turner

On 5 January, the Independent's website ran a photo uploaded to the Flickr image-sharing site by user Peter Zabulis. Zabulis flagged his photo of a snowed-over field as "all rights reserved," and he took exception to the Independent's use of the image without permission, and he wrote to them to tell them so.

Exception turned to outrage as a terse note from the Independent claimed that by posting the photo to Flickr, Zabulis had not asserted his copyright (whatever that means) and thus copyright had not been breached. The ensuing debate – including a public pillorying of the Independent for failing to grasp the nature of Flickr, copyright and photographer's rights – generated a lot of heat, but not much light (one bright spot: the Independent paid Zabulis and apologised to him).

Debates about copyright fall apart when they're pitched in terms of absolutes: "Copyright prohibits all copying", or "Non-commercial copying is always legal". Copyright started life as an industrial regulation that set out the rules governing the relationship between different actors in the supply-chain of the "creative industries" (originally just publishing, later music, film, software and many other industries).

Much of copyright was created by simply enshrining existing business practices into law – for better or for worse. Many artists have pointed out that copyright, even at its best, can present a playing field tilted in favour of the companies that shepherded its passage into law.

Theoretically, copyright also bound the activities of non-industrial actors – fans, audiences, readers, people who were whistling in the shower. But practically speaking, the average person would virtually never interact with copyright: first, because the personal means of interacting with copyrighted works (reading books, listening to records) did not involve making copies, and second, because when copies were made, they were invisible to the copyright industries' radar. No one was going to come by your office to look for photocopied Garfield cartoons stuck on your cubicle.

Which isn't to say that there weren't a myriad of rules, formal and informal, governing the use of creative works by individuals. Certain songs could be sung at the pub, but not in front of a nursery school.

Recounting the plot of last night's TV show to a mate was permissible, but spoiling the ending wasn't. Tracing a library book illustration for a science project was OK: cutting up the book was not. Pretending to have made up a ghost story that you read in a Poe collection was plagiarism, not culture.

Now, thanks to the internet (which runs by copying things, and which makes all those copies visible with a simple search) copyright has been stretched to cover both industrial and non-industrial uses of creative works, and what's more, the definition of industrial and non-industrial has become a lot fuzzier.

We're trying to retrofit the rules that governed multi-stage rocket ships (huge publishing conglomerates) to cover the activity of pedestrians (people who post quotes from books on their personal blogs). And the pedestrians aren't buying it: they hear that they need a law degree to safely quote from their favourite TV show and they assume that the system is irredeemably broken and not worth attending to at all.

It's an impossible situation. As an author, I depend on there being some rules of the road when I negotiate with my publishers, and it's in every commercial creator's interest to try to find a moderate, coherent copyright rule that avoid dumb absolutes in favour of nuance and fairness. I don't pretend that I have all the answers, but here's some of the principles that I think a good copyright system must embrace if is to succeed. Many of these principles are already in various nations' copyright rules as part of "fair dealing" or "fair use," but these user-rights in copyright are complex and difficult to navigate and vary from country to country.

As we on the internet create the norms that will be enshrined in future copyright, here's what I think we should keep in mind: "All rights reserved" doesn't cover commentary or reportage. If the Independent had been commenting on Zabulis's photo ("Witness the interplay of lights and darks" or "Area man sneaks into snowy field, takes photo for proof") then reproducing as much of Zabulis's photo as they needed to in order to report thoroughly on the subject should be fair game. Likewise, Zabulis was in the right to reproduce a screenshot from the Independent's website in order to show people how his image had been taken without permission.

Commercial and non-commercial are different. While there's a lot of grey area between "commercial" and "non-commercial", there are also some bright lines. Newspapers should have to pay photographers for stock images; kids working on school reports (and other non-commercial users) should be able to clip images and use them for without negotiating a rights agreement with a copyright holder.

Incidental use isn't infringement. If Zabulis's photo had included a blowing piece of trash bearing a copyrighted work (say, a copy of the Independent), he should still be allowed to sell and publish his photo without the Independent's permission. Incidental copying includes (for example), Google copying every page on the web in order to create an index of the words on those pages.

Some commercial copying is OK. For example, when a giant movie studio sits down to create a movie (whose copyright they will eventually defend with the atavistic savagery of a maddened grizzly), the designers for the film will create a series of "mood books" filled with clipped, scanned and copied text, images, even video clips, to help the design team agree on the look and feel of the movie. The studio doesn't and shouldn't need permission to make these uses, though they are commercial and involve copying. There are many other cases like this, from pasting articles into an email you send to your boss to photocopying an inspirational text and tacking it up in the break room. They share one common trait: they don't displace any revenue for the rightsholder.

