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The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.

Undercover FBI agents used this hyperlink-enticement technique, which directed Internet users to a clandestine government server, to stage armed raids of homes in Pennsylvania, New York, and Nevada last year. The supposed video files actually were gibberish and contained no illegal images.

A CNET News.com review of legal documents shows that courts have approved of this technique, even though it raises questions about entrapment, the problems of identifying who’s using an open wireless connection–and whether anyone who clicks on a FBI link that contains no child pornography should be automatically subject to a dawn raid by federal police.

Roderick Vosburgh, a doctoral student at Temple University who also taught history at La Salle University, was raided at home in February 2007 after he allegedly clicked on the FBI’s hyperlink. Federal agents knocked on the door around 7 a.m., falsely claiming they wanted to talk to Vosburgh about his car. Once he opened the door, they threw him to the ground outside his house and handcuffed him.

Vosburgh was charged with violating federal law, which criminalizes “attempts” to download child pornography with up to 10 years in prison. Last November, a jury found Vosburgh guilty on that count, and a sentencing hearing is scheduled for April 22, at which point Vosburgh could face three to four years in prison.

The implications of the FBI’s hyperlink-enticement technique are sweeping. Using the same logic and legal arguments, federal agents could send unsolicited e-mail messages to millions of Americans advertising illegal narcotics or child pornography–and raid people who click on the links embedded in the spam messages. The bureau could register the “unlawfulimages.com” domain name and prosecute intentional visitors. And so on.

“The evidence was insufficient for a reasonable jury to find that Mr. Vosburgh specifically intended to download child pornography, a necessary element of any ‘attempt’ offense,” Vosburgh’s attorney, Anna Durbin of Ardmore, Penn., wrote in a court filing that is attempting to overturn the jury verdict before her client is sentenced.

In a telephone conversation on Wednesday, Durbin added: “I thought it was scary that they could do this. This whole idea that the FBI can put a honeypot out there to attract people is kind of sad. It seems to me that they’ve brought a lot of cases without having to stoop to this.”

Durbin did not want to be interviewed more extensively about the case because it is still pending; she’s waiting for U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage to rule on her motion. Unless he agrees with her and overturns the jury verdict, Vosburgh–who has no prior criminal record–will be required to register as a sex offender for 15 years and will be effectively barred from continuing his work as a college instructor after his prison sentence ends.

How the hyperlink sting operation worked
The government’s hyperlink sting operation worked like this: FBI Special Agent Wade Luders disseminated links to the supposedly illicit porn on an online discussion forum called Ranchi, which Luders believed was frequented by people who traded underage images. One server allegedly associated with the Ranchi forum was rangate.da.ru, which is now offline with a message attributing the closure to “non-ethical” activity.

In October 2006, Luders posted a number of links purporting to point to videos of child pornography, and then followed up with a second, supposedly correct link 40 minutes later. All the links pointed to, according to a bureau affidavit, a “covert FBI computer in San Jose, California, and the file located therein was encrypted and non-pornographic.”

Excerpt from an FBI affidavit filed in the Nevada case showing how the hyperlink-sting was conducted.

Some of the links, including the supposedly correct one, included the hostname uploader.sytes.net. Sytes.net is hosted by no-ip.com, which provides dynamic domain name service to customers for $15 a year.

When anyone visited the upload.sytes.net site, the FBI recorded the Internet Protocol address of the remote computer. There’s no evidence the referring site was recorded as well, meaning the FBI couldn’t tell if the visitor found the links through Ranchi or another source such as an e-mail message.

With the logs revealing those allegedly incriminating IP addresses in hand, the FBI sent administrative subpoenas to the relevant Internet service provider to learn the identity of the person whose name was on the account–and then obtained search warrants for dawn raids.

Excerpt from FBI affidavit in Nevada case that shows visits to the hyperlink-sting site.

The search warrants authorized FBI agents to seize and remove any “computer-related” equipment, utility bills, telephone bills, any “addressed correspondence” sent through the U.S. mail, video gear, camera equipment, checkbooks, bank statements, and credit card statements.

While it might seem that merely clicking on a link wouldn’t be enough to justify a search warrant, courts have ruled otherwise. On March 6, U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt in Nevada agreed with a magistrate judge that the hyperlink-sting operation constituted sufficient probable cause to justify giving the FBI its search warrant.

The defendant in that case, Travis Carter, suggested that any of the neighbors could be using his wireless network. (The public defender’s office even sent out an investigator who confirmed that dozens of homes were within Wi-Fi range.)

