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Old 14-03-18, 07:07 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 17th, ’18

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March 17th, 2018




Inside the Booming Black Market for Spotify Playlists
Austin Powell

Tommie King could be the next rapper to breakout from Atlanta. He’s well-connected, has obvious swagger, and he’s been quietly building a successful collection of singles on Spotify. His latest, “Eastside (feat. Cyhi the Prynce),” has already clocked more than 110,000 streams, driven largely by its placement on 14 independent playlists.

Gone are the days of hustling in parking lots, selling mixtapes out of the trunk of your car. In the modern music economy, in which streaming services account for nearly two-thirds of the total revenue generated by recorded music, emerging artists are increasingly being tracked via big data. Spotify streams, YouTube views, Twitter interactions, and even Wikipedia searches are all being used to discover the proverbial next big thing. That’s why King’s manager has worked to land his music on a staggering 594 Spotify playlists to date.

“Without Spotify playlists, to tell you the honest truth, I wouldn’t feel like we were accomplishing much,” King tells me when I reach him at the phone number he lists publicly on his Facebook page. “Streams are now the only way to really reach people you otherwise wouldn’t be able to connect with. It gives you the ability to be played worldwide, which we’re doing quite well with.

“That’s everything nowadays.”

There’s just one catch: King essentially paid to be added to those Spotify playlists. He’s one of countless artists who have compensated curators to check out his tracks—or in the case for some of his contemporaries, to be added to specific playlists—to gain valuable streams and attention.

The black market for Spotify playlists is booming. It’s cheaper than you might expect to hack the system—and if it’s done right, it more than pays for itself.

The rise of Spotify playlists

It’s impossible to overstate the value of Spotify playlists. The company dominates the streaming music market, with 159 million active users and 71 million paid subscribers—nearly double Apple Music’s subscription base, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal.

More importantly, Spotify has made playlists its defining feature. CEO Daniel Ek said in February 2016 he wants “to soundtrack every moment of your life,” and he meant it. The company has created an official playlist for every conceivable occasion (“Down in the Dumps”, “Songs to Sing in the Shower”), some curated by its 150-person editorial staff and others algorithmically generated for specific genres and moods. Now, as Spotify noted in its SEC filing earlier this month, which valued the company at $23 billion, those official playlists account for nearly one-third of all listening on the platform, up from less than 20 percent in 2016.

The biggest of those playlists can essentially manufacture hits. A single add to Spotify’s influential RapCaviar, which boasts more than 8 million followers, can result in hundreds of thousands of streams, depending on where it’s placed and how long it stays there. RapCaviar has been credited, for example, with making Smokepurpp’s “Audi” go gold, with 68 million streams and counting.

And that’s just one in-house playlist. Spotify boasts 2,500 of them, and they’ve become some of the most valuable real estate in the industry. Record labels and PR reps now pitch and collaborate with the tastemakers at streaming services the same way they have with radio stations and the press for decades.

“With so much of our revenue being directly generated from streaming services, it’s naturally a huge focus,” said Phil Waldorf, the co-founder of the indie label Dead Oceans and the head of global marketing for Secretly Group, its larger distribution network. “The added value [of a playlist add] is multi-faceted. On a basic level, the revenue generated from extra plays is a nice windfall. But, the hope is that the song performs well and then gets added on other playlists. A strong playlist add is a building block to more editorial support. And we hope some discovery happens along the way.”

The rising value of Spotify playlists has spurred a new form of payola—the decades-old illegal practice of paying for a song to be broadcast on the radio—with massive amounts of money changing hands behind the scenes. An August 2015 exposé by Billboard quoted an unnamed major-label executive who claimed playlist adds were being sold for “$2,000 for a playlist with tens of thousands of fans to $10,000 for the more well-followed playlists.”

Spotify responded by updating its terms of service to explicitly prohibit “selling a user account or playlist, or otherwise accepting any compensation, financial or otherwise, to influence the name of an account or playlist or the content included on an account or playlist.”

But the practice of paying for placement, as with other forms of payola before it, hasn’t died out. It’s just been remixed.

The new payola

In a matter of minutes and for a mere $2, you can pay to have your song considered by one of the 1,500 curators working on SpotLister, one of several new services that sells access to prominent Spotify users.

The site was founded by two 21-year-old college students—Danny Garcia, a guitar player at New York University, and a close friend who requested anonymity due to unrelated privacy concerns. They started a “private-for-hire” PR company in 2016 that offered “pitching services” to generate buzz on SoundCloud and, later, Spotify. The two would take on anywhere from 15 to 20 clients a month, each paying anywhere from $1,000-$5,000 to secure prominent placement on playlists.

“We started out paying $5 [for a playlist add] and that worked in the beginning,” Garcia recalls. “When more people started getting into the game, you saw the prices starting to rise, and then the playlisters started seeing that they were relevant and worth a lot more. There are some playlists that have 90,000 followers that can charge $100-$200 for an add, all the way up to playlists with 500,000 who can charge $2,000 for one placement.”

Spotify, in a statement to the Daily Dot, said, “There is no ‘pay-to-playlist’ or sale of our playlists in any way. It’s bad for artists and bad for fans. We maintain a strict policy, and take appropriate action against parties that do not abide by these guidelines.”

Pay-for-play schemes, however, are absolutely taking place on Spotify. “I’ve had some ask for anything from $25 to $100,” confirms Cody Patrick, the owner of Organic Music Marketing, who manages Tommie King and other hip-hop artists in the Atlanta area. He’s deeply established in the local scene. His production company, Resolve Media Group, is responsible for nearly every notable rap video filmed in Atlanta in recent memory, including D.R.A.M.’s “Broccoli” and Migos’ “Bad and Boujee.” Patrick’s seen it all on Spotify.

“I’ve had some curators who run multiple playlists offer me monthly retainers to be in their playlists for a certain amount of time,” he says. “I’ve seen people offer levels: You pay this much in the top 10, this much to be in the middle, this much to be in the circulation, period.”

Personal outreach, though, is time consuming and often cost prohibitive. You have to not only identify target playlists but track down contact information and make introductions. Even then, there’s no easy way to tell if a playlist is open for business. Ignatious Pop, a Spotify user who’s garnered more than 1 million followers for his longform soundtracks for popular shows like Big Little Lies and Insecure, told me he’s “been offered plenty of cash for my playlists, profile, or just to add tracks to the playlists, which I have turned down every time.”

SpotLister aims to simplify the whole process, tapping into the network of contacts its co-founders created over the last two years. Here’s how it works: When you upload a track to the service, it gets analyzed by what it calls its Playlisting Indexing Algorithm, which uses Spotify’s API and Echo Nest to scrape the song’s characteristics and uses that metadata to identify the most appropriate playlists to submit to. That way an indie rock band isn’t wasting

The more followers a playlist has, the more it costs to be considered. A playlist with 100,000, Garcia says, takes nine credits, or $18, while a playlist with only 500 followers—the minimum to be included on SpotLister—costs just one credit, or $2. After each submission, playlisters have 72 hours to review a track—which involves not only listening to it but providing some level of feedback, which, in turn, is provided to the artist—to receive compensation. Playlisters receive 44 percent of the revenue generated from each reviewed submission, regardless of whether they decide to add the track to their playlist.

After just five months, SpotLister claims to have access to 13,000 playlists with a cumulative reach of 11.7 million followers.

“We can’t make guarantees about getting a song on a playlist,” Garcia clarifies. “We’re paying the playlister to review the track, not to actually add it.”

Exploiting the system

There’s a fundamental problem with SpotLister’s model that might not be apparent at first glance, and it has nothing to do with Spotify’s terms of service. What matters about a playlist isn’t how many followers it has—it’s how reliable and engaged its listeners are.

That’s because it’s ridiculously easy to inflate numbers on Spotify.

Streamify, one of several services that offer phony streams, allows you to acquire up to 2 million plays at a time. In fact, it’ll give you 1,000 free streams just for signing up—and it works. Late last year, two Vice reporters in Denmark created a fake band called Cl1ckba1t, created an unlistenable song, and paid the service $40 to generate 10,000 streams. Their order was fulfilled in 10 days.

Likewise, playlisters often inflate their follower counts through what’s known as a followgate, a well-established technique in social media that requires a user to follow an account (or submit an email address) in exchange for something like a free download. As such, you might end up paying more to submit to a playlist that appears to have a ton of followers but is really just a ghost town.

“I’ve had to bite the bullet and find out how they really work,” says Patrick, who’s used no fewer than nine different Spotify services to bring attention to his clients. “It’s hard not to purchase fake followers for a playlist.”

SubmitHub is trying to solve that problem. Jason Grishkoff, a former Google team member based in Cape Town, South Africa, originally created the service in late 2015 as a way for artists to send songs to his blog, Indie Shuffle. Now anyone who shares music with a sizable audience—bloggers, playlisters, SoundCloud channels, YouTubers—can use the service to solicit submissions.

