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Old 20-03-19, 06:40 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 23rd, ’19

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March 23rd, 2019




Arrests Shut Down Illegal TV Streaming Gang
BBC

Police raids across Europe have broken up a sophisticated operation that pirated and resold net-based TV (IPTV) channels.

Five people have been arrested and dozens of servers shut down as a result of raids in Spain, Denmark and the UK.

The IPTV services run by the gang offered customers more than 800 channels including sports and movies.

The raids come as three British men were jailed for pirating footage of top football matches.
European reach

Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency, said the raids marked its "biggest hit" against pirated IPTV services.

The gang behind the European network ran 11 separate sites that offered IPTV streams. They gave access to football matches as well as national broadcasters, US cable networks, on-demand movies, radio stations and porn.

Prices for access started at €40 (£35) per month and could go as high as €460, said Spanish police who led the operation. Services were offered in 30 countries with servers located in Spain, Denmark, the UK, Latvia, Holland and Cyprus. In total, said police, 66 servers have been disconnected as a result of the raids.

The group is believed to have made about €8m from running the online TV services.

The operation against the Europe-wide group stemmed from an initial complaint made by the UK's Premier League.

In the UK, three men who pirated footage of matches, Steven King, Paul Rolston and Daniel Malone, were this week jailed for a combined total of 17 years for this crime.

The trio are alleged to have made £5m from pirating the video streams over a period of 10 years. Pubs and clubs paid the trio for access to the games.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47653654





File-Sharing Fraudsters Sentenced
Colin Mann

Four UK men who ran a file-sharing website which leaked films online – sometimes before they were released in cinemas – have received custodial or suspended sentences.

Steven Pegram, Mark Rollin, Paul Taylor and Alan Stephenson were part of a group which uploaded films online for others to download via BitTorrent on their website ‘thefoundary.name’.

The men obtained The Expendables 3 in July 2014 and uploaded it ahead of its cinema release in the US on August 15th.

Their actions caused a loss of around £1.5 million to producers Lionsgate Films. They also defrauded members of the Motion Picture Association of America including Paramount, Sony, Walt Disney, Fox and Warner Brothers.

Pegram was sentenced to four-and-a-half years imprisonment; Rollin to three years imprisonment. Taylor and Stephenson both received two year prison sentences, suspended for 24 months.

Pegram owned the site and paid for its servers along with Taylor and both uploaded films for sharing. Rollin had encoded and uploaded numerous films to the site and had 47 high quality films on his computer. Stephenson set up and maintained the website.

Are You Here from Millennium Entertainment and Third Person by Sony Entertainment were found on Rollin’s computer before they had been released in cinemas in November and December 2014. Other files found included 22 Jump Street, Transformers Age of Extinction and audio files of Bad Neighbours and Godzilla.

The estimated loss to the movie industry of the group uploading and sharing Godzilla and X-Men: Days of Future Past alone was almost £4 million.

Leigh Webber, of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), said: “These defendants set up and ran a site which allowed users to download films for free via BitTorrent, including the Expendables 3 before its release in the cinema. All of them had clear knowledge of what the site was used for and were well aware they were breaching the copyright of the production companies. The CPS showed the court the numerous files on computers seized from the defendants and the payments they had made to keep the site up and running. Evidence also showed that the harm caused to members of the Motion Picture Association totalled around £7 million.”

Rollin and Stephenson pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the copyright owners of works including or contained within films and the proprietors of trademarks contained within or accompanying the said works. Pegram and Taylor pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud on the first day of their trial on December 3rd 2018.
https://advanced-television.com/2019...ers-sentenced/





Otis Mays, Fake Lawyer, Charged with Terrorism Swindle, Making Child Porn
Pete Kotz

Otis Mays Jr. may have the heart of a lawyer, but he was somewhat lacking in the official credentials. Sherburne County Jail

According to police, Otis Ray Mays Jr. knows how to run a scam, even if he still needs work on the longevity part.

He decided to pose as a lawyer, since he appears to have the larcenous heart required of the profession. Then he offered to help a husband and wife landlord team evict tenants from their property.

That caper went well enough that Mays chose to dig further into their pockets, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office. He told the couple that their son, a student at the Minnesota State University in Mankato, was visiting terrorism websites, and would soon face federal charges.

