Founder of Pirate Bay arrested in Sweden after two years on the run

Peter Sunde had been sought by Interpol for copyright violations.

 One of the founders of file-sharing website Pirate Bay has been arrested in southern Sweden to serve an outstanding sentence for copyright violations after being on the run for nearly two years, Swedish police said on Saturday.

Peter Sunde had been wanted by Interpol since 2012 after being sentenced in Sweden to prison and fined for breaching copyright laws.

"We have been looking for him since 2012," said Carolina Ekeus, spokesman at the Swedish National Police Board. "He was given eight months in jail so he has to serve his sentence."

Ekeus said Sunde had been arrested on Saturday in the southern Swedish county of Skane but she was not able to provide further details.

Four men linked to Pirate Bay were originally sentenced to one year in prison and a fine of 32 million crowns (£2.85 million). An appeals court later reduced the prison sentences by varying amounts, but raised the fine to 46 million Swedish crowns (£4.1 million).

In September, 2012, Cambodia arrested and deported another Pirate Bay co-founder at Sweden's request.

Swedish media reported on Saturday that Sunde may have been living in Germany in recent years and that Sweden's Supreme Court had as recently as May rejected an appeal from him.

"He is extremely talented and I still think that the judgment was wrong," Peter Althin, who defended Sunde during the trial, was quoted as saying by Swedish news service TT.

"It's about being on the cutting edge if one is going to be successful... But if one is too far ahead it is not always about success. Peter fought for file-sharing and in 10 years I think it goes without saying that file-sharing for one's own needs will be allowed."

Pirate Bay, launched in 2003, provided links to music and movie files that were stored on other users' computers. Swedish subsidiaries of prominent music and film companies had taken the company to court claiming damages for lost revenue.

Peter Sunde had been wanted by Interpol since 2012

Despite the Swedish court case, the website is still functioning. On its website, Pirate Bay says it is now run by a different organisation and is registered in the Seychelles.

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Google received 12,000 requests in the first day of offering an online removal form.

Google takes steps to comply with EU’s ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling.

Google Inc has launched a service through which European citizens can request that links to what they deem as objectionable material be taken off search results, the first step to comply with a court ruling affirming the “right to be forgotten.”

The world’s largest Internet search engine, which processes more than 90 percent of all Web searches in Europe, said on Thursday that it has made available a webform through which people can submit their requests, but stopped short of specifying when it would remove links that meet the criteria for being taken down.

Google said it has convened a committee of senior Google executives and independent experts to try and craft a long-term approach to dealing with what’s expected to be a barrage of requests from the region’s roughly half-billion occupants.

“To comply with the recent European court ruling, we’ve made a webform available for Europeans to request the removal of results from our search engine,” Google said in a statement.

“The court’s ruling requires Google to make difficult judgments about an individual’s right to be forgotten and the public’s right to know. We’re creating an expert advisory committee to take a thorough look at these issues. We’ll also be working with data protection authorities and others as we implement this ruling.”

The decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union requires that Internet search services remove information deemed “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.” Failure to do so can result in fines. Google, which began getting requests to remove objectionable personal information from its search engine shortly after the ruling this month, has said it was disappointed by the decision.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has said the ruling created an inherent conflict between the “right to be forgotten and a right to know” – referring to the delicate balance of enforcing the ruling while preserving a stated corporate philosophy of making as much information freely available to as many people as possible. Google added on Thursday that it will work with data protection authorities and others as it implements the ruling.

Data Headaches

The court decision creates extra headaches for U.S. Web companies, which have businesses based on handling tremendous amounts of data that often aren’t touched by humans. It paves the way for European users to flood the firms with Web takedown requests, adding to costs.

The shares of Google were little changed at $559.89 at the close in New York yesterday.

The right to be forgotten and the right to free information “are not foes but friends,” Reding said. “It’s not about protecting one at the expense of the other but striking the right balance in order to protect both.”