Unlike SpotLister, users can submit tracks on SubmitHub for free—Grishkoff claims the site facilitates 10,000 submissions per day—but premium credits can be purchased to ensure feedback and that influencers listen to at least 20 seconds of each song.

“We quickly started to realize that many [Spotify] follower accounts weren’t legit,” Grishkoff says. “It gets tricky. There are some people who have 100,000 followers and 20,000 of them are real that they picked up a while ago, but in order to keep up appearances, they’ve been buying followers.”

Grishkoff developed an ingenious workaround: He asked SubmitHub artists who use Spotify to upload data from their dashboards—which reveal all of the playlists a song has been added to and how many streams that playlist has generated for it—and cobbled it together. The resulting database estimates how many plays a specific playlist is likely to produce. That information is included with details on a breakdown of a given playlister’s response rate and whatever information they’ve provided about what they’re interested in.

Grishkoff is clearly proud of the service SubmitHub provides. He claims that influencers listen to two minutes of a song on average and that the overall rejection rate is above 90 percent. He’s convinced that the site’s influencers aren’t just in it for the money.

“I think if you asked any of these guys, ‘If I paid you a dollar, would you put me in your playlist,’ they’d tell you, ‘Dude, fuck off.’”

Grishkoff also argues there’s inherent value to the feedback that services like SubmitHub are able to facilitate, even if it’s crude or tossed-off.

“If you’re an early artist and you don’t want to throw down the money yet for a publicist, this is a good way to dip your foot in there and see if you have a shot or not,” he says. “It can be helpful to reach an audience but also for a bit of a reality check. You might not be destined for the success you think you are.”

The ripple effect

The real beauty of these Spotify services is that, when the system works, you can actually make your money back—and then some.

“You can hypothetically do that back-of-the-napkin math now,” Grishkoff says. “With [SubmitHub] you can say, ‘OK, it costs a dollar to send [this track to a playlister]. They’ve got a 15 percent approval rating, but if I’m one of those 15 percent, it looks like they get an average of 4,000 plays, so I might make $15 back.”

In other words, Spotify is inadvertently paying artists to cheat its own system.

That’s not the way the creators of SpotLister and SubmitHub see it, of course. They believe their services are leveling the playing field on Spotify, helping counter the dominance of major labels. UMG, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment all hold equity in the service, and their artists, perhaps coincidentally, dominate most of Spotify’s most influential playlists. On average, three-fourths of the artists on the aforementioned RapCaviar, for example, belong to major labels. And what’s more, those labels’ playlists dwarf most other unofficial alternatives, especially Sony’s various Filtr playlists.

“We see ourselves as a solution to that problem,” says the other co-founder of SpotLister. “The major labels have so much influence over what goes into these major playlists now. We just want to give opportunities for up-and-coming artists to have that as well.”

Make no mistake, though: The end goal of using services like SpotLister is, in part, to end up on Spotify’s official playlists.

“I’m using Spotify as an algorithm,” King stresses. “To me, the importance of playlist adds is to get on the radar of official Spotify editors. As soon as you’re in a certain number of playlists, you start getting added to Release Radar and Discover Weekly [two algorithmically generated playlists created each week for subscribers], and you can build organic streams from there.”

That’s a common belief in the industry, one shared by Dead Oceans’ Waldorf, who, to be clear, has not used SpotLister or other comparable services for his artists. “[i]f a song or artist is repeatedly saved or listened to,” he says, “it’s more likely to pick up traction in the algorithmic playlists, which have their own positive impact on discovery.”

“That’s a really strong signal to Spotify,” adds Grishkoff, and one that Tuma Basa, the global head of hip-hop programming at Spotify, has confirmed informs the company’s playlists. “[W]e can see within our analytics if something is for real,” Basa told Digital Trends earlier this year. “That’s the beauty of our technology. It’s all right there. All facts. No guesswork.”

MaWayy has experienced that Spotify ripple effect first-hand. The electronic duo—Brian Way and Masoud Fuladi, who collaborate online and have never actually met in person—has “used pretty much every platform we found online,” MaWayy says via email. That includes SpotLister and SubmitHub. The former added their track “Wrong” onto 19 playlists in a matter of days, generating 800,000 plays in the process. That momentum caught Spotify’s attention, and the single was subsequently added to three of Spotify’s biggest electronic music playlists: mint, Fresh Electronic, and Furutos Hits. “Wrong” is now quickly approaching 1 million streams at the time of publication.

“The speed and reliability of this process is amazing,” MaWayy wrote. They noted that some of the larger playlists they were added to seemed buoyed by fake followers, but they’re still satisfied with the results. “We like how easily we could get our music heard by all these playlist curators.”

If anything, it’s almost too easy. These third-party services have found a backdoor into the valuable world of Spotify playlists, and anyone with some budget to spare can potentially be granted access. That has the potential to dramatically alter the way independent music gets promoted online, and it leaves Spotify in a vulnerable position. After all, there’s no easy way to determine what tracks benefitted from pay-to-play schemes and which ones curators just genuinely liked.

“It’s dangerous when you start to look at the potential to lose what really gives the culture its weight,” says Tommie King, the Atlanta rapper. “Now if you have the right amount of money, you can just do it.”

That doesn’t mean he regrets using the service.

“It’s not really a big secret,” King says. “Everything costs money.

“It’s just part of the game.”
https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/sp...-black-market/





We Pirated Our Own Video and This Is What Happened
Patrick Hall's

Piracy is a major issue among all types of creatives. Regardless of if you make handbags, design websites, create beautiful paintings, produce movies, or craft amazing photographs, at some point or another, someone is going to steal and rip off your work. Recently, we decided to run a social experiment; we actually pirated one of our own tutorials and put it online for free before it was even released to the public. What happened next was pretty interesting.

Back in winter of 2017, Fstoppers teamed up with Landscape Photographer Elia Locardi to produce the third installment in his Photographing the World series. While we were filming throughout Italy, Dubai, and North America, we came up with the idea of releasing a fake lesson and seeding it on torrent websites. The idea was sort of a "Rickroll" where Elia would teach what would appear to be a legit lesson. However, by the end of the video, Elia would acknowledge that this copy of the tutorial was in fact pirated and that the viewer had unfairly stolen the content from Elia himself. As we traveled from destination and country to country, we continued to brainstorm exactly what this fake lesson would look like and where we would film it. When Elia traveled to Charleston, South Carolina to film the final post-processing sections of Photographing the World 3, it became pretty clear where this final lesson would be filmed.

Elia's Photographing the World series has been one of the most successful photography educational tutorials we have ever produced. However, one of the biggest complaints people have (yet also one of the biggest praises about the series too) is that we travel to exotic locations that many photographers do not have access to themselves. Therefore, for this fake lesson, we thought it would be funny if instead of heading to Italy for the first lesson, we brought Italy to the viewer! The Fstoppers team packed up all our gear and headed to the most popular Italian location not in Italy: Olive Garden.

We wound up filming an entire lesson outside the Olive Garden in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Elia did not hold anything back. Everything from scouting, to composition, to gear used, and even the local history was included in the lesson just as he does in his real, full-length tutorials. What starts off as a pretty serious exploration of an Italian restaurant quickly becomes more and more ridiculous as Elia is faced with billboards, urban distractions, traffic, employees, and other environmental elements found on location. Once the final images were captured, we then wanted Elia to take all of the photos into Photoshop just as he does normally and teach exactly how to edit and composite everything into one portfolio-worthy image. Let's just say that by the end of the post-production section of this lesson, it becomes abundantly clear that this is not a real lesson from Photographing the World 3. You can watch the full, unedited lesson on how to photograph an Olive Garden in the video below.

Once we created this fake lesson, we then had to seed it on a few torrent sites. In order to make the tutorial seem legit, we packaged it up with a bunch of fluff material so the entire download was 20-30 GB of data. The file structure was designed to look exactly like a normal copy of Photographing the World and the fake lesson was listed as lesson one. Once we uploaded the torrent files, we had a bunch of friends download it, seed it, and even leave positive comments to help promote the whole series to the top of the search results. After a few weeks of serving the fake files, we were shocked that people were actually downloading and resharing the tutorial as if it was the real thing.

The Hypocrisy of Piracy

Dealing with piracy is nothing new for most photographers and videographers. If you have ever published an image or a video online, chances are someone somewhere has stolen your content and used it for free or even worse, has made money off your hard work without any credit or compensation. Fstoppers is a pretty small company with only three full-time employees. When we team up with professional photographers like Peter Hurley, Mike Kelley, Clay Cook, or Elia Locardi to produce our expansive photography tutorials, we are putting up all the money, taking all the financial risk, and hoping that our hard work will not only be appreciated but will also allow us to make enough money to make the whole experience worthwhile. There is a fine balance between giving back to the photography community we love so much and making enough money to make a living doing what we love. When you see your photography, graphic designs, or videography taken from you without your permission, it can be frustrating and sometimes outright discouraging.

