News Blog

If you're going to have a revolution, it's best to leave the guns at home.

That's one of the underlying messages in The Singing Revolution, a documentary by Jim and Maureen Tusty about the birth of the Estonian Republic currently touring the independent film circuit. Funded in part by venture capitalist Steve Jurveston, the movie shows how Estonians held their national unity under Soviet domination through singing festivals. Later, during the late 80s and 90s, Estonian activists pushed for independence through parliamentary maneuvering. (Jim Tusty and Jurvetson are also Estonian.)

The film starts a one-week run Friday at San Francisco's Lumiere theater.

Granted, the decisive figure in the revolution turned out to be Boris Yeltsin. Soviet troops and tanks had driven into Estonia and planned to take over the country's main TV tower. Only a few hours before the army was set to take action in Estonia, Yeltsin stood down the coup in Russia. The army subsequently, suddenly reversed course.

Still, for several decades Estonians pushed for independence within the rule of law, Tusty noted. And look at the results. Investors from the west have migrated to the tiny Baltic nation, which gets high marks for clean government and transparent accounting. You can't say that about every emerging nation. is trying to jumpstart a tech industry, but investors in the west remain skittish because of corruption and political issues. Intellectual property protection and corruption have always been China's weak points.

Political correspondent Declan McCullagh for years has been touting Estonia as an emerging tech power.

Bad blood continues to exist between Estonia, which had to endure a brutal occupation under the Soviets, then Nazis and then the Soviets again, and Russia. Last year, Estonian web sites were besieged with denial of service attacks that nearly escalated into a cyber war between the two nations.

The film is also an interesting history of one of the less-examined facets of the Cold War. For decades, a number of nationalists lived in the forest to resist Soviet rule. Some of the forest boys are interviewed. Tusty also got an interview with one of the two policemen in the TV tower, who planned to start the fire extinguishing system and flood the tower with Freon gas. By doing that, it would eliminate oxygen in the building and suffocate everyone, the policeman said. There's also a lot of footage from news programs from 1989-1991 when the Eastern bloc was crumbling, which was also the last time the evening news was entertaining.

News recently broke that Russia is requiring registration for Wi-Fi use. I had forgotten until I checked into my hotel in Moscow tonight, and had the bother of having to go to a special desk in the lobby to sign up.

Reading the agreement, it sounds like this is an antispam measure? Seems a bit like the guns debate in the U.S. I doubt many of the spam kings and criminals that would be affected by it are going to register...

Russian Wi-Fi Agreement

(Credit: Matt Asay)

WASHINGTON--Allofmp3.com, the controversial Russian online music store, may be effectively dead for now, especially if its sprawling mother country has any hopes of joining the World Trade Organization any time soon.

In late August, controversial Russian music store Allofmp3.com vowed on its blog (screenshot shown here) to live again. U.S. authorities want to prevent that.

But Russia's allegedly lackluster copyright enforcement and the rise of successor services like Alltunes.com continue to rattle U.S. politicians and bureaucrats.

The nation does not yet meet "international standards" in its intellectual property laws, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) said at a hearing about international piracy convened here Thursday by a U.S. House of Representatives intellectual property subcommittee, which he leads.

In addition to government intervention, payment and credit card processors and Internet service providers need to do more to rid the Internet of international piracy operations, too, he said: "Their refusal to use the tech­nical tools at their disposal to staunch piracy exacerbates the problem."

Russia has already taken modest steps to improve its standing as an intellectual property law enforcer, such as refusing to renew the leases on 15 of 16 unlicensed optical disc plants that reside on its military land, said Victoria Espinel, assistant U.S. trade representative for intellectual property and innovation.

But, as negotiations progress over Russia's joining the WTO, the country still needs to shut down and prosecute owners of "illegal Web sites" operating in Russia, including Allofmp3's successors, Espinel said.

"Russia remains a continuing frustration," said Eric Smith, president of the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a coalition of seven trade associations representing the music, movie, video game, publishing and computer software realms.

Cross-border copyright law clashes
Enforcement authorities and international record industry groups have tried enlisting the help of outside companies, including payment processors, to cut off documented cases of pirated file transfers. But that technique hasn't always been successful, particularly in Russia.

Visa vice president Mark MacCarthy told politicians that a pair of local court decisions issued this summer limited his company's attempts to halt Russian banks from processing its transactions through Allofmp3.com and Alltunes.com.

Last year, Visa concluded that Allofmp3 site was illegal because it hadn't secured proper permission from music copyright holders and stopped allowing Visa transactions to be processed. It made the same move a few months later with Alltunes.com. But in two separate cases, the judges determined that there wasn't significant evidence to show Allofmp3 and Alltunes were engaging in illicit activity because they were ostensibly paying royalties to a royalty collection body.

In the United States' view, those supposed royalty collection authorities were "rogue" operations that weren't authorized by the record industry, Espinel said. It pressured Russia to enact a new law, set to take effect in January, that says only those online services that pay royalties to "authorized" collection bodies are legit, she added. Assuming they're enforced, it seems those legal changes could confirm what record companies have believed all along--that the Russian music stores are illegal.