“The European court made it clear that two rights do not make a wrong and has given clear directions on how this balance can be found and where the limits of the right to be forgotten lie,” she said. “It is mass surveillance not data protection that legitimizes the actions of repressive regimes.”

Tougher Rules

The EU’s move toward tougher rules may make it harder for Internet startups, according to Page’s FT interview.

“We’re a big company and we can respond to these kind of concerns and spend money on them and deal with them, it’s not a problem for us,” he told the FT. “But as a whole, as we regulate the Internet, I think we’re not going to see the kind of innovation we’ve seen.”

The new special committee has five members, including Wikipedia’s Wales, Frank La Rue from the United Nations, Peggy Valcke of the University of Leuven law school, academic Jose Luis Pinar, and Oxford University’s Luciano Floridi.

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Chicago teacher killed in gang crossfire

A Chicago public school teacher was fatally shot at her second job at a real estate office in what police say was an exchange of gunfire between two groups of alleged gang members.

Betty Howard taught at Gwendolyn Brooks College Prep, and after work with special needs students she spent time at a realty company in Chatham, a middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Family members say she was in the office when she was shot Thursday.

Police said the gunfire appeared to stem from a gang conflict. Family members said a bullet came through a wall and struck her in the head.

Howard, 58, would travel to homes to teach disabled students, doing whatever it took to help some of the city's most challenged youth, Brooks Principal D'Andre Weaver said.



Students on Friday wrote "thank you" letters to Howard. Students from her home room released green and pink balloons, the colors of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the teacher's sorority.

Sophomore Isaac Simmons said he didn't know Howard, but his friends who were in her class could feel the concern she had for them.

"I know a couple of kids that actually went to her for help, and it seemed like she was always trying to help out and do the best for kids," he told WMAQ-TV. "It's so much violence, you really don't know what to do. I mean, I've just got to hope and pray that something like that doesn't happen to me."

Community activist Andrew Holmes says some members of the community are offering a $2,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Howard's killer.

"I'm talking directly to the people they were shooting at," Holmes said. "You know who was shooting at you. Whether you were shot today, you know who was shooting at you. What you need to do is pick up that phone (and call police)."

Chicago's battle with violent crime has been closely watched. In 2012, the city led the U.S. in homicides with more than 500. It ended 2013 with 415 homicides — the lowest total in nearly half a century but still far more than any other U.S city, including much larger Los Angeles and New York
.

Victim from shooting that killed teacher: 'You're hitting innocent people' 

Brittany Willams went through several emotional stages after getting grazed by a stray bullet Thursday night down the street from her Chatham neighborhood apartment.

"Shocked. Worried. Grateful. Thankful. Blessed," she recalled this afternoon about the graze wound to her left hand during an interview at her job at McCormick Place. "...I've never been in action like this. And for a person whose never been through this, it was a shock. I didn't know that I was really hit until somebody started coming around me like, 'You're bleeding.'"

She was one of three people shot Thursday evening in the 700 block of East 79th Street, a shooting that left 58-year-old Betty Howard dead, and a coworker injured from an errant bullet that penetrated the wall of a realty business.

With her left hand bandaged up, Williams told the Tribune that she had just finished running errands when she decided to take her 1-year-old Shih Tzu, Lauren, for a walk. While she walked north on Evans Avenue, Williams crouched down to tend to her pet.

"My dog, she loves grass. So I noticed that she had some by her mouth," Williams recounted. "So I bent down to touch her face. That's when I heard the first gunshots."

Williams immediately dropped to the ground, clutching Lauren with her right arm.

"That's when I felt the bullet shave my (left) hand," Williams recalled. "And when it did that, a couple more shots went off, and that's when I heard...tires screeching to ride off.

"And that's when I hurried up and grabbed my baby and ran," she said.

Williams felt pain in her left hand, but because of the adrenaline rush, she initially thought she only scratched herself.