Mays convinced them that for $30,000, he could make sure the kid avoided arrest. An additional $6,222 could get the charges dropped altogether. And the caper kept rolling.

He then told the unnamed parents that their son's computer contained pirated videos. This time he upped the make-it-go-away fee to $305,000, apparently certain that he had some very gullible fish on the line. Why video pirating would cost 10 times the legal fee of a terrorism charge is anyone's guess. But Mays seems to have a gift for deception, making him a prime candidate for law school if he ever chooses to go legit.

What he doesn't seem to have is an eye for the long game. After conning the couple out of $340,000, he performed no actual services to aid them in their woes, real or imagined. This was bound to raise the suspicions of even the most guileless marks.

Soon, the FBI and detectives from Bloomington and Richfield were on his trail. They would discover that Mays also has more than a passing interest in acting as well. Or more precisely, according to the U.S. attorney: “In sexually explicit conduct with a minor victim for the purpose of producing video recordings of the conduct.” He was further charged with receiving multiple videos of child porn.

In the end, Mays may have pocketed more than 300 large, but that figure is now accompanied by free lodging, plus three federal counts of wire fraud, nine counts of producing child porn, and 1 count of receiving child porn. And that may not be all.

Evidence suggests there are other victims, say agents. Anyone with info is asked to call the FBI at 763-569-8000.
http://www.citypages.com/news/otis-m...porn/507425231





Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ Over EU Copyright Directive
Sherwin Siy and Jan Gerlach

Volunteer editor communities in four language Wikipedias—German, Czech, Danish, and Slovak—have decided to black out the sites on 21 March in opposition to the current version of the proposed EU Copyright Directive.

Those language editions of Wikipedia will redirect all visitors to a banner about the directive, blocking access to content on Wikipedia for 24 hours. A final vote on the directive is expected on 26 March.

These independent language communities decided to black out in the same way most decisions are made on Wikipedia—through discussion and consensus, something summarized in a statement from the German Wikipedia volunteer community: “Each of these independent Wikipedia communities has been engaging in public online discussions as to their course of action, and voting on whether and how to protest. They have done this according to their own rules of governance.”

• • •

This is not the first time volunteer editors have decided to take a stand on policy issues that may impact Wikipedia and the broader free and open internet.* However, it is something that happens rarely and with clear intention, and for good reason: Wikipedia’s volunteer communities recognize the importance that any one Wikipedia plays in the world, and its authority as a collection of knowledge, relies upon the neutrality of its content. And as we said in another community-led civic engagement seven years ago, “Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, [but] its existence is not.”

The Wikimedia Foundation supports decisions from our community about how they choose to include the Wikimedia projects in policy issues that directly impact our mission and values. We also recognize that our community is often in the best position to understand the local policy context and make decisions about how the site gets involved. The Wikimedia Foundation’s role is to respect each community’s decision and work to ensure that their action is supported.

This community governance is a part of what makes Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects so robust and so unique. These sites are not just about millions of people compiling information, but about providing knowledge equity: ensuring that people everywhere have a say in contributing knowledge and how that knowledge is used.

That’s why the Wikimedia Foundation’s role in these black outs is supportive, focused on ensuring that each community’s decisions are heard, respected, and not disrupted.

Sherwin Siy, Senior Public Policy Manager
Jan Gerlach, Senior Public Policy Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

*In 2011 and 2012, the Italian, English, and Russian Wikipedias went dark in opposition to proposed laws in Italy, the United States, and Russia (respectively).

• • •

The Wikimedia Foundation’s position on the EU Copyright Directive, separate from the opinions of the communities who edit Wikimedia sites, is clear: it would be a net loss for free knowledge in the world. To learn more and find out how to get involved, visit fixcopyright.wikimedia.org.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/2019...ght-directive/





Court Denies ISP Safe Harbour Protection in Record Label Legal Battle
Chris Cooke

A US court has ruled that American internet service provider Grande has no safe harbour protection in its ongoing legal battle with the Recording Industry Association Of America. Which firstly means that the net firm will be held liable for its users alleged copyright infringement, but also that the previous BMG v Cox case has set an important precedent under American law regarding the liabilities of ISPs claiming safe harbour protection.

The safe harbour, of course, says that internet companies cannot be held liable for their users’ copyright infringement, providing they have systems in place to remove infringing content and deal with repeat infringers when made aware of such things.

