Monday, 13 December 2010

Incompetent (Australian) BitTorrent Researchers Strike Again

I almost cried this morning.
Last summer we debunked a study by the University of Ballarat’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL). Carefully we spelled out the many obvious mistakes that were made, both in data collection and the research design in general. In addition, we contacted the lead researcher, offering our help.
Several news outlets who published the story were kind enough to acknowledge our critique, but the researchers themselves went silent and didn’t respond directly to the errors we pointed out. Today, the same researchers are again making headlines, and it seems that they haven’t learned a thing.
In a replication of the study they conducted earlier this year, the researchers have studied what’s being downloaded on BitTorrent. Among other things they want to find out which files are popular on BitTorrent at the moment, and how many of these are infringing.
But there’s a problem. Again.
In common with those behind last year’s study, the researchers have no clue what they are doing. Mistake after mistake has been made, as we will point out below. The worst part is that some media outlets appear to be taking this research seriously, while it’s in fact a disgrace for anyone who works in academia.
In large parts the methodology is the same as last time, so we won’t report all the painful mistakes that were pointed out before. Instead, will will just sum up some of the new findings, and point out why these are clearly wrong.

1. Most downloaded files

The data collected for the new study was gathered in July 2010, and the researchers used the number of active seeders at the time to determine what files are ‘most downloaded’. One would assume that such a list would be dominated by new titles, but according to the Australian researchers this is not the case.
In their top 10 most downloaded (read ‘seeded’) movies, we find the following titles that have been available for years:

Wanted (2008)
Hancock (2008)
Juno (2007)
Step Brothers (2008)
Gladiator (2000)
Toy Story (1995)

At TorrentFreak we have years of experience at tracking BitTorrent downloads, and we’ve never seen any old titles in our weekly lists. Older titles do show up as popular in tracker scrapes sometimes, but they are always from fake torrent files or manipulated trackers. Common sense should have alerted the researchers that something might have been wrong with their data collection methods or sample.
The report also claims that the aXXo release of the film Wanted had a massive 50,582 seeders two years after it was released. Aside from the fact that we haven’t seen such a high seeder count in weeks, it is absolutely impossible that a download would have these impressive figures two years after it first became available.
The inaccuracy of the most downloaded film list is nicely illustrated by the researchers themselves. Aside from gathering data from BitTorrent trackers, they also looked at the 100 most searched for terms on the BitTorrent search engine isoHunt at the time. Interestingly, none of the older movies listed in their top 10 most downloaded list was present in the list of popular searches.

2. Popular Categories

As we suggested, to determine the popularity of various categories the researchers used a random sample of torrents this time, instead of the sample of popular torrents they previously selected. Despite this change the gathered data differs significantly from what most torrent sites report.
Based on a sample of 127,600 torrent files they conclude that nearly 70% of the torrents are video content and less than 2% is software.
If we look at the >10 million torrent files (unique hashes) that are available on a quality torrent site such as BitSnoop, we see a different picture. On BitSnoop 9% of all torrents are categorised as software, while video adds up to ‘just’ 52%. This leads us to believe that the sample the researchers used is heavily biased towards video content, or that their categorization algorithms are flawed.

3. Multiplying Trackers

The last point that we want to address is again an illustration of the incompetence of the researchers. What we missed last time is that they simply added up the reports of the different BitTorrent trackers they scraped. If “torrent A” is tracked by 5 individual trackers, then the researchers add up the seeder counts of them all, while in fact they are often used by the same downloaders.
Or put differently, most torrent clients allow people to use multiple trackers. That means that they can be listed as a seeder at several trackers at the same time. The researchers didn’t calculate this in, and are therefore overestimating the download counts, which were already suspicious to begin with.
Sadly enough we have to conclude that this new study is just as bad as the previous one, and totally unusable to describe the BitTorrent landscape. We’re not exaggerating if we say that the researchers are incompetent, lack common sense, and are too stubborn to take advice when we offered it.
When I contacted researcher Dr. Paul Watters last time he sent the following reply: “I would be happy to send you a complimentary of my O’Reilly ‘Statistics in a Nutshell’ book that might give further insight into statistical methodology.” I chuckled, since I’ve worked as an academic myself for years, publishing in high impact peer-reviewed journals.
Perhaps the State Government of Victoria, IBM, Westpac Banking Corporation, the Australian Federal Police and Village Roadshow should ask for a refund, as they all supported the research financially.

