Sure, HTML5 adds support for Web video that doesn’t need Flash. But there are many reasons Adobe’s plug-in still is necessary, YouTube says.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

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I still think those opposed to the Comcast/NBC Universal merger are overreacting, but I have to admit the most amusing effort to deal with the merger may come from the Parents Television Council, the group famous for flooding the FCC with complaints every time it hears about something it doesn’t believe belongs on TV. Apparently, PTC is now demanding that Comcast reveal how much money it makes from porn. Honestly, I’m wondering if it got the idea from a recent episode of 30 Rock, which has been using the “fictional” ongoing merger between NBC (in the show) and Kabletown to mock the proposed real-life merger. In one episode, a Kabletown exec claims that the entire business is funded on porn, and execs don’t have to do anything, because the money just rolls in.

“Comcast is one of the most far-reaching distributors of pornography in the communities it serves, raising serious questions about whether the company meets the character and public interest obligations required,” said PTC President Tim Winter.

Interesting. I didn’t realize that “character” was part of how the FCC reviewed mergers. Good luck with that one, PTC.

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This isn’t much of a surprise given the convoluted history of the .xxx domain — including meddling by the US government — but it appears that after all of these years, the domain is set to be approved. It doesn’t seem like anyone’s happy about this — for conflicting reasons — which was why there was so much controversy over it in the first place. Some religious groups fear that this is “legitimizing” porn, while some porn sites fear that they’re going to be required to operate in the .xxx domain. Of course, porn is already legitimized and it would be nearly impossible to require porn sites to operate in that domain, so it seems like both sides have little to fear. As Wired notes in the link above, the reality will probably be that the domain — like so many modern top-level domains will mostly be ignored or become home to more shady operators that most people know to avoid.

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A former ISP for The Pirate Bay, Black Internet, was told by a Swedish court that it had to stop hosting the site a while back. The Pirate Bay quickly switched to a different provider, but Black Internet went to court to challenge the legality of being told whom it can and cannot host. It appears that the Swedish appeals court ruling on the matter went beyond just telling Black Internet that it can’t host The Pirate Bay, it also told the ISP that it must block all of its customers from reaching the site, even though the site is no longer hosted by Black Internet. It seems like yet another attempt by courts trying to play whac-a-mole in an incredibly ineffective manner that is likely to do more damage than good. Completely blocking people from reaching a site, even if they have legitimate reasons for reaching it, doesn’t help anyone. Those who are interested in infringing on copyrights will still figure out plenty of ways to do so. They’ll route around the blocks or go to other sites. So what does this do other than create an inconvenience and set a bad precedent for any ISP? Update: Thanks to folks in the comments for pointing out the update, where the court is claiming that Black Internet misinterpreted the decision, which says that Black is prohibited from providing “internet access” and there’s a bit of a debate over what “internet access” means. It appears that Black interpreted that to mean “access” while the judge meant just hosting.

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As a court is about to hear oral arguments concerning the legality of one of US Copyright Group’s (really law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver) lawsuits which attempt to lump thousands of alleged file sharers into a single lawsuit, something odd has happened in response to US Copyright Group’s most famous lawsuit against 5,000 people accused of sharing the movie Hurt Locker. Despite the fact that no one has yet been identified in that particular lawsuit, some random guy has stepped forward and filed a response to the lawsuit, supposedly in “protest.” It seems like a pretty weak protest, however. In fact, the guy says he does download some files, but didn’t even download Hurt Locker. And, on top of all that, he seems confused. During an interview with News.com, he also says that he was trying to “take a stand against file sharing.” In the end, this seems like it’s all a really weak and confused publicity stunt by a guy who is apparently running for some form of public office. The courts will likely make this one disappear quickly.