There has been much debate over the years as to quite how far internet firms must go with this anti-infringement and anti-infringer activity in order to benefit from the safe harbour. In the BMG v Cox case, ISP Cox Communications was accused of running a deliberately shoddy system for dealing with repeat infringers, so that it could claim to be safe harbour compliant but without actually doing anything about those who repeatedly infringe.

BMG argued that such behaviour should mean Cox did not enjoy safe harbour protection. It won the case, though the original ruling was overturned on appeal because of a procedural technicality. The appeals court pretty much upheld the conclusions of the initial judgement regarding Cox’s liabilities, but the net firm settled with the music company before a second full trial could take place to fully set those conclusions in stone.

Grande has been accused of operating a similarly slack system for dealing with infringers and infringement on its network. With that in mind, the RIAA reckoned that, if Cox was liable for its users’ infringement, so was Grande.

The court has now concurred with that position in a summary judgement. Noting that US copyright law says that those seeking safe harbour protection must “reasonably implement” a policy for cutting off repeat infringers, that new court ruling then quotes the BMG v Cox judgement, to the effect that “an ISP has not ‘reasonably implemented’ a repeat infringer policy if the ISP fails to enforce the terms of its policy in any meaningful fashion”.

The new judgement also cites a magistrate judge’s opinion on the case from back in December, which concluded that the “undisputed evidence shows that though Grande may have adopted a policy permitting it to terminate a customer’s internet access for repeat infringement, Grande affirmatively decided in 2010 that it would not enforce the policy at all, and that it would not terminate any customer’s account regardless of how many notices of infringement that customer accumulated, regardless of the source of the notices, and regardless of the content of a notice”.

Grande tried to distinguish itself from Cox by arguing that its rival “failed to follow through on its own policy” because it considered the evidence against certain users, concluded that said users should probably have their accounts terminated, but then declined to do so. Grande said it never got as far as considering the evidence and concluding that any one infringing user should be disconnected.

The court ruled that that was worse. The judgement notes that “Grande thus did even less than Cox to ‘reasonably implement’ the kind of policy required for the protections of … safe harbour”. It then concludes: “If lax enforcement and frequent circumvention of existent procedures disqualifies a defendant from the safe harbour’s protections, the complete nonexistence of such procedures surely must do likewise”.

After considering other arguments relating to the case beyond safe harbour, the judge ruled in Grande’s favour on a couple of points, and then declined to make summary judgement on a bunch more, meaning that the legal battle will now proceed to a full court hearing.

Crucially, if it gets that far, Grande will have to go to court without safe harbour protection. And, more importantly, this judgement seems to suggest that BMG v Cox has definitely raised the bar regarding what net firms must do to rely on the safe harbour.
https://completemusicupdate.com/arti...-legal-battle/





FCC Clears Path for Terahertz Wireless Data

It could be used for broadband, imaging and beyond.
Jon Fingas

Never mind the possibilities opened up by millimeter wave 5G and other many-gigahertz technologies -- the FCC is already thinking about the next generation beyond that. The Commission has voted unanimously in favor of creating a category of experimental licenses that range from 95GHz to a whopping 3THz -- effectively, the limits of usable wireless technology. The Spectrum Horizons order would let companies experiment with this ultra-high frequency tech for as long as 10 years, and would make it easier for them to sell real-world products while they're in that test phase.

The measure also sets aside 21.2GHz of spectrum to share for unlicensed devices. The airwaves in question were chosen to minimize possible interference with current "governmental and scientific" uses in those areas, such as space science.

These frequencies could lead to extremely fast wireless network data, advanced imaging and very fine-grained sensors, among other purposes. However, you might not want to get your hopes up for a cellphone with terahertz 6G any time soon. Even more so than with millimeter waves, the terahertz range would be limited by short ranges and difficulty penetrating objects. That's what the experiments are for, though -- it could establish uses that aren't even on the radar yet.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/03/17/...eless-license/





New York Times Not Entitled To Information About Net Neutrality Commenters, FCC Says
Wendy Davis

The Federal Communications Commission is asking a judge to reject The New York Times Company's request for information about comments submitted to the agency in its 2017 net neutrality proceeding.

The agency argues in new court papers that the data sought by the Times -- including IP addresses associated with comments -- would compromise commenters' privacy. The FCC also says it can't provide the information sought by the news company without undertaking new research.