Ernesto @'Torent Freak'

Sunday, 12 December 2010

Interview with Gil Kerlikowske, director of the US Office of National Drug Control Policy

JPBarlow At the heart of all secrets lies shame. less than 20 seconds ago via Twittelator from Mill Valley, CA

Aspirin: the world's humble true wonder drug

The geek who shook the world

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Photo: Mark Chew

The journalist Suelette Dreyfus collaborated with Julian Assange to create Underground, a 1997 book about hackers in Australia and around the globe. Here she reveals the inside story on Assange, the geek who founded WikiLeaks and became the scourge of world governments.
One of Julian Assange's favourite books is Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. It is a bleak novel loosely based on the Stalinist purges and Moscow show trials of the late 1930s.
It tells the story of a Russian named Rubashov who was once a revered 1917 revolutionary, but who is cast out from his society. Suddenly he awakes in the middle of the night to find he is arrested and imprisoned. There are no charges, no due process and no justice. He can get no truth or explanation of what is going on. Eventually he is interrogated, and asked to sign a false confession admitting his guilt in a plot to assassinate the mysterious “No. 1”, the unknown and unnamed government leader.
He refuses.

From left: Julian Assange after being accused of hacking in 1995; a stressed Assange tells reporters last month that WikiLeaks staff were receiving death threats; Interpol's online wanted poster before Assange's arrest last week. Photo: Reuters/Getty Images

He is isolated in his cell, but finds a way of communicating with another prisoner by tapping on pipes. Ever so carefully, they begin secretly passing information and stories back and forth.
In the gloomy prison, an interrogation begins. First, an old friend of Rubashov's is brought in to start a soft persuasion. When that fails, because Rubashov refuses to admit to a crime he did not commit, his friend is arrested and executed for going too easy on the prisoner.
Then a coarse and violent interrogator takes over. He believes that torture is a good way to extract confessions from prisoners. He hates Rubashov because the prisoner is educated: being enlightened through learning is clearly a dangerous thing.

The activist on the cover of <i>Time Magazine</i> this month.

The activist on the cover of Time Magazine this month.

At the novel's end, Rubashov is summarily executed.
It's a case of life imitating art, with obvious parallels between Julian Assange's predicament and that of his favoured novel.
The world's most mysterious and famous publisher of verboten secrets is sitting in a jail cell in Britain awaiting extradition to a place with a very alien legal system, Sweden, to face questioning about criminal charges he does not understand. He has said publicly that he is at a loss to know how he could be accused of sexual offences against two women with whom he had sex when they have admitted it was consensual.
Assange has always been an avid reader of books. I know this because we worked together for almost three years to create Underground, a book published in Australia in 1997 and again in an electronic version in 2001. Underground is the true story of hackers in Australia and around the globe. Assange, the former hacker, contributed exceptional technical skills and analysis, and I brought years of experience as a journalist and writer. The book has become something of a classic among computer enthusiasts and has been translated into Czech, Chinese and Russian. Books were the basis of Assange's self-education. He attended school off and on during his childhood, but he was continually frustrated by teachers who were at a loss about what to do with him.
A geek friend of his once described Assange as having an IQ "in excess of 170". I suspect this could be true. I can only imagine how hard it must have been for a teacher in 1970s Australia to teach her class of normal children while also dealing with one small blond-haired boy who was off the charts.
So Assange largely gave up on school, finding it more efficient to educate himself by reading books. He learned to tune out if people didn't feed him information fast enough.
I've watched Assange do this many times. It's not meant to be rude, though it can make him seem aloof. It is, I suspect, a habit learned from these early years. It can give him the air of an absent-minded professor. He's not really absent; it's just that his brain is running several processors in parallel, like a high-powered desktop computer.
If some information is of more interest, more processing power will be diverted to that to optimise the running of the machine. Sometimes he thinks he has told you something when he hasn't. This is probably because his brain moves so much faster than his voice; by the time he opens his mouth to speak, his thoughts have zoomed a million light years down the next thought path.
The computer geek in him always gravitated towards optimisation of everything. Some people are born engineers and the desire to optimise is a good test of this.
Once, when Assange was packing boxes to move house, he complained at how long it took. Most people just throw things in boxes and tape them up. Not Assange. He approached putting his books in boxes as though he was solving a puzzle aimed at using all the space in the box most efficiently. If there was dead space in the box, the packing had not been optimal and was a failure. He would empty the box and restart the packing again.
This desire for optimisation might be dismissed as the quirky trait of a geek, but it is far more important. It is part of the larger puzzle of how WikiLeaks has come to exist today.
The need for optimisation and the deep desire for justice, reflected by his choice of books, came together with a few other convictions.
One of these can be found in another favourite piece of writing, this time by the World War II pilot and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The quote, used by Assange to sign many of his emails, was this: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the seas."
The quote suggests that if you can show people why something is important, they will work to achieve that goal far more effectively than if you just tell them to tick off items on a banal to-do list. Large corporations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year trying to drum that message into their executives in high-end training courses. Assange knew it instinctively.
The final piece in the puzzle was curiosity. Like all good journalists, Assange has it in abundance. It is part of his clay. He understood that most people are curious and he spoke to me about the immense power of information to change the world for the better.
WikiLeaks is the picture that emerges when you lay the last puzzle piece in place.
If you want to improve the lot of the poorest, most oppressed people in the world, you can go to a destitute, corrupt African country and work in a community-aid program. It is a noble and self-sacrificing choice. But it only saves one village. Therefore, although it works towards greater justice (in this case economic justice) it is not optimal. A computer geek would consider it sub-optimal. To be optimal, it must be on a much larger scale. Larger than one village, larger than one country, even than one continent. The only way to do that is to use information which can be replicated endlessly – and cheaply – to promote change for the better. But it must be good information, not trashy information or PR spin. It must be the kind of information that plucks at those little threads of curiousity we all have in one measure or another.
It must be the kind of information news media organisations would publish for their readers.
Not everyone wants change, however. Tin-pot dictators like to steal money from their countries.
Average people may think they are happy in their ordinary lives: they don't want change. Yet imagine if there was a secret world these average people did not know about. What could be in that world? It could be a world of classified logs from the front line of a war. It could also be a world of secret diplomatic cables that tell the truth about what really happens behind the mahogany doors of power. The average people might actually want that information – if someone revealed it to them.
WikiLeaks has taught people to "long for the endless immensity of the seas". Who wants to go back to their cramped dog-box apartment now that they have tasted the salty air and seen the ocean's infinite horizon?
Yet Assange still sits in prison, waiting for answers and explanations, like Rubashov. It is more than likely the US will try to extradite him from Sweden if he is forced to leave Britain. Hints in the American media suggest that a secret grand jury investigation is under way or is even completed – without Assange even being in the country.
American politicians propose that Assange be assassinated. Forget a trial or jury. They are judge, jury and executioner, like the thuggish interrogator in Darkness at Noon.
The office of US senator Joseph Lieberman tried to gag WikiLeaks this week by making a phone call that forced Amazon to stop hosting the publisher. The New York Times has also released the diplomatic cables. Lieberman's office has called for an investigation but has not tried to order the paper to stop its presses. As if it could. There would be rioting in the streets of Manhattan.
In person, Assange is remarkably calm. He is sometimes dedicated to the cause of free speech in a pointed way that that affronts Americans, which is surprising, really, given their dedication to the right of free speech.
What matters is that WikiLeaks is changing the balance of power between average citizens and their governments like nothing else has this century. For the past decade the pendulum has swung towards government. WikiLeaks is pulling the pendulum back towards towards the citizens.