So what can we all do to combat piracy in our field? To be honest, there really isn't much anyone can do to completely discourage those who blatantly steal digital content, but there are steps you can take to protect yourself if an infringement does take place. In our latest tutorial, Making Real Money with Monte Isom, Monte discusses the importance of copyrighting your work (I've shared the free video of that below). By copyrighting your work with the US Copyright Office, you gain legal leverage in the event that you need to take someone to court for stealing or selling your work. Of course, here at Fstoppers, we copyright all of our videos and photography so that when we catch people stealing and reselling our work, we can prosecute them, but that process is often time-consuming and painful for those on the infringing side of the lawsuit. You can also simply not post any of your work online or cover all your work with obnoxious watermarks and copyright notices, but that almost always takes away from beautiful images and video you have spent so much time creating.

In creating this fake video, we hoped that we could tackle the issue of piracy with humor. Of course, making one funny video that we seeded on a torrent site will never completely eliminate those who wish to steal from others, but hopefully it will make a lot of creatives in our own field stop and think about what they are doing. Every week, Fstoppers receives multiple emails from photographers who have had their images stolen from their websites and then used in advertisements, on Instagram, on other photographer's websites, and in all sorts of commercial applications. This problem is a real epidemic within the creative industry. However, in many cases, those creatives who are super upset that someone has stolen their own work are quick to download a free copy of Photoshop, a pirated series of their favorite television show, an artists' latest album, or even educational tutorials from some of the biggest names in the photography world. They do not even think twice about it, and that is extremely frustrating and hypocritical.

So, in the end, while we have tried to bring the issue of piracy to the forefront by making a ridiculous yet humorous mockumentary of our own content, we hope we can persuade more people in our industry to do the right thing and pay for the content they enjoy just as they hope to get paid for their own content that they produce for their own clients.
https://fstoppers.com/architecture/w...appened-228756





'Black Panther,' 4 Weeks in, Tops 'A Wrinkle in Time'

T'Challa still rules the box office four weeks in, even with the fresh rivalry of another Walt Disney Studios release in "A Wrinkle in Time."
Lindsey Bahr

"Black Panther" took the No. 1 spot at the North American box office with $41.1 million according to studio estimates Sunday, leaving another newcomer in its wake. The Marvel and Disney phenomenon crossed the $1 billion mark worldwide this weekend and became the 7th highest grossing domestic release with $562 million. Not accounting for inflation, it's now passed "The Dark Knight."

With a marketplace still dominated by "Black Panther," Disney faced some stiff competition from its own studio in launching Ava DuVernay's adaption of "A Wrinkle in Time," which opened in second place with $33.3 million from 3,980 locations. The PG-rated film, which cost around $103 million to produce and stars Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon, received mixed reviews from critics (it's currently at a "rotten" 44 percent on RottenTomatoes) and audiences who gave it a B CinemaScore.

In gauging "A Wrinkle in Time's" long-term prospects, a somewhat similar comparison could be Disney's "Tomorrowland," a PG-rated sci-fi pic with middling reviews and a B CinemaScore which opened to $33 million in the early summer of 2015 and went on to gross $93 million domestically. "Tomorrowland," however, notably cost nearly twice as much to make as "A Wrinkle in Time."

But the "Black Panther" effect is the x-factor here. For Disney, it's a "win all around."

"When you think about having two films at the top of the box office, it's definitely a win all around," says Disney's worldwide theatrical distribution president Dave Hollis. "We're feeling good about this start ... We're feeling good about what, for us, is a little family competition between now and (the Easter holiday)."

Hollis says he doesn't think the studio would have done anything differently regarding "Wrinkle's" release had they known the scope and longevity of "Black Panther's" prospects.

"There's always going to be competition in the marketplace," he says. "With a tentpole strategy like ours, four weeks of separation is about what we can expect."

Still, "Black Panther" has devoured the marketplace for a month straight now, leaving all other newcomers in the dust.

The new horror film "The Strangers: Prey At Night," with Christina Hendricks, took third place with $10.5 million. The Jennifer Lawrence thriller "Red Sparrow" landed in fourth in its second weekend with $8.2 million and the comedy "Game Night" placed fifth with $7.9 million in weekend three.

Hardly any of the new releases, which also included the thriller "The Hurricane Heist" (8th place, $3.2 million) and the dark action comedy "Gringo," (11th place, $2.6 million) were well-reviewed going into the weekend, save for the limited release independents like "Thoroughbreds," which made $1.2 million from 549 locations, and Armando Iannucci's "The Death of Stalin," which opened in four theaters to $181,000.

It also left room for the Academy Award best picture winner "The Shape of Water," which is also available on home video, to capitalize on its post-Oscars stature. The Fox Searchlight film added 720 theaters and took in in $2.4 million from 1,552 locations, bringing its domestic total to $61 million.

But even though "Black Panther" has helped boost the year to date box office significantly, it's also proving to be a continued challenge for any other wide release hoping for a piece of the market.

"Every movie that has opened in the wake of 'Black Panther' has had its work cut out for it," says comScore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. "We keep underestimating this film and it just shows no sign of slowing down."

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to comScore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1."Black Panther," $41.1 million.
2."A Wrinkle in Time," $33.3 million.
3."The Strangers: Prey At Night," $10.5 million.
4."Red Sparrow," $8.2 million.
5."Game Night," $7.9 million.
6."Peter Rabbit," $6.8 million.
7."Death Wish," $6.6 million.
8."The Hurricane Heist," $3.2 million.
9."Annihilation," $3.2 million.
10."Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle," $2.8 million.

http://www.courant.com/entertainment...311-story.html





Entire Broadband Industry Will Help FCC Defend Net Neutrality Repeal

NCTA, CTIA, and USTelecom sign up to defend net neutrality repeal in court.
Jon Brodkin

The biggest lobby groups representing broadband providers will help the Federal Communications Commission defend the repeal of net neutrality rules in court.

Yesterday, three trade groups that collectively represent every major home Internet and mobile broadband provider in the US filed motions to intervene in the case on behalf of the FCC. The motions for leave to intervene were filed by NCTA–The Internet & Television Association, CTIA–The Wireless Association, and USTelecom–The Broadband Association. (Yes, those are the organizations' correct names.)

NCTA represents cable companies such as Comcast, Charter, Cox, and Altice. CTIA represents the biggest mobile carriers, such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, and Sprint. USTelecom represents wireline telcos with copper and fiber networks, such as AT&T and Verizon. All three groups also represent a range of smaller ISPs.

As intervenors in the case, the groups will file briefs in support of the net neutrality repeal order and may play a role in oral arguments.

NCTA's motion noted that its members would once again be subject to "common-carriage regulation under Title II of the Communications Act" if the FCC were to lose the case. CTIA said that its members "would be adversely affected if the [net neutrality] Order were set aside and the prior Title II Order classification and rules were reinstated."

12 lawsuits against FCC combined into one

Twelve lawsuits against the FCC seeking to overturn the net neutrality repeal have been consolidated into one case at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The lawsuits were filed by more than three dozen entities, including Democratic attorneys general from 22 states, consumer advocacy groups, and tech companies such as Mozilla, Vimeo, and Etsy.

The Internet Association—a lobby group for Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and other Web companies—previously announced plans to intervene in order to support the lawsuit against the FCC. The group hasn't filed its motion to intervene yet, though.

The case could take about a year to decide if it lasts as long as the previous case that upheld the net neutrality rules in 2016.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...rality-repeal/





Trump FCC Sued for Granting 'Favors to Massive Media Conglomerates Like Sinclair'

"This FCC seems intent on looking the other way as people in the U.S. brace for a new wave of media mergers."
by
Jake Johnson

In an effort to stop the GOP-controlled Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from gutting regulations aimed at preventing major corporations from dominating local media, a coalition of advocacy groups filed a lawsuit on Friday accusing the agency of repeatedly violating court orders to examine the impact of its deregulatory moves "on localism, diversity, and competition in broadcast ownership."

"This FCC seems intent on looking the other way as people in the U.S. brace for a new wave of media mergers," said Jessica González, deputy director of Free Press, one of the groups behind the suit. "Runaway consolidation gouges newsrooms and hurts communities—especially marginalized communities that more often depend on broadcast TV for local news."

Specifically, González argues that FCC chair Ajit Pai's aggressive deregulatory agenda is encouraging mergers like Sinclair Broadcast Group's proposed takeover of Tribune Media, which would give Sinclair—a company owned by a family of pro-Trump millionaires—control of enough local TV stations to reach 70 percent of American households.

"The Pai FCC is a gift to the broadcast industry, as the commission bends over backwards to give favors to massive media conglomerates like Sinclair," González said. "Meanwhile, people of color own a pathetically low number of broadcast stations in the U.S., and consolidation makes it much more difficult for broadcasters of color to enter the market. This latest move by the Pai FCC is patently discriminatory."