The FCC's papers come in response to a lawsuit filed last September by the Times, which is investigating possible Russian meddling in a proceeding that resulted in the repeal of the Obama-era net neutrality rules. Those regulations prohibited broadband providers from blocking or throttling traffic and from charging higher fees for fast-lane service.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai proposed revoking those rules in April of 2017. That proposal drew a record-breaking 22 million comments, but they were submitted under fake names, or by Russian bots. The precise number of fake comments is unclear, but around 450,000 came from Russian email addresses.

The Times is seeking IP addresses, timestamps and user-agent headers (which could provide information about commenters' browsers) for all public comments regarding net neutrality submitted between April 26, 2017 and June 7, 2017.

The newspaper argues that it's entitled to the information under the Freedom of Information Act.

The FCC says it's entitled to summary judgment on the grounds that the information is exempt from FOIA laws, arguing that the agency's comment system isn't configured to provide that kind of data.

The FCC says that fulfilling the request would require it to “essentially conduct research to conceptualize and develop new technical means of extracting data from server logs in a manner the FCC does not presently do or know how to do,” or else to “create a new record that does not exist.”

“FOIA does not mandate agencies to undertake these tasks to satisfy a FOIA request,” the government argues in a request for summary judgment filed last week with U.S. District Court Judge Lorna G. Schofield in the Southern District of New York.

The agency also says that turning over IP addresses and time stamps could violate the privacy of commenters.

“The New York Times itself has stated that it will perform an analysis aimed at linking information provided by the FCC’s FOIA response to specific ECFS comments, which are publicly available and include the names and postal addresses entered by members of the public who submitted comments,” the FCC writes. “Thus, if the agency produces personal IP addresses with the time stamp of a user’s request, there is a substantial possibility that The New York Times or any member of the public could match at least some of those IP addresses with individual commenters who made submissions to ECFS during the requested period, by looking up the public comments.”

The Times is expected to respond to the FCC's argument by April 11.
https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/333352/





House Dems Plan April Vote on Net Neutrality Bill
Harper Neidig

The House will hold a vote on Democrats’ bill to reinstate the Obama-era net neutrality rules next month, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) announced on Monday.

Hoyer said in a letter to colleagues that the House will consider the Save the Internet Act during the week of April 8.

Party leaders introduced the legislation earlier this month with a show of force on Capitol Hill.

“Supporting this bill means supporting our democracy, ensuring that the voices of the public are heard, their will is respected and the internet remains free and open to all,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at a press conference unveiling the legislation.

The Republican-led Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted along party lines in 2017 to repeal the popular regulations prohibiting internet service providers from blocking or throttling websites, or from creating internet fast lanes.

Democrats and consumer groups are fighting the repeal with a legal challenge in federal court and have pushed net neutrality regulations at the state level.

While Republicans have floated their own bills to replace the rules, many oppose the Save the Internet Act because it reinstates the provision in the 2015 order that designates broadband providers as common carriers, opening them up to tougher regulation and oversight from the FCC.

Though it enjoys widespread support among Democrats, the legislation may have a hard time getting through the GOP-held Senate.

The bill, which was officially introduced by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), has 144 co-sponsors.
https://thehill.com/policy/technolog...-bill-in-april





When Google Fiber Abandons Your City as a Failed Experiment
Adam K. Raymond

There’s a glob of stringy, black rubber spilling out of the street at the corner of Speed and Fernwood in Louisville’s Highlands neighborhood. A block away on Rosedale, the same spongy substance that covers most of Google Fiber’s buried lines in the city snakes in and out of the asphalt.

Google Fiber, Alphabet’s gigabit broadband service, started its relationship with Louisville in 2015. After a two-year delay and negotiations over its rollout, the company adopted a novel but cost-effective plan to bring ultrafast internet speeds to Kentucky’s largest city. This February, only 16 months after it turned on its service, Google Fiber announced plans to turn it off, making Louisville, one of only 19 cities to get Google Fiber since its launch in 2010, the first to lose it. Now, the most visible sign of the tech giant’s screw up is lying all over the roads.

“I literally just got done driving around, looking at streets with Google,” said Metro Councilman Brandon Coan. Strands of errant sealant are “everywhere,” he said outside a coffee shop in his district, one of a few where Google Fiber ran lines before its abrupt departure. “I’m confident that Google and the city are going to negotiate a deal … to restore the roads to as good a condition as they were when they got here. Frankly, I think they owe us more than that.”

