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![]() ![]() "I’ve never heard of anyone doing that." – Alex Lidow December 9th, 2017 ![]() Not Even Free TV Can Get People to Stop Pirating Movies and TV Shows Ashley Rodriguez Since the internet made it easier to illegally download and stream movies and TV shows, Hollywood struggled with people pirating its works online. About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to piracy globally last year, Digital TV Research found (pdf), and it’s expected to approach $10 billion by 2022. Streaming-video services like Netflix and Hulu have made it more affordable to access a wide-range of titles from different TV networks and movie studios. But the availability of cheap content online has done little to curb piracy, according to research published in Management Science (paywall) last month. Customers who were offered free subscriptions to a video-on-demand package (SVOD) were just as likely to turn to piracy to find programming as those without the offering, researchers at Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics and Carnegie Mellon University found. The researchers partnered with an unnamed internet-service provider—in a region they chose not to disclose—to offer customers who were already prone to piracy an on-demand package for free for 45 days. About 10,000 households participated in the study, and about half were given the free service. The on-demand service was packaged like Netflix or Hulu in layout, appearance, and scope of programming, but was delivered through a TV set-top box. It had a personalized recommendation engine that surfaced popular programming based on what those customers were already watching illegally through BitTorrent logs, which were obtained from a third-party firm. Free TV isn’t enough The study found that while the participants watched 4.6% more TV overall when they had the free on-demand service, they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering. That included new theatrical releases, which go to theaters and premium services before on-demand channels like Netflix, as well as other series and movies that were not licensed on the service.(Those whose tastes, based on BitTorrent logs, aligned perfectly with the programming on the service were a little less likely to use BitTorrent, but that was not the majority of pirates.) The findings suggest that launching an online-streaming offering, like Disney is doing in 2019, or bringing programming to more services like Netflix won’t alone stop piracy. HBO, which offers its flagship series Game of Thrones in 130 countries through networks or its online-subscription service HBO Now, was still plagued by piracy during the latest season. “To the extent that people can find free, pirated content easily, it’s going to be very difficult to get them to pay for it in a legal channel,” Michael Smith, one of the report’s authors at Carnegie Mellon University, told Quartz. Making programming available sooner could help solve the problem, he said. That’s partly why Lachlan Murdoch, co-chairman of 21st Century Fox, has argued for shortening the exclusive 90-day windows that cinemas get. “It goes in the theaters for about 45 days and then the theaters by contract have a 45-day blackout where you’re not allowed to show that to anyone,” said Murdoch at the Business Insider Ignition conference last week. “The only place they get it is actually from the piracy sites, so movie theatrical windows will also collapse and will collapse quickly.” Making it harder to pirate programming could help, too. Shutting down the file-sharing site Megaupload increased the revenue at two movie studios studied by at least 6% over an 18-week period, Smith found in earlier research (pdf). Pirates are cheapskates The latest study found that people who were prone to piracy weren’t willing to spend much on the on-demand offering once the 45-day free trial was up. They were only willing to spend about $3.25 a month, compared to the $13 the package costs. Netflix charges $10.99 a month for its standard service, after raising rates in the US this year. Its cheapest offering is $7.99 a month in the US. There are a few caveats to the study: The report may omit true cord-cutters, because the free SVOD service was delivered over the TV. Researchers did not disclose the region where the study took place, which could affect the audience for on-demand video and piracy. And the study, which was published for the first time last month, conducted from December 2014-February 2015. Since then, streaming has become more established, the price point has risen (Netflix’s standard plan was $8.99 a month in the US then), and the way people pirate video has changed. The majority of people who pirated the latest season of Game of Thrones, for example, did so via streaming, while the remaining 15% did so by torrent or download, Muso data found. But Smith said the main point holds true. “This is an unusual study given that we were able to convince an ISP to run this experiment,” he said. “It’s one of the closest things to a real-world setting that you’re going to find for this sort of study… It’s really hard to get people back to paying for something they’re used to getting for free.” https://qz.com/1145988/study-not-eve...ies-and-shows/ ![]() 'Rampant' Piracy in Singapore Sparks Calls for Crackdown from Hollywood, Sports Titans • Group for Disney, Fox, NBA says TV boxes allow illegal streams • Government IP office says it will work with content providers Singapore, which prides itself on being a haven for law and order, is being called a haven for pirating copyrighted programming by entertainment titans such as Walt Disney, HBO, the National Basketball Association and the English Premier League. Viewers in the city-state buy legitimate set-top boxes that also allow unauthorised streaming of thousands of movies, TV shows and live sporting events, said the Coalition Against Piracy. Its 21 members, including divisions of Sony Corp. and Twenty-First Century Fox Inc, want the government to block the pirating software inside the devices, which are found at local electronics stores and on e-commerce sites such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's Lazada. "Within the Asia-Pacific region, Singapore is the worst in terms of availability of illicit streaming devices," said Neil Gane, general manager of the Asia-focused coalition, referring to countries where the boxes are considered legal. "They have access to hundreds of illicit broadcasts of channels and video-on-demand content." Singapore is a focal point in the entertainment industry's campaign to curb piracy in the region. Online TV and movie piracy will cost the industry an estimated US$31.8 billion (S$42.87 billion) in global revenue this year, reaching US$51.6 billion by 2022, according to London-based Digital TV Research. The Asia-Pacific region will become the largest for online piracy next year, overtaking North America, the researcher said. Uncensored Content Singapore ranked ninth in the number of visits per Internet user to piracy websites, according to London-based Muso TNT, which tracks such visits. In a separate survey of 1,000 Singaporeans sponsored by industry association CASBAA, about 40 per cent said they were active consumers of pirated content. "The piracy here is rampant and shockingly so," said Lise-Anne Stott, Singapore-based head of legal for A+E Networks Asia, a coalition member that offers History, Lifetime and three other channels there. The boxes allow Singaporeans to use apps that access programming not shown at home because it's censored, lacks a licensing deal or requires a subscription fee users don't want to pay. In some cases, users can stream uncensored versions - with nudity or violence - of locally available shows such as A+E's Vikings. "Copyright infringement is not so much about a device or technology as it is about whether that device or technology is used in a manner that is illegal," the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore said in an e-mail. "Users of such devices should therefore ensure that they are accessing content from authorised content providers." Online Tutorials Some of the devices scraping the Internet for unauthorised content come from Chinese vendors such as Unblock and EVPad. The square gadgets can be bought either with the streaming apps already installed for plug-and-pirate use or with embedded links for downloading those apps. Tutorials to set them up are found on YouTube and Baidu Inc's online forum. The Singapore government said it didn't consider the devices themselves to be illegal. The boxes also can view legally available websites such as YouTube. At Sim Lim Square, an electronics market a short drive from the president's official residence, at least 15 retailers sell the set-top boxes for as little as S$100. Many storefronts advertise that these boxes can stream content otherwise unavailable in Singapore. Not Downloading Ken Lee, a salesman, said his store sells 10 to 20 boxes on a typical weekend. During major electronics fairs, sales can reach 300 a day, he said. Lee said he tells buyers there's nothing unlawful about using the devices. Since the boxes aren't downloading copies of programmes, they aren't violating copyright laws, he said. Unblocktech didn't respond to requests for comment. EVPad said in an e-mail that customers decide which apps to download, and it cannot be held responsible. The industry's efforts include lobbying the Singapore government to eliminate any confusion about legal uses of the devices and to make it easier to take legal action against companies offering pirated content, said John Medeiros, Hong Kong-based chief policy officer for CASBAA, the coalition's parent organisation. "We continue to engage with the industry on their concerns in relation to the popularity of devices that connect televisions to access online content," Singapore's Intellectual Property Office said. Ranked Fourth The coalition also wants Singapore to block streams of illegal content from entering the country. Last year, the country blocked one website for offering illegal downloads. Minister for Home Affairs and Law K. Shanmugam said in August that Singapore has "a strong intellectual-property regime which protects innovations comprehensively and effectively". The next month, the World Economic Forum ranked Singapore fourth out of 137 countries for protecting intellectual property rights. Coalition members Sony Pictures Television Networks Asia and Viacom International Media Networks declined to comment. Walt Disney Co. and HBO Asia didn't respond to requests for comment. "This new coalition adds to our efforts to protect the legitimate rights and interests of the NBA and our partners," said Ayala Deutsch, executive vice-president and deputy general counsel for the league, which earns US$2.6 billion annually in broadcast rights from US-based networks alone. The English Premier League, which generates at least 1 billion pounds (S$1.82 billion) a year from international media rights, is "currently investigating" suppliers of pirated content in Asia after helping Thai authorities break up an illegal streaming operation there. Games are available in Singapore with a subscription. "The Premier League is currently engaged in its most comprehensive global anti-piracy programme," it said. "This includes supporting our broadcast partners in South-east Asia with their efforts to prevent the sale of illicit streaming devices." — With assistance by Bruce Einhorn, Krystal Chia, Yuan Gao, David Hellier, Keith Zhai, and Scott Soshnick https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-for-crackdown ![]() Facebook and YouTube are Full of Pirated Video Streams of Live NFL Games • YouTube and Facebook host multiple pirated video streams of many NFL games. • Some of these feeds attract thousands of users before they're taken down. • Uploading pirates are like temporary owners of a digital sports speakeasy, warning viewers that the viewing party could end soon -- and telling them where to go next. John Shinal, Michelle Castillo Pirated video streams of televised National Football League games are widespread on Facebook and on Google's YouTube service, CNBC has found. Using technology from these internet giants, thousands of football fans were able to watch long segments of many contests free of charge during the league's Week 13 schedule of games last Thursday and Sunday. Dozens of these video streams, pirated from CBS and NBC broadcasts, featured ads from well-known national brands interspersed with game action. This online activity comes as the league struggles with declining ratings that have been blamed variously on player protests during the national anthem and revelations about former players suffering from a brain disease caused by concussions. Yet this illegal distribution of NFL content may also be crimping the league's viewer numbers. The NFL strictly controls television and online video rights to its games. In particular, games played by teams that are not in a local TV market are often not televised except on DirecTV, and only for subscribers who pay extra for a package called "Sunday Ticket." That package starts at $55 per month. If pirated versions of these games are available online users might ignore the DirecTV package, or skip locally televised games that they might otherwise watch. It also means that advertisers are reaching audience members that they did not pay for. Facebook reportedly is prepared to spend more than $1 billion for the rights to future sports content, but as of now Amazon is the only large technology company with a streaming deal for football. It paid $50 million for the rights to stream 10 Thursday Night Football games this year. Almost-live whack-a-mole CNBC was able to find dozens of feeds on Facebook and YouTube (including duplicates of the same game) over the past week. Most were disabled by Facebook and YouTube after as little as 10 minutes, but some stayed online for 20 minutes or more -- long enough to attract thousands of viewers. For the majority of games followed by CNBC (though not all) these pirated video feeds attracted more viewers on YouTube than on Facebook. For example, with 10:32 left in the second quarter of Thursday night's game between the Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys, 6,986 people were watching a feed posted by a YouTube user named "Kai sisir," according to the stream's counter. Over on Facebook, meanwhile, a stream of the same game, posted by a user called "Unlimited Stream NFL," had attracted some 2,000 viewers by the time it was shut down at 5:49 p.m. PT. The following screen shots show some of the games that were available to watch this past Sunday. While many of these videos were uploaded to YouTube and Facebook via feeds with names such as "Allsport live," "HQ Live," "Live Streaming NFL" and "Am_Football Live Anvivo," none were able to maintain a truly live feed. Rather, most videos trailed the action televised on the networks by at least a play or two. And the viewing experience was far from seamless, with feeds shut down at times during an important play, as when YouTube shut down the one from Kai sisir just after Redskins quarterback Kirk Cousins fumbled the ball with roughly 9:40 left in the second quarter. Still, a determined online viewer willing to jump from one feed to another can watch long portions of games that otherwise would be unavailable in their region or require a subscription to the Sunday Ticket. These pirated feeds were made easier to find thanks to the search software of both companies. Typing the letters "nfl" into the search box on either website prompted the software to suggest similar, related phrases such as "nfl live streaming," for example. Clicking on that search string then called up a list of video feeds for various games: YouTube also hosts several tutorial videos explaining how to watch the NFL for free. To give one measure of the interest in these pirated streams, one posted two years ago by a user called WizzyIggy had been viewed 177,000 times as of Monday afternoon. Facebook said via a spokesperson that it uses "reference streams" provided by video publishers and media companies to check for pirated content with a tool called Rights Manager. "If a match surfaces, Rights Manager immediately takes action on the rule set by the rights holder -- for example, to block that stream," the Facebook spokesperson said in an email. "We've been growing our global team that processes these reports across time zones and continue to invest in our copyright tools. This remains a work in progress," the email said. An NFL spokesperson said the league was aware of the problem and have people whose full-time job is to track down illegal content and cases of piracy. YouTube did not return requests for comment. Like a digital sports speakeasy Uploading and hosting one of these feeds can turn ordinary Facebook or YouTube users into minor social media celebrities -- although the fame is fleeting. A Facebook user named Johnny Garcia uploaded an almost-live video feed that drew 1,400 viewers, 60 comments and 8 shares on the website. Like owners of a digital sports speakeasy, these video pirates warn viewers that the show will end soon and alert them where to go next to keep watching. "Sorry for the lag, I will fix when my stream gets put down, I will re-upload," Garcia said in a comment stream that ran in the stream he uploaded. Before it was taken down with 3:25 left in the first quarter, it had been on for at least 15 minutes, long enough to show ads from national brands like Bounty, Amazon and Sprint. A feed on YouTube uploaded by a user named "girangerwoder235" posted a message on it that said: "We Can't Broadcast Here Because YouTube copyright Click Link in comment." It had 274 people watching when the feed was disabled. The presence of ads -- and the quality of their feeds -- gave some pirate streams an air of legitimacy. For example, the game between the Tennessee Titans and Houston Texans early Sunday contained a long break in play at the 10:40 mark of the second quarter as officials reviewed a 4-yard touchdown pass by Texans quarterback Tom Savage. At that point, the CBS broadcast of the contest showed ads from Dodge, Verizon and Kay Jewelers, followed by promotional videos for the Carol Burnett 50th Anniversary Show and another for another show on the network called Man with a Plan. A CNBC reporter watched them all on a feed called "NFL Unoficcial LIVE," with a misspelling pointing to a possible overseas origin. Still, viewers of these pirated games could be a demanding audience, with many comments complaining about the start-and-stop quality of the video. "REALLY? just audio??" wrote a Facebook user called Nitrous De Jesus Rodriguez, on a feed titled "NFL Live HD." https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/06/how-...k-youtube.html ![]() ‘Coco’ Wins as Disney Aims to Dominate December Box Office Anousha Sakoui • Pixar feature pulls in $26.1 million in second weekend • Warner Bros. superhero film ‘Justice League’ comes in second Walt Disney Co. could own the month of December again. It’s already taken the first step, with the animated “Coco” on top for the second weekend in a row. The Pixar feature, based on Mexico’s Day of the Dead holiday, collected an estimated $26.1 million in theaters in the U.S. and Canada, ComScore Inc. said in an email Sunday. That just missed an estimate of $26.5 million by BoxOfficePro.com. The movie dominated a weekend without new wide releases. At this time of year, Hollywood is focused on unveiling smaller art-house movies that compete for awards like the Oscars. “Coco” will face little competition until Dec. 15, when Disney introduces what could be its biggest movie of the year: “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” The eighth installment in the saga of the Skywalker family is likely to rule the box office for the rest of 2017. “Coco” now has generated an estimated $280 million worldwide, ComScore said. Last year, Disney won each weekend in December thanks to the one-two punch of “Moana” and “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ber-box-office ![]() Disney Is Said to Have Resumed Talks to Buy Parts of Fox Michael J. de la Merced The Walt Disney Company has resumed talks with 21st Century Fox about buying at least part of the company, as Fox weighs whether to shrink its empire, two people briefed on the matter said on Saturday. Fox is still in talks with Comcast about a potential deal, added these people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the negotiations. The Murdochs, who control Fox, are expected to make a decision about whether to pursue a sale by the end of the year, one person added. The return of Disney, which held talks with Fox earlier this year, highlights how media companies are increasingly seeking to compete in a new era of streaming by getting bigger and acquiring more content. It also leaves medium-sized players like Fox to decide whether they can buy the scale they need — or sell and focus on particular business niches. If Fox decides to pursue sales negotiations, it would represent a potential unwinding of a media kingdom that the Murdoch family has assembled for decades. Disney and Comcast have been most interested in only part of the constellation of Fox businesses, notably the 20th Century Fox movie studio; cable channels like FX; Sky, the British broadcaster; Star, an Indian broadcaster. Fox would be left with several highly profitable businesses, including Fox News, its broadcast network and its sports pay-TV channel. Earlier this year, Disney said that it would build two Netflix-style streaming services to address structural challenges to its vast television businesses — namely that more consumers, particularly younger ones, are foregoing pricey cable subscriptions. One question that would still hang over any transaction is how regulators would view such a deal. The Justice Department has sued to block AT&T’s $85.4 billion takeover of Time Warner, a so-called vertical merger that would unite the largest television distributor in the United States with a major content producer. The Trump administration has argued that the combination would give one company too much power over both the creation of content and its distribution. The companies are fighting the government’s claims, asserting that they run contrary to established law. But deal makers have wondered whether the Trump administration’s stance would pose difficulties for any sale of Fox assets. Representatives for Fox, Disney and Comcast declined to comment, or did not immediately respond to requests for comment, on the state of the talks. News of the talks having resumed was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/02/b...ntury-fox.html ![]() Google Releases its Android File Storage Manager to All The Airdrop-like Files Go! file-sharing system is out of beta. Steve Dent Google has filled a big hole in its Android system by releasing Files Go!, its mobile file organization and sharing app. Launched in beta last month, the app makes it easier for Android users to free up space, find files, back them up to the cloud, and share them with other smartphones, even offline. It's one of the linchpin apps of Google's Oreo 8.1 (Go edition), a slimmed down version of Android meant for the less-powerful devices in developing nations. Files Go! will also be handy for power users who currently lean on third-party file organization apps, which are often paid or ad-supported. On top of giving you direct access to your downloads, received files, apps, images, video, audio and documents, it will offer suggestions for freeing up space. For instance, it can tell you how much you can free from your app cache, unused apps, large files and downloaded files. It'll also offer to move files to an SD card, if you have one. Another long overdue feature is the ability to share files offline, Airdrop-style. When you enable the feature, it lets you create a "hotspot" to connect and transfer files via Bluetooth. If a friend also has Files Go and file sharing enabled, it's simply a matter of hitting send or receive. "The file transfers are encrypted, fast (up to 125 Mbps) and free," says Google. The app can also remind you when you're low on storage and let you backup files to Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox and other apps. Google says it has been testing the app for a month and has saved users an average of 1GB space. It's now available for all on the Google Play Store, assuming you have Android 5.0 or higher. https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/05/...