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Old 08-08-18, 06:32 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 11th, ’18

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August 11th, 2018




SoundCloud on the Blockchain? Audius Raises $5.5M to Decentralize Music
Josh Constine

Audius wants to cut the middlemen out of music streaming so artists get paid their fair share. Coming out of stealth today led by serial entrepreneur and DJ Ranidu Lankage, Audius is building a blockchain-based alternative to Spotify or SoundCloud.

Users will pay for Audius tokens or earn them by listening to ads. Their wallet will then pay out a fraction of a cent per song to stream from decentralized storage across the network, with artists receiving roughly 85 percent — compared to roughly 70 percent on the leading streaming apps. The rest goes to compensating whomever is hosting that song, as well as developers of listening software clients, one of which will be built by Audius.

Audius plans to launch its open-sourced product in beta later this year. But it’s already found some powerful investors that see SoundCloud as vulnerable to the cryptocurrency revolution. Audius has raised a $5.5 million Series A led by General Catalyst and Lightspeed, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Pantera Capital, 122West and Ascolta Ventures. They’re betting that Audius’ token will grow in value, making the stockpile it keeps worth a fortune. It could then sell chunks of its tokens to earn revenue instead of charging artists directly.

Audius co-founders (from left): head of product Forrest Browning, CEO Ranidu Lankage, CTO Roneil Rumburg

“The biggest problem in the music industry is that streaming is taking off and artists aren’t necessarily earning a lot of money. And it can take three months, or up to 18 months for unsigned artists, to get paid for streams,” says Lankage. “That’s what crypto really solves. You can pay artists in near real-time and make it fully transparent.”

The big question will be whether Audius can use the token economy to crack the chicken-and-egg problem of getting its first creators and listeners on a platform that might be less functionally robust than its traditional competitors. There are a lot of moving parts to decentralize, but there are also plenty of disgruntled musicians out there waiting for something better.
From Sri Lankan hip-hop star to serial entrepreneur

Most startup guys don’t have Billboard charting singles on their bio, but Lankage does. Born in Sri Lanka, his hip-hop songs in his native tongue of Sinhalese were the first of the language to be played on the BBC and MTV. He got signed to Sony and even went platinum, but left the label seeking greater control over his work. After going to Yale, he applied his music business knowledge to build a Reddit for dance music called The Drop with Twitch’s Justin Kan back in 2015.

The two teamed up again on a video version of Q&A app Quora called Whale, but that fizzled out too. Lankage’s next venture Polly, a polling tool built as a complement to Snapchat, inspired the now super-popular Instagram Stories polls and questions stickers. But after an acqui-hire by Reddit fell through, he returned to his first love: music.

“I’ve always been passionate about building tools for creators,” says Lankage. But this time, he wanted to focus on helping them turn their art into a profession. He teamed up with CTO Roneil Rumburg, an engineering partner at Kleiner Perkins who’d build a crypto wallet called Backslash, and head of product Forrest Browning, who’d sold his software metering startup StacksWare to Avi Networks.

Their goal is to build a blockchain streaming music service where listeners don’t have to understand blockchains. “A user wouldn’t even know that they have a wallet,” says Rumburg. They’ll just hear an ad every once in a while, get a subscription, or pay per stream. Since Audius is open sourced, developers will be able to build their own listening clients on top, which could specialize in discovery of certain types of music or offer their own payment schemes.

“I have known Ranidu, Forrest and Roneil for a long time, and have always been impressed with their ability to blend art, technology and business together,” says investor Niko Bonatsos of General Catalyst. “In Audius, they bring together all three skills, with a deep technical heart and a compelling solution for a very big marketplace.”

Tokens, not record labels

For starters, Audius is focusing on signing up independent electronic musicians. These are the types that might be popular on SoundCloud but actually have to pay for hosting there while not getting much back due to the platform’s weak monetization options. Don’t expect U2 and Ariana Grande on Audius, at least not yet. But the startup could differentiate by offering access to content you can’t find elsewhere.

To get artists on board, Lankage tells me Audius plans “to use token incentives.” Those willing to jump on first before there are many listeners could get a bonus allotment of tokens that might be worth more if they help popularize the service. And where artists go, their fans will follow. Audius is hoping artists will share its links first because that’s where they’ll earn the most money.

Audius has also lined up a legion of big-name advisors to help it develop its blockchain product and artist relationships. Those include Augur co-founder Jeremy Gardner, EDM artist 3LAU, EA co-founder Bing Gordon and more it can’t announce just yet.

The linchpin of Audius will be the user experience. If the system feels too complicated, listeners and artists will stay elsewhere. A DJ might earn more per stream from Audius, but if Spotify or SoundCloud offer better ways for fans to subscribe to them and generate more plays long-term, they’ll still direct supporters there. But if Audius can hide the nerdy bits while solving the music industry’s problems, it has the potential to be one of the first mainstream consumer blockchain projects that treats the tech as a utility, not just a new stock market to bet on.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/08/audius/





Major Record Labels Sue Cox Communications for $1.5 Billion

Has Cox Communications knowingly profited from subscribers’ willful copyright infringement?
Daniel Sanchez

Sony Music, Universal Music Group (UMG), Warner Music Group (WMG), and a host of other labels have filed a lawsuit against Cox Communications.

Filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the major labels — including divisions Arista, Sony/ATV, and Warner Bros. Records — claim the ISP has knowingly contributed and reaped substantial profits from “massive copyright infringement committed by thousands of its subscribers.”

The suit comes several years after BMG took the ISP to court.

BMG Rights Management had accused Cox of deliberately refusing to disconnect persistent music pirates despite multiple warnings. After a short two-week trial in December 2015, a Virginia jury found the ISP liable of willful contributory copyright infringement. The jury noted Cox Communications “knew or should have known of such infringing activity.”

A federal court had ordered Cox Communications to pay BMG $25 million in damages along with millions in legal fees, including attorney costs. The ISP also lost its fabled DMCA ‘safe harbor’ protection for failing to implement an effective repeat infringer policy.

Cox Communications quickly appealed the ruling.

Earlier this year, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit sided with the ISP. According to the Court, the “should have known” argument was too flimsy. Thus, the Court reversed the ruling. The ISP no longer owed BMG a dime.

Yet, it wasn’t all good news for Cox. The Court of Appeals didn’t reinstate the company’s safe harbor protection. Calling out the company over its ineffective “thirteen-strikes policy,” Circuit Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote,

“Cox failed to qualify for the DMCA safe harbor because it failed to implement its policy in any consistent or meaningful way — leaving it essentially with no policy.”

Now, the major labels have capitalized on this ruling.

According to the labels, Cox Communication actively contributes to “subscribers’ infringement,” both willfully and extensively.

Echoing Motz’s judgment, the filing states,

“For years, Cox deliberately refused to take reasonable measures to curb its customers from using its Internet services to infringe on others’ copyrights – even once Cox became aware of particular customers engaging in specific, repeated acts of infringement.”

Represented by the RIAA, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group recently accused another ISP – Grande Communications – of doing the same.

The labels reportedly sent “hundreds of thousands of statutory infringement notices” to the ISP over its subscribers’ blatant piracy. Yet, the pirates continued using Cox to illegally download, copy, and distribute music on BitTorrent, among other services.

The ISP, upon receiving the notices, only imposed an ‘arbitrary cap’ on the number of infringement notices it received. Cox last agreed to receive around 600 notices per day in 2013.

The labels also called Cox’s “thirteen-strike” policy a “sham.”

When consumers violate the thirteen-strike policy, Cox disconnects repeat infringers, but only temporarily. The ISP only implemented “soft terminations” with “virtually automatic reinstatement.” Infringing users could then freely continue pirating music.

In fact, wrote the labels, Cox offered its service “as an attractive tool, and as a safe haven, for infringement.” The ISP’s “unlimited ability to download and distribute Plaintiffs’ works” made it a draw for pirates. In turn, the company deliberately attracted, retained, and charged higher fees to subscribers.

Elaborating on the ISP’s practice, the labels explained,

“Rather than stop its subscribers’ unlawful activity, Cox prioritized its own profits over its legal obligations. [The ISP’s] profits increased dramatically as a result of the massive infringement it facilitated.”

The labels then took their argument a step further.

By refusing to shut down infringing subscribers, Cox “obtained a direct financial benefit.” The ISP wanted to “maintain the revenue that would come from their accounts.” Conversely, Cox had told labels it cut down its anti-piracy staff “for budget reasons.” At the same time, the ISP allegedly thwarted the labels’ enforcement activities.

The lawsuit then notes major labels have categorized nearly 20,000 Cox subscribers as blatant repeat infringers.

Citing five specific examples of several infringers who have received over 60 notices, they wrote,

“Cox simply looked the other way.”

• During a 601-day period, Cox’s subscriber with IP address 174.78.143.156 was identified in 142 infringement notices, which were sent on at least 116 separate days.

• During a 539-day period, Cox’s subscriber with IP address 70.167.91.154 was identified in 104 infringement notices, which were sent on at least 96 separate days.

• During a 426-day period, Cox’s subscriber with IP address 72.198.185.108 was identified in 96 infringement notices, which were sent on at least 80 separate days.

• During a 326-day period, Cox’s subscriber with IP address 184.191.182.8 was identified in 84 infringement notices, which were sent on at least 71 separate days.

• During a 248-day period, Cox’s subscriber with IP address 184.177.171.108 was identified in 64 infringement notices, which were sent on at least 52 separate days.

The labels have called for a court to rule against Cox on two counts.

First, Cox must be found liable for contributory copyright infringement.

The company “facilitated, encouraged, and materially contributed to” copyright infringement “on a massive scale.” It provided a network for its subscribers “to commit repeated infringement.” Cox also purposefully ignored and turned “a blind eye” to the unlawful reproduction and distribution of copyrighted works.

Second, Cox must be found liable for vicarious copyright infringement.

The labels allege the ISP has the legal and practical right and ability to supervise as well as control piracy activity. Cox also derives a direct financial benefit from the practice. For failing to terminate the nearly 20,000 infringing accounts, the ISP profited from “illicit revenue.” As such, Cox’s willful, intentional, and purposeful actions have disregarded Plaintiffs’ rights.

The labels have listed over 10,000 musical works and have asked the court for up to $150,000 per work infringed. If the US District Court rules against Cox, it could cost the ISP up to $1.5 billion.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/201...ommunications/





Japanese Publishers Team Up for a 'Stop! Pirated Manga' Online Campaign
Krista Rogers

Weekly Shonen Jump and other staples of the manga industry have had enough with online pirating. Citing rapid growth in the illegal distribution of comics and manga anthologies since last year, Japan’s Shuppan Koho Center (“Publications PR Center”) is spearheading an effort to bring together several mainstay publishers such as Shogakukan (Weekly Shonen Sunday), Shueisha (Weekly Shonen Jump), Kodansha (Weekly Shonen Magazine), and Kadokawa (Young Ace) and promote awareness of the issue with the general public.

Above is one of the campaign ads that the editorial team of globally popular Weekly Shonen Jump (the home of "Dragon Ball," "One Piece," "Naruto") shared last week. It is accompanied by text saying: “Let’s stop looking at illegal sites of pirated manga! This is a notice for the ‘STOP! Pirated versions’ campaign that many publishing companies are participating in. It’s connected to empowering and protecting manga authors so that they can continue producing new content. We ask for your cooperation.”

The site explains that the illegal industry often collect high profits from ad revenue and website membership fees. For those who are unconvinced about the actual monetary losses on the side of the publishing companies, the following data are backed by several official reports on the subject:

Estimated damage within Japan: 50 billion yen

Estimated damage within the U.S.: 1.3 trillion yen

Estimated damage from Haruka Yume no Ato, the largest manga pirating ring in Japan: 73.1 billion yen

Estimated damage from pirate site Manga Mura: 320 billion yen

The campaign website also describes in a paneled comic strip how the illegal distribution of manga affects the manga creation process, along with six of the most typical methods of illegal distribution that readers should be on the lookout for.

Six typical methods of illegal distribution with brief descriptions:

Online reading sites–There are actually fewer Japanese sites of this nature and more unauthorized English and other translated versions. Internet users can easily access and read manga on their phones, tablets, or computers (Manga Mura is an example). Sites can also be dangerous for the reader because of easily transmitted viruses, automated redirecting to harmful sites, and other scams.

• Leech sites–The main type of site found in Japan. They house virtually no ads and most of their revenue is generated through affiliated cyberlockers (storage services). The legality here is a bit of a grey area so efforts are being made to made to address them at the moment.
• Video submission sites–More common in Japan than overseas. Manga chapters are copied into video-sharing services such as YouTube to create a kind of electronic slideshow of pages. It’s harder to detect and prevent pirated manga through this type of distribution than pirated anime.
• Spoiler sites–These sites often get their hands on new manga chapters before they’re even published in the official magazines, so they tend to attract the type of reader who wants to keep up with stories as soon as possible. Luckily, illegal distributions via this method have relatively leveled off since a large bust back in February 2017.
• P2P–Stands for “Peer to Peer,” or files shared directly by users/computers in a connected network. Examples in Japan include Winny, Share, PerfectDark, and Cabos; examples overseas include BitTorrent.
• Swindling sites–A classic credit card scam. These sites advertise free-to-read manga, but then readers still can’t read anything unless they register their credit card. After a time, they’ll probably notice they’ve been unwillingly charged.