But the magistrate judge ruled that even the possibilities of spoofing or other users of an open Wi-Fi connection “would not have negated a substantial basis for concluding that there was probable cause to believe that evidence of child pornography would be found on the premises to be searched.” Translated, that means the search warrant was valid.

Entrapment: Not a defense
So far, at least, attorneys defending the hyperlink-sting cases do not appear to have raised unlawful entrapment as a defense.

“Claims of entrapment have been made in similar cases, but usually do not get very far,” said Stephen Saltzburg, a professor at George Washington University’s law school. “The individuals who chose to log into the FBI sites appear to have had no pressure put upon them by the government…It is doubtful that the individuals could claim the government made them do something they weren’t predisposed to doing or that the government overreached.”

The outcome may be different, Saltzburg said, if the FBI had tried to encourage people to click on the link by including misleading statements suggesting the videos were legal or approved.

In the case of Vosburgh, the college instructor who lived in Media, Penn., his attorney has been left to argue that “no reasonable jury could have found beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Vosburgh himself attempted to download child pornography.”

Vosburgh faced four charges: clicking on an illegal hyperlink; knowingly destroying a hard drive and a thumb drive by physically damaging them when the FBI agents were outside his home; obstructing an FBI investigation by destroying the devices; and possessing a hard drive with two grainy thumbnail images of naked female minors (the youths weren’t having sex, but their genitalia were visible).

The judge threw out the third count and the jury found him not guilty of the second. But Vosburgh was convicted of the first and last counts, which included clicking on the FBI’s illicit hyperlink.

In a legal brief filed on March 6, his attorney argued that the two thumbnails were in a hidden “thumbs.db” file automatically created by the Windows operating system. The brief said that there was no evidence that Vosburgh ever viewed the full-size images–which were not found on his hard drive–and the thumbnails could have been created by receiving an e-mail message, copying files, or innocently visiting a Web page.

From the FBI’s perspective, clicking on the illicit hyperlink and having a thumbs.db file with illicit images are both serious crimes. Federal prosecutors wrote: “The jury found that defendant knew exactly what he was trying to obtain when he downloaded the hyperlinks on Agent Luder’s Ranchi post. At trial, defendant suggested unrealistic, unlikely explanations as to how his computer was linked to the post. The jury saw through the smokes (sic) and mirrors, as should the court.”

And, as for the two thumbnail images, prosecutors argued (note that under federal child pornography law, the definition of “sexually explicit conduct” does not require that sex acts take place):

The first image depicted a pre-pubescent girl, fully naked, standing on one leg while the other leg was fully extended leaning on a desk, exposing her genitalia… The other image depicted four pre-pubescent fully naked girls sitting on a couch, with their legs spread apart, exposing their genitalia. Viewing this image, the jury could reasonably conclude that the four girls were posed in unnatural positions and the focal point of this picture was on their genitalia…. And, based on all this evidence, the jury found that the images were of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, and certainly did not require a crystal clear resolution that defendant now claims was necessary, yet lacking.

Prosecutors also highlighted the fact that Vosburgh visited the “loli-chan” site, which has in the past featured a teenage Webcam girl holding up provocative signs (but without any nudity).

Civil libertarians warn that anyone who clicks on a hyperlink advertising something illegal–perhaps found while Web browsing or received through e-mail–could face the same fate.

When asked what would stop the FBI from expanding its hyperlink sting operation, Harvey Silverglate, a longtime criminal defense lawyer in Cambridge, Mass. and author of a forthcoming book on the Justice Department, replied: “Because the courts have been so narrow in their definition of ‘entrapment,’ and so expansive in their definition of ‘probable cause,’ there is nothing to stop the Feds from acting as you posit.”

A new kind of flash memory technology with potentially greater capacity and durability, lower power requirements, and the same design as flash NAND is primed to challenge today’s solid-state disk products.

Fremont, Calif.-based Nanochip Inc. said it has made breakthroughs in its array-based memory research that will enable it to deliver working prototypes to potential manufacturing partners next year. Three investors, including Intel Capital, recently put $14 million into the company, which has been developing the technology since its founding in 1996.

“It’s a technology that doesn’t depend on Moore’s Law,” says Gordon Knight, CEO of Nanochip. “This technology should go at least 10 generations.”