-file-manager/ ![]() Epic Games is Suing a 14 Year Old for Making a Cheat Tutorial and His Brilliant Mother is PISSED Cory Doctorow Epic Games makes the wildly successful multiplayer free-to-play game Fortnite, which is the locus of a pitched battle between players and publisher over game-mods, especially cheat-hacks that give unfair advantage to some players. A 14 year old boy named Caleb “Sky Orbit” Rogers made a video in which he demonstrated the use of one of these hacks. In response, the company sent Youtube a heavy-handed copyright takedown, claiming that capturing incidental footage of gameplay was a copyright violation, and that demonstrating the functionality of one of these aftermarket add-ons is also a copyright violation. Then Caleb Rogers correctly asserted that there was no copyright infringement here. Videos that capture small snippets of a videogame do not violate that game creator's copyrights, because they are fair use: they take a small part of the work (not the core of the work), for a critical purpose, without creating a substitute market for the work. No one who watches a 14 year old's screen capture of a videogame will decide that it's as much fun as playing the game. When Caleb Rogers filed a put-back notice with Youtube that reinstated his video, Epic responded by filing a lawsuit against him, repeating the incorrect claim that Rogers' video was a copyright infringing derivative work, and claiming that Rogers had formed, and then breached, a contract with Epic by playing their game and then talking about how to cheat in it. In response, Rogers' mother, Lauren Rogers, has filed an outstanding memo with the court explaining some of the problems with Epic's suit. She points out that Epic claims that her minor child is incapable of forming a contract, so he can't have breached a contract by violating the game's EULA. She adds that Epic published news releases that identified her minor child by name, breaching child protection law. She says that Epic is just wrong when they claim that Caleb was selling the cheat software. Finally, she says that it's impossible that a cheat program deprived the company of income from its free-to-play game, because the game was free-to-play. There's more, though. Epic has claimed that after Caleb Rogers filed his put-back notice on Youtube, they were obliged to sue him, or they'd lose the right to sue other people who did the same thing. This is wrong. There is the concept of "genericization" that's part of trademark law, under which someone who consistently fails to enforce their trademarks against competitors can eventually lose their mark. But Epic is suing Caleb Rogers for copyright infringement, which has no such doctrine. Lauren Rogers' memo also fails to mention the clear fair use nature of Caleb Rogers' video, and the Lenz decision, which requires rightsholders to consider fair use before sending takedown notices, and can make them liable for fees if they are found to have abused the takedown process by failing to do so. Caleb Rogers did some obnoxious things: cheating, boasting about cheating, then making a video about his takedown in which he said intemperate things about companies. But you know what's more obnoxious that 14 year old cheaters? Corporations staffed by grown-ass humans who file lawsuits against 14 year olds that advance absurd theories about copyright, infringement, fair use, contracts, and EULAs. If Epic wins its suit, the precedent it sets will not be limited to corporations who are upset about obnoxious teens -- it will establish that capturing incidental footage of games (the heart of Let's Play videos and innumerable other forms of online communication, criticism and analysis) is a copyright infringement if you hurt some corporate overlord's feelings in the process. “This particular lawsuit arose as a result of the defendant filing a DMCA counterclaim to a takedown notice on a YouTube video that exposed and promoted Fortnite Battle Royale cheats and exploits,” Epic told Polygon. “Under these circumstances, the law requires that we file suit or drop the claim.” https://boingboing.net/2017/11/28/fo...le-royale.html ![]() The Copyright Mavericks The geniuses behind the Wayback Machine have a new way to help libraries bring old books to the public. Jennifer Howard The internet has made it easier than ever to access information that you once had to dig through stacks and archives to find. You don’t have to have a New York Public Library card to make use of the system’s holdings as long as they’ve been digitized and made findable online. There’s a hitch, though. Copyright-holders, including publishers and authors, can get nervous about putting material online when they still have a commercial or intellectual stake in it. Nobody wants to deny creators a living—but murky and overlong copyright terms, combined with fear and uncertainty among librarians and readers, have locked up too much material for too long without benefit to anybody. Librarians have gotten bolder, however, and with the help of copyright specialists, they have been finding more creative ways to open up material without flouting the law. The current round of experimentation follows a decadelong legal struggle over what libraries can and can’t do with copyrighted works. In 2005, Google’s mammoth Google Books scanning project became the focus of copyright-infringement lawsuits brought by the Authors Guild and publishers. The case dragged on for years, but courts ultimately found in Google vs. Authors Guild that Google’s scanning work constituted fair use. (The Supreme Court declined to hear the authors’ appeal in 2015.) HathiTrust Digital Library fought and won a similar copyright-infringement action brought against it in 2011 by the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs. Although Google, HathiTrust, and the concept of fair use ultimately prevailed, U.S. copyright law, as set out in the Copyright Act of 1976, remains byzantine and punitive enough that many libraries still err on the side of caution when it comes to making their holdings available in digital form. Limited bandwidth plays a role here. “Taking calculated risks is something that most large research libraries have a limited capacity to do,” says Nancy Sims, copyright program librarian at the University of Minnesota. A project like HathiTrust “is the sort of thing a library can do maybe once every 15 or 20 years.” The latest calculated risk involving copyright comes from the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library based in the Bay Area. The IA does many things, including run the invaluable Wayback Machine, which archives web pages for posterity—20 years’ worth and counting now. As an independent nonprofit, IA tends to be scrappier and can afford to take more risks than its research-library counterparts. Now it’s dared to jump over a border wall many libraries will not: the year 1923, often used to mark the boundary between works still under copyright and those released into the public domain. It’s not a hard-and-fast standard—there are both exemptions to and extensions of copyright terms—but it’s become something of a default. “We’ve had to go on the assumption that anything published after 1923 was under copyright and had to be treated with caution,” says Mike Furlough, HathiTrust’s executive director. In October, the IA’s founder and digital librarian, Brewster Kahle, announced the debut of the Sonny Bono Memorial Collection. It’s named after the entertainer and California congressman who—much to the chagrin of those who felt copyright was already too restrictive—pushed to keep many 20th-century works about to enter the public domain locked up longer. Bono died not long before the passage of a 1998 law—not so fondly known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act—that extended the copyright life of works published in 1923 or later. Big rights-holders like the Walt Disney Co. benefited. The public did not. In a move that might tick off Cher’s late ex-husband if he knew about it, the Sonny Bono collection consists entirely of post-1923 works. It exploits an underappreciated portion of Section 108, the statute that lays out the conditions under which libraries and archives may reproduce copyrighted material. Kahle and the Internet Archive, working with Tulane University Law professor Elizabeth Townsend-Gard and some of her students, zeroed in on Section 108(h). It permits libraries and archives to make copies of works that are in the last 20 years of their copyright term—“Last Twenty” works, the IA calls them—as long as they aren’t actively being sold and as long there’s not a copy available “at a reasonable price.” In the headline of his blog post about it, Kahle crowed, “Books from 1923 to 1941 now liberated!” A few books, anyway. So far, the Internet Archive has used this approach to add 61 books to the Sonny Bono Memorial Collection. The IA promises that many more will be added soon. It’s not a knockout blow for copyright freedom. Users have probably not been clamoring to get their hands on some of these books—1933’s Frog, the Horse That Knew No Master by Col. S.P. Meek is not likely to be at the top of your to-read list. Still, leveraging Section 108(h) feels like a neat calculated-risk maneuver on the IA’s part. Better still, it could inspire other libraries to take more leaps into scanning mid-20th-century works, creating their own “Last Twenty” collections, and seeing if anybody cries foul. (Copyright-holders can always come forward and ask to have their works taken offline.) The Section 108(h) approach is not a silver bullet with which to slay all copyright werewolves. For one thing, the statute leaves the definition of “reasonable” unspecified, which in this age of cheap and plentiful secondhand book–selling online could spell legal trouble down the road. Figuring out whether something is in the last 20 years of its copyright is harder than it might sound. Still, people who have spent a lot of time working with Section 108 say the IA’s gambit appears to open up a reasonably safe space for the Internet Archive to operate in. “Despite the trolling name, this is a serious and significant use of § 108(h), more or less as intended,” James Grimmelmann, professor of law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School, told me via email when I asked him about the Sonny Bono Memorial Collection. “Their best move is also their biggest one: to systematize the process of ticking off all of § 108(h)’s prerequisites.” He points to a “companion paper” by Townsend-Gard as “the most important part of the announcement because it details what they’re doing.” The paper creates a roadmap for other libraries to follow if they want to open up more of their own “Last Twenty” material. Figuring out whether something is in the last 20 years of its copyright is harder than it might sound, though. There’s not a central up-to-date repository against which to check whether something’s probably safe to digitize and post online. Somebody has to sort through databases and work through if/then checklists to make that call. The New York Public Library has managed “to clear a large portion of their image collections,” says Minnesota’s Nancy Sims, in part because “they had two trained lawyers working on it.” One of those lawyers is Greg Cram, associate director of the NYPL’s copyright and information policy section. The library hired Cram seven years ago to work on research and copyright issues. The NYPL has a repository of about 2 million digitized assets, Cram says, and it’s his job to help figure out the rights status of each of them. (An asset can be one of many things—an entire text or one scanned page of a book, a sound recording, an image.) To make that task easier, the NYPL built a system that tracks metadata: all the information the library has about each asset that can help determine whether it’s under copyright or has any licensing requirements attached. The process involves knowing when to take what Cram calls “reasonable amounts of risk” in making items available for public use. Getting sued is one risk, but so is walling off content that patrons should be able to research and enjoy. Take the library’s World’s Fair 1939–1940 digital collection, which presents some 12,000 images from the famous exhibition—“wonderful evidence of the time,” Cram says. The NYPL holds the fair’s records as well as the photos, but Cram and his colleagues discovered that those records aren’t clear about who, if anyone, holds the copyright to the images. “At that point, we made a decision to put the collection online,” he says. It’s been six years, and no rights-holders have come forward to complain. Is there a way to do that more efficiently and spare librarians and lawyers the chore of combing through rights metadata for every object? Maybe. Cram’s now involved in a pilot project to make the records of the U.S. Copyright Office more searchable, which would help. And there are other attempts afoot to streamline the process. Elizabeth Townsend-Gard and her husband, for instance, have founded a company, Limited Times, that helps individuals and institutions sort out the rights status of works using a copyright tool called the Durationator. It’s a program that runs an automated series of checks on a book or other work to determine, if possible, whether a librarian or other user can share it without worrying about a visit from the copyright goon squad. Limited Times already has some institutional clients testing it out to see how much time and labor it can save them, and hopes to go wide with an institutional subscription model soon. The Frick Art Reference Library has been beta-testing the Durationator for more than a year. For Megan de Armand, the assistant digital and metadata librarian there, says it has improved substantially over that time, and that it’s been especially helpful in answering questions about works created outside the U.S. and subject to other countries’ copyright laws. Early on, she’d get a report as long as 25 pages for each item. “Now it can be as simple as filling in a few boxes of data and getting a quick reply or loading data into a spreadsheet and getting quick items,” she says via email. Townsend-Gard dreams of a world where librarians and researchers and students don’t have to waste time on copyright determinations. “I really believe that copyright should be more like electricity, where you don’t have to figure out how it’s made,” she says. You should just be able to hit a button and get your answer. The Sonny Bono Memorial Collection gets us at least one small step closer to that. This winter, as you curl up by the fireside with a newly liberated digital text like Rebel in Bombazine or Father’s gone a-whaling, consider what treasures and curiosities are out there waiting for their turn to be found again. http://www.slate.com/articles/techno...t_creep.ht ml ![]() The Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit Mark Harris Eric Swildens knows how damaging intellectual property trials can be. In 2002, Speedera Networks, the content delivery network he cofounded, was sued for patent infringement and trade secrets violation by Akamai. “It was trial by fire,” says the 50-year-old engineer. “I learned a bunch of stuff I didn’t necessarily want to learn.” After a three-year battle in which he spent up to $1000 an hour on lawyers, Swildens ended up selling Speedera at a discount to Akamai for $130 million. The experience left Swildens with a working knowledge of intellectual property battles in the tech world, and a lingering soft spot for others facing hefty patent claims. So when he heard in February that the world’s second-most valuable company, Alphabet, was launching a legal broadside at Uber’s self-driving car technology, he put himself in then-CEO Travis Kalanick’s shoes: “I saw a larger competitor attacking a smaller competitor…and became curious about the patents involved.” In its most dramatic allegations, Waymo is accusing engineer Anthony Levandowski of taking over 14,000 technical confidential files to Uber. But the company also claimed that Uber’s laser-ranging lidar devices infringed four of Waymo’s patents. “Waymo developed its patented inventions…at great expense, and through years of painstaking research, experimentation, and trial and error,” the complaint read. “If [Uber is] not enjoined from their infringement and misappropriation, they will cause severe and irreparable harm to Waymo.” But Swildens had a suspicion. He dug into the history of Waymo’s lidars, and came to the conclusion that Waymo’s key patent should never have been granted at all. He asked the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to look into its validity, and in early September, the USPTO granted that request. Days later, Waymo abruptly dismissed its patent claim without explanation. The USPTO examiners may still invalidate that patent, and if that happens, Waymo could find itself embroiled in another multi-billion-dollar self-driving car lawsuit—this time as a defendant. Prosecuting a patent in a lawsuit is a risky business. Patents undergo intense scrutiny during a trial, where many are shown to be poorly written, inapplicable, or even to have been granted in error. But Waymo thought it had a slam dunk for a big patent win. Public records seemed to show Uber using its technology, and an email from a supplier contained an Uber circuit board almost identical to its own lidars. As the legal discovery process unfolded, however, it turned out that three of its four patent claims applied only to an outdated lidar, codenamed Spider, that Uber was no longer developing. When in early July the ride-sharing company promised to abandon the Spider design and never revive it, Waymo dropped those claims. But one claim remained, related to a patent nicknamed 936. The 936 patent describes a laser diode firing system that generates the pulses of light a lidar uses to build a 3D picture of the world around it. Waymo believed that just such a circuit was present in Uber’s current generation of lidar, codenamed Fuji. But when Swildens looked it over, he was surprised by how basic the firing system looked. “You’re talking about a capacitor, a laser diode, a transistor, an inductor, and some other diodes,” Swildens tells me from his home in Los Altos Hills, near Mountain View. “It’s a very simple circuit. When I initially saw it, I couldn’t imagine the circuit didn’t exist prior to this patent.” In mid-July, he started looking for places where that circuit might have been described previously. If an invention claimed in a patent can be shown to have existed or been described previously, it is called “prior art” and generally