Moments later, Williams collapsed in front of Kale Realty, where Howard and a coworker were shot. That's when passersby crowded around her and noticed she was shot.

"I'm like, 'I'm OK.' And then I look at my hand and my hand is just swelled up big," Williams recalled.

As for her dog Lauren, she made it out unharmed, but wouldn't leave Williams's side.

"She knew something was wrong with me," Williams said of her dog. "She just stayed under me until my (girlfriend) came outside."

The paramedics bandaged up her wound, but didn't clean it, she recalled. Williams then removed the bandage temporarily to apply peroxide and Neosporin to her wound. Today, a co-worker wrapped a fresh bandage around the wound.

Williams said she's lived down the block at 79th and Cottage Grove Avenue for three years -- a bustling area with numerous storefronts. Historically, the area has been plagued by gang violence. But residents and business owners have acknowledged that the area improved greatly last year after the Chicago Police Department added rookies to work foot patrols and veteran cops to work overtime shifts seven days a week.

But the violent crime has still been a nuisance to Williams, who plans on moving out of her apartment with her girlfriend and the dog. She's heard gunshots on multiple occasions from her apartment.

She was even about to leave work early this afternoon to talk to her realtor about where to move next. It's one thing to hear gunshots every now and then, but to become a shooting victim in the neighborhood was the final straw, she said.

Every time there's gunfire, she worries about who the next victim is going to be.

"Honestly, I just want everybody to just stop shooting," she said. "...You're hitting innocent people that don't have nothing to do with what y'all got going on."

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CIA drone strike program targeting Pakistan winds down

Just after midnight last Christmas,Pakistani officials say,two Hellfire missiles from a U.S. drone slammed into a house in Miramshah, Pakistan,killing four militants.

Source:PBS NewsHour video still of U.S. Air Force drone.

It was an otherwise unremarkable episode in the sixth year of a relentless unmanned aerial campaign by the CIA. Unremarkable, except for this: There hasn’t been a drone strike reported in Pakistan in the months since.

The secret targeted killing program that once was the mainstay of President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism effort appears to be winding down. In a major foreign policy speech at the U.S. Military Academy on Wednesday, Obama said the U.S. would continue to carry out occasional drone strikes, but he cited Yemen and Somalia, not Pakistan, where drone missiles once rained down at a rate of two per week.

Armed U.S. drones are still flying regularly over Pakistan’s tribal areas, and CIA targeting officers are still nominating militants to a kill list, according to U.S. officials regularly briefed on the covert program who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss covert programs publicly. But over the past five months, no missiles have been fired.

And while the CIA won’t say the program has ended, Obama announced this week a plan to pull nearly all American troops out of Afghanistan by the end of 2016. The targeted killing program in Pakistan relies on drones flown from, and intelligence gathered in, U.S. bases in Afghanistan that would then be closed.

“The program (in Pakistan) appears to have ended,” said Peter Bergen, who has closely studied drone strikes for the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank.

Several factors are driving the change, U.S. officials say. Many of the senior al-Qaida figures in Pakistan have been killed. Those who remain are much harder to target because they are avoiding mobile phones and traveling with children, benefiting from stricter targeting rules designed to prevent civilian casualties. The drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan has eliminated the need for “force protection” strikes against large gatherings of militants in Pakistan suspected of plotting attacks against American troops.

Also, the tribal areas of Pakistan are no longer the hotbed of al-Qaida activity they once were, officials and outside analysts say. Hardcore al-Qaida militants from Pakistan have gone to Syria and Yemen, home to Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which U.S. officials consider the most dangerous al-Qaida affiliate.

And Obama administration officials are pushing to have the U.S. military, not the CIA, carry out drone strikes. Since the military generally requires permission from a country to operate on its territory, most analysts don’t believe it could carry out regular drone attacks in Pakistan.

The CIA and the White House declined to comment for this story.