Joining Free Press in suing the FCC on Friday were Common Cause, Communications Workers of America, and the Office of Communication, Inc. of the United Church of Christ.

As Common Dreams reported at the time, the FCC voted along party lines last November to roll back media ownership regulations, a move that advocacy groups warned could ultimately be the death knell of local media.

Last month, the New York Times revealed that Pai is under investigation by the FCC inspector general's office, which is looking into "whether Mr. Pai and his aides had improperly pushed for the [media ownership] rule changes and whether they had timed them to benefit Sinclair."

In response to the Times report, Free Press and other advocacy groups demanded that Pai recuse himself from all decisions related to the Sinclair merger, which has to be approved by the FCC.

"Approving this deal would do real harm to low-income families and people of color," Free Press said in a statement at the time. "It would turn Sinclair into a media colossus with the power to spread xenophobic and racist pro-Trump messages that threaten these communities. Pai must recuse himself and this deal must be rejected."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/20...rates-sinclair





Comcast 'Blocks' an Encrypted Email Service: Yet Another Reminder Why Net Neutrality Matters

Now imagine your favorite websites getting blocked by your internet provider in the name of net neutrality.
Zack Whittaker

For about twelve hours earlier this month, encrypted email service Tutanota seemed to fall off the face of the internet for Comcast customers.

Starting in the afternoon on March 1, people weren't sure if the site was offline or if it had been attacked. Reddit threads speculated about the outage. Some said that Comcast was actively blocking the site, while others dismissed the claims altogether. Several tweets alerted the Hanover, Germany-based encrypted messaging provider to the alleged blockade, which showed a "connection timed out" message to Comcast users.

It was as if to hundreds of Comcast customers, Tutanota didn't exist.

But as soon as users switched to another non-Comcast internet connection, the site appeared as normal

"To us, this came as a total surprise," said Matthias Pfau, co-founder of Tutanota, in an email.

"It was quite a shock as such an outage shows the immense power [internet providers] are having over our Internet when they can block sites...without having to justify their action in any way," he said.

By March 2, the site was back, but the encrypted email provider was none the wiser to the apparent blockade. The company contacted Comcast for answers, but did not receive a reply.

When contacted, a Comcast spokesperson couldn't say why the site was blocked -- or even if the internet and cable giant was behind it. According to a spokesperson, engineers investigated the apparent outage but found there was no evidence of a connection breakage between Comcast and Tutanota. The company keeps records of issues that trigger incidents -- but found nothing to suggest an issue. The spokesperson did not want to speculate further.

It's not the first time Comcast customers have been blocked from accessing popular sites. Last year, the company purposefully blocked access to internet behemoth Archive.org for more than 13 hours.

In recent weeks, there have been several more site blocking issues.

Even as recently as earlier this month, customers said Comcast's so-called "protected browsing" was blocking access to everyday websites, like Steam and PayPal, which the internet giant flagged as "dangerous." Not every customer faced the same issue; the protected browsing isn't enabled by default.

For Pfau, the reason behind Tutanota's apparent blockade remains a mystery.

"It doesn't really matter if it was a purposeful block or a technical glitch," said Pfau. He argued that the net neutrality repeal will "harm competition immensely" not just in the US, but also further afield -- like Europe, which already has strict net neutrality laws in place.

"Such a scenario would be extremely devastating for European services and start-ups as they would not have a fair chance on the American market in the first place," he said. "That's why the American fight for net neutrality is so important -- even for us here in Europe."

Although the Federal Communication Commission's repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules won't come into effect until April 23, nobody's quite sure what that post-net neutrality world will look like.

Those net neutrality rules were designed to ensure that every bit of internet traffic is treated equally, regardless of where it's coming from and where it's going to. Without those rules, a major concern is that internet providers with their own television, radio, and news content can and will arbitrarily slow down access or prevent their customers altogether from accessing rival services -- unless they pay more.

But it's troubling, just a few months after the net neutrality rules were repealed, to see internet providers with arbitrary control over what customers can see and access -- even if the blocking is a mistake or a false positive. It's bad enough when it's a major website, but it looks worse when the block affects a company like Tutanota, a privacy-focused email provider, which could be seen as a direct competitor to Comcast's own email offerings.

Pfau said the end of net net neutrality can be "devastating" for online freedoms.

"The worst about this form of censorship is that ISPs will not have to justify their decision," he said. "They can include or exclude any service from their bundles without having to explain why."

"They can more or less decide what services their customers use," he added.

Comcast, for its part, has said in a pledge made on its website that, "we do not block, slow down, or discriminate" against lawful content. Ars Technica noted however that the company did not say it "won't" block or slow down content in the future.

So far, individual states have hit back at the net neutrality repeal effort by bringing their own state-level laws into effect, mandating that communications providers treat the internet like any other utility service -- like water, gas, and electricity.

Washington state is the first to bring laws into effect, with New York and Montana seen as likely contenders to be next in line.

But with some members of Congress still scrambling to override the FCC's net neutrality repeal, it's unclear if lawmakers can introduce and pass legislation in time before the April 23 deadline.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/comcast...rality-repeal/





Verizon Forced to Update Aging DSL Networks in New York
Karl Bode

Verizon will finally repair and upgrade a large chunk of its New York State infrastructure, two years after the state began investigating the company's neglect of its aging network. Verizon froze its FiOS expansion years ago, and has been plagued since by accusations that it's just letting many parts of its network just rot on the vine. From Pennsylvania to New Jersey, millions of customers have lamented either DSL lines that don't get upgrades, or lines that aren't being repaired on a timely basis as Verizon shifts its focus to media and advertising.

Occasionally, Verizon faces something vaguely resembling accountability for this neglect.

In New York, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) have announced has reached a settlement with Verizon requiring it repair 54 central offices across the state, replace bad cable, defective equipment, faulty back-up batteries, and to take down 64,000 double telephone poles.

The agreement also requires that Verizon expand broadband to a few additional apartment buildings in New York City and more than 30,000 homes across the state. That's of particular importance given New York City's lawsuit against Verizon for failing to adhere to FiOS deployment requirements embedded in the company's 2014 franchise agreement with the city.

"The settlement is the result of a CWA campaign to pressure the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) to require Verizon to upgrade and repair the legacy telephone network and to expand consumer access to broadband," notes the union.

"In 2015, CWA, 20 allied organizations, and 70 legislators filed a request for an investigation, providing substantial documentation of Verizon’s failure to maintain its copper network," the CWA added. "In April 2016, the PSC opened a formal proceeding with extensive discovery and evidence collection. CWA and Verizon agreed to a settlement, which has been endorsed by the PSC staff. The PSC must approve the final settlement."

Verizon was forced to do something similar in Pennsylvania, after the union shared embarrassing photos of the company's network in disrepair, ranging from disintegrating cabinets to lazy remnants of double poles. Verizon, of course, sees fare more money to be made in pivoting to video, wireless and advertising, leaving cable broadband ISPs with a bigger monopoly than ever across a large number of markets Verizon used to actually care about.
https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/...ew-York-141416





What is 5G and Who are the Major Players?
Eric Auchard, Stephen Nellis

U.S. President Donald Trump has blocked microchip maker Broadcom Ltd’s (AVGO.O) $117 billion takeover of rival Qualcomm (QCOM.O) amid concerns that it would give China the upper hand in the next generation of mobile communications, or 5G.

Below are some facts about 5G and major players.

WHAT IS 5G?

5G networks, now in the final testing stage, will rely on denser arrays of small antennas and the cloud to offer data speeds up to 50 or 100 times faster than current 4G networks and serve as critical infrastructure for a range of industries.

Deals to start building mass-market 5G networks are still largely a year away, but by 2025, 1.2 billion people are set to have access to 5G networks - a third of them in China, according to the global wireless trade group GSMA.

Moving to new networks promises to enable new mobile services and even whole new business models, but could pose challenges for countries and industries unprepared to invest in the transition.

Unlike the upgrades of cellular standards 2G in the early 1990s, 3G around the millennium and 4G in 2010, 5G standards will deliver not just faster phone and computer data but also help connect up cars, machines, cargo and crop equipment.

WHY IS THE U.S. WORRIED?

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which vets acquisitions of U.S. corporations by foreign companies, said the Broadcom takeover risked weakening Qualcomm, which would boost China over the United States in the 5G race.

Acquiring Qualcomm would represent the jewel in the crown of Broadcom’s portfolio of communications chips, which supply wi-fi, power management, video and other features in smartphones alongside Qualcomm’s core baseband chips - radio modems that wirelessly connect phones to networks.

The concern is that a takeover by Singapore-based Broadcom could see the firm cut research and development spending by Qualcomm or hive off strategically important parts of the company to other buyers, including in China, U.S. officials and analysts have said.