In the words of the Shuppan Koho Center, “Manga is a part of Japanese culture that we are proud to share with the world. It’s a symbol of ‘Cool Japan.'” For the sake of fans around the world, let’s support the artists and ensure their beloved stories can continue well into the future.
https://japantoday.com/category/nati...nline-campaign





The Skull and Crossbones Still Flies High Above Pirate Web Video Sites
Martyn Warwick

• Pier-to-pier remains the preference for those who won't pay for content
• But web video sites increasing in popularity
• Avast number of pirated downloads
• To err is human but to arr! is pirate

A new research report confirms that individuals who are determined not to pay for access to movies and tv shows are still faithful adherents to pirate web video sites. It comes as no surprise really. Pirates are cheapskates and even when they are having their distinctive facial ornaments fitted, they won't pay more than a buck an ear.

According to the new report from Irdeto, the digital platform security company, peer to peer piracy (or perhaps that should be pier-to-pier piracy) remains the preference of those seeking access to illegal copies of films and tv programmes, despite the many and various crackdowns and attempts to shutter pirate sites that have been made over quite a few years now. What's more, ever-increasing web video piracy is actually adding to the global movie and tv piracy problem rather than replacing P2P piracy.

It seems the burgeoning pirate web video sites are as popular as good old P2P. Irdeto says this is down to visits by “casual pirates,” (the ones that don't dress-up in full fig pirate costume à la Jack Sparrow when squatting on the fo'c'sle of an evening to watch the telly) who are happy to go both to legitimate sites and illegal piracy sites to see what they want to see.

The report reveals that last year 50 percent of forays by casual pirates were to web video sites. However, over the same period 80 per cent of monthly visits to pirate sites by “committed pirates” (i.e those so confirmed in their piracy that they never patronise legitimate streaming sites) were to P2P sites. It seems pirating is addictive. 'Committed pirates' say that once they lose their first hand, they are hooked forever. But many confess to spending a lot of time browsing in second-hand stores.

The research also finds that visits to P2P sites account for 70 per cent of global activity for both web video and P2P platforms. The result was an average of 800 million global monthly downloads from P2P sites in 2017. Again, P2P activity greatest in 'high-piracy' countries, including Russia, India, Brazil, the Netherlands and the US - and the incidence is on the rise.

Interestingly the report reveals that web video sites actually source 28 per cent of their high-quality video content from P2P sites. In other words pirates are pirating from other pirates. Amusing really. Strangely there is also a small cadre of namby-pamby fishermen pirates who do actually pay for the content they steal, but only in pieces of skate.

Peter Cossack, (and what a very apt freebooting name that is given the subject matter of this story), VP of Cybersecurity Services at Irdeto commented, "“While many expect P2P piracy to be taken over by streaming and direct downloads, it’s clear that this has not happened yet. P2P piracy is still a big threat to the industry, in which the overall piracy problem is growing."

Agencies such as Interpol and the FBI are issuing information packs containing hints on how to identify suspects. One tip is that groups of eight outrageously costumed men with fireworks burning in their beards and sporting eight legs, arms and eight eyes between them will almost certainly be pirates.

At this point I have to declare a personal interest in this subject. I grew up in a fishing village and my cousin, Roger, the cabin boy, was the son of a poor and and particularly ineffective pirate. Everyone was outraged when the lad was forced to walk the plank but the family couldn't afford a dog.
https://www.telecomtv.com/content/po...o-sites-31956/





Broadcom Co-Founder Henry Nicholas Arrested in Las Vegas on Suspicion of Drug Trafficking
Richard Winton

Broadcom co-founder and billionaire Henry T. Nicholas III was arrested in Las Vegas on suspicion of narcotics trafficking after police discovered heroin, cocaine, meth and ecstasy in his suite at the Encore hotel, police said Thursday.

Las Vegas Metropolitan police detained Nicholas, 59, and a woman, Ashley Fargo, about 10:40 p.m. Tuesday after hotel security called the police to the room, said Officer Larry Hadfield, a department spokesman. Hadfield said security reported finding contraband in the room.

Nicholas and Fargo were arrested and booked on suspicion of trafficking heroin, cocaine, MDMA and methamphetamine, Hadfield said.

Both since have been released from custody, he said.

David Chesnoff, Nicholas’ attorney, said that Nicholas was released on his own recognizance and that Chesnoff’s law firm is investigating the circumstances of the arrest. Chesnoff, who is perhaps Las Vegas’ best-known defense lawyer, has represented celebrities including Paris Hilton, Bruno Mars and Motley Crue singer Vince Neil.

Neither Fargo nor any representative for her could immediately be reached for comment.

This is the latest run-in with the law for Nicholas, who stepped down as chief executive of Broadcom in 2003 and who, according to Forbes, has a fortune of $3.1 billion.

Nicholas was indicted in 2008 on charges that he had provided cocaine and ecstasy to friends and business associates. The indictment alleged that Nicholas installed “a secret and convenient lair” at his home in Laguna Hills to indulge an obsession with prostitutes.

The indictment also said that during a flight from Orange County to Las Vegas, Nicholas and his entourage generated so much marijuana smoke that it billowed into the cockpit, “requiring the pilot flying the plane to put on an oxygen mask.”

In a separate indictment, prosecutors accused Nicholas and fellow Broadcom co-founder Henry Samueli of backdating Broadcom stock options to make them more valuable to prized employees without accounting for the practice in regulatory filings.

A federal judge in 2009 dismissed the criminal charges against Nicholas and Samueli related to stock-option backdating and then, in early 2010, dismissed the drug distribution charges against Nicholas.

“I have long held a deep and abiding faith in the American justice system,” Nicholas said at the time.

Broadcom was one of the dozens of tech companies targeted during a federal crackdown on stock option grants. Options are rights to buy a company’s stock at a set price — usually the stock’s price the day the options are granted. If the stock price rises, employees can use their options to buy shares at the set price and then sell them at a profit.

Companies are allowed to backdate option grants to a date when the price was lower as long as they account for it in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Prosecutors alleged that Broadcom executives backdated options and failed to make the required disclosures.

During the tech boom, options were used to recruit and retain highly skilled engineers. In 2007, amid an SEC investigation, Broadcom restated its financial results to account for nearly $2.2 billion in options expenses.

Nicholas said the legal challenges that he and other executives faced did not diminish the pride he felt for the company he built with Samueli, his former professor at UCLA.

The pair launched the company in 1991 and turned it into a multibillion-dollar technology empire. Broadcom has designed chips used in a variety of electronic devices, including iPhones and Bluetooth headsets.

“We changed the way people communicate,” he said. “We changed everything.”

Avago Technologies agreed to buy Irvine-based Broadcom in 2015 and, upon acquiring the company, changed its own name to Broadcom.

Nicholas has spent millions of dollars advocating for crime victims, helping pass California’s three-strikes felony law and a victims’ rights law known as Marsy’s Law, named for his sister, who was killed by her ex-boyfriend in 1983.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/l...809-story.html





With Crucial California Bill Back in Play, California Lawmakers Warned: Back Net Neutrality or "Feel Constituents' Wrath"

"California assemblymembers won't get a second chance and they need to decide immediately to either side with the public or be willing to pay the price for catering to big telecoms."
Julia Conley

With the latest version of California's net neutrality bill unveiled by Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener this week, open internet defenders are prepared to publicly pressure and shame state lawmakers who plan to appease powerful internet service providers (ISPs) by voting against the proposal instead of standing with their constituents.

The advocacy group Fight for the Future urged Californians to demand that their representatives vote in favor of SB 822, which will be considered by the state Assembly's Communications and Conveyance Committee before going the Assembly votes on it later this month.

Noting that ISPs like AT&T and Comcast have poured millions of dollars into their campaign to defeat SB 822, Fight for the Future on Thursday unveiled its scorecard for California lawmakers, showing constituents where their Assembly members stand on net neutrality.

BREAKING: The California #NetNeutrality bill #SB822 has been reintroduced and is moving again. We've launched a new scorecard, and are preparing crowdfunded billboards, to ensure California Assemblymembers can't hide. https://t.co/UH42QSxKXF pic.twitter.com/UfMJmWLIrH

— Fight for the Future (@fightfortheftr) August 9, 2018

As of this writing, just 11 of the Assembly's 80 members have committed to voting for the newly-unveiled SB 822. But Fight for the Future is promising to mount billboard campaigns targeting representatives who vote against net neutrality protections.

"California assemblymembers won't get a second chance and they need to decide immediately to either side with the public or be willing to pay the price for catering to big telecoms," said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future.

Advocates in California began fighting for state-level net neutrality protections after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), led by President Donald Trump-appointed chairman and former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai, voted last December to repeal net neutrality protections, putting the panel at odds with more than 80 percent of the American public.

Fight for the Future has been fighting since before the FCC's vote to protect net neutrality, which keeps internet service providers (ISP) from giving faster service to wealthy internet companies while independent journalists, entrepreneurs, and organizers fight to reach their audiences on the internet

The group's campaign in California has already proven successful, with Assemblyman Miguel Santiago signing on as co-author of SB 822 weeks after working to gut the bill—after Fight for the Future raised $15,000 to put up a billboard in his district urging him to support net neutrality.

"The massive online outcry that led to his conversion should be a warning to the rest of the Assembly: don't mess with net neutrality unless you're prepared to feel your constituents' wrath," said Greer.

California's decision on net neutrality would have wide-reaching effects on the regulations for the entire country, setting an example for other states whose residents want comprehensive state-level protections.

"SB 822 will prevent Internet providers like AT&T and Comcast from turning the internet into a playground they control and using their monopoly power to interfere with what apps, services, websites and devices we choose to use," said Greer.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/20...-neutrality-or





FCC Admits it was Never Actually Hacked
Devin Coldewey

The FCC has come clean on the fact that a purported hack of its comment system last year never actually took place, after a report from its inspector general found a lack of evidence supporting the idea. Chairman Ajit Pai blamed the former chief information officer and the Obama administration for providing “inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people.”

The semi-apology and finger-pointing are a disappointing conclusion to the year-long web of obfuscation that the FCC has woven. Since the first moment it was reported that there was a hack of the system, there have been questions about the nature, scale and response to it that the FCC has studiously avoided even under direct Congressional questioning.

It was so galling to everyone looking for answers that the GAO was officially asked to look into it. The letter requesting the office’s help at the time complained that the FCC had “not released any records or documentation that would allow for confirmation that an attack occurred, that it was effectively dealt with, and that the FCC has begun to institute measures to thwart future attacks and ensure the security of its systems.” That investigation is still going on, but one conducted by the FCC’s own OIG resulted in the report Pai cites.

The former CIO, David Bray, was the origin of the theory, but emails obtained by American Oversight in June show that evidence for it and a similar claim from 2014 were worryingly thin. Nevertheless, the FCC has continuously upheld the idea that it was under attack and has never publicly walked it back.

Pai’s statement was issued before the OIG publicized its report, as one does when a report is imminent that essentially says your agency has been clueless at best or deliberately untruthful at worst, and for more than a year. To be clear, the report is still unpublished, though its broader conclusions are clear from Pai’s statement. In it he slathers Bray with the partisan brush and asserts that the report exonerates his office:

“I am deeply disappointed that the FCC’s former [CIO], who was hired by the prior Administration and is no longer with the Commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people. This is completely unacceptable. I’m also disappointed that some working under the former CIO apparently either disagreed with the information that he was presenting or had questions about it, yet didn’t feel comfortable communicating their concerns to me or my office.

On the other hand, I’m pleased that this report debunks the conspiracy theory that my office or I had any knowledge that the information provided by the former CIO was inaccurate and was allowing that inaccurate information to be disseminated for political purposes.”

Although an evaluation of Pai’s “conspiracy theory” idea must wait until the report is public, it’s hard to square this pleasure of the chairman’s with the record. At any time in the last year, especially after Bray had departed, it would have been, if not simple, then at least more simple than maintaining its complex act of knowledgelessness, to say that the CIO had made an error and there was no attack. Nothing like that has escaped the mouth of Chairman Pai.

One must assume the agency had reviewed the data. Bray left a long time ago; why did these subordinates of his fail to speak out afterwards? If the FCC had its doubts, why did it not say so instead of risking withering criticism by avoiding the question for months on end?

Some of the FCC’s reticence to speak out may have even been explained as part of the request by the inspector general not to discuss the investigation. That’s an easy out, at least for some of the time! But we haven’t heard that, that I know of at least, and it doesn’t explain the rest of the agency’s silence or misleading statements.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel urged everyone to move on with a quickness:

“The Inspector General Report tells us what we knew all along: the FCC’s claim that it was the victim of a DDoS attack during the net neutrality proceeding is bogus. What happened instead is obvious—millions of Americans overwhelmed our online system because they wanted to tell us how important internet openness is to them and how distressed they were to see the FCC roll back their rights. It’s unfortunate that this agency’s energy and resources needed to be spent debunking this implausible claim.”

Although moving forward is a good idea, accountability and an explanation for the last year of mystery would also be welcome.

Because it wasn’t a hack, it seems that the comment-filing system, though recently revamped, needs yet another fresh coat of paint to handle the kind of volume it saw during the net neutrality repeal. Plans for that are underway, Pai wrote. A separate investigation by the Government Accountability Office regarding fraud in the comment system will no doubt affect those plans.

I’ve contacted the FCC and its Office of the Inspector General for more information, including the report itself. I will update this post when I hear back.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/fc...tually-hacked/





Security Flaws On Comcast’s Login Page Exposed Customers’ Personal Information

After a BuzzFeed News inquiry, Comcast patched the vulnerabilities.
Nicole Nguyen

Comcast Xfinity inadvertently exposed the partial home addresses and Social Security numbers of more than 26.5 million customers, according to security researcher Ryan Stevenson, who discovered the security flaws. Two previously unreported vulnerabilities in the high-speed internet service provider’s online customer portal made it easy for even an unsophisticated hacker to access this sensitive information.