For as long as they are able to fly over Pakistan, CIA drones will hunt for senior al-Qaida figures, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida’s leader, U.S. officials say. If the agency gets a clean shot at such a target next week or next year, it will push the button, they say.

But as the CIA closes its remote Afghanistan outposts where case officers met with Pakistani sources and technicians eavesdropped on cellphones, intelligence collection will dry up, making militants harder to track.

“By the end of this year, we will have a noticeable degradation in our ability to collect intelligence on people of concern,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Without commenting explicitly about drone strikes, Rogers criticized what he calls “a pullback in the counterterrorism strategy,” a move he says “has made Americans a little less safe.”

The current drone cease-fire in Pakistan is by far the longest pause since President George W. Bush ordered a stepped-up campaign of targeted strikes in that country’s tribal area in the summer of 2008. The pace intensified under Obama. All told, there have been 354 strikes in Pakistan since 2004, according to the Long War Journal, an online publication that tracks the strikes through media reports.

But the rate of strikes began falling in 2011 and decreased each year since. Last year, Obama announced stricter targeting criteria, including a provision that no strike would occur unless there was “a near certainty” that civilians would not be harmed.

Even before that, American officials appear to have made the calculation that it was no longer worth it to attack lower-level militants in Pakistan, given the bitter opposition to the attacks in that country.

Last year, an analysis by the New America Foundation found that just 58 known militant leaders had been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, representing just 2 percent of the total deaths.

Obama seemed to allude to the backlash Wednesday when he said, “Our actions should meet a simple test: We must not create more enemies than we take off the battlefield.”

In December,the Obama administration reached an informal deal with Pakistan that the CIA would suspend drone strikes -except against the most senior al-Qaida leaders -while the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif pursues peace talks with the Taliban.

The talks have sputtered, and last week Pakistani fighter jets killed more than 60 people in North Waziristan, a militant stronghold, according to local media reports.

But Pakistani officials say the cessation in drone strikes has strengthened support for counterterrorism operations among a public that deeply resented an American bombing campaign on its soil. A senior Pakistani official said the hiatus made the government feel like the U.S. was hearing their concerns.

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Yogurts With More Sugar Than A Twinkie

We all like to think of yogurt as a healthy breakfast, but as it turns out, many of the most popular yogurt brands have more sugar than a junk food you'd never consider eating.



The American Heart Association recommends that men eat no more than 36 grams of sugar per day, and women no more than 20. One Twinkie makes a big dent in that recommended daily max, packing 19 grams of the sweet stuff, Time reported. Many of the top-selling yogurts have even more.

Part of this high sugar count is due to sugar that occurs naturally in yogurt, but the amount of natural sugar varies dramatically, depending on the kind. Lowfat yogurt, for example, is notorious for being high in sugar, Monica Reinagel, M.S., LDN, CNS tells The Huffington Post. The first 17 grams of sugar per serving, in lowfat varieties, is naturally occurring lactose. In original yogurt, it's common to see anywhere between 12 and 15 grams of natural sugar, according to Heather Bauer, R.D., CDN. That's why Bauer recommends going Greek. Greek yogurt, she said, has as little as 6 grams in plain flavors.

What really ups the sugar, though, is what we put into that plain yogurt. Fruit, especially the syrupy kind mixed into store-bought yogurts, is a common culprit. Plus, once you start throwing in candied nuts or sweetened granola, you've can quickly find yourself well beyond the sugar content of an entire Twinkie. "If you're going to add toppings, always stick to a plain flavor," Bauer says.

But many would-be yogurt eaters will tell you they just don't care for the bitter taste of a plain scoop. To make it more palatable, nearly all big brands, like Yoplait and Dannon, offer a large selection of fruit- and sometimes even dessert-flavored options. It's often these sweet additions that give the yogurts like the five below more sugar than a Twinkie.

Strawberry-flavored original Yoplait yogurt, despite being 99 percent fat free, packs 26 grams of sugar per 6-ounce container.