invalidates the patent. Prior art can be other patents, products offered for sale, or even books. “I was ready to give up at any time,” he says. “If it seemed to pan out as some super invention, I’d have quit working on it.” But he did not have to look far. Right on the front page of the 936 patent was a citation for another patent called High Definition Lidar System, filed in 2011 by David Hall. David Hall is the founder of Velodyne, the company that built the lidar on Google’s first self-driving car and that still makes the vast majority of automotive lidars today. Patent applications cite earlier patents to show how they differ from them. For 936, the original USPTO examiner noted, “The cited prior art…does not teach or suggest the use of an inductor.” However, Swildens noticed that Hall’s patent does in fact mention inductors several times, and describes a circuit that operates in the same manner as the one in 936. Swildens even modeled both circuits in simulation software to double-check his calculations. (David Hall declined to speak to Swildens or to Backchannel for this story). Then Swildens found another potential weakness. The inventors of 936, including Pierre-Yves Droz, who worked with Anthony Levandowski for many years, also claimed a novel gallium nitride field effect transistor in their circuit. But when Swildens looked into this, he found a book published in 2012—the year before Droz filed 936—that explained how gallium nitride (GaN) transistors could be used in a wide variety of circuits. He even called up the book’s author, Alex Lidow, to confirm that it had been published well before 936 had been written. Lidow is CEO of Efficient Power Conversion, a company that aims to replace the silicon in power, analog, and digital applications with its gallium technologies. “Velodyne came to us very early on in 2011 to talk about using our GaN devices in lidar systems,” Lidow told Backchannel. “We now have relationships with all [the lidar manufacturers]. Most of it is under NDA so I can’t talk specifics other than to say they all use our GaN devices.” Perhaps most damning, Swildens found a reference to a similar firing circuit as far back as 1996, in a patent filed by an engineer working for Leica Geosystems, a Swiss mapping technology company. Because that patent is now over 20 years old, anything it describes is likely now in the public domain, free for anyone to build without fear of litigation. “In my opinion, the 936 patent shouldn’t have been filed in the first place,” says Swildens. “The whole thing should now be thrown out, never to be seen again.” But what to do next? Swildens was surprised that Uber had not filed its own re-examination request of the 936 patent and saw time ticking away toward the case’s initial October trial deadline. (It was subsequently delayed to early December and has been delayed again until February 5.) So he took the unusual step of challenging the 936 patent himself, filing what is called an ex-parte reexamination request. He gathered the prior art he had discovered, completed reams of paperwork, and pulled together his detailed arguments into a 101-page document that he filed with the USPTO on August 1. “I’m proud of my work. There’s no fluff in there,” he says. He then wrote a $6,000 personal check for the reexamination fee. Swildens would not see this money again, whether or not his request was successful. “It’s definitely not a drop in the bucket for me,” he says. “But when I do something, I like to do it properly.” Proper or not, the request surprised Waymo’s lawyers, who were not expecting an attack from someone completely unconnected to the case. “Ex parte re-exams have become relatively rare,” says Brian Love, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law. “Particularly so for a person off the street, as competently filing a request can cost $50,000.” “I’ve never heard of anyone doing that,” agrees Alex Lidow. “It’s really crazy.” Swildens insists that he has not been paid by or even been in communication with either side during the process—although not for want of trying. After Swildens filed his request with the USPTO and sent a copy to Waymo, he thought Uber should have one also. He visited two of the company’s buildings in San Francisco before being directed to its headquarters, where he was met with skepticism by a security guard. “I explained that I had filed an ex parte reexamination on my own and Waymo had had it for two weeks already and it didn’t seem fair that Uber didn’t have it, given it was going to trial,” explains Swildens. “But I felt the guy thought I was some crazy person who just came in off the street.” Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this story. Meanwhile, the company continued to treat the 936 patent as a threat. On August 15, Uber submitted a proposal to redesign Fuji to avoid infringing on the 936 patent, and asked the court for a summary judgement of non-infringement. Waymo was not convinced. On August 24, it filed a document that said Uber’s request for summary judgment on the 936 patent was “meritless” and called its motion “futile.” Even as late as September 12, Waymo was saying that Uber had not implemented its design-around and was continuing to use the infringing Fuji design. “Waymo is not obligated to take Uber at its word [and] the parties should be permitted to present the evidence at trial,” read one of its motions. But the very next day, Waymo dropped all of its claims relating to the 936. Each party has its own explanation as to why. Waymo now tells Backchannel that backroom negotiations with Uber produced assurances that the company would not infringe the patent in the future. Yet Uber, in a filing days later, claimed that “Waymo’s patent claims were a complete misfire”—in other words, that it had demonstrated its hands were clean. Swildens, naturally, thinks his reexamination request played a role. He notes that USPTO had a phone interview with Waymo’s lawyers a few days before, on September 8, at which the examiners presumably told Waymo that a reexamination of the 936 would be going ahead. If the reexamination started while the patent was being actively litigated, Uber and the court would have to be informed. “I believe that not only does my request show that Waymo’s claims were not their invention, it shows that the circuit was in Velodyne’s earlier patent – and may even have existed prior to that,” he says. “It was a mess and wouldn’t look good for them.” Two days later, on September 15, the USPTO formally ordered a re-examination of the 936 patent. According to the latest statistics from the USPTO, such examinations normally take around two years and result in a patent’s claims being changed or cancelled around 80 percent of the time. By that time, the Uber lawsuit should be ancient history. And if Swildens’ analyses hold up and 936 gets revoked, Waymo may find itself facing a new threat—this time for infringing on Velodyne’s turf. But Swildens says his involvement is done. “One of the reasons I filed this is that it’s a funny story, with great engineers and fascinating characters fighting a pitched battle. When something interesting presents itself in life, I see where it leads.” https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swi...awsuit-patent/ ![]() "Process Doppelgänging" Attack Works on All Windows Versions Catalin Cimpanu Today, at the Black Hat Europe 2017 security conference in London, two security researchers from cyber-security firm enSilo have described a new code injection technique called "Process Doppelgänging." This new attack works on all Windows versions and researchers say it bypasses most of today's major security products. Process Doppelgänging is somewhat similar to another technique called Process Hollowing, but with a twist, as it utilizes the Windows mechanism of NTFS Transactions. Doppelgänging works by utilizing two key distinct features together to mask the loading of a modified executable. By using NTFS transactions, we make changes to an executable file that will never actually be committed to disk. We will then use undocumented implementation details of the process loading mechanism to load our modified executable, but not before rolling back the changes we made to the executable. The result of this procedure is creating a process from the modified executable, while deployed security mechanisms remain in the dark. Process Doppelgänging bypasses most modern AVs Researchers say malicious code that utilizes Process Doppelgänging is never saved to disk (fileless attack), which makes it invisible to all major security products. Researchers sucessfully tested their attack on products from Kaspersky, Bitdefender, ESET, Symantec, McAfee, Windows Defender, AVG, Avast, Qihoo 360, and Panda. Furthermore, even advanced forensics tools such as Volatility will not detect it. In their experiments, researchers used Process Doppelgänging to run Mimikatz, a known utility used for password-stealing operations, "in a stealthy way to avoid detection." Process Doppelgänging is a fileless attack "The goal of the technique is to allow a malware to run arbitrary code (including code that is known to be malicious) in the context of a legitimate process on the target machine," Tal Liberman & Eugene Kogan, the two enSilo researchers who discovered the attack explained in an email describing their new research. "Very similar to process hollowing but with a novel twist. The challenge is doing it without using suspicious process and memory operations such as SuspendProcess, NtUnmapViewOfSection. "In order to achieve this goal we leverage NTFS transactions. We overwrite a legitimate file in the context of a transaction. We then create a section from the modified file (in the context of the transaction) and create a process out of it. It appears that scanning the file while it's in transaction is not possible by the vendors we checked so far (some even hang) and since we rollback the transaction, our activity leaves no trace behind." Everything looks OK to security products because the malicious process will look legitimate, and will be mapped correctly to an image file on disk, just like any legit process. There will be no "unmapped code," which is usually what security products look for. The good news and the bad news The good news is that "there are a lot of technical challenges" in making Process Doppelgänging work, and attackers need to know "a lot of undocumented details on process creation." The bad news is that the attack "cannot be patched since it exploits fundamental features and the core design of the process loading mechanism in Windows." Process Doppelgänging now joins the list of new attack methods discovered in the past year that are hard to detect and mitigate for modern AVs, such as Atom Bombing, GhostHook, and PROPagate. Research material on Process Doppelgänging will be published on the Black Hat website in the following days. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...dows-versions/ ![]() Zero-Day Apple iOS HomeKit Vulnerability Allowed Remote Access to Smart Accessories Including Locks, Fix Rolling Out Zac Hall A HomeKit vulnerability in the current version of iOS 11.2 has been demonstrated to 9to5Mac that allows unauthorized control of accessories including smart locks and garage door openers. Our understanding is Apple has rolled out a server-side fix that now prevent unauthorized access from occurring while limiting some functionality, and an update to iOS 11.2 coming next week will restore that full functionality. The vulnerability, which we won’t describe in detail and was difficult to reproduce, allowed unauthorized control of HomeKit-connected accessories including smart lights, thermostats, and plugs. The most serious ramification of this vulnerability prior to the fix is unauthorized remote control of smart locks and connected garage door openers, the former of which was demonstrated to 9to5Mac. The issue was not with smart home products individually but instead with the HomeKit framework itself that connects products from various companies. Users need to take no action today to resolve the issue as the fix that is rolling out is server-side. The future update to iOS coming next week will resolve any broken functionality. The vulnerability required at least one iPhone or iPad on iOS 11.2, the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, connected to the HomeKit user’s iCloud account; earlier versions of iOS were not affected. Pretty big deal. Amazing scoop by @apollozac and even better working with Apple on a fix for 48 hours prior to publishing https://t.co/Kgm16C6cny — Seth Weintraub (@llsethj) December 7, 2017 We also understand that Apple was informed about this and related vulnerabilities in late October, and some but not all issues were fixed as part of iOS 11.2 and watchOS 4.2 which were released this week. Other issues in this category were fixed server-side from Apple so end users needed to take no action. Apple shared this statement with 9to5Mac regarding the issue: “The issue affecting HomeKit users running iOS 11.2 has been fixed. The fix temporarily disables remote access to shared users, which will be restored in a software update early next week.” We believe this vulnerability being brought to our attention has resulted in the solution being readied sooner than it otherwise would have been, and our readers deserve to know that the vulnerability existed. The severity of this vulnerability also imposes a responsibility on 9to5Mac as a publication to share what we know with our audience if we’re going to continue covering HomeKit and smart home products. Does this vulnerability shipping mean you shouldn’t trust HomeKit or smart home products going forward? The reality is bugs in software happen. They always have and pending any breakthrough in software development methods, they likely always will. The same is true for physical hardware which can be flawed and need to be recalled. The difference is software can be fixed over-the-air without a full recall. Trusting HomeKit and smart home products with your security, however, will have to be a personal decision now just like it always has. Personally, once this vulnerability has been patched, I believe I’ll be comfortable with trusting HomeKit security solutions to remain protected, but you can always use an old fashioned lock and key or install security cameras as a double measure. I would also like to know — just like with the root security issue that affected the Mac last week — that the development process that led to this vulnerability shipping and the issue remaining live for weeks without users knowing is audited and changes are made if possible. The bottom line is if a HomeKit connected lock or garage door opener knowingly can’t secure your home, customers shouldn’t be given the opportunity to test the risks associated with any known vulnerabilities. Our hope in publicizing this specific vulnerability is that we may have a meaningful impact in improving the quality assurance and security audit processes so that HomeKit can be a better solution in the future and live up to its reputation as being the most secure smart home framework. https://9to5mac.com/2017/12/07/homekit-vulnerability/ ![]() Zimbabwe’s Internet Went Down for About Five Hours. The Culprit Was Reportedly a Tractor. Lila Thulin Zimbabweans lost internet access en masse on Tuesday when a tractor reportedly cut through key fiber-optic cables in South Africa and another internet provider experienced simultaneous issues with its primary internet conduits. The outage began shortly before noon local time and persisted for more than five hours, affecting not only citizens’ day-to-day internet usage but businesses that rely upon web access. And while five internet-free hours might sound unfathomable to those of us accustomed to having the web constantly at our fingertips, large-scale internet outages—from inadvertent lapses caused by ship anchors to government-calculated blackouts designed to showcase political power—do happen, and maybe more frequently than you’d thought. According to local news sources, a tractor in South Africa damaged cables belonging to Liquid Telecom, which has an 81.5 percent market share of Zimbabwe’s international-equipped internet bandwidth as of the second quarter of 2017 and leases capacity to other internet providers. In a bad coincidence, city council employees in Kuwadzana, a suburb of Zimbabwe’s capitol city of Harare, cut an additional TelOne cable around the same time. (According to NewsDay Zimbabwe, it was an accident. The company blamed “faults that occurred on our main links through South Africa and Botswana” in a statement.) While a TelOne backup link through Mozambique remained intact, it couldn’t make up for the lost bandwidth. Together, Liquid Telecom and TelOne account for 96.5 percent of the market share of international-equipped internet bandwidth in Zimbabwe, so their cable struggles amounted to a country-wide problem. A graph of internet activity in Zimbabwe provided to Slate by content delivery network Akamai shows a precipitous drop midday Tuesday to levels normally only seen during the wee hours of the night. And the cable-slicing didn’t only affect the internet: South African news site Fin24 reported that the outage had also affected phone service and access to social media applications like WhatsApp. We apologise to affected customers in Zimbabwe, Zambia and parts of DRC for the unexpected interruption of our internet service. This was due to cuts on primary and secondary fibre routes near the South Africa Zimbabwe border. Both fibre breaks are fixed and now back in service. — Liquid Telecom (@liquidtelecom) December 5, 2017 “This should not happen,” Supa Mandiwanzira, who assumed the title of minister of information communication technology and cyber security after Robert Mugabe’s forced resignation this November, said, according to NewsDay Zimbabwe. “There should be redundancy plans in place, and I wonder why these did not kick in. If we find that these companies were not truthful with us, we will revoke their licenses,” he said. The internet is increasingly part of daily life in Zimbabwe. As of 2016, roughly 50 percent of Zimbabweans have internet access—up from only 5 percent in 2010. It is not without its problems, though. Freedom House’s 2017 “Freedom on the Net” report listed Zimbabwe’s internet as “Partly Free,” citing “government efforts to exert greater control over the country’s ICT market and internet infrastructure.” Given that record, it may be reasonable to wonder whether the government could have cut internet access. But according to the state-owned newspaper The Herald, though, Mandiwanzira denied that the government had any role the internet outage. Peter Micek, general counsel of the open-internet nonprofit Access Now, agreed. “Trust in authorities remains brittle in Zimbabwe,” he acknowledged in an email, but he added, “We believe this outage was coincidental, not intentional” due to the confirmation from the internet service providers of technical outages. But Julie Owono, executive director of Internet Sans Frontieres, expressed more doubt via email: “As a member of the #Keepiton coalition, Internet Without Borders questions the simultaneity of these cable cuts. To quash doubts, Liquid Telecom and TelOne should be transparent and make public detailed reports explaining the precise circumstances of the cable cuts. It is also urgent that Zimbabwe's new government commits to guaranteeing the online human rights of its citizens by refusing to voluntarily cut the country from the Internet, especially for political reasons.” Governments intentionally cutting off internet access is a big problem worldwide. Between January and October of this year, Access Now recorded more than 60 internet shutdowns of varying severity. African countries like Cameroon, Egypt, The Gambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have limited internet use in the past to quell political unrest, and in 2016, Mugabe’s administration raised prices on cellphone service following the largest protest in a decade, a move that many thought was intended to limit social media use by activists. The South African tractor that apparently wiped out broadband in Zimbabwe is far from the only unexpected cause of infrastructural havoc. In 2011, The Telegraph reported on a 75-year-old woman who cut through a cable in the country Georgia while foraging for scrap metal, unintentionally taking away 90 percent of Armenia’s internet access for half a day. But Hayastan Shakarian insisted, “I have no idea what the internet is.” In 2008, a ship’s anchor damaged a cable providing web and phone access to a large swathe of the Middle East. Google wraps its underwater cables in a ballistic-resistant protective coating to prevent sharks from biting through the Internet-giving conduits. And we would be remiss to not mention cybersquirrel1.com, a tongue-in-cheek site tracking the many instances of squirrel and other wildlife-caused power disruptions. Fortunately, Zimbabwe was only internet-less for a handful of hours, but let those long email, social media, and online-shopping-free minutes serve as a warning to tractor drivers to check their routes just a little bit more carefully in the future. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_te...t_cut_the.html ![]() FCC Won’t Delay Vote, Says Net Neutrality Supporters are “Desperate” Pai says FTC will protect consumers—but FTC could lose its regulatory authority. Jon Brodkin The Federal Communications Commission will move ahead with its vote to kill net neutrality rules next week despite an unresolved court case that could strip away even more consumer protections. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says that net neutrality rules aren't needed because the Federal Trade Commission can protect consumers from broadband providers. But a pending court case involving AT&T could strip the FTC of its regulatory authority over AT&T and similar ISPs. A few dozen consumer advocacy groups and the City of New York urged Pai to delay the net neutrality-killing vote in a letter today. If the FCC eliminates its rules and the court case goes AT&T's way, there would be a "'regulatory gap' that would leave consumers utterly unprotected," the letter said. When contacted by Ars, Pai's office issued this statement in response to the letter: “This is just evidence that supporters of heavy-handed Internet regulations are becoming more desperate by the day as their effort to defeat Chairman Pai's plan to restore Internet freedom has stalled. The vote will proceed as scheduled on December 14.” Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge is not satisfied by Pai's response. "Forty organizations ask the Federal Communications Commission why, if they are relying on the FTC to protect consumers, they do not do the prudent thing and wait until the cloud over FTC jurisdiction is resolved," Public Knowledge Senior VP Harold Feld told Ars. "The FCC's official response is name calling. This tells anyone interested who is 'fear mongering' and who really has the interests of consumers at heart." AT&T vs. the FTC The court case centers on the FTC's attempt to punish AT&T for throttling the mobile Internet connections of customers with unlimited data plans. While the FTC is not legally able to regulate common carriers, the agency says it can regulate the non-common carriage portions of a company that is otherwise a common carrier. At the time of the throttling, AT&T was a common carrier for landline phone and mobile voice service but not for mobile Internet access. AT&T argued that its common carrier status prevented the FTC from regulating any portion of its business, and a panel of judges at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sided with AT&T in August 2016. The ruling seemed to leave the FTC without any enforcement powers over the broadband businesses of traditional phone companies like AT&T and Verizon. But there was no "regulatory gap" because the FCC had classified ISPs as common carriers in a February 2015 decision, giving itself broad authority over broadband service. Now that the FCC is led by Republicans, it plans to eliminate the common carrier classification of broadband providers and says the FTC will pick up the slack. Eliminating the common carrier classification of broadband will "[r]estore the Federal Trade Commission's ability to protect consumers online from any unfair, deceptive, and anticompetitive practices," Pai's proposal says. FTC may retain power, but it’s not a done deal Pai's argument is supported by a May 2017 decision by the Ninth Circuit that vacated AT&T's victory over the FTC and ordered the case to be reheard en banc. The decision to rehear the case before the full court may indicate that the FTC will ultimately be allowed to regulate broadband providers even when those companies offer non-common carrier services such as traditional phone lines. But it isn't a certainty because the full court still hasn't issued its decision. "Given the enormous danger to consumers of losing all protections should the Ninth Circuit decide to affirm the panel decision and side with AT&T Mobility, the FCC should delay a vote until the en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit issues its decision," consumer advocacy groups and the city of New York wrote to Pai today. Pai's anti-net neutrality proposal says that there is no need to wait for the final decision from the Ninth Circuit. "Consistent with the Commission's request, the Ninth Circuit granted rehearing en banc of the panel decision, and, in doing so, it set aside the earlier panel opinion," Pai's proposal says. "In light of these considerations and the benefits of reclassification, we find objections based on FTC v. AT&T Mobility insufficient to warrant a different outcome." But the danger of the Ninth Circuit stripping the FTC of regulatory authority is made even greater by the FCC's proposal to preempt state consumer protection laws, the letter from consumer advocacy groups said: This potential regulatory gap is further compounded by the Draft Order's purported preemption of any state regulations the FCC deems "incompatible" with the newly announced "deregulatory" federal policy. Although the Draft Order is vague as to what, precisely, the FCC is preempting, it would appear from context that it includes state consumer protection laws. In short, the FCC has decided to put all remaining consumer protection eggs in one basket, but cannot be troubled to wait until the Ninth Circuit affirms that this approach is actually consistent with the FTC's own jurisdictional statute. The FCC attempt to preempt state laws is part of the anti-net neutrality proposal and would thus be approved in the same vote on December 14. Common carrier rules include numerous consumer protections that go beyond the core net neutrality rules, as we've previously detailed. According to Feld, the FCC's plan to move ahead with the vote shows that "Chairman Pai and the other Republican commissioners simply do not care if consumers are protected or not." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ng-court-case/ ![]() 7 Reasons Why VPNs Might Die Out by 2020 Christian Cawley You’ve signed up to a VPN, and you’re happy with the privacy it brings to your online activities. Maybe you use for safety on public Wi-Fi, or to beat region-blocking restrictions on your favorite streaming sites. But what if we told you that the VPN (at least in its current form) is in danger of dying out? You might be doubtful, so here are seven problems with VPNs that need fixing, sooner rather than later. 1. The NSA Can Break VPN Encryption Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: the NSA has the technology to break your VPN’s encryption. The overwhelming majority of 1024-bit encryption uses the Diffie-Hellman cryptographic key exchange. However, it turns out this method uses a limited number of prime numbers, and this flaw has been exploited to decrypt encryption. In 2015, researchers Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger wrote: “Breaking a single, common 1024-bit prime would allow NSA to passively decrypt connections to two-thirds of VPNs and a quarter of all SSH servers globally. Breaking a second 1024-bit prime would allow passive eavesdropping on connections to nearly 20% of the top million HTTPS websites. In other words, a one-time investment in massive computation would make it possible to eavesdrop on trillions of encrypted connections.” Snowden got there first, however, revealing the NSA’s ability to snoop encrypted connections prior to this research being published. So, your VPN isn’t as secure as you thought. That alone is enough to seriously reconsider the subscription. 2. Your ISP Can Block VPN Connections Trying to make a connection to a server holding media blocked in your jurisdiction via Kodi? Or simply want to keep your viewing private? VPNs can be used to bypass ISP restrictions accessing these servers. But those same restrictions can be expanded to include VPN servers. Are you affected by this? It’s difficult to say. Several users across the internet have posted about this problem, on Reddit, and on Kodi forums. But you can easily check if you have been affected by this. Simply try streaming a movie or TV show via your VPN. If it doesn’t work, and all other unencrypted internet connectivity is fine, then there’s a good chance the VPN is being blocked. And don’t forget, if you’re in the U.S., ISPs now have the ability to snoop on your activities and sell data about you. If you thought a VPN could help here, it looks like time is running out. 3. Free VPNs Are Ruining Reputations We’ve looked elsewhere at a number of free VPNs that are worth trying. However, these are the exception. Long term use of these services is not recommended. A subscription service will deliver far better results. It’s great to get free stuff, but this disregard for privacy — where your activities online are being passed to advertising networks — goes against everything VPNs stand for. Worse still, free VPNs drag down the entire VPN industry. Don’t be too sad about this. Many free VPN services are run by the same companies operating “superior” subscription services. Given how they feel about free customers, and the impact this is having on the industry, these companies are essentially overseeing their own downfall. In short, free VPNs need to fail, or else operate with complete transparency. 4. Geo-Blocking Targets Known VPN Server Addresses Geo-blocking used to be easily circumvented by VPNs. These days, not so much. Say you want to watch Netflix, but your account is U.S.-based. You’re on holiday in the U.K., and region blocking means you can’t access the same list of movies and TV shows as you would at home. Employing a VPN can circumvent this block, fooling the Netflix servers into thinking you’re in your home country. All you need to do is use a U.S.-based VPN, and the show is yours to watch. Some VPN services are sold on their ability to bypass region blocking. Now, however, Netflix (and other streaming providers) are wise to this. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to make a connection. Take, for example, the BBC. If you’re trying to view content on the UK version of BBC iPlayer from an overseas location, you’ll be blocked with a polite message. But even using a U.K.-based VPN server will illicit the same response. This is because streaming services are increasingly using a blacklist of VPN servers. Such lists are collated by checking VPN providers and logging the server IP addresses. With these IP addresses blocked, no one can access the Netflix, BBC iPlayer, etc. unless they’re doing so without a VPN, and from the correct geographic location. Another win for the streaming services, and yet another strike against VPNs. 5. Logless VPNs Are a Myth VPNs jostle for attention by promising whatever they can — or whatever they can get away with. One of those promises (“no logging”) always catches the eye. After all, why pay for anonymity if the logs can give you away? The truth is, however, that logless VPNs are never 100 percent free of logs. VPN companies use third-party servers. Those servers are leased, and they have logs recording all sorts of data. While the VPN you subscribe to may not be maintaining logs, you can be certain that whoever owns the server certainly is. What this means is that somewhere there is a log of your activity. It may be innocuous, and you may have done little of interest. But given everything else you’ve learned so far, this is yet another reason to seriously reconsider your continued use of virtual private networks. As we’ve explained previously, server logs are vital for server management: “Without logs, a VPN provider would be unable to handle DNS requests, prevent abuse, troubleshoot connections, or limit VPN accounts based on the subscription type you’ve chosen, such as putting a cap on the amount of data you can use.” And then there’s this: VPNs are good, but their weakness is the single point of failure: hack or subpoena that one point to see everything. https://t.co/iUxkbJsoK2 — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 30, 2015 It’s worth looking at the VPN service’s website to find out what information they admit to collecting. Just remember your online activity isn’t as private or anonymous as you’ve been lead to believe. 6. Data Mining Your Personal Information Reputable sites probably won’t do this, and you’d probably never know, but in the age of low-cost VPNs, these services have to make money elsewhere to maximize their revenue. One way is to sell your personal data onto advertisers and direct marketing companies… spammers, basically. We’ve already seen that this is a problem with free VPNs, so it’s not behavior that you would expect from a paid solution. However, it is certainly not unheard of. Not only is it a breach of trust, this practice also takes a massive liberty with your data. By sharing information about you, that subscription VPN makes extra money. You get extra spam, and adverts targeted to you at some of the sites you visit. That isn’t what you signed up for: you subscribe to your VPN for enhanced privacy, not the opportunity to “enjoy” personalized adverts and part with more cash, right? 7. Are VPNs Completely Anonymous? Short answer: No. As explained earlier, we’ve known for several years that the U.S. government’s NSA has the ability to break the most common forms of encryption. In short, your VPN isn’t as anonymous as you think it is. But this goes beyond what the NSA can do. One of the biggest problems for VPN privacy are IP leaks and DNS leaks. Then there’s the trust issue, which we’ve touched on already: is your VPN really keeping your data private? But there’s possibly a worse problem, one which is regularly overlooked. Your VPN connection is only secure and private between your computer, and the VPN server. Beyond that, you’re identifiable, not just by the account you login with. Data transmitted between the destination site, and your VPN server, if not already encrypted, can be read. And we’ve already seen how security agencies deal with encryption. Perhaps more concerning is the fact that VPN providers can see your destination. It might not be obvious who is going where, but the sites your read and only services you access are recorded, logless or not. What Can VPN Companies Do About This? The future for VPN services is grim. We’re really only touching on the faults above, but the real problem isn’t just dealing with these (potentially insurmountable) problems. As challenges go, this is big: VPN companies need to embrace new technologies. Several are already available, such as protocol obfuscation, which is theoretically more secure than the SSL/TLS/HTTPS system already in use. There’s also the possibility of building a VPN into your computer’s operating system, and developing authentication for connections. The universal push towards HTTPS should also help. Perhaps the biggest privacy step for VPN providers, however, is to develop a new approach to TOR. (What is TOR?) Currently, the most secure and private way to connect to the internet is to use a VPN and TOR together. Although slow, it’s expected that fast internet speeds will overcome this limit in the foreseeable future. TOR is becoming increasingly popular, so it makes sense to wrap both privacy methods into one. Failure to adopt most (or all) of these things will see VPNs all but extinct in just a few years. And who knows what will happen to privacy after that? http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/reasons-vpn-might-die/ ![]() 109 Microwave Towers Bring the Internet to Remote Alaska Villages A $300 million telecom project will boost speeds or provide service to many for the first time Amy Nordrum A hulking orange helicopter named Annie hoists a gleaming metal tower into the sky on the outskirts of Kotzebue, a small Alaskan city just north of the Arctic Circle. Engines roaring, Annie pauses to steady its load, which had begun to sway below, and veers off toward a bald mountaintop. On the mountain, at a rocky site called Igichuk, a work crew has just finished setting up the tower’s base, dropped off earlier by Annie. Now, they’re focused on executing the most delicate delivery of the day, one of many difficult steps required to sink a single new telecommunications tower into the vast, roadless Alaskan tundra. When Annie arrives, the pilot carefully dangles the new section of tower above its base. Below, four crew members stand ready to guide it into position, strapped into harnesses with their feet braced against the base’s highest rung. Once the new section of tower is close enough, each crew member grabs a steel rope looped through one of its lowest joints and gently nudges the tower so that it is centered directly over the base. Within minutes, the section is lined up, its four metal feet perfectly aligned with the base’s corners. The crew works quickly to insert a single bolt into each leg; they’ll go back and add more later. When they give the sign, the pilot releases the tower from Annie’s grasp, and pulls away. The tower stands, now the highest point across the tundra, and sparkles in the midday sun. Once active, it will relay data north to several hundred miners at Red Dog, the world’s largest zinc mine, and back to a tower in Kotzebue, a city of 3,245 built on a thin lip of spongy land that bows out into the Chukchi Sea along the isolated western rim of Alaska. Here on the edge of the U.S. Arctic, Internet connectivity is a slow—and expensive—proposition. Eighty-one percent [PDF] of rural residents in Alaska do not have broadband Internet, defined by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as providing a minimum download speed of 25 megabits per second. People in Kotzebue have long relied on satellite connections for Internet service at speeds comparable to those of dial-up. At the beginning of the year, their average download speed was just 2 Mb/s. The Igichuk tower is one of the final pieces of one of the most ambitious telecommunications projects in the rural United States. Built by General Communication Inc. (GCI) and known as TERRA, it was completed this past October, after US $300 million of investment and six years of construction, when engineers installed its final microwave repeater. The network uses a combination of repeater data links and fiber optics to form a giant, 5,000-kilometer ring around southwest Alaska—a sparsely populated region with few paved roads and wilderness areas larger than West Virginia. With TERRA, Kotzebue residents now pay $59.99 per month for an Internet plan with download speeds of 3 Mb/s, which is not even fast enough to stream a high-definition movie. To be able to do that, they would need to pay at least $149.99 per month for 6 Mb/s. Compare that with New York City, where residents pay an average of $55 per month for 25 Mb/s. So was it worth $300 million to bring slightly better Internet to approximately 45,000 people in 84 rural villages spread out over an area roughly the size of Germany? For GCI, it was a strategic move. The project was completed as more customers began to watch more content online. Large clients such as hospitals and schools in rural communities also needed better access to the outside world. Partly thanks to TERRA, the company welcomed $12 million in new revenue for Internet service in the first three quarters of 2017, while losing $8 million from its cable-TV division. Connecting remote areas has also become a hot topic among tech-industry titans, which are all developing competing last-mile solutions, such as Facebook’s Internet delivery drone and Alphabet’s high-altitude balloons. Some analysts downplay those projects as flashy experiments. Other experts have argued that the world must keep building conventional networks to serve hard-to-reach areas, just in case those blue-sky ideas don’t pan out. TERRA relies primarily on 109 microwave towers, a classic technology that can still be deployed faster and more cheaply than fiber-optic cables in most of rural Alaska. But the project nevertheless took GCI a very long time and a lot of money to complete. It shows what a challenge it can be to build and maintain a communications network in one of the most remote areas in the world—even when you are using the most tried-and-true technology available. To deliver nationwide telephone service, AT&T and other telecommunications companies built vast microwave networks across the United States in the 1950s. They put up thousands of towers and repeaters to provide long-haul links between communities. Over the past couple of decades, those microwave networks have been steadily replaced by fiber optics, which provide much greater bandwidth and therefore far higher data speeds. So now, the United States has some 182,000 km of long-haul fiber-optic cables, and microwave cell towers are increasingly relegated to shepherding data between customers and the nearest cable. However, burying fiber-optic cables is extremely difficult in Alaska, a state divided by three major mountain ranges and half a dozen minor ones, where permafrost covers 85 percent of the land, and where undersea cables are occasionally sliced by fishing trawls or sea ice that forms along the coast each winter. TERRA does include about 700 km of fiber, most of it buried around Anchorage and along Alaska’s limited road system. For one stretch, a diver even laid fiber across the bottom of the still-frozen Kvichak River, in an area frequented by brown bears. But TERRA relies on microwaves in a way that hardly any other new large-scale networks have since the 1990s. And because there is no road system throughout much of Alaska, each of those microwave towers had to be flown or barged in. Some were installed in villages, and 23 were hoisted to mountaintop sites like Igichuk by a small fleet of helicopters. These towers, all 109 of them, poke up every 15 to 65 km in the Alaskan bush. Extending outward from this main ring, several spurs connect half a dozen villages each. “Using microwaves, we can kind of look at it as island hopping, where we hop from island to island to provide service and get over larger stretches of wilderness,” says Patrick Goodyear, senior engineer for TERRA at GCI. All