The damage goes deeper than the roads. In Louisville, a minor league city with major league ambitions, Google Fiber left behind disappointed consumers, unfulfilled promises of transformative economic development, and a slew of embarrassing headlines for a city that allowed the tech giant to use it as a guinea pig.

But Google Fiber got something out of its time here. It learned that nanotrenching—the cost-saving process of burying fiber optic cables just two inches underground—was a bust. “We currently do not have plans that call for 2 inch trenches, our primary specifications are focused on going deeper,” a Google Fiber spokesperson said in an email.

“It is such a shame to think that we wouldn’t be having any of this conversation if they would have dug their little holes two inches deeper,” Coan said.

In October 2017, when Google Fiber started signing up customers in three Louisville neighborhoods, the ISP was a year removed from a “pause” that saw its CEO resign and more than 100 employees laid off. Turns out, disrupting the telecom industry is wildly expensive, full of intractable regulatory challenges, and opposed by powerful incumbent companies.

The plan in Louisville was to revive the effort with what some were calling Google Fiber 2.0. But first, the city had to agree to one major stipulation: Google Fiber wanted to see if it could scale a method for installing fiber cables that was easier to implement, and easier on the bottom line, than hanging lines from utility poles.

The company had buried fiber lines in other cities, but in Louisville it wanted to go shallower. Nanotrenching called for burying cables just two inches underground, rather than the typical six inches. The company also wanted to cover the trenches with epoxy, rather than the typical asphalt mix. In an email, a Google Fiber spokesperson said the company had “already performed limited trials of two-inch trenches in other markets, and believed it was a promising new method of deployment.” In Louisville, Google Fiber wanted to see if two-inch trenches would work at scale, an attempt that the spokesperson described as “ambitious” and a “lean into innovation.”

Local leaders were concerned. The city sent a team to other cities where a company spokesperson said “limited trials” with two-inch trenches had been conducted, and it sought the advice of outside experts.

“What [Google Fiber] told Louisville was that they didn’t think they could make their traditional construction work, but would we be open to letting them use a new construction technique,” said Grace Simrall, Louisville’s Chief of Civic Innovation and Technology. “There were lots of aspects that we asked a lot of questions about, trying to make them aware that we thought this might have challenges, but they, having done parts of Nashville and San Antonio this way, told us they felt confident they could make this work.”

After years of trying to woo Google—an effort that included spending around $400,000 on legal fees to defend an ultimately unused city ordinance that made it easier for Google Fiber to use utility poles—Louisville was in no position to say no.

Ted Smith, Simrall’s predecessor in City Hall, began working to make the city more “fiber friendly” in 2011 and credited three-term Mayor Greg Fischer, a Democrat, with recognizing that “mid-sized American cities were getting left behind.” (Disclosure: My wife is a Democratic State Representative from a part of Louisville that did not receive Google Fiber.)

“We worked very hard for many years to make the case that Louisville was a city that understands the value of cost-effective high-speed broadband,” he said.

It’s little surprise then that Louisville agreed to let Google futz around with its roads. The town of 600,000 is perpetually trying to catch up with the population and business growth in peer cities such as Austin, Nashville, and Raleigh, which are all Google Fiber cities. Louisville finally had a chance to join the cool kids.

The enthusiasm after Louisville accepted Google Fiber’s offer tells the story. Gigabit internet would help make Louisville “a technologically innovative community,” igniting a “transformation” that would result in a “citizenry that’s more skilled, engaged and prosperous” than ever before, local leaders said.

That didn’t happen. By March of 2018, just five months after Google Fiber launched its nanotrenching trial, the method began to fail. Not only was the sealant spilling out onto roads, leaving fiber lines exposed, but the shallow trenches left cables vulnerable during routine road maintenance.

“If anyone understood road technology or tire technology, [they] would know it’s going to be a problem,” said Jim Hayes, president of the Fiber Optics Association and a decades-long veteran of the industry.

The problem, Hayes said, is that tires easily grabbed the epoxy and ripped it out of the ground. The shorter trench walls also left less asphalt for the sealant to adhere to. Typical microtrenching, a “well-accepted method of installing fiber,” involves burying cables at least six inches deep with a groove that’s no more than an inch wide, Hayes said. “I’ve never heard of any problems with microtrenching.”