5G promises to open up the clubby world of telecom equipment by creating openings for a far wider range of players in hardware, software and semiconductors, many of them from Asia, increasing the dependence of Silicon Valley on foreign players.

MAJOR PLAYERS

Before the new technology becomes a reality for consumers, two transitions need to take place.

Mobile operators have to upgrade their networks with 5G gear made by the likes of Huawei [HWT.UL] and ZTE 0000630.SZ of China, Sweden’s Ericsson (ERICb.ST) and Finland’s Nokia (NOKIA.HE). And phone makers need to make handsets with built-in 5G radios ready to hook up to networks.

Qualcomm (QCOM.O) is the dominant player in smartphone communications chips, making half of all core baseband radio chips in smartphones. It is one of the last big U.S. technology companies with a major role in mobile communications hardware.

Most other baseband chips come from Asia: MediaTek (2454.TW) of Taiwan holds about one quarter of the market, while Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) and Huawei [HWT.UL] - two big smartphone makers - develop chips for their own devices. Huawei does through a subsidiary known as HiSilicon.

Its dominant position in 5G comes from its mastery of two areas: getting its patents adopted in what are known as standards and then selling the chip designs that work with those standards.

The standards are set by a global body to ensure all phones work across different mobile networks, and whoever’s essential patents end up making it into the standard stands to reap huge royalty licensing revenue streams.

Qualcomm has landed a number of these foundational patents, which means that both handset makers and telecommunications gear makers will have to pay it licensing fees. It dominated standards setting in 3G and 4G wireless and looks set to top the list of patent holders heading into the 5G cycle.

Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson and others are also vying to amass 5G patents, which has helped spur complex cross-licensing agreements like the deal struck late last year Nokia and Huawei around handsets.

Editing by Kim Miyoung in Singapore and Jason Neely in London
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-qu...-idUKKCN1GR1IN





Maybe Nobody Wants Your Space Internet

SpaceX plans to launch nearly 12,000 satellites to provide internet from low Earth orbit, starting with two demo units launched in February.
Sarah Scoles

In the early 2000s, Greg Wyler, former founder of a semiconductor company, was laying fiber in Africa. He wanted to do something that mattered. Semiconductors didn’t matter, you know? But linking people to each other and to information did, he thought.

“The lesser educated version of myself said, ‘Fiber is the answer,'" says Wyler. "'I’ll run it everywhere.’”

He didn’t run it everywhere, though he did run it quite a few places in Africa. “Each connection, each time we connected a school, each time we brought internet to somebody, we saw their lives change,” he says.

In remote parts of the world, like where Wyler was, internet connections often have to come to the ground from geostationary satellites. That's slow, because geostationary orbit is far away. When kids participated in online classes, by the time the screen showed them raising their hands, the question had already been answered. Unacceptable, thought Wyler.

“But I was stuck,” he says. “The only [ground-based] internet was 5,000 miles away. I had two options: Run fiber 5,000 miles, or bring the satellites closer to Earth. So I did both.”

Wyler went on to found a satellite internet company called O3B, which stands for “the other three billion,” referring to the half of the planet that isn’t connected to the internet. Later, he founded OneWeb, which he hopes—believes, asserts—can "bridge the digital divide," by launching hundreds of satellites into low Earth orbit.

Wyler and OneWeb are representative of a movement that believes everyone on Earth should have the internet—and that it can come from above our heads, not below our feet. In the past few years, companies new and old have launched into the field, all trying to connect some fraction of our half-disconnected world. Which, historically, isn't a good bet: Satellite internet providers haven't had a great run, financially.

And while most of these new players boast humanitarian aims—and that's surely part of their motivation—it's not the whole story. The thing is, all those people they want to provide with the internet? They might not actually want it.

The challenge of getting aerial internet up is so great that providers are not necessarily firm yet on what happens when it gets down. For the low-flying satellites to work as intended, companies have to build hundreds (or thousands) of them. Digital delivery systems that fly in the stratosphere, like high-altitude balloons, have to stay aloft and in the right spots. Both are formidable technical challenges, taking years of development.

SpaceX, as usual, has some of the loftiest plans. The company, on its way to developing a satellite communications system for the well-heeled travelers it sends to Mars, will create one for earthlings who want to stay home. Its Starlink constellation, the company says, will eventually have nearly 12,000 satellites—more than have launched in the history of satellite launching—though for now, it has only launched two demo satellites.

In 2015, the year Elon Musk announced the space internet project, SpaceX got a vote of confidence from Google in the form of a $900 million investment—money that some speculate was thrown toward the internet effort. But Google (or, if we’re being precise about it, Alphabet’s subsidiary X) also has its own global internet blueprints: Its Project Loon launches high-altitude internet balloons to the stratosphere, far below the realm of satellites, where the flaccid, floating jellyfish catch a ride on wind currents to their destinations.

Google isn’t the only member of the Frightful Five with a loony internet idea. And why would it be? The more people who are on the internet, the more people who are on your site. And if we know anything about the web's whales, it's that they can never get enough to eat.

Especially hungry, hungry Facebook. In 2013, Mark Zuckerberg announced internet.org, a Facebook-led initiative to provide connectivity to the unconnected. Facebook, in addition to partnering with mobile providers, partnered with Eutelsat to use equipment aboard a satellite to transport internet to Africa—until it exploded on the SpaceX rocket it was supposed to ride into orbit in 2016. Internet.org is also aiming lower, conducting two test flights with drones it calls "Aquilas". Theoretically, those would help expand coverage beyond the 63 countries where "Free Basics by Facebook" is available—a service that offers limited selections of “news, employment, health, education and local information," and, of course, Facebook.

Some high-flying space internet companies have no stake in specific websites. Recently de-stealthed Astranis plans to send small satellites to geostationary orbit, and sell bandwidth to internet service providers, which can sell internet to people on the ground. Wyler's OneWeb will keep its satellites closer to home, in low-Earth orbit, so those kids can raise their hands in class and you can stream Netflix from way-out Ottawa. Its production facility in Florida will churn out its hundreds of satellites—at a rate of around four per day—and its partners include longtime space-internet player Hughes, aerospace giant Airbus, and also Coca-Cola. “We are launching this year,” says Wyler. “When I say ‘launching,’ we’re launching production satellites. No-fooling-around, long-lasting production satellites.”

But the question is whether enough of the world’s unconnected people want all this internet, from all of these companies, and whether these companies are fully considering the financial and social constraints of the developing world. “It’s still very early to say, from a demand perspective, whether there’s enough market to fulfill all of these mega constellations,” says satellite industry analyst Mansoor Shar.
https://www.wired.com/story/maybe-no...space-internet





Calif. Weighs Toughest Net Neutrality Law in US—with Ban on Paid Zero-Rating

Bill would recreate core FCC net neutrality rules and be tougher on zero-rating.
Jon Brodkin

A proposed net neutrality law in California would replace the repealed federal regulations, going beyond the federal rules by banning payments for data cap exemptions. If passed, the bill would ban AT&T's Sponsored Data, Verizon's "FreeBee" data, and any similar programs imposed by home or mobile Internet providers.

The bill would also try to prevent interconnection payment disputes that harm Internet service quality—such as those between Netflix and major ISPs in 2013 and 2014.

The legislation "is the first state-level bill that would comprehensively secure all of the net neutrality protections that Americans currently enjoy," according to Stanford law professor Barbara van Schewick. (The Federal Communications Commission repeal hasn't taken effect yet.)

"The [California] bill prohibits ISPs from blocking, speeding up or slowing down websites, applications, and services; charging online companies for access to an ISP's customers and blocking those that do not pay; and from entering into deals with online companies to put them in a fast lane to the ISP's customers," van Schewick wrote today.

Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) consulted with van Schewick on technical matters before introducing the legislation text yesterday. The bill has 14 other coauthors from the state Assembly and Senate.

Some state net neutrality proposals "have just copied the text of the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules," but the Wiener bill also covers other "important protections [that] were fleshed out in the text of the [FCC's] order," van Schewick wrote.

Van Schewick said the California bill is notable for prohibiting ISPs from charging "access fees" that online services would have to pay in order to send data to broadband consumers. "None of the other [state] bills have done this and it's one of the loopholes that ISPs will use (if it’s not closed) to extract payments from edge providers," van Schewick told Ars.

Although the FCC is trying to preempt state-level net neutrality laws, van Schewick contends that "the bill is on firm legal ground."

Zero-rating

The bill takes a stronger stance against data cap exemptions (or "zero-rating") than the FCC rules did. Exempting specific applications or classes of applications from data caps in exchange for payment would not be allowed.

"An Internet service provider may zero-rate Internet traffic in application-agnostic ways, without violating [the proposed law], provided that no consideration, monetary or otherwise, is provided by any third party in exchange for the provider’s decision to zero-rate or to not zero-rate traffic," the bill says. In order for the zero-rating to be "application-agnostic," it must not "differentiat[e] on the basis of source, destination, Internet content, application, service, or device, or class of Internet content, application, service, or device."