told, the ring and the spurs connect dozens of tiny villages, among them the famous gold-rush town of Nome, and also Shaktoolik (population 258) and Shageluk (population 81). Annie and the other Aircranes, as they’re known, have been a key technology used by GCI and STG—the contractor that oversaw many TERRA tower installations—to reach such remote and offbeat places. Annie is a beast, burning more than 2,000 liters of fuel per hour and capable of carrying 11,000 kilograms on its hook. Manufactured by Erickson, only 20 Aircranes like it exist in the world. During its first season of construction, STG used a gin pole, a common way to erect a telecom tower in sections without using a helicopter, at the most remote sites. But it took crews two to three weeks to install a tower. “With an Aircrane coming in, we can stack a tower as fast as it can bring the equipment in,” says Brennan Walsh, president of STG. The real problem at those remote sites is power: Most of them are far away from the electrical grid. Rebecca Markley, GCI’s director for rural initiatives, says the company considered installing solar arrays to power those towers, but soon found the arrays would take up too much room at the sites, some of which are barely big enough for a helicopter to land. Back at Igichuk, Annie dropped off two diesel-fueled generators that will keep the new site running around the clock. Later, a smaller helicopter equipped with a giant fuel bladder would make 30 round trips to fill a 34,000-liter tank with fuel. That’s enough diesel to run the tower for 15 months. Specifying such a long run time is typical of GCI’s design philosophy for the TERRA project, in which each site has been built with multiple layers of hardware redundancy along with special adaptations to help it weather extreme conditions. For example, each mountaintop tower has a backup generator, along with a rack of 48 lead-acid batteries that can keep the tower operating for at least two days, should the backup generator also fail. That kind of fault-tolerant approach to system design has already paid off. One November, at a mountaintop site called Cone Shoulder, a ground fault caused both generators to fail in the middle of a blizzard. The site ran on batteries until technicians could repair it, three days later. The HVAC systems at each mountaintop site also have twice as many fans and vents as they need to cool the communications modules. And the router box, which manages radio traffic and controls the HVAC system, contains multiple modules that can handle all the necessary functions for the radios and HVAC control, just in case one module fails. Because many of the towers are built on permafrost, they could tilt perilously should the ground ever thaw. To prevent this, GCI employed a technique also used for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and installed passive refrigeration devices called thermosyphons in the pilings on which the towers rest. Thermosyphons are partially buried, with a portion sticking up into the air. They are tubes filled with gas that cools above ground and condenses into a liquid, which then evaporates. That evaporation sucks heat out of the ground, making sure it stays frozen. Ultimately, one of TERRA’s greatest strengths comes from its shape. Circles or rings create extra resiliency within a network: If one site does go down, all the traffic can be immediately routed in the opposite direction, taking the long way around the ring but ultimately getting where it needs to go. So far, TERRA’s rigorously fault-tolerant hardware has survived everything the forbidding Alaskan wild could throw at it. But the software? That’s another story. Software has made networks more flexible and responsive—and TERRA is no exception. In the network, basic characteristics of the microwave channels are configured by software scripts. For example, software defines the frequency and amplitude of the carrier wave on which a signal is transmitted. The network handles traffic based on priority levels assigned through software. “Software controls just about everything,” Goodyear says. Unfortunately, that also means faulty software can knock out a site or disrupt multiple portions of the network. A few years ago, while technicians were trying to upgrade one stretch of towers, a software bug caused the radios to spontaneously reset and pushed GCI nine months behind schedule. These problems notwithstanding, software is at the very heart of the TERRA network’s ability to function in the face of the Arctic’s environmental and climatic extremes. Thanks to software, GCI can remotely route all traffic through one tower if another one malfunctions. And software helps the network respond to weather, altering signals when there’s more fog or rain, in ways that minimize signal attenuation. At GCI’s office in Anchorage, senior engineer Goodyear pulls up a photo of a microwave tower high in the Askinuk Mountains on the western coast of Alaska. The bottom half is buried in 2.5 meters of snow. “This is pretty typical for this site in the early spring,” he says. He flips to another photo [see below: “Cold Call,” bottom photo] that shows the top half of the same tower completely iced over from chilly coastal winds that whip up moisture from the Bering Sea. Snow and ice absorb and reflect radio waves, impeding an antenna’s ability to receive and transmit signals. Goodyear estimates GCI poured $2 million into combating that problem at the Askinuk Mountains site in its first two years. He points to the small triangles above each antenna in the second photo; they’re basically metal hats meant to keep snow and ice from accumulating. Crews had also installed long metal plates to shield the tower’s waveguides from falling ice. Microwaves travel through waveguides—which are hollow metal tubes—when they are moving between amplifiers and antennas, for example. But in frigid climates, moisture can accumulate inside them and cause them to freeze up, so at particularly vulnerable TERRA sites a special dehydrator pushes air through the waveguides to keep the moisture out. Despite all of these efforts, one antenna is still missing from the tower in the photo, and the waveguide that runs to it sticks out awkwardly into the cold air. Ice had built up, warmed in the sun, slid down the tower, and popped the antenna right off. Through software, GCI was able to remotely reroute traffic from the disabled antenna to go through two antennas placed higher up on the tower, to keep the site running. Since then, Goodyear’s team has slashed the height of that tower to limit its exposure to icy gales. So far, that fix seems to be working. GCI engineers have also made hardware adjustments to improve signal strength across the network when a site is working but not as well as it could. For example, near a coastal town called Quinhagak (population 669), a tower sits high up on the shoulder of a mountain, with barely enough room for a helicopter to land next to it. To save space, the GCI crew initially installed a shorter tower with 1.8-meter antennas. But a reflection point on nearby Kuskokwim Bay soon began to impede service to the next tower. Occasionally, when the tide was just the right height, a few stray microwaves would bounce off the bay and right into that tower’s antenna. But they arrived later than the microwaves that traveled straight over, causing the two signals to destructively interfere with each other. So now GCI is upgrading that site to 3-meter antennas, which will not “see” the reflection point from the same angle as the smaller antennas. If all goes well, this geometry will cut back on the reflected microwaves. To build anything in Alaska requires a certain amount of fortitude. Looking back, GCI’s Markley says, “there have been lots of times where we were thinking, ‘Are we actually going to be able to do this?’ ” No other company had ever thought it economically feasible to deliver terrestrial Internet to this remote part of Alaska. If TERRA had been built in the contiguous United States, it would stretch from Washington, D.C. to Seattle. But it will serve about as many customers as live in Twin Falls, a small city in Idaho. TERRA was made possible by a patchwork of federal grants, loans, and subsidies. Heather Handyside, GCI’s communications director, acknowledges TERRA wouldn’t have been built without the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed into law in 2009. Through it, the federal government contributed $82 million in grants and loans to the $300 million project. GCI also secured about $35 million in federally supported loans through the New Markets Tax Credit program, and received another $6 million federal grant for the project. On top of all that, GCI collects more federal money through the federal government’s E-Rate Program, which subsidizes telecommunications costs for schools and libraries. The company says TERRA provides a path for rural Alaskans to access distance learning, take advantage of telemedicine, and diversify their economy by telecommuting or selling handicrafts on retail sites like Etsy. Even with all that support, the rates that TERRA customers pay remain much higher than elsewhere in the United States. The most expensive GCI plan for Kotzebue costs $300 a month for speeds that are about 8 percent those of the least expensive Anchorage plan, which is $65 a month. GCI points out that speed is only part of the picture: TERRA has reduced latency from 550 to 25 milliseconds for rural customers, making it much easier to hold video conferences. (Several Alaska Native corporations and organizations contacted for this story, including NANA Regional Corp., which serves Kotzebue, declined to comment on TERRA or GCI’s rates.) After years of neglect by telecommunications companies, rural Alaska is now attracting interest. GCI is facing competition in at least a small slice of TERRA’s service area. A company called Quintillion recently installed a subsea fiber-optic cable to provide broadband to villages along the northwest coast of Alaska, the first phase of a cable that will stretch from Tokyo to London. That’s good news for Alaskan customers, and bad timing for GCI. The final repeater in the TERRA network was switched on in October, at a site coincidentally labeled on the TERRA map as Final Repeater for its proximity to Final Mountain. Now in place, the TERRA towers have an expected life-span of 50 to 60 years. During that time, several new generations of wireless technology will come along, requiring GCI to upgrade its equipment. Already, crews have begun to replace generators at the earliest sites, which have reached the end of their five-year life-span. With TERRA up and running, GCI’s investment has finally begun to pay off, and many Alaskans are sure to benefit from their access to it. Before long, they could start to demand even more data and faster speeds. But given TERRA’s constraints, GCI may struggle to deliver it in a timely manner and at an affordable price. Meanwhile, Quintillion or another competitor could take on the herculean task of burying more fiber across Alaska—that is, if Facebook and Alphabet don’t figure out how to offer broadband coverage cheaply by balloon or drone. GCI does sell capacity on TERRA to other telecom companies, which should further expand access for residents, but competitors say the price GCI charges is too high and accuse it of holding a monopoly over Internet service throughout much of rural Alaska. Several competitors, including a coalition of rural telecom providers, have complained to the FCC about GCI’s wholesale pricing. Given all of this, there would seem to be ample room for a clever company to devise a way to bring faster, cheaper connectivity to the Far North. Developing it would certainly not be for the faint of heart, and it may always be an economically risky proposition. But it could also represent a true breakthrough, reaching the dozens of Alaskan villages that still remain without terrestrial Internet of any kind. https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wi...laska-villages ![]() From the Arctic’s Melting Ice, an Unexpected Digital Hub Cecilia Kang This is one of the most remote towns in the United States, a small gravel spit on the northwest coast of Alaska, more than 3,700 miles from New York City. Icy seas surround it on three sides, leaving only an unpaved path to the mainland. Getting here from Anchorage, about 700 miles away, requires two flights. Roads do not connect the two places. Basics like milk and bread are delivered by air, and gas is brought in by barge during the summer. “I don’t know if people even know that we exist,” said Daisy Sage, the mayor. Needless to say, this is not the sort of place you expect to be a hub of the high-tech digital world. But in a surprising, and bittersweet, side effect of global warming — and of the global economy — one of the fastest internet connections in America is arriving in Point Hope, giving the 700 or so residents their first taste of broadband speed. The new connection is part of an ambitious effort by Quintillion, a five-year old company based in Anchorage, to take advantage of the melting sea ice to build a faster digital link between London and Tokyo. High-speed internet cables snake under the world’s oceans, tying continents together and allowing email and other bits of digital data sent from Japan to arrive quickly in Britain. Until recently, those lines mostly bypassed the Arctic, where the ice blocked access to the ships that lay the cable. But as the ice has receded, new passageways have emerged, creating a more direct path for the cable — over the earth’s northern end through places like the Chukchi Sea — and helping those emails move even move quickly. Quintillion is one of the companies laying the new cable, and Point Hope is one of the places along its route. Financial companies would certainly welcome — and pay for — a faster connection between London and Toyko. Over the past decade, traders have increasingly relied on powerful computer programs to buy and sell securities at huge volumes and lightning speeds. A millisecond can be the difference between a big profit and a big loss. Quintillion’s faster connection would also appeal to the operators of data stations around the world that store and send information for social media sites, online retailers and the billions of gadgets that now connect to the internet. But it will be years before the full connections between countries are made. For now, Quintillion’s undersea cables are just around the northern part of Alaska, and the company is taking advantage of a nascent business boom in the Arctic. Oil, shipping and mining companies that can benefit from a faster internet are rushing into the more open waters. Quintillion is also teaming up with local telecommunications companies to use the undersea cables to bring faster internet service to some of the nation’s most disconnected communities. In Point Hope, the new connection could mean better health care, as patients in the town and doctors in faraway cities communicate via seamless webcast. It could help improve education, too. Teachers, now used to waiting hours to download course materials, will now be able to do it in minutes. Many of Point Hope’s older residents cringe at the incursion of technology. For the most part, this is still a traditional community of Inupiaq native Alaskans. Until the 1970s, many families lived in sod houses framed with whale bones. People here also have no illusions about the overall effect of global warming. They see the waters rising and worry about sea mammals disappearing. They rely on the sea for food, and their year is built around festivals for berry picking and whaling. “Inupiaq people are taught to be patient,” said Steve Oomittuk, a leading local whale hunter whose family has lived in Point Hope for many generations. “We wait for animals to come to us for our food, our shelter, our medicine, our clothing. The internet makes people impatient for everything. This is not our way of life.” But interviews with dozens of Point Hope residents suggest that people here see Quintillion’s cable as a way of connecting with an outside world that has long been beyond easy reach — and something that could change their lives for the better. Leona Snyder, for one, is excited about what the connection could do for her Justice Jones, who turns 16 on Sunday. She wants him to go to college, which would mean leaving the village. Having broadband internet could help him study and research outside opportunities. “Internet means exposure to the world,” she said. “I want that for Justice. I want him to be a judge. Judge Justice Jones. It has a ring to it, don’t you think?” Navigating the Ice In June, three ships carrying huge rolls of cable traveled through waters in the Bering Strait and the Chukchi Sea to lay the final miles of Quintillion’s undersea internet network. The boats unfurled 40 miles of fiber optic cable into the dark, choppy water. An enormous shoveling tool plowed the sea floor and buried the cables for protection. It was the final stretch of a 1,200-mile network connecting six coastal towns, including Kotzebue, Nome and Point Hope. “A project like this has been discussed for 20-plus years but was formidable from a cost and weather standpoint,” said Tim Woolston, a Quintillion spokesman. “The ice situation has evolved to the point where it’s now physically possible.” An infusion from Cooper Investment Partners, a private equity firm in New York, has helped Quintillion finance the laying of the cable. The company would not say how much the network had cost to build so far. But it insisted that supplying high-speed internet service to an estimated 20,000 people along the cable’s route would be a good business. Quintillion makes money leasing the bandwidth from its undersea cable network to local telecoms that then bring internet service directly to homes and businesses in Alaska. The company has not announced its business plans for connecting internet service between Asia and Europe, but will probably use a similar model. Although that is a relatively small number of people, Quintillion believes it will increase along with what the company expects to be broader commercial growth in the region driven by oil and mineral exploration. With broadband service available, Quintillion is also betting that more data centers, research centers, hospitals and schools will make the Arctic Circle home. Other broadband-internet providers have the same idea. Cinia, a telecom company owned by the Finnish government, has completed the first stage of a multiyear plan to lay a subsea broadband network between Europe and Asia through the Arctic Ocean. Cinia, which expects the Arctic network to cost about $700 million, just completed the first leg, from Germany to Finland. Today, much of the internet communications between the continents run through Asia, including through the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. The shorter route planned by Cinia would bring a 35 percent decrease in latency, or delay, the company said. “The financial sector wants the shortest route for trading, and we are talking about fractions of milliseconds, but it makes a difference,” Ari-Jussi Knaapila, Cinia’s chief executive, said in an interview. Multiplayer video games that connect participants around the world also demand faster internet traffic with less delay, he added. After Alaska, Quintillion plans to bring its undersea cables to Asia. A third stage would extend the network to Europe. The company would not predict how long the project would take to complete. In the meantime, Quintillion is offsetting some of its costs by joining forces with local telecom companies to sell the internet service directly to customers. In Point Hope, several local companies, including the Arctic Slope Telephone Association Cooperative, have rushed to prepare homes. Alaska Communications, another telecom, has signed up city offices and businesses at other sites. The fiber network will bring connection speeds of 200 gigabits per second to the village, among the fastest rates in the country. Point Hope will not feel the full effect right away. Residential customers will initially be able get service at 10 megabits per second under plans starting $24.99 a month, while service will be faster for businesses. That is still 10 times faster than the existing phone-line connections here, and good enough for streaming video on a service like Netflix. The companies said they planned to offer faster speeds if demand warrants doing so. People here are already thinking that the new broadband lines could transform the local economy. The one general store, the Native Store, will be able to order new supplies more easily. The phone association has installed computer terminals at City Hall to provide free internet service to the public. Point Hope’s transportation director is building a conference center with Wi-Fi and web video conferencing above a bus garage to host state events. Artists are planning to sell native crafts and jewelry online. Last month, about 25 residents, including the mayor, gathered at City Hall and talked about how internet service could turn Point Hope, one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in North America, into a tourist destination with a museum with interactive displays and a website. The village’s small motel with 20 beds would offer Wi-Fi. “The trigger to all of this is lower-cost broadband that will bring a whole new economy and hope to places like Point Hope,” said Jens Laipenieks, president of the Arctic Slope Telephone Association Cooperative. A Place a Step Ahead Nome, a few hundred miles to the south and with 4,000 residents, offers a glimpse into Point Hope’s future. Climate change, and broadband connections, have already altered education and commerce. With the warming of the Bering Sea, the Crystal Serenity cruise ship, 820 feet long and with a capacity of more than 1,000 passengers, has started to anchor offshore, bringing new tourism. The ship has only recently been able to navigate around the ice. If local politicians have their way, it will be only the beginning. They are lobbying the state to build a deep water port so that even larger cruise ships can dock in Nome. The officials have indicated Quintillion’s broadband service improves its case to state officials, who want to make sure Coast Guard and tourist boats will have access to high-speed internet service. “The future is here and there is not anything changing that,” said Richard Beneville, Nome’s mayor, who also runs a tour company. Nome has had broadband internet service for years. The arrival of Quintillion’s lines, which were turned on Dec. 1, will make the connections much faster. Like the changes that Point Hope is experiencing, the ones in Nome worry some residents. Austin Ahmasuk, a marine environmentalist who lives along the coast, is among them. He is concerned that the change will dilute some of the local culture and result in harm to the environment. “The very thing that kept most global development away from the north — ice — is disappearing in all its formats,” Mr. Ahmasuk said. “History shows that outside people don’t have the same interest in our culture and environment.” But residents here are mostly embracing having a stronger connection with the rest of the world. Early on a weekday evening, Bryan and Maggie Muktoyuk organized more than a dozen people at the Lutheran Church on Bering Street for a weekly rehearsal of native dance and drums. Seated in a row, men and teenage boys pounded on round drums made of stretched walrus stomach. Women with mittens and ornate mukluk boots swayed their hips to the beat. Ms. Muktoyuk held up her iPhone and, with a Wi-Fi connection, started to stream a video of the rehearsal on Facebook. Mr. Muktoyuk had set up a group page on the social network for other native dancers around the Alaska’s North Slope region. A line of men took to the community room’s floor, pounded their feet and shouted as they reached toward the sky. They were learning a new dance that Mr. Muktoyuk had choreographed, inspired by an exhausting whale hunt he had participated in months earlier in Wainwright, near Point Hope. “Make sure you get this,” he said to Ms. Muktoyuk. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/02/t...gital-hub.html ![]() 40 Percent of America Will Cut the Cord by 2030, New Report Predicts A new market analysis predicts the slow death march of pay TV will continue. Kaleigh Rogers As a haughty millennial, the fact that anybody still pays for traditional cable TV baffles me, but 85 percent of US households still do. That tide is slowly turning, however, and by 2030, as many as 40 percent of Americans will have cut the cord, according to predictions in a new report by market analyst TDG Research. The writing has been on the wall for some time, TDG, a boutique consulting firm focused on the future of TV, wrote in the report. After the recession, many Americans were looking to cut unnecessary expenses, which kicked off a trend of cord cutting. Coupled with the rise of digital streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, these trends contributed to traditional pay TV’s decline, something TDG predicted back in 2010. Those predictions proved true, with the percent of US households still shelling out for cable dropping every year since 2012. If the trend continues on the current path, TDG predicts the percent of US households subscribing to pay TV will drop to 60 percent in the next 13 years. "TDG said early on that the future of TV was an app. Unfortunately, most incumbent multi-channel video providers weren't taking notes," Joel Espelien, TDG Senior Analyst, said in a press release. "The question is no longer if the future of TV is an app, but how quickly and economically incumbents can adapt to this truth and transition to an all-broadband app-based live multi-channel system." Back in the day, internet subscriptions were an upsell from cable or telephone providers. Now the opposite is true: internet is the must-have, while cable or home phone are often a luxury add-on for Americans. Last year, the number of broadband households surpassed the number of legacy pay-TV households, according to the report. Cost is a major driver of this shift: the cost of bundling a few favorite streaming services together still pales in comparison to the average cable bill. TDG found that two thirds of cord cutters and “cord nevers” (people who have never paid for cable) said service expense was the key reason they do not use legacy pay TV services. But there’s also a generational shift: 61 percent of adults aged 18-29 say online streaming services are the primary way they watch TV, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. It was the only age group where cable doesn’t reign supreme, with cable’s significance increasing by age group: Having grown up on the internet, it’s natural and easy for younger generations to consume media through various digital media rather than paying a single source for all entertainment. And the cost of paying for something you don’t even use (like channel bundles where you only want the one channel out of six) is an anathema for us, especially after coming of age in the midst of one of the worst economies in recent history. So it’s not surprising that this is where the trend is going, but it will be interesting to see how quickly we get there and how long it will take before legacy TV providers finally get the hint. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...study-cable-tv ![]() Phonelike PCs Failed Before. Here's Why they'll Succeed Now Windows RT was an ill-fated attempt to make computers more power-efficient like smartphones. Microsoft and Qualcomm are giving the idea a second go. Shara Tibken Five years ago, Microsoft attempted to radically transform how a Windows computer would work. At the core of this change was the embrace of chips that normally powered smartphones and tablets made by Qualcomm. It marked a dramatic deviation from the normal use of x86 chips from Intel and AMD, which traditionally served as the brains of a Windows PC. Windows RT, a lightweight version of Windows 8, would enable thinner and lighter PCs and tablets. It would help Microsoft and its partners like HP and Dell better compete with Apple's iPad. And it would get people excited about PCs again. None of that really happened, and Windows RT bombed. Less than three years after it hit the market, the software ceased to exist. But Microsoft, along with chipmaker Qualcomm and PC makers like HP, is now back for a second try. Together, they've created "always connected PCs" that are powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon chips. The move comes as you spend more and more time on your smartphone, and the market for PCs continue to shrink. The answer? Turn your next PC into something more akin to your phone. For Qualcomm, PCs marks a potential new business at a time when Intel has created a 4G LTE radio good enough to power Apple's iPhone. Microsoft and PC makers hope the longer lasting computers may get you to give their products a second look. The first two devices, 2-in-1 laptops from HP and Asus, promise more than 20 hours of battery life, always-on connectivity and the ability to instantly wake. And importantly, they run full Windows and can use ordinary Windows apps. "You get everything you have come to expect out of Windows plus all of these new things," Cristiano Amon, the executive vice president in charge of Qualcomm's chip business, said in an interview Tuesday at the company's tech conference in Maui. "It completely changes the value proposition from what the original Windows RT was." If Microsoft, Qualcomm and their PC partners want these new devices to succeed, they better hope that's true. Windows RT's doomed past It's almost impossible today to introduce PCs that run on mobile chips without mentioning -- or at least thinking of -- Windows RT. Windows RT, which hit the market in late 2012 as a lightweight alternative to Windows 8. The software struggled immediately and failed to gain traction with users, in part because traditional Windows programs, like Outlook, wouldn't run on it. Windows RT confused consumers, who couldn't understand the differences between RT and full-blown Windows 8. Microsoft also tightly controlled the development process for Windows RT devices, limiting the number of companies ARM chipmakers could work with, in what it said would make better devices. The company was trying to emulate Apple's model of controlling both the software and hardware experience. But that meant few products, outside Microsoft's Surface, ever hit the market with the software. Microsoft itself overestimated how many Surface RT units it could sell and had to write down the value of the tablets. One by one, other PC vendors and chipmakers ditched Windows RT before Microsoft finally killed the last table running the software in early 2015. "When you make something that has a limited experience, it always has to be counteracted by some sort of other big benefit," Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Pat Moorhead said. Windows RT devices weren't thinner or lighter than x86-powered rivals. At the same time, they were less powerful and ran a limited number of applications. "In a way, Windows RT was the worst of both worlds," Moorhead said. Microsoft and Qualcomm, the world's biggest wireless chipmaker, weren't ready to give up completely, though. The two announced plans a year ago to make Windows 10 run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor, the same chip that powers Samsung's Galaxy S8 and the Google Pixel 2. This time around, they took steps avoid to the problems of the past. "We all have battle scars from RT," Miguel Nunes, product manager for Qualcomm's Windows on Snapdragon operations, said in an interview. "None of us could afford another Windows RT." Second time around When Microsoft and Qualcomm set out to make Windows 10 run on Snapdragon chips, they knew they couldn't risk another flop. They had to be more like smartphones, with more compact designs, better battery life, wireless connectivity and always-on capabilities. And importantly, they couldn't run a stripped-down version of Windows. "There was a decision made by Microsoft and Qualcomm that there is no second class system of Windows," Amon said. "It is just Windows. Period." HP, Asus and Lenovo jumped on board and started building devices that sport Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 processor and its X16 LTE modem. In the case of HP, its Envy x2 features a 12.3-inch display and will last up to 20 hours on a single charge and up to about 30 days in "modern standby mode." The device will have up to 8GB of RAM and up to 256GB of storage when it launches in the spring. Pricing isn't yet available. The Asus NovaGo has a 13.3-inch LED-backlit full HD display, is able to run 22 hours of video and can stay on standby for 30 days. It will start at $599 for 4 gigabytes of RAM and 64GB of storage. The $799 model will get 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Lenovo will unveil its device at CES in January. "This is a full PC and it's fundamentally transformed the way I work," Terry Meyerson, executive vice president of Microsoft's Windows and devices group, said Tuesday at Qualcomm's tech summit. He noted the PC he's been using needs to be charged only once a week. It wakes up immediately and always has a connection when he needs it. What's different this time around goes beyond the devices themselves, said Amon. Mobile processors have become more powerful, and people have gotten more comfortable with cloud computing, accessing data over the Internet instead of storing it on the device itself. Think Google Docs or Photos stored in iCloud. "Expectations are now being defined by" smartphones, Amon said. "Those are significant changes from where we started." Trading off The new Snapdragon-powered PCs may appeals to some buyers, but they also have some drawbacks. They're mainly aimed at people who want to search the web, access social media, check email or consume content like videos. They won't work well for photo editing or intensive gaming. Qualcomm has been pushing for more and more devices to come with built-in wireless connections. No more waiting for Wi-Fi when your tablet has LTE. But that means another cellular plan -- something consumers haven't been clamoring for. In a Creative Strategies study, about half of the iPad users it surveyed opted for the pricier LTE version of Apple's tablet. Only 49 percent of those people actually activated LTE on the tablet. (for those of you who hate math, that means only about a quarter of people use LTE on their tablets). For those who did set up LTE on their iPads, it "was mostly for peace of mind," Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi said. It's common for cellphones to come equipped with mobile hotspots that let you share Wi-Fi with your other devices. That makes having a modem inside your computer or tablet less important. If having connectivity in a PC becomes vital, it's likely Intel will put its own 4G LTE chips in computers. And while Microsoft and Qualcomm tout the devices' ability to use "full Windows," that comes with some caveats. The version of Windows running on the devices is 10 S, which is a more locked-down experience. The software only runs applications downloaded from Microsoft's Windows Store. And though the Snapdragon-powered devices can run traditional Windows apps, it's through a process called emulation, which can make the machines lag in some instances. The pitch from Microsoft, Qualcomm and the PC makers is that Windows 10 S is more secure. All apps in the Windows Store have been approved by Microsoft, making malware and other issues less likely. Now it will be up to consumers to decide if a smartphone-like PC is what they want. "The question is if [these devices] are better enough to justify the potential concerns," Technalysis Research analyst Bob O'Donnell said. "The tradeoffs are much more interesting this time than with RT." https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-...on-windows-rt/ ![]() Android Go Seeks a Smoother Ride for Low-End Smartphones Google will release a new version of its mobile operating system, as well as a tailored app store and apps -- all designed for entry-level Android phones. Sarah McDermott Entry-level phones may cost less than big hitters, but they come at the cost of space, speed and efficiency. Google's looking to change that with Android Go. Android Oreo (Go Edition) will launch Wednesday as part of the Android Oreo 8.1 rollout, and all Android Oreo devices with 512MB to 1GB of memory will be optimized for Android Go. Google said this will allow them to function properly as smartphones while doubling their available storage space. The rollout includes: • An operating system designed for better performance, storage and security features on low-end phones. • A new set of "lighter" Google apps. • A Google Play store that highlights the apps designed to work best on entry-level devices. Android Go, introduced at Google I/O earlier this year, offers possibilities for Android users in emerging markets, kids trying out their first phones or anyone who needs a low-cost backup phone. In a Google blog post, Android director of product management Sagar Kamdar noted that of the 2 billion Android users around the world, more are in India than the US. "To make sure billions more people can get access to computing, it's important that entry-level devices are fully functioning smartphones that can browse the web and use apps," Kamdar said. https://www.cnet.com/news/android-go...-run-smoothly/ ![]() Firefox Is As Fast As Chrome Now, And No One Cares Maybe the internet really is over Brett O’Connor Firefox is as fast as Chrome now. Specifically, it’s finally doing the thing Chrome has already done for some time now that made it faster. I know you’ve been promised that Firefox is faster before, dashed among a lot of other internet hyperbole, and these promises did not come true. Firefox has instead sucked big time. Inevitably they had to get it right, though. With that inevitability is a feeling, and that feeling may be: you don’t care. Great, Firefox is faster, but you’re tired! You have a lot of good reasons not to care, as switching a web browser is not some fly-by-night for-fun choice. Your web browser is officially a serious tool, and you’re going to need more than Firefox being exactly like the one you already have if you’re going to switch. The switching cost is too damn high. Speaking of the web browser you already have, most likely, you are using Google Chrome. Eeeevvverrryone knows you’re using Google Chrome, especially Mozilla, the creators of Firefox, who have published their own report with humbling statistics about how everyone uses Chrome. If you want to see what’s inevitable, look at that website. It’s full of terrifying data points of inevitability turned into cool JavaScript chart things, showing us how Google knows a terrifying amount about us, Internet censorship is on the rise, and that only half the world uses the internet. (That last one is interesting, considering all this inevitability…) I can’t help but wonder if this feeling of inevitability resonates with what the artists called “postinternet.” That is, maybe this is a sign that we have reached a point of growth in internet where its existence is no longer novel. Its effect on society is ubiquitous and lasting. Postinternet isn’t a very focused concept itself, but the time period inherent in its name is appealing, and you can kind of see it happening. The word INTERNET itself, once ringing with possibility, sure just feels like annoying screech of inevitability. (The people who don’t hear this screech have an idea for a website.) For most of us, the web browser has gone from technology to tool, even though those two words have always meant the exactly same thing. It would make sense with life under postinternet that our choice of web browser wouldn’t really exist or—more likely under our current economic and social systems—be like choosing between brands of laundry detergent. Sure, they’ll distinctively “innovate” every once in a while with tasty dissolvable globules with the taste adults love, but really, it’s just soap. But there’s always the possibility we’re calling it too early. After all, our choice of web browser used to be a principled one. It wasn’t about the speed. Firefox was the mainstream browser that we installed on our parents’ and grandparents’ computers over Thanksgiving. We sent them an email with some stuff to download before our flight in. We confirmed you can install it on practically anything — even that older computer — and that it wasn’t evil. So, let’s do a quick exercise to see if we should still use Firefox. If the choice between the two is like choosing laundry detergent then hell, let’s call it: the browser wars are—no, the Internet is—totally over. Let’s start by comparing features: Firefox is open source, but so is Chrome. Firefox has advanced privacy controls, but so does Chrome. Firefox has great development tools, but so does Chrome. Features just aren’t really relevant here. You can sync your bookmarks and run most plugins, though Firefox may have some trouble with things specifically built for Chrome, as they are less popular. This lack of popularity is what hurts Firefox the most. There are fewer plugins that work with Firefox, fewer cool web experiments, and fewer websites supporting Firefox the best etc. Unfortunately, the only fix is for Firefox to become more popular. Both Firefox and Chrome are free. This too probably doesn’t matter. All it means is, you are the product, no matter which browser you choose. (What else is new? These days we’re lucky to get two or three choices.) The difference between the two, if anywhere, may be in their principles. Essentially, what kind of product do they see you as? So what are Google’s principles? Great question! We know for a fact that Google is no longer not evil. This twisted concept is purposefully designed to repel us from caring. It’s like looking at a terrible shape your mind can’t find the corners for, its lines spinning off into Alphabets and Androids. Fear and confusion. The only way to save yourself is to look away, which may be exactly what they want. Google’s principles are driven by the shareholders’ (a.k.a. people with money) gaze. Mozilla calls itself “the proudly non-profit champions of the Internet, helping to keep it healthy, open and accessible to all.” That sounds nice, and is presumably something they try and follow through on, which might actually make them a much more terrifying creature than Google, in a way. (Maybe a rat king?) Firefox is built by thousands of volunteers around the world (a.k.a. people with money and time), and functions as a meritocracy (a.k.a. videogame). If anything can be said about them, it’s that these volunteers like to argue about Firefox and Mozilla a lot. It’s kind of like Twitter, but with a purpose. It’s honestly just as terrible as Twitter too, but at least something is coming out of it. That’s part of why it took so long for Firefox to become faster. These volunteers drive the principles of the Mozilla organization as well. So there is a difference between the two browsers. Firefox is basically like environmentally friendly organic soap, and it cleans just as well as Chrome now! With that in mind, your choice of web browser might be more significant than you realize. The internet isn’t over, it’s just beat us down really bad. Your choice of web browser is not inevitable. There’s still so much to do. I mean, Google and Mozilla — fuck them both, really! We’re just canaries in their twisted coal mine. Still, we have choices. So I say why not switch to Firefox, if only as an act of psychological resilience (something we could all stand to practice right now)? The switching cost is actually not that high (yet). Chrome may not yet be inevitable, and using Firefox may align better with your principles. Also, there are still a lot of people without internet — a very non-postinternet sign. For them, the internet is much more inevitable, and might be way more so by the time it gets to them. If we all installed Firefox, things could be very different, should we ever reach that postinternet point. You can still help create the internet of tomorrow by installing a web browser, and it’s 2017. https://www.theawl.com/2017/06/firef...