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It’s the idea that’s been put forth in various movies over time: what if computer hackers could just take a tiny amount off of millions of transactions — transactions so small that most people wouldn’t notice or care. And yet, we hadn’t really heard of it actually working anywhere… until now. The FTC has apparently shut down one such scam, though it was an operation since 2006. The details of how it was set up are pretty convoluted, and help explain, in part, why this sort of scam isn’t quite as easy as the movies make it out to be. Also, by “micro” charges, we’re not talking fractions of pennies, but charges between $0.25 and $9 — enough that they could get away with this for four years without too much of an outcry. In fact, apparently only 6% of the charges were contested. Yes, out of 1.35 million fraudulent charges, only 78,724 people noticed and complained.

Wired digs into the details of how this was set up, which highlights the complexity of the operation:

According to court documents filed (.pdf) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, the scammers — identified only as “John Does” in the complaint — recruited money mules through a spam campaign that sought to hire a U.S.-based financial manager for an international financial services company.

Mules who responded to the ad and were chosen for the task opened multiple bank accounts and about 100 limited liability companies for the scammers, which were then used to make the fraudulent charges and launder money to bank accounts in Cyprus and several east European countries, including Estonia and Lithuania.

Front companies set up by the mules included Albion Group, API Trade, ARA Auto Parts Trading, Data Services, New York Enterprizes, and SMI Imports, among others.

The scammers then purchased domain names and set up phone numbers and virtual office addresses for the front companies through services such as Regus. They used this information — along with federal tax I.D. numbers stolen from legitimate companies with similar names — to apply for more than 100 merchant accounts with credit card processors, such as First Data.

According to IDG,

They used another legitimate virtual business service — United World Telecom’s CallMe800 — to have phone calls forwarded overseas. To further make it seem as though their companies were legitimate, the scammers would set up fake retail Web sites. And when credit card processors asked them to provide information about company executives, they handed over legitimate names and social security numbers, stolen from ID theft victims.

When they had to log into payment processor Web sites, they would do this from IP addresses that were located near their virtual offices, again evading payment processor fraud detection services.

Once approved by the card processors, the front companies were able to charge consumer credit and debit cards. Money charged to the cards was directed into the bank accounts set up by the money mules, who then transferred it to accounts overseas.

The charges showed up on consumer credit and debit card statements with a merchant name and toll-free phone number. But consumers who called the numbers to question the charges generally encountered an automated voicemail recording saying the number had been disconnected or instructing them to leave a detailed message. The calls, of course, were never returned.

See? A bit more complex than just taking a fraction of a penny off of each transaction. But, as the IDG report notes, if you’re looking to set up an online scam, here’s a blueprint.

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You may have heard by now that the political website Daily Kos has come out and explained that it believes the polling firm it has used for a while, Research 2000, was faking its data. While it’s nice to see a publication come right out and bluntly admit that it had relied on data that it now believes was not legit, what’s fascinating if you’re a stats geek is how a team of stats geeks figured out there were problems with the data. As any good stats nerd knows, the concept of “randomness” isn’t quite as random as some people think, which is why faking randomness almost always leads to tell-tale signs that the data was faked or manipulated. For example, one very, very common test is to use Benford’s Law to look at the first digit of data in a data set, because in a truly random set, the distribution is not what people usually expect.

In this case, the three guys who had problems with the data (Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman) zeroed in on just a few clues that the data was faked or manipulated. The first thing they noticed was that when R2K did polls that tested how men and women viewed certain politicians or political parties (favorable/unfavorable) there was an odd pattern: if the percentage of men that rated a particular politician favorable or unfavorable was an even number, so was the the percentage of female raters. It seemed like these two points always matched up. If the male percentage was even the female percentage was even. If the male percentage was odd, the female percentage was odd. Yet, as you should know, these are independent variables, not influenced by each other. That 34% of men find a particular politician favorable should have no bearing on why an even percentage of women find that politician favorable. In fact, this happened in almost every such poll that R2K did, to such a level as to suggest it being as close to impossible as you can imagine:

Common sense says that that result is highly unlikely, but it helps to do a more precise calculation. Since the odds of getting a match each time are essentially 50%, the odds of getting 776/778 matches are just like those of getting 776 heads on 778 tosses of a fair coin. Results that extreme happen less than one time in 10²²⁸. That’s one followed by 228 zeros. (The number of atoms within our cosmic horizon is something like 1 followed by 80 zeros.) For the Unf, the odds are less than one in 10²³¹. (Having some Undecideds makes Fav and Unf nearly independent, so these are two separate wildly unlikely events.)