Knight was alluding to the decades-long trend in which the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit roughly doubles every two years. Current thinking is that flash memory could hit its limit at around 32 to 45 nanometers. That describes the smallest possible width of a metal line on the circuit or the amount of space between that line and the next line. The capacity of an IC is restricted by the ability to “print” to a smaller and smaller two-dimensional plane, otherwise known as the lithography.

And that, according to Stefan Lai, is where Nanochip’s technology shines. “Moore’s Law is driven by lithography,” says Lai, a member of Nanochip’s technical advisory board, as well as vice president of business development at Ovonyx Inc. and former vice president of Intel Corp.’s flash memory group. “Every two years, you need to buy this new machine that allows you to print something that’s smaller and finer.”

Array-based memory uses a grid of microscopic probes to read and write to a storage material. The storage area isn’t defined by the lithography but by the movement of the probes. “If [Nanochip] can move the probes one-tenth the distance, for example, they can get 100 times the density with no change in the lithography,” says Lai. “You don’t have to buy all these new machines.”

Lai said that in principle, Nanochip could develop the ability to move the probe a single atom at a time. The company said its current generation of probes has a radius smaller than 25nm, but it projects that eventually the probes could be shrunk to two or three nanometers apiece. That scale, said Knight will enable development in 10 to 12 years of a memory chip greater than 1TB. For a first generation, anticipated in 2010, Knight says he expects a small number of chips to be in excess of 100GB, but a more realistic number is “tens of gigabytes” per integrated circuit, a capacity comparable to the current generation of flash devices.
A cutaway of a MEMS chip
Click to view larger image
Reusing the old equipment for new chips

Knight sees a market for Nanochip’s technology in USB drives, solid-state disk drives and even enterprise servers. In each case, he believes, there are advantages with array-based memory.

Unlike flash NAND, where the frequently-changing lithography requires construction of ever-pricier manufacturing plants, Nanochip can manufacture its chips on existing low-cost semiconductor equipment, according to Marlene Bourne, head of analyst firm The Bourne Report. “They’re using used equipment [and] adapting to their needs,” she says. “Same machinery, same equipment, same materials, same basic processing steps. You’re just creating three-dimensional objects instead of a flat [integrated circuit].” That will hold true, she says, even as the company increases the density of its chips. That could provide a cost advantage over solid-state drives, which are currently in the range of $15 to $18 per gigabyte.

Like solid-state drives, array-based memory requires no motor, which reduces its power consumption and heat output in comparison with spinning disk hard drives, says Lai. The mechanism used to move the probes is very low power, he says. Because they don’t require “a hundred pieces to make the hard drive work,” Lai says he believes Nanochip products will be more rugged.

Unlike traditional disk drives in servers, says Knight, his company’s technology prevents the queuing problems that surface when multiple users try to access data. “When you have an array of these chips, you have many, many points of access,” he says. An internal controller inside the Nanochip sends the tips down to locate specific data, which is returned in multiplex form and output in serial form, “just like the output of a NAND flash drive or disk drive — but in fact, the data is spread out over a few hundred tips.”
Nanochip’s probe and tip
Click to view larger image

Array-based technology isn’t something new and unique, says Bourne. Nanochip is simply applying it in a slightly different way. “The tips that form the core of this memory technology are what’s being used in atomic force microscopes,” she points out.
IBM’s first attempt with Millipede

IBM first showed a similar technology in the late 1990s. The millipede project, which is no longer in active research at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory, used microelectrical mechanical system (MEMS) components. In MEMS, the electronics or “brains” of the chip are usually fabricated using integrated circuits, while the moving parts are microscopic components etched from silicon in a micromachining process. Millipede itself was based on nanoscale research in which individual iron atoms were arranged with atomic precision on a special copper surface. That research won two IBM scientists the 1986 Nobel Prize in physics.

Millipede works by using a microscopic probe to make an indent in a polymer material. Each indent represents a single bit as part of the write operation. The indentations can then be removed from the material surface during an erase operation.

By using thousands of such probes in parallel, array-based memory achieves high data rates, with each probe able to read, write and erase in its own data field.

Where millipede puts “dents in plastic,” Nanochip has found a better material for the read-write process to occur, according to Knight, though he declines say what that better material is. A year and a half ago, Knight says, the company made a breakthrough on a new media type that could be infinitely rewritable. “The media never wears out,” Knight claims. “That’s really what got the company rolling fast.”