 This blueberry offering from Dannon is proof that you should always check nutrition labels -- or you could end up with 24 grams of sugar per 6-ounce serving.

 This vanilla pick from Stonyfield clocks in at 29 grams of sugar per 8-ounce serving.

 Brown Cow's nonfat vanilla has 25 grams of sugar per 6-ounce container.

 Activia walks a fine line with 19 grams of sugar per 4.4-ounce container of the blueberry flavor. That's as much as a Twinkie, in a smaller-than-average serving size.

Source 

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Self-Driving Cars Will Turn Surveillance Woes Into a Mainstream Worry

In the aftermath of the NSA spying revelations, our society is struggling to equip itself with the laws and public understanding necessary to deal with the spread of technology into every corner of our lives.

Self-driving cars are one place we can start to get it right. They provide yet another example of the challenges to autonomy and freedom brought by technology, and have the potential to bring the debate home for people who don’t feel as concerned by privacy issues related to email and laptops.

On Tuesday, Google unveiled a proper self-driving car, with no steering wheel, no brakes, no pedals. Google expects these no-hands-on-wheel cars to hit the roads in 2017 and it is up to us to craft the laws and policies that will govern their use. Such decisions cannot be left for tomorrow. As Google’s working prototype reveals, the robocars of the future are here. And because people have a long history of projecting personal freedom and autonomy onto automobiles, they will have an innate understanding of the stakes.

Case in Point: The Computer Parked in My Grandmother’s Garage

Grandmother is an inspiring, smart, and fiercely independent 80-year-old woman. Recently, she mailed me a folded up New York Times article entitled “Close the N.S.A.’s Back Doors.” I called her, eager to know why she suddenly cared about backdoors. We often have passionate political conversations, and I have tried many times to drag her into discussing the Snowden leaks and their consequences to no avail. She explained she had happened to see “N.S.A” in the article title, and knowing it might interest me, slipped it in the letter she had just finished writing. Was she concerned about NSA back doors, I asked? No.

Her lack of understanding and concern can be blamed on at least two things: poor metaphors and a narrow view of computing. For non-techies, a “back door” is not a very helpful metaphor. Technically, a back door is a method used to bypass the normal authentication process to secretly and remotely access computers. In the New York Times article, the term is mainly used in its broader sense, “to describe a range of policies and practices whereby governments compel, or otherwise get the cooperation of, private sector companies to provide access to data they control.”

“So someone could access your computer without you seeing it, like if someone entered by the backdoor when you were watching the front door,” I tried to explain to my grandmother. “Nonsense,” she told me, “if there was a backdoor in my house, I would see it. It’s my house after all–the thing you’re describing rather sounds to me like someone having a spare key of my house without me knowing it.”

A back door, indeed, is a programmer-centric metaphor: from inside the code, you can tell there are different ways to get in. It’s not a user-centric metaphor: by definition, from outside the code, the user can’t see it. That makes it challenging to discuss.

This brings us to the second problem: a narrow view of computing. Grandmother owns a desktop computer she uses once a year. It sits in a corner far from her daily life. Miss Teen America fears people activating her camera remotely on her laptop to take naked pictures of her: grandmother doesn’t. Nor does she own a smartphone that could make her worried about remote access and GPS tracking. For people who envision their personal computers as crucial means of empowerment, freedom and autonomy—most of my hacker friends for instance—back doors are a fundamental source of vexation. Grandmother is not one of them. She isn’t as emotionally invested in these tools so potential vulnerabilities to them do not threaten her way of life. And she is not alone. This is sometimes the case even for people whose opinion on the topic matters supremely: in 2013 for instance, Justice Elena Kagan revealed that eight out of the nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices don’t use email at all.