That would prevent ISPs from charging online services for the right to deliver data without counting against customers' data caps. The bill would also protect customers from having to pay more for certain kinds of content by banning "application-specific differential pricing." The bill defines this banned activity as "charging different prices for Internet traffic to customers on the basis of Internet content, application, service, or device, or class of Internet content, application, service, or device."

The repealed FCC rules didn't place any specific restrictions on zero-rating, but the FCC reserved the right to review zero-rating implementations and halt those that harmed Internet users or ISPs' competitors. In the final days of the Obama administration, the FCC concluded that AT&T and Verizon Wireless were violating net neutrality by charging other providers for the same data cap exemptions that AT&T and Verizon provided to their own video services.

But FCC Chairman Ajit Pai rescinded those findings shortly after taking over the chairmanship in February 2017.

If the California bill becomes law, it could prevent paid data cap exemptions in the first place.

Interconnection oversight

Pai's FCC is also abandoning its oversight role for interconnection payment disputes. Under the FCC rules, content providers or network operators that want direct connections to ISPs' networks could file complaints if ISPs make "unjust" or "unreasonable" payment demands.

The California bill doesn't seem to recreate the FCC's complaint process in this respect, but it says that ISPs may not engage in practices related to "ISP traffic exchange that have the purpose or effect of circumventing or undermining the effectiveness of this [law]."

The state Public Utilities Commission would have oversight authority under Wiener's legislation. The bill would also let the state attorney general, district attorneys, or city attorneys bring actions against ISPs that violate the California net neutrality rules.

No state law is likely to replicate all of the consumer protections that are being lost in the FCC's net neutrality repeal. But it would be an achievement just to impose an enforceable law on all ISPs in a state, given the FCC's claim that state net neutrality laws are preempted.

Some states are trying to evade the federal preemption with indirect measures that apply only to ISPs that accept state contracts. No one knows for sure how a court would rule on state bills that regulate net neutrality directly. Even legal analysts who support net neutrality laws disagree on whether such laws would survive lawsuits filed by ISPs.

Van Schewick argues that the FCC's preemption claims are invalid.

"While the FCC's 2017 Order explicitly bans states from adopting their own net neutrality laws, that preemption is invalid," she wrote. "According to case law, an agency that does not have the power to regulate does not have the power to preempt. That means the FCC can only prevent the states from adopting net neutrality protections if the FCC has authority to adopt net neutrality protections itself."

Washington recently became the first state to impose net neutrality rules on all ISPs. There is pending net neutrality legislation in more than half of US states.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...lifornia-bill/





Platform Power is Crushing the Web, Warns Berners-Lee
Natasha Lomas

On the 29th birthday of the world wide web, its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has sounded a fresh warning about threats to the web as a force for good, adding his voice to growing concerns about big tech’s impact on competition and society.

The web’s creator argues that the “powerful weight of a few dominant” tech platforms is having a deleterious impact by concentrating power in the hands of gatekeepers that gain “control over which ideas and opinions are seen and shared”.

His suggested fix is socially minded regulation, so he’s also lending his clout to calls for big tech to be ruled.

“These dominant platforms are able to lock in their position by creating barriers for competitors,” Berners-Lee writes in an open letter published today on the Web Foundation’s website. “They acquire startup challengers, buy up new innovations and hire the industry’s top talent. Add to this the competitive advantage that their user data gives them and we can expect the next 20 years to be far less innovative than the last.”

The concentration of power in the hands of a few mega platforms is also the source of the current fake news crisis, in Berners-Lee’s view, because he says platform power has made it possible for people to “weaponise the web at scale” — echoing comments made by the UK prime minister last year when she called out Russia for planting fakes online to try to disrupt elections.

“In recent years, we’ve seen conspiracy theories trend on social media platforms, fake Twitter and Facebook accounts stoke social tensions, external actors interfere in elections, and criminals steal troves of personal data,” he writes, pointing out that the current response of lawmakers has been to look “to the platforms themselves for answers” — which he argues is neither fair nor likely to be effective.

In the EU, for example, the threat of future regulation is being used to encourage social media companies to sign up to a voluntary code of conduct aimed at speeding up takedowns of various types of illegal content, including terrorist propaganda. Though the Commission is also seeking to drive action against a much broader set of online content issues — such as hate speech, commercial scams and even copyrighted material.

Critics argue its approach risks chilling free expression via AI-powered censorship.

Some EU member states have gone further too. Germany now has a law with big fines for social media platforms that fail to comply with hate speech takedown requirements, for example, while in the UK ministers are toying with new rules, such as placing limits on screen time for children and teens.

Both the Commission and some EU member states have been pushing for increased automation of content moderation online. In the UK last month, ministers unveiled an extremism blocking tool which the government had paid a local AI company to develop, with the Home Secretary warning she had not ruled out forcing companies to use it.

Meanwhile, in the US, Facebook has faced huge pressure in recent years as awareness has grown of how extensively its platform is used to spread false information, including during the 2016 presidential election.

The company has announced a series of measures aimed at combating the spread of fake news generally, and reducing the risk of election disinformation specifically — as well as a major recent change to its news feed algorithm ostensibly to encourage users towards having more positive interactions on its platform.

But Berners-Lee argues that letting commercial entities pull levers to try to fix such a wide-ranging problem is a bad idea — arguing that any fixes companies come up with will inexorably be restrained by their profit-maximizing context and also that they amount to another unilateral impact on users.

A better solution, in his view, is not to let tech platform giants self-regulate but to create a framework for ruling them that factors in “social objectives”.

A year ago Berners-Lee also warned about the same core threats to the web. Though he was less coherent in his thinking then that regulation could be the solution — instead flagging up a variety of initiatives aimed at trying to combat threats such as the systematic background harvesting of personal data. So he seems to be shifting towards the need for a move overarching framework to control the tech that’s being used to control us.

“Companies are aware of the problems and are making efforts to fix them — with each change they make affecting millions of people,” he writes now. “The responsibility — and sometimes burden — of making these decisions falls on companies that have been built to maximise profit more than to maximise social good. A legal or regulatory framework that accounts for social objectives may help ease those tensions.”

Berners-Lee’s letter also emphasizes the need for diversity of thought in shaping any web regulations to ensure rules don’t get skewed towards a certain interest or group. And he makes a strong call for investments to help close the global digital divide.
“The future of the web isn’t just about those of us who are online today, but also those yet to connect,” he warns. “Today’s powerful digital economy calls for strong standards that balance the interests of both companies and online citizens. This means thinking about how we align the incentives of the tech sector with those of users and society at large, and consulting a diverse cross-section of society in the process.”

Another specific call he makes is for fresh thinking about Internet business models, arguing that online advertising should not be accepted as the only possible route for sustaining web platforms. “We need to be a little more creative,” he argues.

“While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people — and can be fixed by people. Create a new set of incentives and changes in the code will follow. We can design a web that creates a constructive and supportive environment,” he adds.

“Today, I want to challenge us all to have greater ambitions for the web. I want the web to reflect our hopes and fulfil our dreams, rather than magnify our fears and deepen our divisions.”

At the time of writing Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter had not responded to a request for comment.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/12/pl...s-berners-lee/





The Times Tech Columnist ‘Unplugged’ from the Internet. Except He Didn’t
Dan Mitchell

So many writers have produced “I went offline, and here is what I learned” stories that they became a tedious cliché years ago. Cliché or no, however, those stories had one thing in common: the writers of them all actually went offline. Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist for The New York Times, took a different tack. He didn’t go offline at all: he just said he did, in a widely discussed column. Manjoo wrote about what he learned from his two months away from social media, and dispensed avuncular advice to his readers about the benefits of slowing down one’s news consumption.

But he didn’t really unplug from social media at all. The evidence is right there in his Twitter feed, just below where he tweeted out his column: Manjoo remained a daily, active Twitter user throughout the two months he claims to have gone cold turkey, tweeting many hundreds of times, perhaps more than 1,000. In an email interview on Thursday, he stuck to his story, essentially arguing that the gist of what he wrote remains true, despite the tweets throughout his self-imposed hiatus.

It seems likely that Manjoo isn’t lying, and that he really believes he had unplugged, and really believes that his weak-sauce explanations don’t belie the point of his column. It could be that Manjoo’s column really does serve as a warning about the pernicious effects of social media. Just not in the way he meant it.

Supposedly tired of the “misdirection” and “mistakes” that happen on social media as news breaks and wearied by the constant flow of news on social media, Manjoo decided he needed to slow things down. And so:

In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers — The Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle — plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist.

He got most of his news from the papers, he wrote. His one caveat: he “allowed for” podcasts, email newsletters, and books and magazines.