In-Stat analyst Steve Cullen believes Nanochip has licensed a material that uses chalcogenide glass from Ovonyx. Knight acknowledges that his company has worked with that kind of recording material but is unwilling to say more on the topic.

Lai, who works for Ovonyx, declines to comment on the material being used by Nanochip but points out that the phase-change semiconductor work being done by Ovonyx has more to do with reducing the size of current circuit technologies. “We will continue to follow Moore’s Law.”

A potential stumbling block for Nanochip’s technology is that the tips on the probes, which have a radius smaller than 25nm, could wear out quickly.

Tip wear is particularly relevant if array-based probes are adopted as storage mechanisms in servers. “Obviously, you have a lot of tip wear that goes into an enterprise server that’s operating 24/7, for five, six or seven years,” says Knight.

Lai concurs. The tip is a problem, he says, because it touches the surface of the material.

Knight declines to specify how Nanochip has resolved the tip wear dilemma, but he insists the company has had a breakthrough in its research that has addressed the problem.
Probe-based storage in the real world

In-Stat’s Cullen claims the new technology will find a home as a replacement for hard drives in notebook computers. “The thing that strikes me about 100GB is that it’s a nice size for something to replace a disk in a notebook PC,” he says. “All they’ve got to do is come close to the price of a disk and then offer some other advantage. It may consume less power than a disk. It could be more rugged.”

Nanochip is confident in its ability to produce a product with the same size as existing drives. “We’ll make the interface so it’ll just plug and play,” says Knight. “It’s a new technology, but you want it to fit right in.”

Lai believes that the new memory could herald breakthroughs in mobile devices and biotechnology. “You now need your whole life history stored in your mobile device,” he says. “If you want something to store your genome in, it may take a lot of memory, and you’ll want to carry it with you.”

The big question that remains for Nanochip is whether the company can create working prototypes with the cost advantages that array-based technology is supposed to offer over conventional forms of memory. The fact that IBM appears to have moved on from its Millipede research doesn’t alarm Bourne. In fact, she points out, several people from the IBM team have joined Nanochip’s board of advisers. Knight said the company has 50 engineers and scientists working around the world on the prototypes, either as part of Nanochip itself or within the companies that his firm is partnering with.

IBM last publicly shared details of its probe-based storage research in a gathering of companies and organizations involved in a joint research project called ProTeM, for “probe-based terabit memory.”

According to Evangelos Eleftheriou, an IBM fellow and manager of IBM Labs’ storage technologies group, the company built a prototype that achieved a storage capacity of a terabyte per square inch. He says that research will be published in an article appearing in a couple of months in the “IBM Journal of Research and Development.” But the group doesn’t have plans to develop any products. It will leave that to other companies that might choose to license the research, he says.

The challenge for adoption of any new type of memory, points out Eleftheriou, is that flash itself isn’t standing still. “In 2010, it’s going to be $1 per gigabyte … so hopefully the cost per gigabyte [of probe-based arrays] is going to be low.”

Now, he says, the areas of interest for probe-based technology at IBM have moved onto topics including archival storage and maskless lithography, a technique that separates individual molecules and places them precisely onto a surface.

“The focus of our research is [to] explore ways to enhance the speed in probe sensing and the way we modify the surface — how fast we can do those things… There are many things that come together, from positioning control, to materials to micro-machining, micro-fabricating, so it’s extremely fascinating altogether.”

(AP) — An Internet committee investigating suspicious domain name transactions has found no evidence that insider information is being used to snatch desired Internet addresses to make money off the individual or business that actually wants to register them.

The committee said the 120 claims of “domain name front running” it reviewed generally resulted from misunderstandings about how the domain name industry works.

“When Internet users are unable to distinguish among different market activities, they often appear to conclude that they have fallen victim to a domain name front runner,” the committee said in a new report.

In some cases, however, the committee found that a separate practice of domain name tasting may be causing problems. That refers to someone testing the financial viability of a name for up to five days and then returning it for a full refund, using a loophole in registration policies. Domain tasting can tie up millions of Internet addresses, including ones someone checks but does not buy.

The Security and Stability Advisory Committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which has oversight of domain name policies and is known by its acronym ICANN, recommended better education so consumers know what to expect.

The report, brought before the ICANN board in New Delhi on Friday, did not examine a controversial practice by domain name seller Network Solutions LLC of grabbing names that people search for on its Web site but don’t immediately register.

The company said it did that to keep the names from front runners. But the practice shared similarities with what Network Solutions was trying to prevent. It has made some changes in response to complaints, and its discussions with ICANN continue.