After BuzzFeed News reported the findings to Comcast, the company patched the flaws. Spokesperson David McGuire told BuzzFeed News, “We quickly investigated these issues and within hours we blocked both vulnerabilities, eliminating the ability to conduct the actions described by these researchers. We take our customers’ security very seriously, and we have no reason to believe these vulnerabilities were ever used against Comcast customers outside of the research described in this report.”

While Comcast has not found any foul play yet, its review is ongoing.

One of the flaws could be exploited by going to an “in-home authentication” page where customers can pay their bills without signing in. The portal asked customers to verify their account by choosing from one of four partial home addresses it suggested, if the device was (or seemed like it was) connected to the customer’s home network. If a hacker obtained a customer’s IP address and spoofed Comcast using an "X-forwarded-for" technique, they could repeatedly refresh this login page to reveal the customer’s location. That’s because each time the page refreshed, three addresses would change, while one address, the correct address, remained the same.

Eventually, the page would show the first digit of the street number and first three letters of the correct street name, while asterisks hid the remaining characters. A hacker could then use IP lookup websites to determine the city, state, and postal code of the partial address.

After learning of the vulnerability, Comcast disabled in-home authentication. Now, customers need to manually input personal information to verify their accounts.

This vulnerability was particularly easy to exploit — and use to target someone. It’s simple to obtain someone’s IP address (or “Internet Protocol”), a string of numbers that links your internet activity to the Wi-Fi network you’re using. Web administrators can see the IP addresses of everyone who visits their website. Many forums also disclose users’ IP addresses, along with their usernames. A malicious actor can also send someone a link designed specifically to obtain a target’s IP address.

While an IP address alone is not sensitive information, paired with the knowledge of someone’s internet service provider, it can help a bad actor confirm their target’s specific location. And often, it’s fairly easy to figure out someone’s internet service provider, or ISP, because an area is typically limited to one or two high-speed internet options, thanks to the consolidation of internet companies.

In the second vulnerability that Stevenson discovered, a sign-up page through the website for Comcast’s Authorized Dealers (sales agents stationed at non-Comcast retail locations) revealed the last four digits of customers’ Social Security numbers. Armed with just a customer’s billing address, a hacker could brute-force (in other words, repeatedly try random four-digit combinations until the correct combination is guessed) the last four digits of a customer’s Social Security number. Because the login page did not limit the number of attempts, hackers could use a program that runs until the correct Social Security number is inputted into the form.

After being contacted by BuzzFeed News, Comcast put a strict rate limit on the portal.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...s-of-customers





Digital Disruption through Space: High-Speed Internet Access through Satellites
Ben Linders

Satellites are enabling high speed access to the internet in rural areas, on airplanes, and for internet service providers to the core network. Space technology innovations like electric propulsion, digitalization revolutionize telecommunications and new entrants like SpaceX are forcing launch costs down. These developments will enable new services and lower the costs of existing ones.

The Satellite Industry Association has testified for rural broadband coverage. SIA President Tom Stroup stated:

Satellite communications services are positioned to be the keystone for bringing 21st century broadband capabilities to the entirety of the United States. These services are capable of providing broadband to rural and remote areas of the country where it remains uneconomical for terrestrial services to deploy, and provide both speeds and prices comparable to terrestrial alternatives.

According to the Wall Street Journal, airlines, plane makers, communications providers and equipment suppliers are collaborating to pursue upgraded internet access on airplanes with faster speed and improved user experience:

Mobile operators world-wide would be able to extend service directly into airliner cabins, allowing passengers to use their phones, tablets or other devices to seamlessly connect to the web while airborne.

As envisioned by proponents, connections would be available for an array of devices using various mobile networks, just the way Wi-Fi hot spots now work on the ground. Connection speeds, rivaling the fastest cable access, would be comparable with those expected with widespread rollout of commercial fifth-generation, or 5G, cellular service across the U.S.

The European Space Agency (ESA) stated that access to the internet is by satellite in many countries:

Internet service providers often link their servers to the core of the Internet network by satellite. With the emergence of very powerful broadband satellites, users – equipped with their own broadband interactive satellite terminals – will get access to the Internet regardless of their distance from the nearest terrestrial node.

Christophe de Hauwer, chief strategy & development officer at SES, spoke about digital disruption through space at Spark the Change France 2018. InfoQ is covering this event with articles, summaries, and Q&As.

InfoQ interviewed de Hauwer about the market for space industry and satellites, how space technology innovation is revolutionizing telecommunications, and opportunities in aerospace, defense and telecommunications.

InfoQ: How does the market of space industry and satellite look?

Christophe de Hauwer: The space industry is thriving: according to Morgan Stanly, the global space economy is predicted to grow from $350 billion in revenues today to more than $1.1 trillion by 2040.

This impressive growth is driven by an exploding demand for connectivity. Global IP traffic is predicted to grow by 20% annually from 2010 to 2040, which means over 5 trillion of Gigabytes will be consumed each month by 2040.

While we see this explosion of demand, we need to be reminded that nearly 4 billion people are still offline today, living without the opportunities and advancements that the internet brings. This is something we need to solve now, not in 20 years.

Satellite technology is at the heart of the answer to both exploding demand and connecting the unconnected. On one hand, satellite will be key to satisfy consumers’ demand for always-on, high-performance connectivity. On the other hand, it will play an essential role in providing connectivity to populations in underserved and unserved areas.

The InfoQ summary Spark the Change: Sparkling Disruptions explored how space technology is innovating. The industry is changing from projects done by large government organizations to smaller companies and investments in startups doing space projects. Satellites are becoming fully digitized, lowering their weight and space required, which changes the type of services that are possible, provides flexibility, and lowers the costs of existing services.

InfoQ: How is space technology innovation revolutionizing telecommunications?

De Hauwer: The space industry has just entered a new era. The arrival of new space ventures has spurred technological innovation and drastically changed economics - for example, new entrants like SpaceX are forcing launch costs down significantly.

Many other space innovations are playing a key role in this revolution: electric propulsion means satellites can achieve a 40-50% reduction in their mass; high-throughput spot beams deliver a significantly higher amount of bandwidth than traditional satellites and can reduce cost per bit ; fully new digitized payloads enable increased efficiency, full flexibility in global coverage and further optimization of spectrum use.

InfoQ: What opportunities do you see in aerospace, defense, and telecommunications?

De Hauwer: If we take the aeronautical industry as an example, airlines are facing growing demands for inflight connectivity: market studies have shown that 63% of travelers think more flights should offer Wi-Fi, and 48% think Wi-Fi in the air should be as fast as it is on the ground. We are shaping and scaling our satellite fleet in order to deliver both the performance and economics needed to take these services mainstream. Whether a plane is travelling along densely populated routes or vast areas of deserts, we want to have them covered with the right kind of connectivity, always on, everywhere.

InfoQ: How does the culture at SES foster innovation?

De Hauwer: SES is building on two crucial elements when it comes to innovation: We want to pioneer and lead the market on new developments in rocket or satellite technologies - like launching on reusable rockets and introducing electric satellite propulsion. And we want to catalyze the markets and ecosystems we serve by working with partners in the entire value chain - like with antenna manufacturers in the mobile reception on ships and planes, or TV and decoder manufacturers in the video segment and the deployment of HD and Ultra HD television. This pioneer and partner model allows injecting innovation into the market.
https://www.infoq.com/news/2018/08/h...net-satellites





The Bullshit Web
Nick Heer

My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten to twenty seconds for a basic news article.

At the time, a few of my friends were getting cable internet. It was remarkable seeing the same pages load in just a few seconds, and I remember thinking about the kinds of the possibilities that would open up as the web kept getting faster.

And faster it got, of course. When I moved into my own apartment several years ago, I got to pick my plan and chose a massive fifty megabit per second broadband connection, which I have since upgraded.

So, with an internet connection faster than I could have thought possible in the late 1990s, what’s the score now? A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the bullshit web.

But first, a short parenthetical: I’ve been writing posts in both long- and short-form about this stuff for a while, but I wanted to bring many threads together into a single document that may pretentiously be described as a theory of or, more practically, a guide to the bullshit web.

A second parenthetical: when I use the word “bullshit” in this article, it isn’t in a profane sense. It is much closer to Harry Frankfurt’s definition in “On Bullshit”:

“It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.”

I also intend it to be used in much the same sense as the way it is used in David Graeber’s “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”:

“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”

[…]

These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’.

What is the equivalent on the web, then?

1 The average internet connection in the United States is about six times as fast as it was just ten years ago, but instead of making it faster to browse the same types of websites, we’re simply occupying that extra bandwidth with more stuff. Some of this stuff is amazing: in 2006, Apple added movies to the iTunes Store that were 640 × 480 pixels, but you can now stream movies in HD resolution and (pretend) 4K. These much higher speeds also allow us to see more detailed photos, and that’s very nice.

But a lot of the stuff we’re seeing is a pile-up of garbage on seemingly every major website that does nothing to make visitors happier — if anything, much of this stuff is deeply irritating and morally indefensible.

Take that CNN article, for example. Here’s what it contained when I loaded it:

• Eleven web fonts, totalling 414 KB

• Four stylesheets, totalling 315 KB

• Twenty frames

• Twenty-nine XML HTTP requests, totalling about 500 KB

• Approximately one hundred scripts, totalling several megabytes — though it’s hard to pin down the number and actual size because some of the scripts are “beacons” that load after the page is technically finished downloading.

The vast majority of these resources are not directly related to the information on the page, and I’m including advertising. Many of the scripts that were loaded are purely for surveillance purposes: self-hosted analytics, of which there are several examples; various third-party analytics firms like Salesforce, Chartbeat, and Optimizely; and social network sharing widgets. They churn through CPU cycles and cause my six-year-old computer to cry out in pain and fury. I’m not asking much of it; I have opened a text-based document on the web.

In addition, pretty much any CNN article page includes an autoplaying video, a tactic which has allowed them to brag about having the highest number of video starts in their category. I have no access to ComScore’s Media Metrix statistics, so I don’t know exactly how many of those millions of video starts were stopped instantly by either the visitor frantically pressing every button in the player until it goes away or just closing the tab in desperation, but I suspect it’s approximately every single one of them. People really hate autoplaying video.

Also, have you noticed just how many websites desperately want you to sign up for their newsletter? While this is prevalent on so many news and blog websites, I’ve dragged them enough in this piece so far, so I’ll mix it up a bit: this is also super popular with retailers. From Barnes & Noble to Aritzia, Fluevog to Linus Bicycles, these things are seemingly everywhere. Get a nominal coupon in exchange for being sent an email you won’t read every day until forever — I don’t think so.

Finally, there are a bunch of elements that have become something of a standard with modern website design that, while not offensively intrusive, are often unnecessary. I appreciate great typography, but web fonts still load pretty slowly and cause the text to reflow midway through reading the first paragraph. And then there are those gigantic full-width header images that dominate the top of every page, as though every two-hundred-word article on a news site was the equivalent of a magazine feature.

So that’s the tip of the bullshit web. You know how building wider roads doesn’t improve commute times, as it simply encourages people to drive more? It’s that, but with bytes and bandwidth instead of cars and lanes.

2 As Graeber observed in his essay and book, bullshit jobs tend to spawn other bullshit jobs for which the sole function is a dependence on the existence of more senior bullshit jobs:

“And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.”

So, too, is the case with the bullshit web. The combination of huge images that serve little additional purpose than decoration, several scripts that track how far you scroll on a page, and dozens of scripts that are advertising related means that text-based webpages are now obese and torpid and excreting a casual contempt for visitors.

Given the assumption that any additional bandwidth offered to web developers will immediately be consumed, there seems to be just one possible solution, which is to reduce the amount of bytes that are transmitted. For some bizarre reason, this hasn’t happened on the main web, because it somehow makes more sense to create an exact copy of every page on their site that is expressly designed for speed. Welcome back, WAP — except, for some reason, this mobile-centric copy is entirely dependent on yet more bytes. This is the dumbfoundingly dumb premise of AMP.

Launched in February 2016, AMP is a collection of standard HTML elements and AMP-specific elements on a special ostensibly-lightweight page that needs an 80 kilobyte JavaScript file to load correctly. Let me explain: HTML5 allows custom elements like AMP’s <amp-img>, but will render them as <span> elements without any additional direction — provided, in AMP’s case, by its mandatory JavaScript file. This large script is also required by the AMP spec to be hotlinked from cdn.amp-project.org, which is a Google-owned domain. That makes an AMP website dependent on Google to display its basic markup, which is super weird for a platform as open as the web.

That belies the reason AMP has taken off. It isn’t necessarily because AMP pages are better for users, though that’s absolutely a consideration, but because Google wants it to be popular. When you search Google for anything remotely related to current events, you’ll see only AMP pages in the news carousel that sits above typical search results. You’ll also see AMP links crowding the first results page, too. Google has openly admitted that they promote AMP pages in their results and that the carousel is restricted to only AMP links on their mobile results page. They insist that this is because AMP pages are faster and, therefore, better for users, but that’s not a complete explanation for three reasons: AMP pages aren’t inherently faster than non-AMP pages, high-performing non-AMP pages are not mixed with AMP versions, and Google has a conflict of interest in promoting the format.