But he also “allowed for” continued Twitter use. And not just a little: he tweeted nearly every day during the 58 days of the experiment. During the first two weeks of February, he tweeted, on average, more than 15 times a day. He refrained completely from tweeting on only five days—all on weekends. That’s far from obsessive, but it’s even farther from “unplugged.” It is, in fact the opposite of “unplugged.”

Manjoo objects to that characterization. “I think it’s clear that I meant I ‘unplugged’ from Twitter as a source of news, not that I didn’t tweet at all,” he wrote.

But he had written, quite plainly, that he had “unplugged from Twitter,” not that he had used it only to post news stories. Reactions to his column on Twitter make it clear that many readers took him as his word.

But also: He didn’t use Twitter only to post news stories. He retweeted news stories from others and commented on others’ tweets about the news on most days during his period of being “unplugged.” In February, he retweeted Sean Hannity, commenting: “You gotta read this thread, it’s amazing.” He was clearly using Twitter to follow the news—albeit less so than he had been before starting this experiment.

You gotta read this thread, it’s amazing, it really makes you ask the big questions about where we are as a society and where can I get some hemlock https://t.co/4MSoMxNAgn

— Farhad Manjoo: ask your friends to follow me (@fmanjoo) February 13, 2018

Having laid the groundwork with the notion that he had “unplugged” from social media, and describing how beneficial it was for his mental health, and expressing how much more time he had for the truly important things in life, Manjoo encouraged his readers to follow his example, and rather throat-clearingly issued a Michael Pollan-like heuristic: “Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.”

Presumably, readers are encouraged to come up with their own definitions of “avoid.”

A Times spokesperson said the paper doesn’t view his assertion as a falsehood, and won’t be issuing a correction.

Starting around the turn of the century, Manjoo made a name for himself as an insightful chronicler of the tech world, writing for sites such as Wired News, Salon, and then Slate, where he became well-known enough over his five-year tenure that the Times hired him to be the paper’s lead tech columnist (after a very short stint working for The Wall Street Journal). In 2008, he wrote an excellent, generally well-received, and prescient book chronicling the various assaults on facts and truth in our public discourse.

But toward the end of his tenure at Slate, and continuing to the present day, Manjoo started to become known for his sometimes out-there “takes.” Some of them seem akin to the tin-eared musings of Henry Blodget, the disgraced former stock analyst and founder of Business Insider (a publication that Manjoo once praised as a “rapacious news aggregator.”) Others are more like the affected “contrarianism” of Nick Bilton, a former Times staffer who once wrote that pens are just so squaresville, daddio, and also that we should all stop writing “thank you” in email, in part because it’s a time-sink.

Manjoo’s last column for Slate was not about technology at all; it was an argument that “men should wear makeup” in which he featured a whole bunch of close-up pictures of himself. Earlier, he had defended BuzzFeed for its decision to publish a video of a man killing himself with a gunshot wound to the head after a car chase that had aired live on Fox News. “People are talking about a thing on Twitter,” he wrote on Twitter. “Posting stuff [that] people are talking about is what BF does. This is their job.”

Last year, he defended President Donald Trump’s lack of literacy in a column headlined: “So Trump Makes Spelling Errors. In the Twitter Age, Whoo Doesn’t?” That one must have done wonders for morale on the Times’ copy desk, which had just suffered a round of layoffs.

Manjoo’s latest column seems to be of a piece with these earlier works. After trying, and failing, to get him to own up to the fact that his assertion that he had “unplugged” from social media was not true, I asked him whether perhaps his use of social media was messing with his own self-perception. He didn’t respond to that question.
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-...nyt-unplug.php





RBC: Nvidia's Crypto Boost is Facing a 'Notable Slowdown' — But its Stock Could Still Surge (NVDA)
Graham Rapier

Nvidia’s crypto boost is likely to face a "notable slowdown" in 2018, says RBC Capital Markets.
Still, the bank is raising its price target for the chipmaker citing tax reform and video games.

Nvidia got a major boost from the explosion of interest around cryptocurrencies in 2017, but that's facing a "notable slowdown," RBC Capital Markets has warned.

"With crypto currencies acting as a boost in FY18E, we take a conservative approach and assume that a notable slowdown occurs in FY19E," analyst Mitch Steves said in a note to clients Wednesday. "Higher end chips typically lead to better mining capabilities and the lower end products will unlikely sell out consistently."

At the height of the crypto boom in December, when the price of bitcoin was near $20,000 a coin, Nvidia’s chips were regularly selling out at stores across the country. Once popular almost exclusively among PC gamers, the chips had found a new market that was insatiable in the demand for mining equipment.

Still, other solid signs under the surface led RBC to upgrade its price target for the stock by another $5 a share, to $285, a 15% premium to the stock’s price of $249 early Wednesday.

"We are raising our price target on Nvidia to reflect 1) new upside case scenario of $12+ in FY21E EPS, 2) confidence in Data Center spending given positive results across major data center players and continued strong demand for memory, 3) solid gaming results driven by pent up demand and new video games requiring a doubling in size and 4) higher long-term gross margin expectations for Pro Visualization and Gaming," Steves wrote.

Gaming, specifically, is a major highlight for RBC, which says “VR units could become more material in 2019 if content is created over the next 12-18 months,” something other Wall Street analysts have also predicted.

Earlier this week, Jefferies said both Nvidia and AMD could see a boost from Steven Spielberg's "Ready Player One," which features an entire virtual reality universe inside the futuristic movie.

Shares of Nvidia are up 23.4% this year, even as the price of bitcoin has fallen 25%.
https://www.newstimes.com/technology...e-11258964.php





Apple Must Explain Why It Doesn't Want You to Fix Your Own iPhone, California Lawmaker Says

Susan Talamantes-Eggman, who introduced a right to repair bill in California, says Apple can't play politics behind the scenes: "The onus is on them to explain why we can’t repair our own things and what damage or danger it causes them."
Jason Koebler

A California state lawmaker says she hopes to make Apple explain specifically why it has opposed and lobbied against legislation that would make it easier for you to repair your iPhone and other electronics.

Last week, California assemblymember Susan Talamantes-Eggman announced that she plans to introduce right to repair legislation in the state, which would require companies like Apple, Microsoft, John Deere, and Samsung to sell replacement parts and repair tools, make repair guides available to the public, and would require companies to make diagnostic software available to independent shops.

Public records show that Apple has lobbied against right to repair legislation in New York, and my previous reporting has shown that Apple has privately asked lawmakers to kill legislation in places like Nebraska. To this point, the company has largely used its membership in trade organizations such as CompTIA and the Consumer Technology Association to publicly oppose the bill. But with the right to repair debate coming to Apple’s home state, Talamantes-Eggman says she expects the company to show up to hearings about the bill.

“Apple is a very important company in the state of California, and one I have a huge amount of respect for. But the onus is on them to explain why we can’t repair our own things and what damage or danger it causes them,” Talamantes-Eggman told me in a phone interview. Talamantes-Eggman told me that the bill she plans to introduce will apply to both consumer electronics as well as agricultural equipment such as tractors.

Broadly speaking, the electronics industry has decided to go with an “authorized repair” model in which companies pay the original device manufacturer to become authorized to fix devices. Under Apple’s model, for instance, repair shops are only allowed to attempt certain basic repairs; for example, if an iPad’s backlight blows out, authorized repair shops are required by Apple to mail the device back to the company. Meanwhile, hundreds of independent repair shops fix these devices without Apple authorization.

The industry says that under this model, companies are protecting their intellectual property, are protecting consumers’ safety, and are protecting device security, though no company has put forward a coherent narrative or argument as to why these bills would result in less secure devices or the divulgence of trade secrets.

"Do I own the phone, or does Apple own the phone?"

“It’s their business model—they sell you something and they fix it. It’s not a trademark or trade secret issue,” Talamantes-Eggman said. “I’ve grown increasingly frustrated that I have to pay a lot of money for my phone and iPad and my wife’s iPad and then have to pay Apple to fix it. Do I own the phone, or does Apple own the phone?”

Talamantes-Eggman says she realizes that Apple is politically powerful in the state, but said that because she’s an assemblymember from Stockton and not Silicon Valley, she has to represent people who are intent on starting small businesses rather than large companies. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We talk a lot about standing up for the everyday person, and sometimes you have to stand up to big corporations in order to stand up for the everyday person,” Talamantes-Eggman said. “We know repair creates jobs and living wage jobs, and I’m very invested in how we dispose of our electronic devices. It makes sense to go up the chain in order to be able to repair and save more devices.”
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...air-california





Feds Bust CEO Allegedly Selling Custom BlackBerry Phones to Sinaloa Drug Cartel

Phantom Secure is one of the most infamous companies in the secure phone industry. Sources and court documents detail that its owner has been arrested for allegedly helping criminal organizations.
Joseph Cox

For years, a slew of shadowy companies have sold so-called encrypted phones, custom BlackBerry or Android devices that sometimes have the camera and microphone removed and only send secure messages through private networks. Several of those firms allegedly cater primarily for criminal organizations.

