A South African man, whose name has not been published, was carjacked, robbed, and stuffed into the trunk of his car near Johannesburg on Sunday. The robbers, however, had overlooked his mobile phone, which he used to text his girlfriend, Lynn Peters. From there, Twitter took over.

Two armed men grabbed the driver and his Volkswagen Golf in the Honeydew area northwest of Johannesburg at about 9:00pm local time. Carjacking is a crime that is common in the country—over 10,000 such incidents occurred last year.






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What do you get when you have Silicon Valley’s best and brightest sitting before you, elbow-to-elbow with Hollywood moguls, New York elite, and some incredibly cool Bostonians (along with a thousand other inspirational souls from around the world)? If you’re Rob Reid, you multiply wit with cynicism, divide by 5 minutes, and express it in a hilarity set normalized to π+1. Behold, ©opyright MathTM, the best short talk at TED 2012 as determined by yours truly. Video of his talk is now available thanks to our friends at TED. So you can fully appreciate it, allow us to give you some background.


Rob Reid understands copyright math because he has the compass cuts and rubber eraser burns of an experienced mathematical optimist grappling with a five-headed label hydra. "The music industry became a frustration for me on October 8, 1998," he told me, "the day that the RIAA sued Diamond Multimedia for releasing the first true mass-market MP3 player, the Rio." Pondering the late '90s, Reid noted, "Their goal was to make open MP3 players completely illegal in this country. So, assault weapons, yes; iPods, no."






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Last week, the Iranian government apparently started a new censorship program that blocks encrypted Internet traffic. Even Iranians who had taken steps to evade government firewalls were being stymied—and the immediate impact can be seen in usage of the Tor network.

Tor anonymizes Internet activity with client software that routs traffic through the Tor network, a worldwide network of relays and bridges set up by volunteers. Iran is second only to the US in Tor usage, with roughly 50,000 Iranians anonymizing their Internet traffic each day by routing it through the Tor network. Yet between Feb. 8 and Feb. 9, connections dropped from about 50,000 to fewer than 20,000, and plummeted to nearly zero by Friday, Feb. 10.







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Apple updated iBooks Author to version 1.0.1 on Friday afternoon, the only change being an update to the software's controversial end user license agreement. The updated EULA now specifically only applies distribution restrictions to the interactive .ibooks format files generated by the app.






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Anonymous has begun taunting its police pursuers in ever-more aggressive ways, upping the ante today by releasing an internal FBI conference call in which agents from across the country and police in the UK share status updates on their investigations of the group—and reveal that major new action is coming soon.

Much of the call is taken up by a UK investigator from the Metropolitan Police who comes across as eager to curry favor with the FBI. The biggest way this is being done? UK investigators are intentionally trying to delay the court cases against Ryan Cleary and Jake "Topiary" Davis, two UK Anons arrested last year, for up to eight weeks as a favor to the FBI's New York field office.







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The release of a series of e-mails apparently stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit was timed so that they would hit the news immediately before the Copenhagen climate conference. They didn't seem to affect the conference itself (where deals appear to have collapsed under their own weight), but they did spawn over a half-dozen inquiries, all of which cleared the researchers of anything other than a cavalier attitude towards the UK's Freedom of Information Act. Nevertheless, whoever was behind that original release has loosed another batch in advance of this year's Durban climate meeting.

The last time out, only Saudi Arabia seemed to reference the contents of the e-mails at the Copenhagen meeting itself. And this time, indications are that a significant agreement is very unlikely, so it's not obvious that the e-mail release will even register. This is especially true because the e-mails have come from the same stash as the original batch. And, in the mean time, multiple inquiries have concluded that the e-mails didn't raise questions about the validity of climate science, although individual researchers displayed a cavalier attitude towards sharing data and Freedom of Information Act requests.







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On Friday, I received a press release pitching a new book on how to live like a liberal. The book offers helpful suggestions for:

Watching MSNBC instead of Fox News
Powering a laptop with a solar power-generating backpack
Progressive financial investment
Where and how to find a like-minded mate

... You get the idea. What really caught my eye was item number one: the idea that people of a particular political persuasion should stop watching news produced by those of another. This, it seems, might be a particular problem on the Internet, where the low barriers to publishing mean that anyone can find a viewpoint with which they totally agree, then read only that material.






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Tunecore has been a boon for musicians like Trent Reznor, who pay the Brooklyn-based company a flat fee of $40 or so and then see their music available for sale on Amazon, iTunes, and eMusic. The copyrights all remain in the artists' hands, as do the revenues; after paying the flat fee, 100 percent of the payout returns to the artists. (The digital stores take their cut first, of course.)

Today, Tunecore announced that it would extend this model to e-books through a service called Bibliocore. After an upfront payment, the e-book is delivered to Apple's iBookstore, rights remain with the author, and Bibliocore takes no cut of the royalties.

To participate, you need a few basic things. First, you need an ePub formatted book that has passed the 1.0.5 ePub check, contains no unmanifested files, and has its own ISBN number. Second, you need some cover art, at least 600 pixels "along the larger axis." Third, you fill out some metadata and set the price. Boom.

The service, now launching in beta, doesn't currently offer listed prices; interested authors must e-mail for a custom quote. Along with numerous other services like Smashwords, Bibliocore makes it simple to get books into the iBookstore. But once you're in, then what? Authors face the challenges of abundance that musicians have faced for the last decade. How do you get noticed? Who will help you market your work? How does one book a reading tour?

For those who already have an established audience, such services look like an incredible way to up one's royalty percentage on each sale—at the cost of being much more entrepreneurial about spreading the word, getting a cover designed, generating blurbs, getting an ISBN, buying all that brie for the launch party... But if you're ready to become youre own indie publisher, it's quickly becoming simple to do. Companies like Smashwords can even distribute to multiple stores, including Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and now the iBookstore, saving would-be authors even more work.

Publishers have been watching the music biz carefully, and have hopefully learned some lessons. They're about to face the same pressures: infringement gets easier, disintermediation means that publishers aren't the gatekeepers to quality work they once were, and digital storefronts can soon start dictating terms to you if they grow too powerful.

Print-on-demand has done its own disintermediation work for the last five years, but the sheer ease of the new devices and the digital storefronts, along with their recent popularity, look set to bring a whole new level of entrepreneurial activity to the book world—and that probably means more pain for traditional publishers.



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The people who uncovered GhostNet, an extensive cyber espionage network that targeted the Tibetan exile community, are back with a sequel. Starting with an infected machine that was found during that investigation, an international team of researchers has uncovered a completely separate network that primarily targeted the Indian government, and turned up some classified documents that had been obtained by the hackers. By reconstructing the network, the team was able to trace things back to the hacking community in Chengdu, China.

The work involved a collaboration between the Information Warfare Monitor and the Shadowserver Foundation, but, over the course of its work, involved dozens of other security groups and experts. It also benefitted from extensive cooperation with the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, which had previously approached the security researchers in response to security lapses that unearthed GhostNet. The researchers take what they term a "fusion methodology," which is basically a combination of fieldwork—studying infected systems in situ—with standard security approaches.






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