When copyright cartels endanger a new medium, their copyrights should be converted into economic rights or thrown out. This principle is as old as sound recordings: when the sheet-music publishers refused to license their work for records, the state intervened and forced them to sell at a fixed rate. Today, many copyrights are relegated to economic rights: a performer has the right to be compensated for the playback of his CD in a shop, but not to stop the shop from playing the music. Copyright's purpose is to promote participation in culture: where refuseniks subvert that goal, their copyrights should be limited.

This is just a partial list, and it may strike you as radical. But before you dismiss it, consider this: most copyright systems are supposed to work this way in theory. But between corporate bullies who like to assert that "all rights reserved" means that no one is allowed to do anything without permission, and personal theories of what copyright means based on half-remembered lectures from the company lawyer, we treat copyright as absolute. And when we do, we turn a system with a real purpose (providing a framework for participants in creative businesses) into a caricature of itself, one that no one can respect.

Google has a cool little surprise in store for heavy e-mail users (and Mac owners): Google E-mail Uploader for Mac. It’s a free app that can archive your old e-mails from Apple Mail, Eudora and Thunderbird on your Google Apps e-mail account.

It’s actually a great idea; chances are that in the pre-cloud era, you’ve had tons of e-mail stored somewhere in your desktop e-mail client. Now, you can move everything to the cloud in one easy step.

If you’re a Windows user, check out the previously available Google E-mail Uploader for Windows. Unfortunately, you can only upload your e-mails to Google Apps e-mail accounts, not your gmail.com or googlemail.com accounts.

[Beautiful Google hard disk illustration courtesy of Joy of Tech]

EU to assess piracy detection software

Virgin Media will analyse traffic on the BitTorrent network

A human rights watchdog has asked the European Commission to assess the legality of software being used to analyse file-sharing in the UK.

The software in question is called CView and will be used by ISP Virgin Media to identify legal versus illegal traffic on its network.

The EC has said it will monitor the use of the software, following a complaint from Privacy International.

Virgin Media countered that the software posed no risk to privacy.

Privacy International has concerns about the software, designed by monitoring firm Detica.

It utilises so-called deep packet inspection, which means that it can identify actual file-names, making it possible to accurately find out what content is legal and what is not.

According to Alexander Hanff, head of ethical networks at Privacy International, use of such software is in breach of current UK law.

"Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) intercepting communications is a criminal offence regardless of what you do with the data," he said.

Mr Hanff said he would file a criminal complaint if Virgin Media deployed CView.

He said the software is similar to that used by ad firm Phorm, which developed technology to monitor individual's web use in order to better target adverts.

Trials of the technology in the UK have been put on hold while the EC investigates how it was tested.

Legal service

The UK government is in the process of creating legislation that could see illegal file-sharers identified and, potentially, thrown off the network.

But this software will not do that job, said a spokesman for Virgin Media.

"It was never designed to capture identities. This isn't an answer for that," said Asam Ahmad.

Instead the software will be used to identify how much traffic on its network is illegal.

"We want to understand what we can do to reduce illegal file-sharing. This will tell us things such as the name of the top ten tracks being shared as well as the percentage of legal versus illegal," said Mr Ahmad.

Virgin Media is about to launch its own music service.

'Double-edged'

Mr Ahmad said no date had yet been set for the trial but told BBC News it will monitor traffic on three peer-to-peer networks notorious for trading illegal as well as legal software; Gnutella, eDonkey and BitTorrent.

He admitted that potentially 40% of Virgin Media's customers could have their data scrutinised and confirmed that it has no plans to inform them beforehand.

He also conceded that it would not be technically difficult to link up deep packet inspection technology with the IP addresses which would identify individuals but stressed that was not the plan currently.

"These mandates have not yet been set and when it comes down to identifying individuals or prosecuting them, that is a role for content providers, not us," he said.

Virgin Media is involved in an ongoing education campaign, which includes sending letters to those identified as downloading illegal content on its network.

Andrew Ferguson, editor of broadband news site ThinkBroadband, said the trial could be "double-edged".

"If Virgin can form a baseline for its 'illegal' P2P traffic, it can see how much effect any legislation has, and perhaps plan better for the letter forwarding side of things," he said.

But he pointed out that Virgin Media is not alone in using deep packet inspection - BT has been doing it for years, he said.

"It is possible they may be doing exactly what Virgin are doing," he said.

A couple of days ago we wrote that the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology advised German citizens to switch from Internet Explorer (regardless of the version they use) to an alternative browser for security reasons.

Now, the French government has issued a similar advisory, pointing out that Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 all share a similar vulnerability, which allows malicious hackers to remotely execute arbitrary code.

The fix? CERTA (Centre d’Expertise Gouvernemental de Réponse et de Traitement des Attaques informatique) proposes a switch to an alternative browser.

This is another serious hit for the world’s most dominant web browser, but also one that’s been losing its marketshare in the last couple of years. Alternative browsers — Firefox, Opera, Safari and others — may not have a perfect security record, but all of them have always been perceived as safer alternatives. This latest vulnerability, discovered after the cyber attacks on Google, does nothing to change that notion.