It seems ridiculous to argue that AMP pages aren’t actually faster than their plain HTML counterparts because it’s so easy to see these pages are actually very fast. And there’s a good reason for that. It isn’t that there’s some sort of special sauce that is being done with the AMP format, or some brilliant piece of programmatic rearchitecting. No, it’s just because AMP restricts the kinds of elements that can be used on a page and severely limits the scripts that can be used. That means that webpages can’t be littered with arbitrary and numerous tracking and advertiser scripts, and that, of course, leads to a dramatically faster page. A series of experiments by Tim Kadlec showed the effect of these limitations:

“AMP’s biggest advantage isn’t the library — you can beat that on your own. It isn’t the AMP cache — you can get many of those optimizations through a good build script, and all of them through a decent CDN provider. That’s not to say there aren’t some really smart things happening in the AMP JS library or the cache — there are. It’s just not what makes the biggest difference from a performance perspective.

AMP’s biggest advantage is the restrictions it draws on how much stuff you can cram into a single page.

[…]

AMP’s restrictions mean less stuff. It’s a concession publishers are willing to make in exchange for the enhanced distribution Google provides, but that they hesitate to make for their canonical versions.”

So: if you have a reasonably fast host and don’t litter your page with scripts, you, too, can have AMP-like results without creating a copy of your site dependent on Google and their slow crawl to gain control over the infrastructure of the web. But you can’t get into Google’s special promoted slots for AMP websites for reasons that are almost certainly driven by self-interest.

3 There is a cumulative effect of bullshit; its depth and breadth is especially profound. In isolation, the few seconds that it takes to load some extra piece of surveillance JavaScript isn’t much. Neither is the time it takes for a user to hide an email subscription box, or pause an autoplaying video. But these actions compound on a single webpage, and then again across multiple websites, and those seemingly-small time increments become a swirling miasma of frustration and pain.

It’s key to recognize, though, that this is a choice, a responsibility, and — ultimately — a matter of respect. Let us return to Graeber’s explanation of bullshit jobs, and his observation that we often experience fifteen-hour work weeks while at the office for forty. Much of the same is true on the web: there is the capability for pages to load in a second or two, but it has instead been used to spy on users’ browsing habits, make them miserable, and inundate them on other websites and in their inbox.

As for Frankfurt’s definition — that the essence of bullshit is an indifference to the way things really are — that’s manifested in the hand-wavey treatment of the actual problems of the web in favour of dishonest pseudo-solutions like AMP.

An actual solution recognizes that this bullshit is inexcusable. It is making the web a cumulatively awful place to be. Behind closed doors, those in the advertising and marketing industry can be pretty lucid about how much they also hate surveillance scripts and how awful they find these methods, while simultaneously encouraging their use. Meanwhile, users are increasingly taking matters into their own hands — the use of ad blockers is rising across the board, many of which also block tracking scripts and other disrespectful behaviours. Users are making that choice.

They shouldn’t have to. Better choices should be made by web developers to not ship this bullshit in the first place. We wouldn’t tolerate such intrusive behaviour more generally; why are we expected to find it acceptable on the web?

An honest web is one in which the overwhelming majority of the code and assets downloaded to a user’s computer are used in a page’s visual presentation, with nearly all the remainder used to define the semantic structure and associated metadata on the page. Bullshit — in the form of CPU-sucking surveillance, unnecessarily-interruptive elements, and behaviours that nobody responsible for a website would themselves find appealing as a visitor — is unwelcome and intolerable.

Death to the bullshit web.
https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/





Bangladesh Shuts Down Mobile Internet to Tackle Teen Protests
Agence France-Presse

Bangladesh authorities have shut down mobile internet across swathes of the country, officials and local media said Sunday, as the authorities try to quell massive student protests that have spiraled into violence.

For the last week students have brought parts of the capital Dhaka to a standstill with a protest against poor road safety after 2 teenagers were killed by a speeding bus.

On Saturday the protests took a violent turn in Dhaka's Jigatala neighborhood with more than 100 people injured.

Witnesses said police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at demonstrators and that alleged pro-government activists attacked youngsters, including some of those rushing to nearby hospitals for treatment.

The country's highest circulated newspaper Prothom Alo said 3G and 4G internet services have been shut down for 24 hours since late Saturday, shortly after the violence broke out.

Social media has been filled with comments from Bangladeshis unable to access the internet via their phones, although wireless and wired networks appear to be unhindered.

Jahirul Haq, chairman of the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC), told AFP they received a "decision" from the government. But he did not clarify what was the government order was. He said he would comment further on the situation later Sunday.

A senior telecoms official who asked for anonymity said: "The BTRC has slowed down the internet at the order of the government."

The move may be an attempt to try and limit the ability of students to mobilize or spread growing online outrage over how the government has handled the protests, hours after police and unidentified men wielding sticks and stones clashed with students.

Images and photos of the attacks on students allegedly by the ruling party activists have flooded the social media, prompting renewed outrage.

Police denied they fired rubber bullets or tear gas at the protesters. However hospital staff said dozens of people had been injured, some seriously, sporting injuries consistent with rubber bullets.

The ruling Awami League party has also denied allegations its cadres beat students up.

Bangladesh's transport sector is widely seen as corrupt, unregulated and dangerous, and as news of the teenagers' deaths spread rapidly on social media they became a catalyst for an outpouring of anger against the government.

The government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has ruled Bangladesh since 2009, but in recent months it has been shaken by mass protests demanding an end to a decades-old system of discriminatory civil service recruitment.

Several powerful ministers have pleaded with students to return to their classes, amid worries the unprecedented teen outrage could turn into widespread anti-government protests ahead of general elections due later this year.

But their pleas have had little effect.
http://news.abs-cbn.com/overseas/08/...-teen-protests





The Tox Project

Tox began a few years ago, in the wake of Edward Snowden's leaks regarding NSA spying activity. The idea was to create an instant messaging application that ran without requiring the use of central servers. The system would be distributed, peer-to-peer, and end-to-end encrypted, with no way to disable any of the encryption features; at the same time, the application would be easily usable by the layperson with no practical knowledge of cryptography or distributed systems. During the Summer of 2013 a small group of developers from all around the globe formed and began working on a library implementing the Tox protocol. The library provides all of the messaging and encryption facilities, and is completely decoupled from any user-interface; for an end-user to make use of Tox, they need a Tox client. Fast-forward a few years to today, and there exist several independent Tox client projects, and the original Tox core library implementation continues to improve. Tox (both core library and clients) has thousands of users, hundreds of contributors, and the project shows no sign of slowing down.

Tox is a FOSS (Free and Open Source) project. All Tox code is open source and all development occurs in the open. Tox is developed by volunteer developers who spend their free time on it, believing in the idea of the project. Tox is not a company or any other legal organization. Currently we don't accept donations as a project, but you are welcome to reach out to developers individually.
https://tox.chat/about.html





Verizon Didn’t Bother to Write a Privacy Policy for its ‘Privacy Protecting’ VPN

Verizon's 'Safe Wi-Fi' says it "protects your privacy and blocks ad-tracking," but its current privacy policy is a placeholder that says the exact opposite.
Karl Bode

Verizon is rolling out a new Virtual Private Network service called Safe Wi-Fi it developed in conjunction with McAfee. According to Verizon, the $4 per month service “protects your privacy and blocks ad tracking, creating a secure Wi-Fi connection anywhere in the world.”

Besides Verizon’s long history of allowing third parties to monetize its customers’ web-browsing habits, there’s another reason you probably shouldn’t trust this product to “protect your privacy:” Verizon didn’t bother to write a privacy policy for it before releasing it to the public.
Verizon's Terms of Service just redirects to McAfee's website. Image: Verizon

The company’s terms of service directs all of its VPN users to the general McAfee privacy policy governing all of McAfee’s products. That policy, in turn, states that McAfee and Verizon have the right to collect an ocean of data on the end user, including carrier data, Bluetooth device IDs, mobile device ID, mobile advertising identifiers, MAC address, IMEI data, and more. The policy explicitly says that browsing history can be used to help target ads at you:

"We may use information collected through [our services], such as what websites you visit or the mobile applications you use, to allow McAfee and others to show you ads that are targeted to your interests," the policy states.

When pressed as to why consumers would pay for a “security and privacy” tool that seems to encroach on consumer privacy, the company told Motherboard that the current privacy policy doesn’t accurately reflect what’s being collected.

“Please know that neither Verizon nor McAfee collect any personal data regarding its users or use of the Safe WiFi VPN,” a Verizon spokesman stated.

Of course that’s not what the current privacy policy states:

And if the current privacy policy is little more than an incorrect placeholder, how exactly is an end user supposed to know what data actually is being collected?

“We're working with McAfee to post their privacy policy specific to Safe WiFi and will send you a link as soon as it posts,” Verizon said, acknowledging that it wasn't aware of the problem until Motherboard “alerted us to this discrepancy.”

Whenever the actual privacy policy is posted, it will “reflect that fact that neither Verizon nor McAfee collects any personal data regarding users or use of the Safe WiFi VPN,” the company promises.

Until then, you’ll just have to trust Verizon. But Verizon’s track record suggests it’s the last company you’d want watching your back.

In 2016 the company was forced to pay the FCC $1.35 million for modifying wireless packets to track users around the internet. Verizon not only initially refused to offer users any way to opt-out of this covert tracking, it spent more than two years doing so before even bothering to inform the public it was happening.

For years, allowed a third party to use undeletable cookies to track its customers’ web-browsing habits. It also helped dismantle state and federal consumer privacy protections, ensuring that government can’t hold companies accountable for flimsy privacy standards and empty promises.

And that’s where much of the problem really originates.

Thanks to barely meaningful U.S. privacy rules, your ISP already has an absolute ocean of data on you, much of it collected whether you utilize a VPN or not. And thanks to cash-compromised lawmakers and terrible tech policy (from neutering said privacy rules to killing net neutrality), companies like Verizon are helping to effectively break the internet, placing the onus on consumers to somehow navigate a minefield of apathy and rampant data collection.

It’s now seemingly impossible to go more than a week without seeing another major privacy scandal, whether it’s a company like LocationSmart leaking the private wireless location data of a massive chunk of North America, or a political data firm like Deep Root Analytics leaving the voting data of millions of Americans openly accessible on a public-facing server.

In many instances, government appears less interested than ever in actually protecting consumers and holding companies accountable for such violations, as last year’s government assault on FCC broadband privacy protections should make abundantly clear.

In response, worried consumers are increasingly flocking to VPNs in a bid to protect their private data while browsing online. Said fear has provided a wonderful marketing opportunity for VPN providers, some of which, like Private Internet Access, bought full page ads last year naming and shaming senators that sold you out on privacy.

But a VPN isn’t some kind of magic bullet, and our collective privacy woes go far deeper than such tools can address. Sure, a VPN may help you dodge the watchful eye of nosy governments or a coffee shop packet sniffer, but you’re still leaving a data trail on the servers of the VPN itself. Often VPN provider claims that they won’t retain user logs are proven to be false, and ferreting out which company is actually protecting your data can often border on the impossible.

Quite often, a VPN provider may turn out to be little more than a scam. Other times they’re so poorly configured and run you would have been more secure not using the service at all. We’ve noted repeatedly how rising privacy worries have resulted in a notable rise in this kind of fraud as scammers try to cash in on consumer concern, creating an ouroboros of dysfunction.

The fear has also resulted in a rise in VPN offerings from more mainstream names that similarly shouldn’t be inherently trusted. And ironically, many of these offerings are coming from companies that helped build our long, dark privacy nightmare in the first place.

Facebook’s VPN Onavo, for example, has been widely and correctly ridiculed as a data-hoovering application dressed up as a security tool. Giant ISPs are also trying to jump into the VPN game despite several decades’ worth of bad behavior on the privacy front, ironically cashing in on the rising interest in VPNs their own bad behavior helped create.

There’s a certain irony in users running to the same ISPs for protection that helped build our current privacy mess in the first place. And while VPNs can provide adequate privacy while at your favorite coffee shop, they’re not a magic bullet for a deeper dysfunction companies like Verizon helped cement.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...protecting-vpn





Verizon Lied About 4G Coverage—and it Could Hurt Rural America, Group Says

"Sham coverage map" could prevent rural carriers from getting network funding.
Jon Brodkin

Verizon "grossly overstated" its 4G LTE coverage in government filings, potentially preventing smaller carriers from obtaining funding needed to expand coverage in underserved rural areas, a trade group says.

The Federal Communications Commission last year required Verizon and other carriers to file maps and data indicating their current 4G LTE coverage. The information will help the FCC determine where to distribute up to $4.5 billion in Mobility Fund money over the next 10 years. The funds are set aside for "primarily rural areas that lack unsubsidized 4G," the FCC says.

If Verizon provided the FCC with inaccurate data, the company's rural competitors might not be able to get that government funding.

"Verizon's claimed 4G LTE coverage is grossly overstated," the Rural Wireless Association (RWA), which represents rural carriers, told the FCC in a filing yesterday.

Accurate data needed to improve coverage

The FCC allows carriers to challenge other carriers' data, but the rural providers say they face great expense in trying to gather the necessary evidence.

"Verizon should not be allowed to abuse the FCC challenge process by filing a sham coverage map as a means of interfering with the ability of rural carriers to continue to receive universal service support in rural areas," the RWA wrote.

The RWA asked the FCC to investigate Verizon's claimed coverage.

"RWA's members are in the middle of the Challenge Process but are expending enormous time and financial resources in their efforts due to inaccurate data submitted by Verizon," the group said. "RWA requests that the Commission investigate the 4G LTE coverage claimed by Verizon and require re-filing of Verizon's data to correct its overstated coverage."

Verizon denied any wrongdoing. "We are reviewing RWA's filing, but we are confident that our Mobility Fund map is fully consistent with the FCC's mapping specifications," a Verizon spokesperson told Ars.