Now, the FBI has arrested the owner of one of the most established companies, Phantom Secure, as part of a complex law enforcement operation, according to court records and sources familiar with the matter.

“FBI are flexing their muscle,” one source familiar with the secure phone industry, and who gave Motherboard specific and accurate details about the operation before it was public knowledge, said. Motherboard granted the sources in this story anonymity to talk about sensitive developments in the secure phone trade. The source said the Phantom operation was carried out in partnership with Canadian and Australian authorities.

A complaint filed in the Southern District of California on Thursday charges Vincent Ramos, the founder and CEO of Canada-based Phantom, with racketeering conspiracy to conduct enterprise affairs, as well as conspiracy to distribute narcotics, and aiding and abetting. Authorities arrested Ramos on Thursday, according to the court docket. Crucially, the complaint alleges that Ramos and Phantom were not simply incidental to a crime, like Apple might be when a criminal uses an iPhone, but that the company was specifically created to facilitate criminal activity.

The heavily redacted complaint, written by FBI Special Agent Nicholas Cheviron, alleges that even members of the notorious Sinaloa drug cartel used Phantom’s devices, and that the “upper echelon members” of transnational criminal groups have bought Phantom phones. A second source also familiar with the secure phone industry told Motherboard that the devices have been sold in Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela, as well as to the Hells Angels gang. Cheviron estimates that 20,000 Phantom devices are in use worldwide, with around half of those in Australia; bringing in tens of millions of dollars of revenue to Phantom.

Some of Phantom’s customer email addresses, used as part of Phantom’s messaging service, make references to violent crime. “Leadslinger,” “the.cartel,” “trigger-happy,” and “knee_capper9” are all examples provided in the complaint.

In addition to removing the microphone and camera from BlackBerry devices, Phantom also takes out GPS navigation, internet browsing, and normal messenger services, the complaint reads. Phantom then installs Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) software to send encrypted messages, and routes these messages through overseas servers, the complaint alleges. The complaint points to Hong Kong and Panama as countries “believed by PHANTOM SECURE to be uncooperative with law enforcement.” Phantom can also remotely wipe devices in the event they are seized by authorities.

In order to pin Phantom to criminal activities, Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) purchased Phantom devices while posing as drug traffickers. The RCMP then asked if it was safe to send messages such as “sending MDMA to Montreal,” to which Phantom replied it was “totally fine.” The RCMP also pretended that authorities had arrested an associate with incriminating evidence on the phone, and needed Phantom to wipe the device. Multiple undercover agents, posing as drug traffickers looking to expand their operations, also met Ramos in Las Vegas in February 2017, the complaint continues.

“We made it—we made it specifically for this [drug trafficking] too,” Ramos told undercover agents, according to a transcript included in the complaint.

As part of its investigation into Ramos and Phantom Secure, the FBI has at least one cooperating witness—a convicted transnational drug trafficker from the Sinaloa cartel—according to the complaint. This unnamed witness, along with someone named Marc Emerson who was alleged to be involved in the drug trafficking before dying due to an overdose in June 2017, were customers of Phantom Secure, and used the company’s devices to conduct their transnational drug trafficking activity, the complaint adds. This is where the aiding and abetting charge comes in—the cooperating witness allegedly used a Phantom device while organizing the transit of five kilograms of cocaine.

On Wednesday, when Motherboard learned of the operation and contacted the Bureau before the court documents became public, an FBI spokesperson declined to comment, citing the Bureau’s policy of neither confirming or denying investigations. The FBI did not respond to a follow-up request on Saturday.

Ramos’ lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.

Law enforcement agencies have cracked down on other encrypted phone companies allegedly catering to organised crime over the past few years. In 2016, Dutch investigators arrested the owner of Ennetcom, whose customers allegedly include hitmen, drug traffickers, and other serious criminals. And then in 2017, Dutch authorities also busted PGP Sure, which also allegedly catered to organized crime.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...ted-blackberry





New Bill in Congress Would Hand Your Data to Cops.

Some lawmakers are trying to sneak the CLOUD Act through by attaching it to a must-pass government funding bill.
Laila

Lawmakers behind a new anti-privacy bill are trying to sneak it through Congress by attaching it to the must-pass government spending bill.

The CLOUD Act would hand police in the U.S., and other countries, extreme new powers to obtain and monitor data directly from tech companies instead of requiring a warrant and judicial review.

Congressional leadership will decide whether the CLOUD Act gets attached to the omnibus government spending bill sometime this week, potentially as early as tomorrow, so we need to flood our lawmakers with messages and calls right now.

Click here to tell your lawmakers to oppose the CLOUD Act and reject any attempts to attach it to a must-pass government spending bill.

If passed, this bill would give law enforcement the power to go directly to tech companies, no matter where they or their servers are, to obtain our data. They wouldn’t need a warrant or court oversight, and we’ll be left with no protections to ensure law enforcement isn’t violating our rights.

The CLOUD Act makes the relationship between big tech companies and governments even cozier. It puts our sensitive personal information at risk by making it readily accessible to cops.

Leaders in Congress are going to make this decision very soon. Take action now to demand that your lawmakers reject any attempt to attach the CLOUD Act to the must-pass government spending bill.

Make sure to call your representative using the Congressional switchboard number: (202) 224–3121. Here’s what you can say:

Defend the Fourth Amendment. Oppose the CLOUD Act and any attempts to sneak this surveillance expansion bill through Congress by attaching it to a must-pass government spending bill.
https://medium.com/@Laila/new-bill-i...ps-3c9afa89266





TSA Accused of Searching Domestic Travelers’ Devices with No Warrant

TSA has failed to fully respond to FOIA requests from the ACLU.
Cyrus Farivar

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California has sued the Transportation Security Administration, alleging that the agency has improperly withheld documents and other materials that would shed light on warrantless searches of digital devices at airports prior to purely domestic flights.

This lawsuit, which is meant to compel the TSA to fully respond to a Freedom of Information Act request, is related to another lawsuit (Alasaad v. Duke) brought by the ACLU to better understand such searches that happen when Americans return home from abroad.

"The federal government’s policies on searching the phones, laptops, and tablets of domestic air passengers remain shrouded in secrecy," said Vasudha Talla, staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, in a Monday statement.

Specifically, the ACLU of Northern California "seeks records related to policies, procedures, or protocols regarding the search of passengers’ electronic devices; equipment used to search, examine, or extract data from passengers’ devices; and training of the officers conducting the screenings and searches of electronic devices."

The advocacy group filed a FOIA request on December 20, 2017, but TSA provided no records.

"TSA is searching the electronic devices of domestic passengers, but without offering any reason for the search," Talla continued. "We don’t know why the government is singling out some passengers, and we don’t know what exactly TSA is searching on the devices. Our phones and laptops contain very personal information, and the federal government should not be digging through our digital data without a warrant."

The TSA did not respond to Ars’ request late Monday evening for comment.

Matt Leas, a TSA spokesman, declined to comment on the lawsuit to The Guardian, which first reported the lawsuit. "TSA does not search the contents of electronic devices," Leas told the British newspaper.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...arch-policies/





ACLU Sues TSA Over Searches of Electronic Devices
Megan Rose Dickey

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Transportation Security Administration over its alleged practices of searching the electronic devices of passengers traveling on domestic flights.

“The federal government’s policies on searching the phones, laptops, and tablets of domestic air passengers remain shrouded in secrecy,” ACLU Foundation of Northern California attorney Vasudha Talla said in a blog post.

The lawsuit, which is directed toward the TSA field offices in San Francisco and its headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, specifically asks the TSA to hand over records related to its policies, procedures and/or protocols pertaining to the search of electronic devices.

This lawsuit comes after a number of reports came in pertaining to the searches of electronic devices of passengers traveling domestically. The ACLU also wants to know what equipment the TSA uses to search, examine and extract any data from passengers’ devices, as well as what kind of training TSA officers receive around screening and searching the devices.

“TSA is searching the electronic devices of domestic passengers, but without offering any reason for the search,” Talla added. “We don’t know why the government is singling out some passengers, and we don’t know what exactly TSA is searching on the devices. Our phones and laptops contain very personal information, and the federal government should not be digging through our digital data without a warrant.”

The ACLU says it first filed FOIA requests back in December, but TSA “subsequently improperly withheld the requested records,” the ACLU wrote in a blog post today.

Although the TSA did announce heightened screening procedures in October 2017, it did not provide any information about its policies or procedures. TSA does, however, have public policies pertaining to the search and seizure of electronic devices at the border and during international trips. That practice, however, is also being challenged by the ACLU in court.

I’ve reached out to the TSA and will update this story if I hear back.
https://beta.techcrunch.com/2018/03/...ronic-devices/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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