Last summer Google Fiber pitched a solution to the problem it created. It would rip out the epoxy and fill in the trenches with asphalt. “It was like, ‘Oh, in retrospect, that seems like an obvious way to fill the hole in the road,’” Coan said.

“They bid out the work to replace the sealant with asphalt,” Simrall said. But before the work started, Google Fiber saw customers lose service when the process of repaving roads damaged fiber lines. “So they shifted their attention to addressing that,” she said.

Then, last month, Google Fiber threw up its hands and quit. The company wouldn’t say how many customers it had at that point, only that the number was “very small” compared to other Fiber cities. Last summer, the local Fox TV affiliate found that the company had pulled permits to wire areas covering about 11,000 households, but it’s not clear how many installations were completed.

In a blog post, Google Fiber explained what happened. “[T]rialing” a “different type of construction method” in Louisville had failed, it said. Fixing it would be too expensive, so instead, it was skipping town, and taking the lessons learned elsewhere.

“This was not an easy decision for us,” a Google Fiber spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We came to Louisville because Google Fiber is working to change an entrenched industry and we saw a chance to bring great service to Louisville’s residents. Naturally there will be unexpected challenges when you do something ambitious, and at scale, for the first time and we underestimated some of those hurdles. We couldn’t be more appreciative of the partnership we’ve had with the City of Louisville, which embraced the need for competition in this industry as part of its larger initiatives around innovation and emerging technology.”

Simrall insists that Google Fiber was “very sincere in their belief they could make it work,” and had planned to use two-inch trenches in all other Google Fiber cities if it did. That’s little consolation to many Louisvillians, who watched one of the world’s richest companies sweep into town with major fanfare, rip up the roads to test an unproven technique, and peace out when it bombed.

“I was shocked. I was disappointed,” said Candace Jaworski, president of the Louisville Digital Association, a non-profit that pushes for innovation in Louisville and campaigned to bring Google Fiber here. Jaworski was looking forward to one day becoming a Google Fiber customer and seeing the change broadband could deliver to Portland, one of the country’s poorest neighborhoods and one of the first where Google Fiber was available.

“Google Fiber getting in and getting folks into the internet out in the West End was going to be huge with catching up that part of town with the rest,” Jaworski said. “Talk about dangling a carrot and not ever being able to get it.”

Ben Carter was lucky enough to get bite of that carrot. An attorney in the Highlands, Carter said Google Fiber provided wildly fast internet and “rock solid” customer service for the time he had it. When he got the news that Google Fiber was ending its operations in Louisville, he was disappointed, and not just because he would lose the blazing internet speed that he enjoyed primarily for its “Tim Allen, way-more-power-than-you-need” quality.

“It seemed like Louisville was batting above its weight a bit in terms of what cities were getting Google Fiber,” he said of the “coup” that the city pulled off in landing Google Fiber. “Louisville isn’t often on those lists.”

Now that Google Fiber is gone, Councilman Coan is worried that Louisville’s reputation will take a hit. “If you’re not paying attention, you’d say, ‘Oh, well. Louisville is just not a good enough city for Google Fiber.’ That’s not true.”

In the end, it may be that Google Fiber was not good enough for Louisville. Alphabet seems to be scaling back the ambitions of Google Fiber as wireless broadband technology advances and the limitations of fighting entrenched telecom giants become clear, said Matt Wood, the vice president of policy at broadband advocacy group Free Press. Its experimentation in Louisville is evidence enough that Google Fiber was looking for a new way forward. But like so many of its “other bets”—the heading under which Alphabet groups ambitious projects such as its life sciences play Verily, self-driving car company Waymo, and Access, the business unit that operates Google Fiber—the company seems to have lost this one.

That’s not to say Google Fiber isn’t responsible for major changes in broadband access. Some cities, including Nashville, the object of Louisville’s envy, have seen access to gigabit internet soar since Google Fiber arrived. Incumbent ISPs such as AT&T and Comcast have accelerated their fiber operations, including in Louisville, thanks to the competition from Google. That means more people are online, conducting more searches, and looking at more ads.

“Their revenue comes from the eyeball side,” Wood said. “Getting more people connected has always been for them...a means to an end.”