Verizon also addressed an earlier version of the RWA's claims in a letter to the FCC last month.

The Mobility Fund is part of the FCC's Universal Service Fund, which is paid for by Americans through fees imposed on phone bills.
RWA: Verizon falsely claimed to cover entire Oklahoma Panhandle

Verizon claims to cover almost all of the Oklahoma Panhandle, an area of 14,778.47 square kilometers, the RWA wrote. But an engineering firm hired by PTCI (Panhandle Telephone Cooperative, Inc.) "used publicly available information and the FCC-adopted 5Mbps downlink standard to produce a map that estimated that Verizon's coverage area should be approximately 6,806.49 square kilometers in the Oklahoma Panhandle—not even half of the LTE coverage area Verizon publicly claims to serve," the RWA wrote.

The filing continued:

Since this estimated propagation map was compiled, PTCI has driven more than 37,000 miles in order to compile data for the MF-II [Mobility Fund II] challenge process. PTCI's speed test data collection included a total of 402,573 test points—drive tests taken using Verizon-specified devices that are on plans not subject to network prioritization or throttling. Of the total test points collected, 357,374 (88.8 percent) tested below 5Mbps download speed or did not register 4G LTE service at all on Verizon-designated handsets. The results of the speed tests taken by PTCI largely bear out [the engineering firm's] initial Verizon propagation projections.

Carriers in other areas would presumably have to undergo similarly laborious and costly processes in order to challenge Verizon data. PTCI estimates that its research "will cost close to $1 million—more than half of which could have been avoided but for overstated Verizon coverage," the RWA said.

The filing also states:

$1 million is a hefty price tag to test an area comprised of only three counties. Other RWA members are seeing similar Challenge Process costs. Pioneer Cellular, also based in Oklahoma, estimates that it will take 20 drivers 75 days to complete testing in the 24,010 drive-testable, challengeable square kilometers of its licensed service territory. Like PTCI, Pioneer expects to spend nearly $1 million to complete the challenge process. This includes $600,000 in labor costs, $247,000 in mileage, $48,000 for handsets, and $96,000 for data usage. Sagebrush Cellular, based in Montana, expects to spend more than $1.5 million to participate in the challenge process. This figure includes $275,000 for project management and other labor, $62,000 for mapping and $1,178,000 for drive testing expenses.

Verizon disputes methodology

Verizon's letter to the FCC said that its map is accurate, and was based on "a sophisticated propagation model that incorporates industry best practices for propagation modeling."

"The [PTCI's] consultants' coverage map underestimates Verizon's Mobility Fund coverage because it fails to take into account all of the Verizon cell sites that provide coverage to customers in the Oklahoma Panhandle," Verizon also wrote. "The consultants' coverage map reflects only the Verizon cell sites that are actually located in the Oklahoma Panhandle.... Because the Oklahoma Panhandle is only 34 miles across, Verizon cell sites in adjacent areas of neighboring states are able to provide coverage to a significant portion of the Oklahoma Panhandle."

Verizon questioned whether the drive tests suffered from "speed measurement errors," and said that drive tests finding sub-5Mbps speeds are "not evidence that Verizon's coverage map is inconsistent with the Commission's mapping standards."

The FCC acknowledged "that the '80 percent cell edge probability' component of the mapping specifications could result in sub-5Mbps speed measurements in areas shown as covered by the Mobility Fund maps," Verizon said. But the FCC declined to adopt stricter measuring requirements because that would result in government funding "being used to upgrade or over-build 4G LTE networks rather than to expand 4G LTE coverage to unserved areas," Verizon said.

The RWA remains convinced that Verizon exaggerated coverage, and said it believes an FCC investigation into Verizon's claimed 4G LTE coverage "could save prospective challengers millions of dollars apiece" and open the challenge process to more companies "who are currently deterred from participating in the process by the enormous cost involved."

If the RWA is correct, this could make more rural areas eligible for Mobility Fund dollars, benefiting customers who would get better coverage and more choices.

We asked the FCC if it will take up the RWA's request for an investigation into Verizon's coverage claims and will update this story if we get an answer.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ca-group-says/





Speedier Broadband Standards? Pai’s FCC Says 25Mbps is Fast Enough

FCC kicks off annual analysis of nationwide broadband deployment.
Jon Brodkin

The Federal Communications Commission is proposing to maintain the US broadband standard at the current level of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream.

That's the speed standard the FCC uses each year to determine whether advanced telecommunications capabilities are "being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion."

The FCC raised the standard from 4Mbps/1Mbps to 25Mbps/3Mbps in January 2015 under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler. Ajit Pai, who was then a commissioner in the FCC's Republican minority, voted against raising the speed standard.

As FCC chairman since 2017, Pai has kept the standard at 25Mbps/3Mbps despite calls to raise it from Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. This week, he proposed keeping the standard the same for another year.

"This inquiry fundamentally errs by proposing to keep our national broadband standard at 25Mbps," Rosenworcel said yesterday. "It is time to be bold and move the national broadband standard from 25 Megabits to 100 Megabits per second. When you factor in price, at this speed the United States is not even close to leading the world. That is not where we should be and if in the future we want to change this we need both a more powerful goal and a plan to reach it. Our failure to commit to that course here is disappointing. I regretfully dissent."

While Pai's proposal isn't yet finalized, keeping the current speed standard would likely mean that Pai's FCC will conclude that broadband deployment is already happening fast enough throughout the US. Pai could use that conclusion in attempts to justify further deregulation of the broadband industry.

Public comments due next month

Pai's proposal came in a Notice of Inquiry that seeks public comment on how the FCC should conduct its annual broadband deployment assessment, which will likely be released early in 2019.

"We propose to maintain the 25Mbps/3Mbps benchmark, and we seek comment on this proposal," the notice says.

US law defines advanced telecommunications capability as service "that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology."

The FCC previously found that the "speed benchmark of 25Mbps/3Mbps was the appropriate measure to assess whether fixed services provides advanced telecommunications capability," the FCC notice said.

Comments can be submitted at this webpage. Initial comments are due on September 10, and reply comments are due on September 24.

Specifically, the 25Mbps/3Mbps standard is used to judge whether home and business broadband technologies such as cable and fiber provide "advanced telecommunications capability." The FCC's annual assessment also evaluates deployment of mobile broadband, but the FCC hasn't chosen a single speed benchmark for mobile access. Pai's FCC previously concluded that "adoption of a single speed benchmark was unworkable given the inherent variability of the mobile experience," and yesterday's notice seeks comment on whether to maintain that approach.

Is mobile or satellite good enough?

Despite not adopting a mobile speed standard, the FCC could determine that parts of America have enough broadband even if they only have mobile service. The FCC said it calculates the number of Americans with access to advanced telecommunications services "by summing the population of all of the census blocks with at least one provider of services, whether the calculation is considering fixed terrestrial services, all fixed services, mobile LTE services, a combination of fixed and mobile LTE services, or a combination of fixed or mobile LTE services."

Pai's FCC last year invited criticism by suggesting that mobile Internet might be all Americans need. By contrast, the Obama-era FCC concluded that Americans need home and mobile access because the two types of services have different capabilities and limitations. Pai's FCC eventually acknowledged that mobile broadband is not a full substitute for home Internet services.

Keeping the 25Mbps/3Mbps standard for home Internet service and no specific standard for mobile would make it easier for the FCC to conclude that broadband progress is happening quickly enough.

Even satellite services are now offering 25Mbps download speeds. "Based upon June 2017 FCC Form 477 data, fixed terrestrial broadband with speeds of at least 25Mbps/3Mbps has been deployed to approximately 93 percent of all Americans, including approximately 98 percent of Americans in urban areas and 70 percent of Americans in rural areas," the FCC notice said.

The FCC has been including satellite services in its estimates of broadband deployment, despite the poor latency and low data caps of current satellite technologies. The FCC is asking for public input on that approach, saying, "We seek comment on this treatment of satellite service, including how the Commission should take into account any possible limitations, such as satellite capacity, in the geographic scope of reported satellite coverage."

So far, the FCC has declined to adopt a latency benchmark that would exclude current satellite services from counting as advanced telecommunications. Future satellite services delivered from low-Earth orbits might solve satellite's latency problem, however.

Pai offered no data for broadband claim

During the Obama presidency, the FCC regularly found that broadband deployment wasn't happening quickly enough. But Pai's FCC concluded in February 2018 that broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, and it credited Pai's net neutrality repeal for turning things around.

But that February 2018 report was issued more than four months before the repeal was finalized and thus contained no data to support Pai's claim that repealing net neutrality rules sped up broadband deployment.

The only proof Pai cited were deployments by four companies. As we wrote in February, "three of these four deployments were planned during the Obama administration, and two were funded directly by the FCC before Pai was the chair. All four came from ISPs that had announced broadband expansions before Pai took over, with the net neutrality rules in place."

FCC data generally lags behind the present time by about a year, so even the next report may not have any data from after the net neutrality repeal. The February 2018 report was based on data through December 2016, and the 2019 report may be based on data through December 2017. Pai's repeal was voted through in December 2017 and implemented in June 2018.

Although the 25Mbps/3Mbps fixed broadband speed was the only official benchmark the FCC used to judge progress in its February 2018 report, the report also presented deployment data from several other speed tiers.

"The 2018 Report presented deployment figures for three speed tiers for fixed services, specifically our 25Mbps/3Mbps speed benchmark, 10Mbps/1Mbps, and 50Mbps/5Mbps; and for two speed tiers for mobile LTE, specifically 5Mbps/1Mbps and 10Mbps/3Mbps," yesterday's notice said. "We seek comment on whether our upcoming report should report on any additional speed tiers and, if so, which speed tiers."
https://arstechnica.com/information-...s-fast-enough/





Court Halts FCC Move to Lower Broadband Subsidies for Tribal Areas
Harper Neidig

A federal court has blocked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from making changes to a broadband subsidy program that would have effectively eliminated benefits for many Native Americans living on tribal lands.

A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay of the FCC’s order, saying that it would likely cause significant loss of telecommunications service to tribal areas.

“While there may be some public benefit to eliminating unnecessary spending, the Tribal Lifeline program has been in existence for nearly two decades and the Federal Communications Commission has not demonstrated that allowing it to continue in its current form while these consolidated cases remain pending will result in significant harm to the government or the public at large,” the court wrote in its order.

The FCC voted 3-2 along party lines in November to make the changes, including limiting the type of carriers that can serve tribal areas and effectively lowering the subsidy for tribal residents enrolled in the program.

“Residents of Tribal lands, like many low-income consumers, rely on Lifeline service from wireless resellers, who are the primary, and sometimes only, providers of Lifeline service,” Gene DeJordy, an attorney for the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, said in a statement. “The victory today is for the people -- Tribal members who cannot afford many of the basic necessities of life and rely on Lifeline service for their telephone and broadband needs.”

An FCC spokesperson said the agency disagreed with the decision.

“Because of today’s ruling, American taxpayers will be required to continue to pay for $34.25 a month in subsidies for Lifeline consumers in Tulsa, Oklahoma while those in rural Appalachia and Detroit only receive $9.25 a month,” the spokesperson said in a statement. "This makes no sense, and we will continue to fight to eliminate the waste, fraud, and abuse that has too long plagued this vital program.”

But the court wrote that the FCC “identified no evidence of fraud or misuse of funds in the aspects of the program at issue here” and that the plaintiffs, which include the Crow Creek tribe and the National Lifeline Association, are likely to win the lawsuit against the agency.
http://thehill.com/policy/technology...r-tribal-areas





More than 1,000 U.S. News Sites are Still Unavailable in Europe, Two Months after GDPR Took Effect

Websites had two years to get ready for the GDPR. But rather than comply, about a third of the 100 largest U.S. newspapers have instead chosen to block European visitors to their sites.
Jeff South

As a senior editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daniel Rubin writes a daily newsletter with links to 10 “Hey, Martha!” articles — some on Philly.com, some on other news websites. The newsletter is a labor of love, Rubin said, and he kept it going even during a recent vacation to Ireland.

Scouring the web for newsletter fodder from a hunting lodge in Connemara, Rubin clicked through the privacy consent forms that the European Union now requires online publishers to present to visitors. No problem — until he read that Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer-winning restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, had died.

“I went to the paper’s site to gather some of his articles and reviews and the paper’s obit, but they blocked me from even their homepage,” Rubin recalled.

That’s because latimes.com has not complied with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect May 25. Instead, people accessing the site from Europe are routed to this notice.

More than two months after the GDPR took effect, hundreds of U.S. news websites — including digital properties operated by Tronc, Lee Enterprises and GateHouse Media — are unavailable in Europe, frustrating many American tourists, business travelers, and ex-pats as well as Europeans interested in news from the States.

“Usually, your media is seen as an example for ours. I think is safe to say that, in Portugal, there’s a big community of people that not only reads the Portuguese media but reads the U.S. press as well on a daily basis,” said Flávio Nunes, a journalist in Lisbon.

He was ticked when he tried to follow a tweet to a Los Angeles Times story on July 22. Nunes knew Tronc had missed the deadline to comply with the GDPR, but he figured that was a temporary oversight.

“I was surprised when I saw that, a couple of months after, they’re still blocking our access,” Nunes said. “It’s crazy because Europe is a massive market. We have over 500 million people living in the EU.”

James Longhurst, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, subscribes to his hometown newspaper, the La Crosse Tribune. While in Germany for an academic conference this summer, he was stymied in accessing the paper online.