There is no remotely realistic way that a simple tabulation and subsequent rounding of the results for M’s and F’s could possibly show that detailed similarity. Therefore the numbers on these two separate groups were not generated just by independently polling them.

The other statistical analysis that I found fascinating was that when you looked at weekly changes in favorability ratings, the R2K data almost always changed a bit. But, if you look at other data, no change is the most common result. As they point out, if you look at, say, Gallup data, you get this nice typical bell curve:

But if you look at the R2K data, you get things like the following:

Notice that substantial dip at the 0% mark. That seems to indicate a likelihood of faked or manipulated data, from someone who thinks that “random” data means the data has to keep changing. Back to Grebner, Weissman and Weissman:

How do we know that the real data couldn’t possibly have many changes of +1% or -1% but few changes of 0%? Let’s make an imaginative leap and say that, for some inexplicable reason, the actual changes in the population’s opinion were always exactly +1% or -1%, equally likely. Since real polls would have substantial sampling error (about +/-2% in the week-to-week numbers even in the first 60 weeks, more later) the distribution of weekly changes in the poll results would be smeared out, with slightly more ending up rounding to 0% than to -1% or +1%. No real results could show a sharp hole at 0%, barring yet another wildly unlikely accident.

Kos is apparently planning legal action, and so far R2K hasn’t responded in much detail other than to claim that its polls were conducted properly. I’m not all that interested in that part of the discussion however. I just find it neat how the “faux randomness” may have exposed the problems with the data.

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While Google’s Street View cars are sidelined pending the investigation into its Wi-Fi spying scandal, it has a backup plan for providing geolocation services: crowdsourcing.

Originally posted at Relevant Results

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As has been predicted and expected for quite some time, Hulu has finally announced its subscription plans. Let’s start with the one thing they got right: unlike some newspaper paywalls and such, they’re not technically putting the existing offerings behind this subscription wall. Technically, you can still use Hulu for free the same way you did in the past, but as I explain in a bit, this might not work out in practice. So what do you get for your $10 per month? Well, you get access to the latest full season of shows from ABC, NBC and Fox (co-owners of Hulu). Of course, this isn’t exactly a benefit. It just means that, unlike currently, Hulu doesn’t delete shows quite as quickly — a point that had been annoying users of the site. What else do you get? Well, you still get the annoying pre-roll/mid-roll/post-roll commercials, so you’re not paying to get rid of those. And… hmm… well, if you pay, Hulu is just slightly less obnoxious about trying to block you from accessing the content on a television (even with a perfectly legitimate setup).

That appears to be it. I’m trying to figure out who thought this was compelling. Basically, for $10/month, Hulu will be slightly less annoying to the average user by not deleting content during the season and maybe kinda sorta letting you access Hulu on your TV if you happen to use the “approved” equipment. Of course, you could also use a system that gets around Hulu’s bizarre and pointless TV blocks just as easily, but we’ll skip over that for now.

Looks like another lost opportunity. Hulu could have come up with real reasons to buy by actually adding value. Instead, it just focused on being slightly less annoying. Some might not see these as being all that different (doesn’t it add value to be less annoying?). That’s true, but there is a fundamental difference: anyone can be less annoying without getting people to pay for it. Any business should be striving to be less annoying all the time in their core product. When you set up your subscription service around “we’ll be less annoying,” you’ve now given yourself a perverse and dangerous set of incentives. You now have the incentive to be more annoying in your core product in a push to get people to sign up for the less annoying product. Effectively, it’s nagware, which may work for some segment of the market, but is not about providing more positive value, but about minimizing negative value. That’s not a growth strategy.

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