And if its failure in Louisville is the beginning of the end for Google Fiber, Coan said, “It would make me feel better. It would make Louisville feel better.”
https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fibe...eri-1833244198





Microsoft Says the FCC 'Overstates' Broadband Availability in the US

You can’t fix a problem you don’t understand, and America has no idea just how bad its broadband coverage gaps are.
Karl Bode

Generally speaking, you can’t fix a problem you don’t fully understand. That’s particularly true of US broadband, where the government’s efforts to map the scope of the nation’s broadband coverage gaps have long been ridiculed as an inaccurate mess.

Microsoft this week was the latest to highlight the US government’s terrible broadband mapping in a filing with the FCC, first spotted by journalist Wendy Davis. In it, Microsoft accuses the FCC of over-stating actual broadband availability and urges the agency to do better.

“The Commission’s broadband availability data, which underpins FCC Form 477 and the Commission’s annual Section 706 report, appears to overstate the extent to which broadband is actually available throughout the nation,” Microsoft said in the filing.

“For example, in some areas the Commission’s broadband availability data suggests that ISPs have reported significant broadband availability (25 Mbps down/3 Mbps up) while Microsoft’s usage data indicates that only a small percentage of consumers actually access the Internet at broadband speeds in those areas,” Microsoft said.

Similar criticism has long plagued the agency. The FCC’s broadband data is received via the form 477 data collected from ISPs. But ISPs have a vested interest in over-stating broadband availability to obscure the sector’s competition problems, and the FCC historically hasn’t worked very hard to independently verify whether this data is truly accurate.

The FCC’s methodology has long been criticized as well. As it currently stands, the agency declares an entire ZIP code as “served” with broadband if just one home in an entire census block has it.

That’s perfectly personified by the FCC’s $350 million broadband availability map, which users routinely discover not only hallucinates both ISP availability and speeds, but fails to even mention US consumers’ biggest broadband pet peeve: price.

In other words we’ve spent decades looking at America’s broadband problem through rose-colored glasses, and however bad we think US broadband issues are (and they’re clearly terrible), the actual problem is decidedly worse. How much worse is the billion dollar question.

In its filing, Microsoft “suggested that the Commission’s ongoing effort to more accurately measure broadband could be improved by drawing on the FCC’s subscription data, along with other broadband data sets from third-parties such as Microsoft, to complement survey data submitted under the current rules.”

However, efforts to improve broadband data mapping have been routinely shot down by the telecom industry. After all, highlighting the real scope of the broadband sector’s competition and availability problems might just motivate somebody to actually do something about it.

Harold Feld, lawyer and Senior VP for consumer group Public Knowledge, told Motherboard that tech companies routinely push for better broadband and better broadband mapping, as they have a vested interest in reaching more Americans with products, ads, and services.

“Tech companies have generally pushed for accurate broadband maps and digital divide solutions generally,” Feld said. “This is why they supported community broadband. Rural digital divide is leaving buckets of money on the table for tech companies...who want to get their business software tied into everything from precision farming to warehouse inventory.”

But Microsoft has an additional horse in this particular race. Arm in arm with consumer groups, the company has long been pushing a technology known as white space broadband, which would utilize the unlicensed spectrum freed by the migration to digital television to create an entirely new wireless broadband alternative well-suited for rural and underserved areas.

Microsoft has spent several years testing the technology in locations ranging from Cambridge, England to remote colleges in Ghana. In 2017 Microsoft announced an ambitious plan to bring the technology to more than 2 million rural Americans across a dozen states by July 2022.

“We all need to move faster,” Microsoft said at the time. “It took 50 years to electrify the nation. The millions of Americans waiting for broadband don’t have the luxury of time.”

But the technology’s arrival has been slowed by a number of reasons, most notably being concerns about potential interference with existing technologies (much of which engineers say can be mitigated), and opposition from entrenched broadband ISPs and broadcasters that aren’t keen on additional competition.

Feld said that despite white space broadband being an American invention, other countries are starting to leapfrog the States in implementation. That’s largely thanks to the Ajit Pai FCC, which has deprioritized the technology’s importance, despite repeated claims that closing the digital divide is a top priority for the agency.

Republicans and Democrats alike have pressed the Pai FCC to do more, but the agency has lagged in both policy support—and in terms of “repacking” the television band—which involves re-assigning television stations to new channels and utilizing the freed spectrum for broadband.