“I found it very strange that the Tribune had essentially changed the global internet into an intranet, only available for local use,” Longhurst said. “It’s just amazingly parochial — a pretense that the rest of the world doesn’t exist and that people in the rest of the world wouldn’t have any access or interest in local news.”

Since May 25, scores of social media postings have complained that certain U.S. news sites were unavailable in Europe. Some blamed the EU.

I'm in Europe trying to read news back home and I'm getting blocked from U.S. news sites because of #GDPR. Thanks, Europe. #balkanization

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) July 12, 2018

But most postings blamed the media companies.

Dear American newspapers (especially the @latimes, I'm looking at you), please get to grips with GDPR before the next Ice Age, so that European readers can look at your websites again.

— Dr Nell Darby (@nelldarby) July 24, 2018

Mark A.M. Kramer, a Baltimore native studying at the University of Salzburg, has a subscription to the Los Angeles Times but can’t access the paper’s website from Austria.

“I have lived two decades in Europe in various locations and have always kept in touch with local U.S. news through online subscriptions,” Kramer said. His advice to blocked news sites: “Think global, cover local. You are missing a great opportunity to engage a readership which goes beyond your perceived demographic.”

The GDPR requires websites to obtain consent from users before collecting personal information, explain what data are being collected and why, and delete a user’s information if requested. Violating the GDPR can draw a hefty fine — as much as 4 percent of a company’s annual revenue.

Websites had two years to get ready for the GDPR. Rather than comply, about a third of the 100 largest U.S. newspapers have opted to block their sites in Europe. They include the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Dallas Morning News, Newsday and The Virginian-Pilot.

Joseph O’Connor, a self-described “rogue archivist” in the United Kingdom, has been tracking the issue. He started after a gunman killed five staff members of the Capital Gazette on June 28. O’Connor wanted to read about the shooting, but the paper in Annapolis, Maryland, and the nearby Baltimore Sun, both Tronc properties, are blocked in Europe.

As of Monday, O’Connor found that more than 1,000 news sites were unavailable in the EU. They included more than 40 broadcast websites and about 100 sites operated under GateHouse’s Wicked Local brand.

GateHouse and Tronc did not respond to requests for comment about the GDPR. Lee Enterprises has no plans to comply. Company spokesperson Charles Arms said Lee’s websites wouldn’t draw enough visitors from the more than 30 countries in the EU and the European Economic Area to justify compliance.

“Internet traffic on our local news sites originating from the EU and EEA is de minimis, and we believe blocking that traffic is in the best interest of our local media clients,” Arms said.

From a financial standpoint, that position is justified, according to Alan Mutter, who teaches media economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He said international web traffic might benefit The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post but “ads served in Paris, Palermo, or Potsdam don’t help advertisers in Peoria.”

But being available in Europe can help customer relations. And about 16 million Americans visited Europe last year.

People in Europe who have encountered a blocked news site can circumvent the problem by using a virtual private network. Maggie Magliato, a recent college graduate from Northern Virginia working as an au pair in Spain, found a workaround when she was unable to access the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star online: A friend made a PDF of an article and emailed it to her.

But the ultimate solution is to comply with the GDPR, said Craig Vodnik, a Chicago-based business consultant with an office in Europe.

Vodnik was in Cologne, Germany, on July 5 trying to read the news back home. He was shocked to find that the websites of the Chicago Tribune and affiliated WGN-TV were blocked: “Do they really not care about international travelers?”

Sarah Toporoff, a Massachusetts native who works in Paris for the Global Editors Network, which promotes newsroom innovation, raised similar questions. She said U.S. newsrooms “are a benchmark for digital innovation” — and it’s important that their content be available in Europe.

“It is naive and wholly irresponsible to think that U.S. news holds no relevance beyond U.S. borders,” Toporoff said. “U.S. brands should be better at knowledge sharing with their European counterparts and learn how to serve audiences within the GDPR’s parameters. Not to do so is quite undemocratic.”
http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/mor...r-took-effect/





New Poll: 43% of Republicans Want to Give Trump the Power to Shut Down Media

The “enemy of the people” talk is working. A plurality of self-identified Republicans say they want Trump to have the power to take “bad” media outlets out.
Sam Stein

Freedom of the press may be guaranteed in the Constitution. But a plurality of Republicans want to give President Trump the authority to close down certain news outlets, according to a new public opinion survey conducted by Ipsos and provided exclusively to The Daily Beast.

The findings present a sobering picture for the fourth estate, with respondents showing diminished trust in the media and increased support for punitive measures against its members. They also illustrate the extent to which Trump’s anti-press drumbeat has shaped public opinion about the role the media plays in covering his administration.

All told, 43 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they believed “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” Only 36 percent disagreed with that statement. When asked if Trump should close down specific outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, nearly a quarter of Republicans (23 percent) agreed and 49 percent disagreed.

Republicans were far more likely to take a negative view of the media. Forty-eight percent of them said they believed “the news media is the enemy of the American people” (just 28 percent disagreed) while nearly four out of every five (79 percent) said that they believed “the mainstream media treats President Trump unfairly.”

But swaths of self-identified Democrats and Independents supported anti-press positions as well. According to the survey, 12 percent of Democrats and 21 percent of Independents agreed that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior” (74 percent and 55 percent, respectively, disagreed). Additionally, 12 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Independents agreed that “the news media is the enemy of the American people” (74 percent and 50 percent, respectively, disagreed)

The concept of an enemy press corps has become a staple of Trump’s tweets and public utterances in recent months. Much of it appears prompted by stories about internal frictions within the White House and a growing fear over the state of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.

Members of the press, as well as top officials at some of the nation’s leading publications, have objected to the phrase, arguing that it is both wildly inaccurate and deeply dangerous. They have pointed to mob-like treatment of the media by Trump supporters at various rallies as evidence for their fears. Offered the opportunity, Trump’s spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, declined to denounce the phrase. Other Trump supports have insisted that he was merely referring to those outlets that spread false information.

But Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his top adviser Kellyanne Conway have both recently said they do not agree that the press is the enemy, while adding that the media plays an important socio-political role.

Respondents to the Ipsos survey seemed to generally share that belief as well. In one of the poll’s few silver linings for the press, 57 percent of all respondents said that they believed news and reporters were “necessary to keep the Trump administration honest” including a plurality of Republicans (39 percent agreeing with that statement compared to 35 percent disagreeing). A slightly less robust 46 percent of respondents said they agreed that “most news outlets try their best to produce honest reporting” (compared to 35 percent who disagreed). And virtually everyone (85 percent of respondents) believed that “freedom of the press is essential for American democracy” (compared to 4 percent opposed to that statement).

But despite support for journalistic principles in the abstract, respondents also seemed inclined to believe that reporters had too much professional protection. According to the survey, 72 percent of all respondents agree it should be easier to sue reporters who knowingly publish false information, including 85 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-po...hut-down-media





Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech
Panich-Linsman

Apple, Google and Facebook this week erased from their services many — but not all — videos, podcasts and posts from the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars site. And Twitter left Mr. Jones’s posts untouched.

The differing approaches to Mr. Jones exposed how unevenly tech companies enforce their rules on hate speech and offensive content. There are only a few cases in which the companies appear to consistently apply their policies, such as their ban on child pornography and instances in which the law required them to remove content, like Nazi imagery in Germany.

When left to make their own decisions, the tech companies often struggle with their roles as the arbiters of speech and leave false information, upset users and confusing decisions in their wake. Here is a look at what the companies, which control the world’s most popular public forums, allow and ban.

Facebook at the Center of the Storm

Of all the tech companies, Facebook has faced the biggest public outcry over what it allows on its platform.

Whenever the social media company has been pressed to explain its decision-making, it has referred to its community standards, a public document that outlines Facebook’s rules for users. The company has outright bans against violent content, nudity and terrorist recruitment propaganda. The rules on other types of content, including hate speech and false news, are more ambiguous.
Image

When asked about Infowars last month, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said he wouldn’t remove pages hosting popular conspiracy theories of the type Mr. Jones is known for sharing. Mr. Zuckerberg then turned the conversation to the subject of the Holocaust, defending Facebook users who deny the Holocaust occurred.

His awkward explanation prompted outrage, and less than a day later, Mr. Zuckerberg offered a public apology.

Now, less than a month later, Facebook has banned Mr. Jones and removed four pages belonging to him — including one with nearly 1.7 million followers — for violating its policies. The ban means that while Mr. Jones still has an account and can view content on Facebook, he is suspended from posting anything to the platform, including to his personal page or any pages on which he is an administrator.

In a post, Facebook said it banned Mr. Jones and his pages for “accumulating too many strikes.”

The company has refused to say how many strikes is too many, however. It has also not answered questions on how long Mr. Jones will be banned or whether Facebook will be reviewing similar content posted by other right-wing conspiracy theorists.

It’s unclear whether the actions Facebook has taken against Mr. Jones signal a new approach by the company against hate speech or whether they are, once again, responding to an isolated case because of public pressure.

— Sheera Frenkel

Google’s Wide Gray Area

Of all the major online services, Google’s YouTube is probably the most explicit about what is and is not allowed. But even with its published “Community Guidelines,” YouTube has wrestled with the subjective interpretation of those rules.

Users can flag videos that they believe violate those guidelines, which include bans on videos with nudity or sexual content or incite violence. YouTube will then review those flagged videos for potential violations. In addition, YouTube’s computer systems also comb the site for videos that violate its rules.

But many videos operate in a gray area. Even in YouTube’s own explanation of “hateful content,” the company calls it is a “delicate balancing act” between free expression and protecting YouTube users.

YouTube still hosts videos of Ahmad Musa Jibril, an Islamic cleric from Dearborn, Mich., whose sermons were viewed by one of the knife-wielding attackers in the terror attack on London Bridge last year. His sermons posed a quandary for the video service because the cleric does not directly call for violent jihad and is, therefore, not in clear violation of community guidelines. YouTube now presents Mr. Jibril’s sermons behind a warning that the video has been deemed “inappropriate or offensive” by part of the YouTube community.

Mr. Jones incurred two content violations from YouTube over the last year. In February, YouTube said he had violated its policies regarding harassment and bullying when a video claiming that David Hogg, one of the outspoken student survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., was a “crisis actor.”

In Mr. Jones’s most recent violation last month, YouTube took down four of his videos that included hate speech against Muslim and transgender people as well as footage of a child being shoved to the ground. YouTube said the videos had violated its policies pertaining to hate speech, harassment and child endangerment.

— Daisuke Wakabayashi

Twitter, the ‘Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party’

Twitter has been more permissive of controversial content than its social media peers, with executives calling it “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” While Facebook removes nude or gory images, Twitter is more tolerant of adult and violent content. Rather than deleting these kinds of images, Twitter tends to hide them behind warnings that require users to click through before they can see the content.

Twitter’s approach has provoked plenty of criticism, particularly around its lax handling of harassment. Celebrities like the actress Leslie Jones have been temporarily driven off the platform by swarms of abusers.

Jack Dorsey, the company’s chief executive, has said that the company needed to do better at policing trolls. In December, Twitter said it would promote “healthy conversation” by using a combination of human moderation and machine learning to detect trolls and minimize the appearance of their posts on the platform.

Although the parents of several Sandy Hook shooting victims are suing Mr. Jones for defamation, a Twitter spokesman said that neither Mr. Jones’s personal account nor his Infowars account are currently in violation of Twitter’s policies. Tweets questioning the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., remain live on both accounts.

The simultaneous takedowns across YouTube, Spotify and Facebook are troubling, said Kevin Bankston, the director of the Open Technology Institute at New America, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington. The number of bans in quick succession from multiple companies raised the specter that this could have been influenced by outside political pressure rather than a straightforward application of company policies, he said.

Twitter’s decision to allow Mr. Jones and Infowars to stay on its platform may reflect a commitment to consistent policy enforcement, Mr. Bankston said.

“A Twitter that’s not accountable to its own rules is not accountable to anybody,” he said.

In a series of tweets late Tuesday, Mr. Dorsey suggested that other tech companies had caved to political pressure in their decision to remove Mr. Jones from their platforms and argued that journalists — not Twitter — were better suited to fact-checking Mr. Jones’ claims.

“He hasn’t violated our rules,” Mr. Dorsey wrote. “We’re going to hold Jones to the same standard we hold to every account, not taking one-off actions to make us feel good in the short term, and adding fuel to new conspiracy theories.”

— Kate Conger

Apple: ‘I’ll Know It When I See It’

Without a social-media platform, Apple typically avoids the content controversies that ensnare its peers. Yet the iPhone maker still makes many decisions about what apps, podcasts, songs and videos it will make available on its popular services.

Apple on Sunday banned five of the six Infowars podcasts from its podcasts service. Apple determined the sixth podcast, RealNews with David Knight, did not violate its policies, which prohibit podcasts that “could be construed as racist, misogynist, or homophobic” or that depict “graphic sex, violence, gore, illegal drugs, or hate themes.” In the past, Apple has also removed neo-Nazi songs and the Nazi anthem from iTunes.

Apple’s decision to ban the Infowars podcasts was surprising partly because an app that Infowars introduced last month was gaining steam on Apple’s App Store. From July 12 through Monday, the Infowars app was, on average, the 33rd most popular news app on the app store, according to App Annie, an app analytics firm. On Tuesday, after news of Mr. Jones’s bans spread, the Infowars app was Apple’s fourth most popular news app, outranking every mainstream news organization.

Apple reviews all apps that apply for its app store and determined that the Infowars app did not violate its rules. Apple posts extensive policies for apps that it distributes, including prohibitions on “content that is offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, or in exceptionally poor taste.” The policies give a series of examples, including content that is defamatory, discriminatory, meanspirited, overtly sexual, encourages violence or includes “realistic portrayals of people or animals being killed, maimed, tortured, or abused.”