Suelette Dreyfus @'SMH'

'Underground'
(Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier)

Air guitar as you have never seen it before!

Jailed Afghan Drug Lord Was Informer on U.S. Payroll

When Hajji Juma Khan was arrested and transported to New York to face charges under a new American narco-terrorism law in 2008, federal prosecutors described him as perhaps the biggest and most dangerous drug lord in Afghanistan, a shadowy figure who had helped keep the Taliban in business with a steady stream of money and weapons.

Confiscated opium is destroyed. Opium and heroin production soared after the fall of the Taliban.

But what the government did not say was that Mr. Juma Khan was also a longtime American informer, who provided information about the Taliban, Afghan corruption and other drug traffickers. Central Intelligence Agency officers and Drug Enforcement Administration agents relied on him as a valued source for years, even as he was building one of Afghanistan’s biggest drug operations after the United States-led invasion of the country, according to current and former American officials. Along the way, he was also paid a large amount of cash by the United States.

At the height of his power, Mr. Juma Khan was secretly flown to Washington for a series of clandestine meetings with C.I.A. and D.E.A. officials in 2006. Even then, the United States was receiving reports that he was on his way to becoming Afghanistan’s most important narcotics trafficker by taking over the drug operations of his rivals and paying off Taliban leaders and corrupt politicians in President Hamid Karzai’s government.

In a series of videotaped meetings in Washington hotels, Mr. Juma Khan offered tantalizing leads to the C.I.A. and D.E.A., in return for what he hoped would be protected status as an American asset, according to American officials. And then, before he left the United States, he took a side trip to New York to see the sights and do some shopping, according to two people briefed on the case.

The relationship between the United States government and Mr. Juma Khan is another illustration of how the war on drugs and the war on terrorism have sometimes collided, particularly in Afghanistan, where drug dealing, the insurgency and the government often overlap.

To be sure, American intelligence has worked closely with figures other than Mr. Juma Khan suspected of drug trade ties, including Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half brother, and Hajji Bashir Noorzai, who was arrested in 2005. Mr. Karzai has denied being involved in the drug trade...