Still, the situation demonstrates "the limits of private sector enforcement efforts in cases of international infringement," MacCarthy said, adding: "When local laws are not clear or are not consistent, governments and aggrieved businesses cannot put private sector intermediaries like Visa in the position of resolving the conflicts and lack of clarity."

Berman, a well-known friend of the entertainment industry, voiced sympathy for Visa's plight. "I think this is a case where the company you represent has shown real leadership and has done the right thing," he told MacCarthy. "I hope other service providers who do online transactions follow your example."

Should Allofmp3.com reappear, as the controversial online music store has promised, it likely will doom its country's chances of joining the World Trade Organization this year.

"We remain committed to helping Russia make it into the WTO," said Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the U.S. Trade Representative, the group that negotiates International trade agreements on behalf of the nation. "In order to make that happen though, they have to honor the commitments that they've made especially in the area of intellectual property rights."

If that wasn't clear enough, Spicer was more direct here: "I don't see Russia entering the WTO with sites like Allofmp3.com up and running."

Russia has tried to comply. At least they made an attempt two months ago to shut down Allofmp3.com and try the company's owner, Denis Kvasov, for violating copyright and intellectual property laws. The problem for Russian trade officials is that Kvasov apparently operated a law-abiding site. The Cheryomushki Court in Moscow acquitted Kvasov.

A message posted at Allofmp3.com notified customers that the site will return but doesn't say when. For some undisclosed reason, the date of the message is Aug. 31.

The recording industry claims that Allofmp3.com is a renegade retailer. The company distributes digital downloads without the permission of copyright holders. Allofmp3.com has claimed that it sends royalties to a Russia-based artist's group, but the Recording Industry Assoc. of America doesn't recognize it.

For a long time, U.S. trade officials have tried to pressure Russian authorities to close the site but Allofmp3.com continues to defy the music industry and government regulators from both countries.

Meanwhile, Russia's hopes of entering the WTO by the end of the year are evaporating. Think of the WTO as an exclusive club, one that Russia desperately wants to join.

The WTO is made up of 150 countries that have agreed on rules and regulations regarding trade. This makes selling goods or services overseas easier for companies from member countries, Spicer said.

But the RIAA claims that pirates outside of the U.S. are stealing billions of dollars. Before the U.S. will support Russia's WTO membership, it wants the government to clean up piracy and improve its standing with the entertainment industry.

So Allofmp3.com's fight will likely continue. How long the site can last is anybody's guess. One thing is certain, all the notoriety from the shut down, subsequent trial and reappearance is free publicity for Allofmp3.com.

In an interview posted on SecurityFocus, a person identifying himself as "DCT" denied that there is a cybergang responsible for creating the MPack tool, a package of malicious software responsible for the latest wave of PC compromises.

"We are just a group of people working together, but doing some illegal business," he said. He also denied any contact with real-world Russian criminals. He said the "Dream Coders Team" (DCT) consists of three people, plus a few other freelancers. The developers are all Russian, while the others are from various countries. He said $ash, an individual often mentioned in association with the selling of the MPack tool, is not one of the three but more of a "marketing director."

The MPack tool is a package of malicious exploits that allow online criminals to compromise PCs. To carry out an attack a user is directed to a site containing a malicious link. The browser then follows that link to a server hosting MPack. The tool then scans the browser for known vulnerabilities and attempts to exploit one for the purpose of compromising the machine. The machine can then be used for identity theft or as a part of a larger botnet.

DCT said that all the publicity surrounding the recent MPack attacks had increased interest in sales of the tool. However, it has also drawn the attention of law enforcement. "In Russia there is a law which forbids (malicious software) creation tools like MPack, (but) we secure our systems to the best possible extent, so that even a police officer would not be able to get the PCs analyzed," said DCT. Despite these precautions, he said that "we will have to shut down the project soon."

Those friendly Russians want to bring more energy directly to your doorstep if you live in North America. That means digging the world's longest tunnel. The proposed project would dig a tunnel over 60 miles long beneath the Bering Sea, surfacing at two islands en route.

Next week a coalition of Russian businesses will present this plan to Canada and the U.S. If it moves ahead, the tunnel would be twice as long as the one now connecting Britain and France.

The tunnel would connect major highways and pipelines yet to be constructed. The hope is to deliver petroleum, natural gas and even electricity from energy-rich Russia to energy-hungry North America. You can bet Saudi Arabia is NOT going to invest in this.

This tunnel project promises to run counter to any plan from President Bush to lessen American need for oil. But there is a green angle as well. Some of the electricity is supposed to come from yet-to-be-built tidal power plants in eastern Siberia.

There is one reassuring angle if you're already planning your trans-Siberian drive for 2025--Miami to Mermansk by car. There are no major earthquake fault lines running beneath the Bering Sea. So you may drive through a tunnel next to a large pipeline full of natural gas in relative security.