How Apple decides which apps violate those policies is more vague, however. Apple said in its policy: “We will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’ And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.”

— Jack Nicas
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/t...ne-speech.html





Forget Astroturfing: Startups Can Just "Brobilize" Customers For Lobbying Efforts

When tech companies including Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, and Bird end up in hot water with local regulators, they turn to their customers to bail them out.
Caroline O'Donovan

Despite $415 million in funding and a giant fleet of electric scooters scattered all across the streets of San Francisco, the startup Bird only lasted a few months before city supervisors voted to boot them from the City by the Bay. But then, nine weeks after the sidewalks were cleared, San Francisco customers got an email asking them to help “Bring Bird Back to San Francisco!” by contacting their local elected official. The email contains a link to a website where customers can send a prewritten message, in the form of a tweet or an email, to city officials by just entering their name and contact information and clicking send.

“Please bring Bird back to San Francisco,” the email message says. “While I understand the need for reasonable regulations, it has been nearly two months since I’ve had access to this affordable, sustainable transportation option.” While it’s hard to know (for anyone other than Bird) how many people emailed, there were plenty who weren’t shy about sending a tweet.

Unlike the neighborhood bakery that wants customers to add their names and addresses to a petition for expanded outdoor seating, tech companies typically already know who and where their users are. It means startups can mobilize — or brobilize — thousands of people via a simple email or push notification to blast targeted messages to their elected officials, often with just a few clicks. It’s like astroturfing for the always-on, location-aware era.

So @RideBirdScooter set up a website to let people contact elected representatives and "Bring Bird Back to San Francisco!" I got an email about it, presumably all its other SF-based customers did too. https://t.co/KdeAY62BjL
Mat Honan
@mat
06:53 PM - 06 Aug 2018

Bird — which has also tried to brobilize customers in Milwaukee, Culver City, and Boston — did not invent this method of getting startup customers to help fight regulation. Uber texted its customers in Texas when the city of Austin was trying to force drivers to undergo more stringent background checks. Airbnb has done it in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, where hosts participating in a political campaign called Airbnb Citizen have lobbied legislators by phone, in the street, and in public hearings. Just this week, delivery company DoorDash set up a website where its delivery workers can ask California lawmakers to override a court decision that would make it harder to continue classifying those workers as independent contractors.

These click-to-lobby efforts have been ramping up for a few years now as elected officials get more serious about regulating tech (or more cognizant of the political value of appearing to do so) and startups increasingly ask their user bases to defend them in response.

"Advocacy and activism are important elements of this country’s DNA,” a Bird spokesperson wrote in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “Voluntary activism takes many forms including in-person demonstrations, emails to city officials, videos created by community members, and more. Bird has supported advocacy within our ecosystem at different moments in time to help provide riders and chargers with an easy and effective way to vocalize their support for environmentally friendly and equitable transportation options in their communities."

Customers don’t always appreciate the attempts of tech companies to politically brobilize them. The attempt to turn a transactional business relationship into an ongoing ideological one can also make people uncomfortable. For example, last week, Uber started calling its customers in New York City, where a bill that would cap the number of ride-hail drivers in the city was gaining traction. (It ultimately won.) Uber representatives told customers who answered the phone that they could be transferred immediately to the phone line of a local elected official, where customers could leave a message decrying the bill and supporting Uber’s right to operate freely in the city.

"All you have to say is 'I support Uber' and hang up," an Uber representative told a BuzzFeed News reporter last week. But the ask didn’t seem so simple or appealing to some New Yorkers.

@Uber Stop fucking calling me to call council members. Figure out a way to deal with it on your own. Just be better.
Youna Cho
@theyounaverse
04:34 PM - 27 Jul 2018

At the time, Uber told BuzzFeed News that its communication with customers is “consistent with our terms and conditions and our Privacy Policy.”

And when Uber tried to brobilize voters in Texas by auto-texting customers and asking them to vote down regulation in an upcoming election, some customers ended up suing them.

Despite criticism, brobilization must be working for someone, or companies wouldn’t keep on trying it. Eaze, a marijuana delivery startup, has also tested the brobilization waters. Before marijuana was legalized in California, Eaze shared information about local city council meetings with its customers, encouraged them to email their local legislators, gathered testimonies about the health benefits of marijuana through the hashtag #WeedHelps and a Google form, and helped organize groups of “ambassadors” to start and share local Change.org petitions. The company, which described this effort as a grassroots campaign in a 2016 interview with BuzzFeed News, was a client of political consultant Bradley Tusk, who once planned to get New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg elected president via a brobilization effort of sorts.

Eaze never flouted regulations the way some startups do — it only facilitated the legal delivery of weed to patients with medical marijuana cards prior to its legalization in California. But by brobilizing its users to help make weed a mainstream issue, Eaze helped move the legislative agenda along, and in doing so, broadened its own potential market considerably.

Eaze said the movement around legalizing marijuana and the medical benefits of the drug predates the company’s user brobilization efforts, and that since weed became legal in California, it's focused on “helping [its] retail and brand partners navigate the new regulatory frameworks to ensure consumers shopping through Eaze would have a totally compliant experience with local and state laws.”

Brobilizing is becoming so mainstream that campaign software companies initially aimed at nonprofits are increasingly signing deals with startups. Both DoorDash and Bird used a Virginia-based tech firm called Phone2Action to organize their recent campaigns. Founded in 2012, Phone2Action started gaining momentum after raising $4.6 million in 2016 to continue building the “best platform for digital stakeholder engagement,” services it's so far sold to Tesla, Expedia, and Lyft, according to its website.

Phone2Action declined to comment on the Bird and DoorDash campaigns, but a spokesperson for the company wrote via email, “Phone2Action is a technology used by a wide variety of organizations, nonprofits and companies to communicate directly with their supporters and connect them with lawmakers. As such, we rarely comment on specific campaigns and leave it up to the companies/organizations running them to speak about their goals.” DoorDash also declined to comment on this story.

While some companies brobilizing users on the fly seek out ready-made software solutions, companies like Airbnb have opted to build from scratch. The Airbnb Citizen campaign, which casts hosts as victims of regulatory overreach who would lose much-needed income if Airbnb can’t continue to grow, succeeded in San Francisco, where hosts went out, knocked doors, and asked their neighbors to support a pro-Airbnb policy. The company’s user brobilization was so successful that it launched host-led campaigns called “home sharing clubs” in cities around the world. In New York City, where Airbnb just lost a major regulatory battle, the company even agreed to finance a local host’s lawsuit against the city.

“We’re democratizing capital,” former Clinton campaign strategist and Airbnb global policy chief Chris Lehane told Business Insider in 2017. "We are driving economics for people at the grassroots level.”

Brobilizing was born out of the idea, oft-held by tech companies, that regulation is generally bad, and that customers will always prefer a convenient service over the existing law. As lawmakers in cities like New York and San Francisco continue to try and appear tough on Big Tech, these companies will only ramp up the barrage of emails, texts, and calls asking their customers to fight back.

Matt Stempeck is a civic technology researcher who’s followed the efforts of private companies including Facebook, Aereo, and Etsy to brobilize their users since 2013. Stempeck calls the practice “user lobbying.” In 2015, he described it as a “new lever of corporate influence on democracy” in an article for the Harvard Business Review.

“This 'demand forgiveness, not permission' playbook to launching new tech in communities underscores how little priority these companies give to the social impact of their businesses versus their need to grow at an astronomical rate,” Stempeck told BuzzFeed News. “It's a strategy that Airbnb and Uber used to great effect: Launch before local regulators can respond, and use that time to build up an interest group of your very own.”
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...lize-customers





Telecom Lobbyists Have Stalled 70 State-Level Bills That Would Protect Consumer Privacy

In 2018 alone, the telecom lobby has killed or stalled a whole host of legislation that would prevent ISPs from selling your data.
Michael Gaynor

On July 27, Washington, DC’s Office of Cable Television, Film, Music, and Entertainment proposed a set of rules restricting the city’s internet service providers from selling customer data and browsing history without their consent.

The proposal seems basic, commonsense and broadly supported by the public. And, if recent history is any judge, it’s doomed to failure.

Rewind back to March 2017: Congress voted to overturn a yet-to-take-effect Obama-era FCC regulation requiring ISPs to get permission from customers before collecting their data and selling it to advertisers. It was a victory for corporate giants like Comcast and Verizon, who nevertheless assured everyone that they had no intention of selling their customers’ internet histories.

In the wake of that repeal, about half of the country’s states chose not to take the ISPs at their word, and began crafting their own legislation to restore the FCC’s rules within their borders. Washington, DC is the latest example, and the National Conference of State Legislatures shows close to 70 similar bills on state dockets this year. So far, not a single one has passed.

The reason, according to online-privacy experts, is the lobbying muscle of the telecom and internet industries. “Companies have a lot more resources to send in lobbyists to argue against these bills,” said Natasha Duarte, policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “Especially when were talking about state legislatures, things move really quickly.”

Only two states, Nevada and Minnesota, currently enforce privacy requirements on ISPs, according to Eric Null, policy counsel at the Open Technology Institute. But, Null says, those regulations actually predate Congress’s repeal of the FCC rule (in the aftermath of that repeal, Nevada also passed a bill to enhance the state’s existing privacy protections).

To see how a privacy bill can falter, look at California. Last year, the state’s landmark privacy bill, AB 375, stalled out due to pressure from telecom and Silicon Valley lobbyists. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called it “a massive misinformation campaign,” complete with ominous advertisements showing a child staring at a computer screen, with text claiming that AB 375 would make people more vulnerable to pop-ups, hackers, and cyber attacks.

“They made these vague arguments about why it would be bad for consumers and business,” said Duarte. “They brought a lot of lobbying power to stop it from getting a vote.”

Last June, AB 375 resurfaced, this time heavily amended and rushed through to passage with plenty of input from lobbyists. Duarte said that compared to the original, the new version had been “gutted,” and they were “two completely different pieces of legislation.”

In April, Oregon passed a major net-neutrality bill–an achievement in and of itself–but only after pro-privacy portions in earlier versions were amended out.

“Net neutrality is slightly easier because it’s become a cause célèbre, it’s very popular,” said Katharine Trendacosta, policy analyst at EFF. “The thing you run into with ISP privacy is all the companies are on the same side.”

She explained that while Google and AT&T might be on different sides of an issue like net neutrality, ISP privacy laws create a formidable alliance between tech companies and telecom corporations: “Every internet company is on the same side in privacy bills. They don’t want them. It’ll hurt their bottom line.”

With controversies like Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal piling on the public’s consciousness, Trendacosta said she’s seeing a general uprising in the realm of internet privacy. But it’s especially important for potential legislation to focus on regulating what data ISPs collect and sell, not just Facebook. A social-media site only collects what information you give it, she said, while ISPs are one’s primary method for accessing the internet, and thus, could essentially collect anything.

Also, unlike social media, consumers rarely have a choice when it comes to their internet-service provider.

“The vast majority of people only have one option for their internet provider in their area,” said Trendacosta. “If you don’t have a choice, it doesn't matter if they have bad privacy policies–you’re gonna have to go with them. That’s why it’s important to have legislation.”
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...nsumer-privacy





The Internet Trolls Have Won. Sorry, There’s Not Much You Can Do.

When it comes to online comments and discourse and what you can do to limit their toxicity, you only have a certain amount of power. The real leverage lies with the tech companies.
Brian X. Chen

This column is going to be a bit unusual. Typically, I write about a broad tech problem and offer some solutions. But this week, I’ve stumbled into a topic that many agree has no easy fix: online comments.

Over the last decade, commenting has expanded beyond a box under web articles and videos and into social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. That has opened the door to more aggressive bullying, harassment and the ability to spread misinformation — often with difficult real-life consequences.

Case in point: the right-wing conspiracy site Infowars. For years, the site distributed false information that inspired internet trolls to harass people who were close to victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting. This week, after much hemming and hawing about whether to get involved, some giant tech firms banned content from Infowars. (Twitter did not, after determining Infowars had not violated its policies.)

What does that show us? That you as an internet user have little power over content you find offensive or harmful online. It’s the tech companies that hold the cards.

Given the way things are going, our faith in the internet may erode until we distrust it as much as we do TV news, said Zizi Papacharissi, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago who teaches social media courses.

“I think we are the ones who are breaking it, because we never completely learned how to use it,” she said of the internet. “We break it and we fix it again every day. At some point it will crack,” added Ms. Papacharissi, who also edited A Networked Self, a series of books studying people’s behaviors and relationships on social networks.

Why are internet comments so hopelessly bad, and how do we protect ourselves? Even though there is no simple fix, there are some measures we can aim to take. Here’s what you need to know about how we got here and what you can try.

Why are people so toxic online?

There are many theories about why the internet seems to bring out the worst in people. I gathered a sampling of some noteworthy findings.

Ms. Papacharissi said that in her 20 years of researching and interviewing people about online behavior, one conclusion has remained consistent: people use the internet to get more of what they do not get enough of in everyday life. So while people have been socialized to resist being impulsive in the real world, on the internet they cave to their temptations to lash out.

“The internet becomes an easy outlet for us to shout something and feel for a moment fulfilled even though we’re really just shouting out into the air,” she said.

This is nothing new, of course. Before the internet, people took their frustrations to TV and radio talk shows. The internet was simply a more accessible, less moderated space.