The ICANN committee said cases suspected of front running often turned out to be coincidence, with multiple parties interested in the same names.

Separately, ICANN has floated a proposal to charge its existing fee of 20 cents per domain name even if the name is returned, making tasting masses of names more expensive.

During ICANN meetings in New Delhi this week, many parties complained that the fee would penalize legitimate returns, such as ones to correct for typos, said Paul Twomey, ICANN’s chief executive. The board took no action Friday.

Moving the project from in-house to open source is a way for a relatively small company to get the infrastructure software it needs, Judd says. “We aren’t in the database business. this is the kind of infrastructure that should be in open source. This is not company proprietary stuff,” he says.

The current Hypertable version is a 0.9 alpha release, and has been tested on about 10 nodes so far, Judd says. But Yahoo developers have expressed in interest in “kicking the tires” and testing on more nodes. Yahoo developers are already involved in another way: Hypertable stores its data on a distributed filesystem, and the database developers are currently using the Apache Software Foundation’s Hadoop, which Yahoo supports by employing lead Hadoop developer Doug Cutting and his team and with infrastructure.

The Google database design on which Hypertable is based, Bigtable, attracted a lot of developer buzz and a “Best Paper” award from the USENIX Association for “Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data” a 2006 publication from nine Google researchers including Fay Chang, Jeffrey Dean, and Sanjay Ghemawat. Google’s Bigtable uses the company’s in-house Google File System for storage.

The API for Hypertable is slightly different from Bigtable’s, Judd says. Although it is not a full SQL database, it is more featureful than a simple key/value store such as Brad Fitzpatrick’s memcached. Memcached is widely used along with a conventional SQL database in high-traffic web sites, to cache chunks of HTML and XML and save an application from having to query the main database.

Brian Aker, director of architecture for open source database supplier MySQL AB, says that he can see a development path that would bridge the gap from the Hypertable API to a full SQL database. In an email interview, he wrote, “Someone could turn this into a backend for MySQL without a lot of effort. You would gain an SQL interface by doing this.” For Hypertable as is, Aker says he can see several applications. Besides log data, Hypertable could be useful for image and object servers, and for pre-rendering responses to Representational State Transfer (REST) queries produced by web applications. By Don Marti, LinuxWorld.com,

EST, explained in one of last year’s hot web development books, RESTful Web Services, is a design philosophy for web applications that exposes a web application as a large tree of URLs. Since a client could potentially request or post data to one of many URLs, each responsible for a small piece of information, Hypertable could be a useful way to scale the REST server to handle more traffic.

Polish university student Marek Cygan has won this year’s Google Code Jam, the annual programming contest held last Friday at the California headquarters of the search firm.

Dutch student Erik-Jan Krijgsman finished second, followed by Petr Mitrichev from Moscow’s State University.

Cygan beat 99 fellow programmers from 32 countries to the first price of $10,000. The contestants were selected from a group of 14,500 hopefuls from around the world who entered the contest through the internet.

The programmers had 75 minutes to create a solution for three problems, followed by a 10-minute final round. Contestants were allowed to use the Java, C++, C# or VB.NET programming languages.

During an interview at the event, Google declined to provide details about the tasks as the competition was still running.

Previous contests involved contestants creating an application to calculate the shortest route through a maze, and to devise an application that would determine the largest group of people that know each other in a social network.

Another provided the coder with the weight of several children and asked them to create an application that would spread them on a seesaw so that the device would balance.

The tasks are not picked randomly, but are linked to problems that Google itself is facing with its applications.

“Things like finding the fastest way out of a maze is not that different from computing directions in Google Maps,” Jeff Huber, vice president of engineering at Google, told vnunet.com.

The competition helps the company identify programmers who are good at solving such problems and thereby acts as a recruiting tool. About a third of the 100 finalists also had a job interview scheduled.

Huber stressed, however, that winning the competition did not guarantee a job and that Google still followed its regular recruiting procedures. “This is a nice introduction, but not a shortcut,” he said.

This year’s competition marked the first time that a woman made it to the final round. Although Google declined to comment on Stefanie Leitzka’s performance, Huber hoped that the German student’s participation would encourage other women to start a career in computer sciences.

“We have a long way to go to improving the diversity that we should have in the field and the industry,” he acknowledged.

Huber could not provide a percentage of women software engineers in Google’s workforce, but said that the company is “healthy” relative to the industry.

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