-no-one-cares/ ![]() YouTube is Cutting Access to Amazon Fire TV on Jan. 1 Google, which owns YouTube, and Amazon are going to war over streaming services and plenty more. YouTube is also disappearing again from Amazon’s Echo Show video device. Richard Nieva, Ben Fox Rubin If you've got an Amazon Fire TV, say goodbye to using it to watch YouTube. The Google-owned video service is cutting access to the Amazon device on Jan. 1, a Google spokeswoman said on Tuesday. YouTube is also cutting access Tuesday for a second time to Amazon's Echo Show video device. The moves signal that the ongoing battle between the world's biggest search engine and the world's largest online retailer may get messier in 2018. "We've been trying to reach agreement with Amazon to give consumers access to each other's products and services," the Google spokeswoman said in a statement. "But Amazon doesn't carry Google products like Chromecast and Google Home, doesn't make Prime Video available for Google Cast users, and last month stopped selling some of Nest's latest products. "Given this lack of reciprocity," she said. "We are no longer supporting YouTube on Echo Show and FireTV. We hope we can reach an agreement to resolve these issues soon." Google and Amazon have been in an intensifying competition on multiple fronts, with Amazon pushing deeper into Google's turf of online advertising and Google moving into Amazon's territory of e-commerce and smart speakers. This competition over the years has spilled out into public view and often resulted in fewer options for customers. Still, it's unclear whether Google's latest move should be seen as a negotiating tactic by the search giant or a sign of more fighting between the two companies. In one of the most recent spats between the two tech powerhouses, YouTube vanished from Amazon's Echo Show device in September, with Google saying Amazon's implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show violated its terms of service. The Show, unveiled in May, is essentially an Amazon Echo smart speaker with a built-in touchscreen display. YouTube returned to the Show last month, just in time for Black Friday, by directing users to YouTube's website, but Google is cutting access again. "Echo Show and Fire TV now display a standard web view of YouTube.com and point customers directly to YouTube's existing website," an Amazon spokeswoman said. "Google is setting a disappointing precedent by selectively blocking customer access to an open website. We hope to resolve this with Google as soon as possible." Two years, ago, Amazon banned Google's Chromecast and Apple TV from its website, helping Amazon direct its customers toward its own Fire TV and away from competing devices. Amazon at the time said the move was to ensure its customers were buying the best devices for watching its Prime Video service and to help "avoid customer confusion." Apple said earlier this year that Prime Video is coming to Apple TV. Prime Video isn't available on Google Chromecast or Android TV devices, but it is on mobile Android devices. Google and Amazon have been in a high-stakes battle to get their devices into your home. Amazon released the Echo, a voice-controlled speaker and smart home hub, in 2014. Google followed suit last year with its rival Google Home. Apple plans to join the market with its $350 HomePod. Still, Amazon is the dominant leader in the smart speaker world, with Echo devices owning 73 percent of the market. Google is far behind with 27 percent, according to a report by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. In September, Amazon unveiled a new line of Echo devices, including the Echo Plus, the Echo Spot and an updated Echo. In October, Google unveiled a slew of hardware products to get its Assistant, a digital helper akin to Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, to more users. The new devices include an updated version of the Google Home smart speaker and a Google Home Mini device. Despite the direct competition between the Google Home and the Amazon Echo, the two companies continue to work together for some connected home devices. For instance, Google's parent company, Alphabet, continues to let people control their Nest thermostats and cameras using an Echo. The Nest thermostat is available on Amazon, but last month other Nest products disappeared from the site, including the Nest Thermostat E, a cheaper version of the device, and the Nest Secure alarm system. Right now Google Home can't be bought on Amazon either. Neither can Google's Chromecast video streaming device. Google has been in negotiations with Amazon to try to get both company's products on each of their platforms, a person familiar with Google's thinking told CNET. That could mean, for example, having Prime Video, Amazon's streaming video service, on Google's Cast streaming products. "It should be about users of Google and Amazon, not Google and Amazon," the person said. https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-to...y-1-echo-show/ ![]() The Hidden Player Spurring a Wave of Cheap Consumer Devices: Amazon Farhad Manjoo A few weeks ago, Wyze Labs, a one-year-old start-up in Seattle, sent me its first gadget to try. It’s a small, internet-connected video camera, the kind you might use for security or to keep tabs on your dog or your baby. On the surface, the camera doesn’t sound special. Like home internet cameras made by Nest or Netgear, the Wyze device can monitor an area for motion or sound. When it spots something, it begins recording a short clip that it stores online, for access on your phone or your computer. But the WyzeCam has one groundbreaking feature that no rival can match. It is being sold for such an unbelievably low price — $20 — that it sent me tunneling into the global gadget industry to figure out how Wyze had done it. That, in turn, led to a revelation about the future of all kinds of products, from cameras to clothes. That future? We’re going to get better products for ludicrously low prices, and big brands across a range of categories — the Nests and Netgears of the world — are going to find it harder than ever to get us to shell out big money for their wares. There’s a hidden hero in this story — or, if you’re a major brand, a shadowy villain. It’s Amazon. To understand Amazon’s role, let’s take a closer look at how Wyze piggybacked off Amazon. Nest’s and Netgear’s comparable indoor cameras sell for around $200 each, while Wyze’s device goes for $20 plus shipping if you buy directly from the company’s website. The only other place to purchase the WyzeCam is on Amazon, where members of the company’s Prime service can get it for $30 including two-day shipping. Wyze did not create a home internet camera for a tenth of the price of rivals by skimping on quality. Though the camera comes in extremely spare packaging, it otherwise offers many features you would expect in big-brand devices, including tough security. (Although all internet-connected devices pose some security risk, Wyze said its devices and the data they recorded were locked down with encryption.) Wyze’s low prices are instead born of two ideas, both connected to Amazon. The company’s three founders all worked at the retail giant, and they said they had been inspired by Amazon’s high-volume, low-margin approach to sales. To hit the $20 price, Wyze licensed the camera’s hardware from a Chinese company, then created its own software. It also cut out just about every middleman, including most retailers. And it’s banking on long-run success. While Wyze is just breaking even on its first camera, its founders believe internet-connected home devices will be a growth category. They plan to establish a trusted brand with the first camera, then release a succession of products that they hope to sell in large numbers, at low prices. But how do you establish a brand online? That’s the second place Amazon comes in. Though they snubbed every other retailer, Wyze’s founders recognized that they needed an Amazon storefront to help them establish an instant presence next to the big guys. Customer rankings and reviews on Amazon have become just about the most important factor in how consumers buy electronics products; because Amazon pages come up high on search results like Google’s, a positive rating on Amazon can effectively make a brand — and a negative rating can break one. “That’s why we had to sell on Amazon,” said Yun Zhang, Wyze’s chief executive. “You just can’t ignore them.” Wyze is now one of dozens of companies relying heavily on Amazon to create online brands. There’s Anker, which makes low-priced, well-regarded accessories for your electronics. There’s Yi, which makes, among other things, action cameras that rival GoPro. And there are RAVPower, TaoTronics and VAVA, three consumer electronics brands that are all owned by Sunvalley Group. Sunvalley, a Chinese company, said it will exceed $300 million in sales this year, with about 90 percent coming through Amazon. In an earlier time, you might have dismissed companies like these as “Chinese knockoffs.” After all, like Wyze, most of them use commodity parts and global manufacturing efficiencies to create low-priced versions of relatively uncomplicated products. But knockoffs get a bad rap because they are of indeterminate quality: Even if it’s selling at a good price, who wants to risk buying a no-name portable smartphone charger if it might blow up in your face? Allen Fung, the general manager of Sunvalley’s American division, said that what was unique about Amazon was that its store encouraged low prices while heavily penalizing companies that made shoddy products. “It’s not a race to the bottom,” Mr. Fung said. “Sellers are forced to create better products at lower pricing, and sellers who aren’t able to do that just get weeded out.” Mr. Fung recently spent a couple of hours providing an in-depth look at how he manages his company’s brands on Amazon. To win a certain product category — portable chargers, say, or children’s night lights — the company is obsessive about monitoring customer feedback, including the rate at which its products are returned. Sunvalley recently hired a team of customer service agents to respond to complaints. It has also hired industrial designers to improve the look of its devices — which also helps it stand out from other commodity devices on Amazon’s results page. Sunvalley also spends heavily on Amazon ads (these show up as “sponsored” results on Amazon’s search page), and sometimes it will sell products at a loss during one of Amazon’s daily or seasonal deals to get a boost that lifts all of its products in the website’s search rankings. All of these investments are costly and time-consuming, and competition on Amazon is intense. Mr. Fung said Sunvalley’s gross margins were under 25 percent, which is quite low for consumer electronics. “It’s really tough,” he said. “There’s a real process of natural selection there.” This process is not going to affect just the consumer electronics business. Mr. Fung said his teams regularly looked to Amazon as a kind of product road map — they look for categories dominated by high-priced items from well-known brands, and then try to create better, cheaper versions. Sunvalley has expanded into home appliances like lamps and humidifiers, as well as into cosmetics. Amazon, which charges a fee for third-party companies to sell through its platform, is not a passive actor in this trend. It has long encouraged businesses to set up shop on its site. The company said that half of its products came from small businesses, and that in 2016, more than 100,000 businesses exceeded $100,000 in sales through its system. It also started a lending program to allow those businesses to scale up; last year, its loans exceeded $3 billion. “As this takes off, it really makes you start to question, you know, what is a brand in the Amazon age?” said Scot Wingo, executive chairman of ChannelAdvisor, an e-commerce consulting firm. It’s an intriguing question, and one that raises fears of Amazon’s rise. While the growth of high-quality, low-priced brands on Amazon seems unquestionably good for consumers, the trend does produce economic losers. The classic worry about Amazon is that it puts local retailers out of business. Now another worry is that by exposing global brands to the harsh reality of low-priced competitors, it may put them out of business, too. Mr. Wingo said global brands across a variety of categories — electronics, apparel, home improvement — regularly approached his company looking for a way to compete with low-priced rivals on Amazon. He has had to let them know there’s no easy solution, he said. “There is this erosion of what it means to be a traditional consumer product brand,” Mr. Wingo said. “In a way, Amazon is providing all this information that replaces what you’d normally get from a brand, like reputation and trust. Amazon is becoming something like the umbrella brand, the only brand that matters.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/t...es-amazon.html ![]() A.I. Will Transform the Economy. But How Much, and How Soon? Steve Lohr There are basically three big questions about artificial intelligence and its impact on the economy: What can it do? Where is it headed? And how fast will it spread? Three new reports combine to suggest these answers: It can probably do less right now than you think. But it will eventually do more than you probably think, in more places than you probably think, and will probably evolve faster than powerful technologies have in the past. This bundle of research is itself a sign of the A.I. boom. Researchers across disciplines are scrambling to understand the likely trajectory, reach and influence of the technology — already finding its way into things like self-driving cars and image recognition online — in all its dimensions. Doing so raises a host of challenges of definition and measurement, because the field is moving quickly — and because companies are branding things A.I. for marketing purposes. An “AI Index,” created by researchers at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other organizations, released on Thursday, tracks developments in artificial intelligence by measuring aspects like technical progress, investment, research citations and university enrollments. The goal of the project is to collect, curate and continually update data to better inform scientists, businesspeople, policymakers and the public. The McKinsey Global Institute published a report on Wednesday about automation and jobs, sketching out different paths the technology might take and its effect on workers, by job category in several countries. One finding: Up to one third of the American work force will have to switch to new occupations by 2030, in about a dozen years. And in an article published in November by the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists from M.I.T. and the University of Chicago suggest an answer to the puzzle of why all the research and investment in A.I. technology have so far had little effect on productivity. Each of the three research initiatives has a somewhat different focus. But two common themes emerge from the reports and interviews with their authors. ■ Technology itself is only one ingredient in determining the trajectory of A.I. and its influence. Economics, government policy and social attitudes will play major roles as well. ■ Historical patterns of adoption of major technologies, from electricity to computers, are likely to hold true for A.I. But if the pattern is similar, the pace may not be. And if it is much faster, as many researchers predict, the social consequences could be far more wrenching than in past transitions. The AI Index grew out of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, a Stanford-based project begun in 2014 by A.I. experts. The study group, mainly scientists, seeks to broaden understanding of artificial intelligence and thus increase the odds society will be benefit from the technology. The group was initially going to publish major studies every five years. But given the speed of progress and investment, the five-year interval “seemed way too slow,” said Yoav Shoham, a professor emeritus at Stanford and chair of the steering committee for the “AI Index.” The new index is not a single number, but a series of charts and graphs that track A.I.-related trends over time. They include measures like the rate of improvement in image identification and speech recognition, as well as start-up activity and job openings. There are also short essays by artificial intelligence experts. Some of the charts showing the progress of technology are telling. Image and speech recognition programs, for example, have matched or surpassed human capabilities in just the past year or two. But A.I. experts warn that gains in specific tasks or game-playing proficiency are still a far cry from general intelligence. A child, for example, knows that a water glass tipping on the edge of a table will most likely fall to the floor and spill the water. He or she understands the physics of everyday life in a way artificial intelligence programs do not yet. “The public thinks we know how to do far more than we do now,” said Raymond Perrault, a scientist at SRI International, who worked on the index. The current “AI Index,” Mr. Shoham said, is “very much a first step.” The group is seeking contributions of data and comments from academic and corporate researchers around the world. The idea, he said, is to create “a living index” that details as many measurable dimensions of the field as possible, including social impact. The McKinsey automation-and-jobs report captures the uncertainty surrounding A.I. and its coming effect on labor markets. Its projection of the number of Americans who will have to find new occupations by 2030 ranges from 16 million to 54 million — depending on the pace of technology adoption. The faster A.I. advances, the greater the challenge. McKinsey’s upper-range projection of 54 million suggests a more rapid transformation than in previous waves of change in the work force, when employment migrated from farms to factories and later from manufacturing to services. “That’s where the conversation has to go — how to manage this transition,” said Susan Lund, an economist at McKinsey. “We need a major change in how we provide midcareer retraining and how we help displaced workers find new employment.” Still, the rise of A.I. has not yet shown up in the economy as a whole, at least not in the numbers. In their recent paper, Erik Brynjolfsson and Daniel Rock of the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and Chad Syverson of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business call it “a clash of expectations and statistics.” They offer a few possible explanations, including false hopes and poor measurements of the new technology. But the one they settle on is a lag in the adoption and effective use of A.I. There are historical precedents. The electric motor, for example, was introduced in the early 1880s. But it was not until the 1920s that discernible productivity gains showed up, after the motors spread and factory work was reorganized into mass-production assembly lines to exploit the new technology of its day. A.I. will follow a similar path, but faster, predicts Mr. Brynjolfsson, who also worked in the “AI Index.” And the index, he said, should help accelerate adoption by giving people needed information to make better decisions. There are A.I. skeptics, but Mr. Brynjolfsson is not one of them. “History shows it takes years, even with a powerful technology in place,” he said. “But to me, it’s dead certain it’s going to happen.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/t...