Daniel Ha, a founder of Disqus, a popular internet comment tool used by many websites, said the quality of comments vary widely depending on the pieces of content being discussed and the audiences they attract. For example, there are videos about niche topics, like home improvement, that invite constructive commentary from enthusiasts. But there are others, such as a music video from a popular artist or a general news article, which ask people from all around the world to comment. That’s when things can get especially unruly.

“You have an airport of people from all walks of life coming together, and they’re speaking different languages with different attitudes and they’re just saying stuff,” Mr. Ha said.

Comments can be terrible simply because many people are flawed. It’s up to the content providers and tech platforms to vet their communities and set rules and standards for civilized discussion.

That is an area where many resource-strained news publications fall short: They often leave their comments sections unmoderated, so they become cesspools of toxic behavior. It is also an area where tech companies like Facebook and Twitter struggle, because they have long portrayed themselves as neutral platforms that do not that do not wish to take on the editorial roles of traditional publishers.

What about fake comments?

Tech companies have long employed various methods to detect fake comments from bots and spammers. So-called Captcha tests, for Completely Automated Procedures for Telling Computers and Humans Apart, ask you to type a word or select photos of a specific item to verify you are human and not a bot. Other methods, like detecting a device type or location of a commenter, can be used to pin down bots.

Yet security researchers have shown there are workarounds to all these methods.

Some hackers are now getting extremely clever about their methodologies. When the Federal Communications Commission was preparing to repeal net neutrality last year, there were 22 million comments posted on its site between April 2017 and October 2017, many of which expressed support for the move.

Jeff Kao, a data scientist, used a machine-learning algorithm to discover that 1.3 million comments were likely fakes posted by bots. Many comments appeared to be very convincing, with coherent and natural-sounding sentences, but it turned out that there were many duplicates of the same comments, subbing out a few words for synonyms.

“It was like Mad Libs,” he said. “If you read through different comments one by one, it’s hard to tell that some are from the same template. But if you use these machine learning algorithms, you can pick out some of these clusters.”

The F.C.C. said in a letter that it planned to re-engineer its comment system in light of the fakes.

What can I do?

For the issue of spoofed comments, there is a fairly simple solution: You can report them to the site’s owner, which will likely analyze and remove the fakes.

Other than that, don’t take web comments at face value. Mr. Kao said the lesson he learned was to always try to view comments in a wider context. Look at a commenter’s history of past posts, or fact-check any dubious claims or endorsements elsewhere on the web, he said.

But for truly offensive comments, the reality is that consumers have very little power to fight them. Tech companies like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have published guidelines for what types of comments and material are allowed on their sites, and they provide tools for people to flag and report inappropriate content.

Yet once you report an offensive comment, it is typically up to tech companies to decide whether it threatens your safety or violates a law — and often harassers know exactly how offensive they can be without clearly breaking rules. Historically, tech companies have been conservative and fickle about removing inappropriate comments, largely to maintain their positions as neutral platforms where people can freely express themselves.

In the case of Infowars, Apple, Google and Facebook were the ones that banned some content from the conspiracy site after determining it violated their policies. Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, said on Tuesday that the company did not suspend the accounts belonging to Infowars because its owner, Alex Jones, did not violate any rules.

“If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction,” he said in a tweet.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment elaborating on the decision.

Beyond reporting comments individually, you could also use an online petition tool like Change.org to demand that tech companies remove offensive content. (But note that supporters of Infowars are already on that site petitioning for the site's content to be restored on YouTube.)

When publishers and tech companies fail to address inappropriate comments, Ms. Papacharissi recommended an exercise in self-discipline.

“Think before you read,” she said. “Think before you speak. And you don’t always have to respond. A lot of things do not deserve a response. Sometimes not responding is more effective than lashing out.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/t...-comments.html





Tribune Calls Off $3.9 Billion Sinclair Media Deal

Trump angry with FCC chair over Sinclair deal
Charles Riley

Tribune said in a statement Thursday that it has terminated its merger agreement with Sinclair, scuttling a $3.9 billion deal that would have given the broadcasting group an even broader reach into American living rooms.

The breakup of the deal is a stinging defeat for Sinclair (SBGI), owner of dozens of local television stations. Sinclair has been scrutinized for its ties to the Trump administration.

Tribune (TRCO) had been expected to walk away after the deal came under scrutiny from US regulators. The FCC in July referred the merger to an administrative judge hearing, and called into question whether some of Sinclair's proposed divestments were a "sham."

Tribune said it will sue Sinclair for breach of contract, arguing Sinclair's negotiations with the US Justice Department and FCC were "unnecessarily aggressive. Sinclair also refused to sell certain stations that would have helped the deal secure regulatory approval, Tribune claims.

"Our merger cannot be completed within an acceptable timeframe, if ever," said Tribune CEO Peter Kern in a statement.

Analysts expect Tribune to seek another buyer.

Sinclair did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside business hours.
https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/09/med...air/index.html





Tim Cook Worries that Humanity is “Being Drained Out of Music”
Mark Sullivan

Fast Company’s former editor and good friend Bob Safian recently returned to contribute a profile on Spotify founder Daniel Ek, in which they discussed his views on music distribution and curation. For a contrasting viewpoint, Safian also talked to Apple CEO Tim Cook about the way he and his company view music. Here’s what Cook said:

“I couldn’t make it through a workout without music,” Cook says. “Music inspires, it motivates. It’s also the thing at night that helps quiet me. I think it’s better than any medicine.”

Apple Music relies mainly on human curation to suggest music to users, while Spotify depends on algorithms. Cook didn’t call out Spotify by name but he is clearly highlighting the difference in approach with this quote:

”We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft.”

Reading this, I wasn’t sure if Cook was talking about the way tracks are chosen for users, or the way music itself is created by songwriters and producers. Either way, he’s right.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90215265...d-out-of-music





Intel: This 'Ruler' SSD is World's Densest, so You Can Cram 1PB in Single 1U Rack

IBM and Microsoft take up Intel's new long and skinny SSDs for cloud storage.
Liam Tung

Intel has unveiled its new 3D NAND solid-state drive (SSD) 'ruler' form factor storage for data-center servers.

The chip giant first set out this form factor a year ago, based on the Enterprise & Datacenter Storage Form Factor (EDSFF) standard for server makers to cut cooling costs and offer a more efficient format than SSDs in the classic 2.5 inch size.

Intel describes the new ruler-shaped Intel SSD DC P4500, which is 12 inches by 1.5 inches, and a third of an inch thick, as the world's densest SSD.

Server makers can jam up to one petabyte (PB) -- or a thousand terabytes (TB) -- of data into 1U server racks by lining up 32 of these 32TB Intel rulers together.

So, instead of the decades-old 2.5-inch square SSD drives inherited from and designed for disk-based storage, Intel now has long and skinny sticks, thanks to flash.

The new shape allows it to optimize SSD storage density, cooling, and power for data centers. Samsung's take on this is its Next Generation Small Form Factor (NGSFF) SSD standard, announced last year and aimed at replacing the M.2 SSD standard.

Samsung boasted it could fit up to 576 terabytes (TB) in a 1U rack, and in January enterprise storage vendor Supermicro announced a 1U server with space for 36 of Samsung's NGSFF non-volatile memory express (NVMe) SSDs that supported up to 288TB per system.

Intel says one of the key advantages over disk is that its ruler is cooler, helping companies reduce demand for air conditioning.

Cloud giants IBM, Microsoft, and Shenzhen, China-based internet behemoth Tencent, the owner of China's version of WhatsApp, WeChat, have adopted its ruler SSDs to support their cloud and data-center operations, according to Intel.

Intel says the slim and long format demands half the airflow to keep them cool compared with traditional SSD format hardware, while its 3D NAND SSD takes up just a 10th of the power and is about five percent of the size of hard-disk storage.

The cooling edge is enabled by the ruler design, which allows air to flow directly to processors located at the rear of a machine.

"A new form factor itself isn't all that exciting, typically," said Wayne Allen, director of data center storage pathfinding, Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group.

"But because [the ruler] impacts everything about server design and helps increase performance and reach new levels of density, it's a big deal."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-...ingle-1u-rack/





The 7 Best Free Ebook Download Sites
Joel Lee August

Book lovers all over the world are waking up and smelling the coffee: ebooks are way better than paper books. The benefits are many: not having to lug around massive tomes, being able to bring your entire library with you anywhere, and backing up your books to the cloud.

But if you’re a voracious reader, buying ebooks one after another can burn holes in your wallet. To save money, one option is to subscribe to an ebook subscription service that grants unlimited reading of ebooks for a modest monthly fee.

The other option is to pay nothing and switch to freely available ebooks instead. You’d be surprised how many ebooks you can get—both fiction and non-fiction—without paying a cent. Where can you find these free ebooks? Well, we’re glad you asked.

1. Overdrive

Overdrive is the cleanest, fastest, and most legal way to access millions of ebooks—not just ones in the public domain, but even recently released mainstream titles.

There is one hitch though: you’ll need a valid and active public library card. Overdrive works with over 30,000 public libraries in over 40 different countries worldwide.

In addition to free ebook checkouts, you’ll also be able to listen to audiobooks for free.

Note that a public library card also grants free access to Lynda online courses, so if you don’t have a library card yet, what are you waiting for? Get one as soon as possible!

2. Library Genesis

If you used to use BookZZ for free ebooks and have felt lost ever since BookZZ shut down, then Library Genesis (also called LibGen) is the site for you.

Library Genesis is a search engine for free reading material, including ebooks, articles, magazines, and more. As of this writing, Library Genesis indexes close to 3 million ebooks and 60 million articles. It would take several lifetimes to consume everything on offer here.

Both fiction and non-fiction are covered, spanning different genres (e.g. science fiction, fantasy, thrillers, romance) and types (e.g. novels, comics, essays, textbooks).

Since it’s a search engine. browsing for books is almost impossible. The closest thing you can do is use the Authors dropdown in the navigation bar to browse by authors—and even then, you’ll have to get used to the terrible user interface of the site overall.

Better to search instead for a particular book title, author, or synopsis. The Advanced Search lets you narrow the results by language and file extension (e.g. PDF, EPUB, MOBI, DOC, etc).

The legality of Library Genesis has been in question since 2015 because it allegedly grants access to pirated copies of books and paywalled articles, but the site remains standing and open to the public.

3. Centsless Books

Unlike the other sites on this list, Centsless Books is a curator-aggregator of Kindle books available on Amazon. Its mission is to make it easy for you to stay on top of all the free ebooks available from the online retailer.

Note that some of the “free” ebooks listed on Centsless Books are only free if you’re part of the Kindle Unlimited program, which may or may not be worth it for you.

Consider signing up to the free Centsless Books email newsletter to receive update notices for newly free ebooks and giveaways. The newsletter is only sent out on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so it won’t spam you too much.

Note: Since Centsless Books tracks free ebooks available on Amazon, there may be times when there is nothing listed. If that happens, try again in a few days.

4. Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is a charity endeavor, sustained through volunteers and fundraisers, that aims to collect and provide as many high-quality ebooks as possible. Most of its library consists of public domain titles, but it has other stuff too if you’re willing to look around.

As of this writing, Gutenberg has over 57,000 free ebooks on offer. They are available for download in EPUB and MOBI formats (some are only available in one of the two), and they can be read online in HTML format.

You can browse the library by category (of which there are hundreds), by most popular (which means total download count), by latest (which means date of upload), or by random (which is a great way to find new material to read).

Because it’s a charity, Gutenberg subsists on donations. If you appreciate what they’re doing, please consider making a tax-deductible donation by PayPal, Flattr, check, or money order.

5. ManyBooks

ManyBooks is a nifty little site that’s been around for over a decade. Its purpose is to curate and provide a library of free and discounted fiction ebooks for people to download and enjoy.

Much of its collection was seeded by Project Gutenberg back in the mid-2000s, but has since taken on an identity of its own with the addition of thousands of self-published works that have been made available at no charge.

The browsing interface has a lot of room to improve, but it’s simple enough to use. Downloads are available in dozens of formats, including EPUB, MOBI, and PDF, and each story has a Flesch-Kincaid score to show how easy or difficult it is to read.

6. Feedbooks

Feedbooks is a massive collection of downloadable ebooks: fiction and non-fiction, public domain and copyrighted, free and paid. While over 1 million titles are available, only about half of them are free.

The split between “free public domain ebooks” and “free original ebooks” is surprisingly even. A big chunk of the public domain titles are short stories and a lot of the original titles are fanfiction. Still, if you do a bit of digging around, you’ll find some interesting stories.

Most of the ebooks are available in EPUB, MOBI, and PDF formats. They even come with word counts and reading time estimates, if you take that into consideration when choosing what to read.

7. PDFBooksWorld

Between the three major ebook formats—EPUB, MOBI, and PDF—what if you prefer to read in the latter format? While EPUBs and MOBIs have basically taken over, reading PDF ebooks hasn’t quite gone out of style yet, and for good reason: universal support across platforms and devices.

If you want to stick to PDFs only, then you’ll want to check out PDFBooksWorld. While the collection is small at only a few thousand titles, they’re all free and guaranteed to be PDF-optimized. Most of them are literary classics, like The Great Gatsby, A Tale of Two Cities, Crime and Punishment, etc.

More Ways You Can Get Free Ebooks

Don’t forget about Amazon Prime! It now comes with a feature called Prime Reading, which grants access to thousands of free ebooks in addition to all the other amazing benefits of Amazon Prime.

Start a free 30-day trial of Amazon Prime and start reading today!

Now that you have a bunch of ebooks waiting to be read, you’ll want to make sure you use a solid ebook reader, whether you intend to read on a computer, read on an Android device, or read on an iPhone or iPad.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-be...t-free-ebooks/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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