However, in my grandmother’s daily life, there is a computer that is filled with software, that is connected to the network–therefore potentially remotely accessible–and that she does consider to be the single most important source of her personal autonomy. She just doesn’t think of it as a computer, because it is her car. As many of the cars on the market and on the roads these days, it is packed with driving assistance software and a little antenna on its roof. Her car, literally, is also a computer.

Grandmother never told me: “You have to learn software programming, it is how people become independent, autonomous, and take control of their lives in the 21st  century.” Instead, she spent a great deal of time forcing me to take driving lessons, “because this is how a woman gets her independence, control, autonomy and freedom in life.” I still don’t have my driver’s license and she is very mad at me for it. Growing up, she had me read Françoise Sagan’s novels, and we would watch Thelma and Louise together. She is French but she shared this very American wisdom with me: the automobile will set you free.

It’s quite clear: for most people, the link between government surveillance and freedom is more plainly understood by cars, rather than personal computers. As more and more objects become connected to the Internet these questions will grow in importance.And cars in particular might become, as Ryan Calo puts it in a 2011 article on drones, “a privacy catalyst”; an object giving us an opportunity to drag our privacy laws into the 21st century; an object that restores our mental model of what a privacy violation is.

When my grandmother starts to consider technologically-enabled constraints on how she can drive; or people knowing exactly where she can go—abstract issues of “autonomy” and “privacy” become much more real.

She started looking more into it. Typing ‘Privacy’ and ‘Cars’ in a search engine, she quickly found Ford Global Vice President of Marketing Jim Farley’s declaration at the Consumer Electronics Show: “We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you’re doing.” In her head, she started re-writing Thelma and Louise in an age of self-driving cars with remote government access for law enforcement purposes. Surely the girls would have been located and arrested, or their cars remotely stopped. “Well, that would make it a ten-minute movie, a YouTube videoclip?,” she joked. Farley’s statement stirred a bit of a public debate, with Democratic Senator Al Franken of Minnesota questioning Ford about its data policies, Farley retracting his statement, competition positioning themselves on the subject and Ford CEO Alan Mulally calling for boundaries and guidelines to operate in this space.

Now, grandmother understands and cares about this issue. And that is important because in order for our society to shape the rules that will make the future of self-driving cars one in which we want to live, we need all members of society to contribute to the conversation.

We need to ask: what happens when cars become increasingly like computers? With self-driving cars, are we getting the best of the computer industry and the car industry, or the worst of both worlds?

“Self-driving” is another misnomer. Driving decisions are never “self-made.” They are accounted for by algorithms when they are not accounted for by drivers. These algorithms reflect many decisions that aren’t self-made either: they are the conscious answers to complicated safety, ethical, legal and commercial dilemmas. Calling a robotic car “self-driving” diverts attention from the surrender of autonomy to algorithms, making it harder to navigate the policy questions that arise.

Self-driving cars are coming–slowly and progressively, with various stages of automation before the streets are filled with no-hand-on-wheel vehicles like the prototype Google revealed Tuesday–but they are surely part of our near future. They hold considerable promise for the environment and for road safety.

They also embody our debate on freedom, autonomy, and privacy when it comes to computing systems–revealing just how intrusive remote access to computing systems by the government or individuals can become.

When grandmother starts to consider technologically-enabled constraints on how she can drive; or people knowing exactly where she can go—abstract issues of “autonomy” and “privacy” become much more real.

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US Airways Cross-country flight diverted after dog poops

A cross-country fight had to make an unscheduled landing when a service dog pooped twice in the aisle, sickening passengers with the odor.

US Airways spokesman Andrew Christie said the May 28 US Airways flight from Los Angeles to Philadelphia had to make an unscheduled stop in Kansas City,

Christie called the episode a "rare and unfortunate situation." The flight continued after the mess was cleaned up on the ground. The passenger and service dog were rebooked on another flight.

Jim Kutsch, president at The Seeing Eye guide dog school in Morristown, New Jersey, tells The Philadelphia Inquirer that such incidents are rare, but that dogs occasionally get sick on planes, too.

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