-how-soon.html ![]() China’s A.I. Advances Help Its Tech Industry, and State Security Paul Mozur and Keith Bradsher During President Trump’s visit to Beijing, he appeared on screen for a special address at a tech conference. First he spoke in English. Then he switched to Mandarin Chinese. Mr. Trump doesn’t speak Chinese. The video was a publicity stunt, designed to show off the voice capabilities of iFlyTek, a Chinese artificial intelligence company with both innovative technology and troubling ties to Chinese state security. IFlyTek has said its technology can monitor a car full of people or a crowded room, identify a targeted individual’s voice and record everything that person says. “IFlyTek,” the image of Mr. Trump said in Chinese, “is really fantastic.” As China tests the frontiers of artificial intelligence, iFlyTek serves as a compelling example of both the country’s sci-fi ambitions and the technology’s darker dystopian possibilities. The Chinese company uses sophisticated A.I. to power image and voice recognition systems that can help doctors with their diagnoses, aid teachers in grading tests and let drivers control their cars with their voices. Even some global companies are impressed: Delphi, a major American auto supplier, offers iFlyTek’s technology to carmakers in China, while Volkswagen plans to build the Chinese company’s speech recognition technology into many of its cars in China next year. At the same time, iFlyTek hosts a laboratory to develop voice surveillance capabilities for China’s domestic security forces. In an October report, a human rights group said the company was helping the authorities compile a biometric voice database of Chinese citizens that could be used to track activists and others. Those tight ties with the government could give iFlyTek and other Chinese companies an edge in an emerging new field. China’s financial support and its loosely enforced and untested privacy laws give Chinese companies considerable resources and access to voices, faces and other biometric data in vast quantities, which could help them develop their technologies, experts say. China “does not have the stringent privacy laws that Western companies have, nor are Chinese citizens against having their data collected, as (arguably speaking) government monitoring is a fact of China,” analysts with the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein wrote in a report in November. Already, China’s companies have at times edged out foreign rivals. IFlyTek has won major competitions for speech recognition and translation. Two years before Microsoft did, Baidu, the Chinese internet search company, created software capable of matching human skills at understanding speech. This year the Shanghai-based start-up Yitu took first place in a major facial recognition contest run by the United States government. IFlyTek and other Chinese companies say they follow China’s laws and protect user data. But they agree that the sheer number of users in China, plus the government’s single-minded drive to dominate the new technology, puts them at an advantage. “China has entered the artificial intelligence age together with the U.S.,” said Liu Qingfeng, iFlyTek’s chairman, at the Beijing conference. “But due to the advantage of a huge amount of users and China’s social governance, A.I. will develop faster and spread from China to the world.” An iFlyTek spokeswoman said the company had yet to receive required permission from officials in Anhui, the Chinese province where it is based, to speak with the foreign news media. IFlyTek is portrayed in the Chinese media both as a technology innovator and as an ally of the government. Last year iFlyTek helped prevent the loss of about $75 million in telecommunications fraud by helping the police target scammers, according to The Global Times, a nationalist tabloid controlled by the Communist Party. Its article quotes a Chinese security official as saying collecting voice patterns is like taking fingerprints or recording people with closed-circuit television cameras, meaning the practice does not violate their privacy. “We work with the Ministry of Public Security to pin down the criminals,” said Liu Junfeng, the general manager of the company’s automotive business, at a conference in September. Where iFlyTek gets its data is not clear. But one of its owners is China Mobile, the state-controlled cellular network giant, which has more than 800 million subscribers. IFlyTek preloads its products on millions of China Mobile phones and runs the hotline service for China Mobile, which did not respond to a request for comment. “Data is gold,” said Anil Jain, a professor who studies biometrics at Michigan State University. “These days you cannot design an accurate and robust recognition system for anything” without data. Cars could be another major market, iFlyTek believes. China is pioneering a push into self-driving cars, which could heavily depend on voice technology. In September, iFlyTek introduced a new product, a glowing ellipsoid that mounts on a dashboard and listens for questions that it can check online, like a car-mounted Siri. “We have to understand if the car is our friend, if there is an emotional connection,” Mr. Liu said. Through a third-party supplier, a few hundred thousand of the four million cars that the Volkswagen Group sells in China annually will be equipped next year with iFlyTek voice recognition technology, said Christoph Ludewig, a spokesman for the German automaker. Volkswagen said it requires that any data gathered from drivers is kept anonymous. “Volkswagen will protect customers from the misuse of their data,” Mr. Ludewig said. Delphi, the American auto parts giant, said it had a relationship with iFlyTek to offer its services in China but declined to disclose details. Mr. Liu, the head of iFlyTek’s automotive business, said that the company’s systems would be installed next year in some Jeeps sold in China and that it was developing automotive voice systems with Daimler, which owns the Mercedes-Benz brand. FiatChrysler, Jeep’s parent, said it had not found any of its suppliers using iFlytek. A Daimler spokeswoman said that the company was regularly in discussions with potential suppliers but declined to say if iFlyTek was one of them. Human rights groups worry that such rapidly evolving capabilities will be abused by China’s autocratic government. “The Chinese government has been collecting the voice patterns of tens of thousands of people with little transparency about the program or laws regulating who can be targeted or how that information is going to be used,” Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s China director, wrote in a report in October. In its home province of Anhui, iFlyTek has assembled a database of 70,000 voice patterns, according to the report, which also said that the police had begun collecting records of voice patterns as they would fingerprints. The report cited as one example three women suspected of being sex workers whose voices were registered in a database, it said, in part because they had been arrested in Anhui. The local Chinese media has also reported about a new plan in Anhui to scan voice calls automatically for the voice-prints of wanted criminals, and alert the police if they are detected. IFlyTek did not respond to requests for comment on the Human Rights Watch report but has said its data-gathering efforts will not stop, particularly as it participates in China’s push to develop self-driving cars. “We are always talking about big data — the vehicle produces many images every day,” said Mr. Liu, the iFlyTek automotive executive. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/b...elligence.html ![]() Drone Maker D.J.I. May Be Sending Data to China, U.S. Officials Say Paul Mozur D.J.I., the popular drone maker, stands as a symbol of China’s growing technology prowess. Its propeller-powered machines dominate global markets and buzz regularly over beaches, cityscapes at sunset and increasingly, power plants and government installations. Now D.J.I. is fighting a claim by one United States government office that its commercial drones and software may be sending sensitive information about American infrastructure back to China, in the latest clash over the power of data in the growing technological rivalry between the two countries. It also shows how consumer technology companies have become increasingly central to debates about national security. The company, formally named Da Jiang Innovations Science and Technology Company, put out a statement this month contesting the allegations made in a dispatch from United States customs officials. The memo, from the Los Angeles office of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, was dated in August but had begun to circulate online more recently. It said officials had “moderate confidence” that the D.J.I.’s commercial drones and software are “providing U.S. critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government.” It cited what it called a reliable source, who it did not identify, in the drone industry “with first and secondhand access.” In a statement, D.J.I. said the report was “based on clearly false and misleading claims.” “The allegations in the bulletin are so profoundly wrong as a factual matter that ICE should consider withdrawing it, or at least correcting its unsupportable assertions,” the company said. The I.C.E. memo focused on the drones used by companies and institutions, not the drones flown by hobbyists in the United States and elsewhere. D.J.I. dominates the overall drone market, with a nearly two-thirds share in the United States and Canada, according to Skylogic Research, a drone research firm. To grow beyond hobbyists, the company has been targeting commercial customers, like utilities, law enforcement and property developers. The allegations could not be independently confirmed, and a spokeswoman for I.C.E. declined to comment. In a statement to The New York Times, a D.J.I. spokesman said that users can control how much access the company can have to their data and that it shares data only “pursuant to appropriate legal process.” The accusations point to a broadening debate in both the United States and China over how to secure vast data reserves that are being vacuumed up by commercial technology companies. Likened by metaphor-minded tech types to gold or oil, data has become a hugely valuable way to suss out market trends and target ads. Now equipped with remote sensing technology to monitor crops, infrared scanners to scrutinize power lines, cameras and tracking systems, drones — much like smartphones — are the stuff of espionage dreams. Customers often have little knowledge of where their data might end up, experts said, while D.J.I. and others give themselves considerable leeway in the fine print of their user agreements to transfer data across borders. American intelligence and political circles are beginning to consider how companies and governments manage the data they collect. Given that major Chinese companies must maintain close ties to the government, new China tech players like D.J.I. have raised particular concerns. This summer, the United States Army issued guidance calling for forces to stop using D.J.I. drones because of unspecified security vulnerabilities. Yet those worries have not spread widely to customers, according to Colin Snow, chief executive of Skylogic. “Only those few who use drones around critical infrastructure are concerned and chose not to use D.J.I.,” Mr. Snow said in an email. “The rest don’t care because of the price/benefit of D.J.I. aircraft.” Chinese officials expressed similar concerns in the wake of Edward J. Snowden’s disclosures that American companies aid in Washington’s electronic espionage efforts. A recent cybersecurity law calls for companies like Microsoft and Apple to store data within China’s borders. Earlier this year Apple said it would build a new data center in China to meet that requirement. The I.C.E. memo listed what it said were a number of examples of D.J.I. drones used in potentially sensitive areas. It said that a Department of Homeland Security facility built to study diseases that threaten American agriculture and public health used D.J.I. drones to assist with construction layout and security. The agency did not respond to a request for comment. The memo said in other cases, water reserves, power plants, rail hubs and other large-scale infrastructure were often monitored by Chinese-made drones. “Much of the information collected includes proprietary and sensitive critical infrastructure data, such as detailed imagery of power control panels, security measures for critical infrastructure sites, or materials used in bridge construction,” the memo said. D.J.I. said that consumers have total control over whether to upload data, such as flight plans and video, to the company’s servers. Yet like many apps, the company’s software encourages such uploads. D.J.I.’s app offers an automatic function to store user flight logs periodically, though it can be turned off. Out of concerns about data protection, the company added a feature last year that allows a drone pilot to cut off any connection to the outside internet while flying. A new D.J.I. product set up to help large companies, government agencies, farms and law enforcement manage drones, uploads a large amount of critical data — like flight plans, video and location — to servers. D.J.I. said it was working out the terms of service for the product, and will likely include an option to allow companies to store data to their own servers. Similar concerns have emerged in China over Apple’s products. In particular, state-run media have showed how the iPhone keeps track of a user’s commonly visited locations. Turning off the function requires a journey deep into the phone’s settings. Apple has said it has strong data privacy and security protections in place in China. For D.J.I., questions about its data storage practices are not new. Last year company officials told The New York Times that it complied with Chinese government requests to hand over data it collects in China and Hong Kong. More recently, one security expert recently outlined how D.J.I. left key digital information accessible to the public that could allow someone to look at customer data on its servers, including military and government flight logs. In a statement, D.J.I. said it hired an independent cybersecurity firm to investigate the report and the impact of any unauthorized access to consumer data. Dan Tentler, founder of Phobos Group, a computer-security company, said such weaknesses were often a bad sign. “In my experience doing security assessments I’ve never found a massive pile of egregiously staggering security problems somewhere to then find a shining, palace of hardened impenetrable security elsewhere in the org,” he wrote in a Twitter message. In terms of companies with major security vulnerabilities in one part of the company, he added, “it’ll be a Dumpster fire the whole way through.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/t...ta-drones.html ![]() Germany Preparing Law for Backdoors in Any Type of Modern Device Catalin Cimpanu German authorities are preparing a law that will force device manufacturers to include backdoors within their products that law enforcement agencies could use at their discretion for legal investigations. The law would target all modern devices, such as cars, phones, computers, IoT products, and more. Officials are expected to submit their proposed law for debate this week, according to local news outlet RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND). Difficulties in investigating modern crime, terrorist attacks The man supporting this proposal is Thomas de Maizière, Germany's Interior Minister, who cites the difficulty law enforcement agents have had in past months investigating the recent surge of terrorist attacks and other crimes. The Interior Minister says that police officers are having a hard time investigating cases because smart devices are warning owners before officers could do anything about it. The Minister cites the cases of smart cars that alert an owner as soon as the car is shaken, even a little bit. He says he'd like police to be able to intercept that warning and stop it when investigating a case. De Maizière claims that companies have a "legal obligation" to introduce backdoors for the use of law enforcement agencies and he also wants to require the industry to disclose its "programming protocols" for future analysis. This latter clause could allow German officials to force companies to disclose details about their encrypted communication practices. German officials want "Hack Back" clause Furthermore, the new law would also give German officials powers akin to the "Hack Back" bill proposed in the US, allowing authorities the power to hack any remote computer. The Minister says this is important to "shut down private computers in the event of a crisis," such as is the case with botnet takedowns. But privacy advocates who also read the new law proposal say the text also contains verbiage that would allow the German state to intercept any traffic on the Internet [1, 2], effectively setting up a surveillance state with full snooping powers over everyone's online communications. Experts called for caution before approving the new law, which could be abused in its current state. German authorities anticipated such reaction and said that any access to such data would be allowed only after law enforcement have obtained a court order. But the problem with encryption backdoors is not how you access them, but that they exist in the first place and that they could be abused by ill-intent actors as well. Concerted efforts to weaken encryption across the globe The law proposal is not a surprise for people who've been keeping an eye on such things. There are concerted efforts going on in Germany, France, and the UK to introduce legislation for mandatory encryption backdoors. In fact, de Maizière and his French counterpart even signed a joint letter they sent to the European Commission that supported encryption backdoors. Similarly, the fight for encryption backdoors has been recently reopened in the US as well, after a series of comments made by US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. While the EU was very clear it does not intend to support the introduction of laws that allow for generic encryption backdoors, in March 2017, the European Commission offered its support for a plan that would allow law enforcement to access data exchanged via encrypted instant messaging services, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and others. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...modern-device/ ![]() US Says it Doesn't Need Secret Court's Approval to Ask for Encryption Backdoors Critics have long argued that the government has wide latitude to conduct surveillance under broad approvals from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Zack Whittaker The US government does not need the approval of its secret surveillance court to ask a tech company to build an encryption backdoor. The government made its remarks in July in response to questions posed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), but they were only made public this weekend. The implication is that the government can use its legal authority to secretly ask a US-based company for technical assistance, such as building an encryption backdoor into a product, but can petition the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to compel the company if it refuses. In its answers, the government said it has "not to date" needed to ask the FISC to issue an order to compel a company to backdoor or weaken its encryption. The government would not say, however, if it's ever asked a company to add an encryption backdoor. A spokesperson for the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment. The government relies on section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to carry out the bulk of its intelligence gathering and surveillance operations. Section 702 has long been seen as the "crown jewels" of the intelligence community's legal powers. Under one application of the powers, the government appears to assert the authority to demand a tech company deliberately bypasses the encryption on one of its products. Last year, the FBI sought a court order -- albeit under a different legal statute -- to force Apple to alter the software on a dead terrorist's iPhone to decrypt its data. Critics have long argued that the government has wide latitude to conduct surveillance under broad approvals from the FISC. Marcy Wheeler, a national security blogger, explained in a blog post last month that the FISC can approve an annual certification affirming that the government requires assistance from a US tech company, but it doesn't require a description of what specific assistance is needed. That gives the government a wide range of powers to issue directives without any further approval or review from the FISC to collect intelligence. A declassified but highly redacted FISC opinion from 2006 states that a directive must be signed off by both the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The admission comes just a few weeks before the controversial section 702 powers are set to expire. Congress has until December 31 to pass a new surveillance law, or the intelligence community risks losing its powers at the end of the annual certification cycle. Several reform and reauthorization bills are under consideration by lawmakers. Wyden, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, last month opposed the committee's own proposed bill, arguing that it "leaves in place current statutory authority to compel companies to provide assistance, potentially opening the door to government mandated de-encryption without [FISC] oversight." Wyden's own bipartisan bill, supported by committee colleague Rand Paul (R-KY), would require the government to obtain approval from the FISC for each request for assistance. http://www.zdnet.com/article/us-says...ion-backdoors/ Until next week, - js. ![]() Current Week In Review ![]() Recent WiRs - December 2nd, November 25th, November 18th, November 11th Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black
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