“The FCC has quietly killed it by leaving critical questions unanswered, doing a really (almost deliberately sloppy) job on repack, and anything else Pai can do without getting his fingerprints on it,” Feld said. “Pai has always hated it, because his bestest buddies (the National Association of Broadcasters and AT&T) hated it.”

Instead, the Pai FCC has fixated almost exclusively on fifth-generation wireless. And while 5G upgrades should provide faster speeds, even Wall Street has acknowledged the technology has been aggressively overhyped, and many rural areas may remain disconnected as carriers understandably focus on more profitable, urban and suburban markets.

“We worry about idiocies like the ‘race to 5G,’ yet cripple a perfectly good technology we invented,” Feld said.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...lity-in-the-us





Global Box Office Flat in 2018, Netflix and Subscription Services Rise in Popularity
Brent Lang

The domestic box office rebounded in 2018 in a recovery fueled by blockbusters such as “Black Panther” and “Incredibles 2.” Ticket sales in the U.S. climbed 7% to top out at a record $11.9 billion, according to a new report by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). That helped off-set declines in overseas markets in Europe and Latin America, pushing the global box office to $41.1 billion, a year-over-year improvement of a percentage point.

The MPAA study is produced by the entertainment industry trade group and is intended to provide a comprehensive look at the overall state of the film business.

In addition to box office revenues, the report found that the global home entertainment business increased by 16% to reach $55.7 billion last year. This was driven primarily by the rise of digital rentals, sales, and subscriptions to streaming services such as Netflix. Digital home entertainment spending in the U.S. increased 24% to $17.5 billion; internationally this sector climbed 34% to $25.1 billion. That helped plug the gap left by massive declines in the sale and rental of DVDs and Blu-rays. In the U.S., disc sales dropped 15% to $5.8 billion and fell 14% internationally to $7.3 billion. Four years ago, physical sales in the U.S. were $10.3 billion and were $14.9 billion internationally, a sign of just how precipitously the DVD market has fallen. Over that same period, digital spending has increased 170% globally. Much of that rise is attributable to the popularity of Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other subscription services. Globally, the number of digital subscriptions increased by 27% to 613.3 million. Online video subscriptions surpassed cable for the first time in 2018. Cable subscriptions fell 2% to 556 million.

As DVD sales have atrophied, studios have tried to encourage consumers to keep buying digital versions of movies and shows. The pitch appears to be falling flat, with customers preferring to simply stream content on Netflix as opposed to buying things on an a la carte basis. Subscription spending climbed 28% in 2018 to $13.3 billion, while digital sales and rentals fell 5% to $10 billion. The report is being unveiled at a time when major media companies such as WarnerMedia, Disney, and Comcast are all readying their own subscription services in the hopes of profiting from this growing market.

The popularity of Netflix is bad news for exhibitors, who fear that streaming services are making it easier for people to skip the theater and stay home and binge. The company has aggravated those tensions by refusing to adhere to a traditional theatrical release model for its films. A select few Netflix movies such as “Roma” or “Triple Frontier” show in cinemas before debuting on the service within a matter of weeks.

On the theatrical front, the business continues to rely heavily on frequent moviegoers, which the MPAA defines as individuals who attend the cinema at least once per month. Though the account for just 12% of the population in the U.S. and Canada, they are responsible for 49% of all tickets sold. All told, 75% of the U.S./Canada population hit up the multiplexes or their local theater at least once in 2018. Women accounted for 51% of ticket buyers and men comprised the other 49% of the audience.

Per capita attendance was highest among the 12-17 and 18-24-year-old age groups, with moviegoers in those age ranges seeing an average of 5.1 films last year. All age groups, except those between the ages of 25 to 39 and those over 60 years old, increased their attendance. The most dramatic growth was in moviegoers between the ages of 40 to 49, as middle aged moviegoers saw 4.3 movies on average as opposed to 3.6 movies in the previous year.

Latino and Asian audiences had the highest per capita attendance among ethnic groups, seeing an average of 4.7 films and 4.5 films last year. Per capita attendance among black and African-American moviegoers increased from 3.4 films annually to 3.7 films in 2018. “Black Panther” was particularly popular with black audiences. They accounted for 35% of all tickets sold to the Marvel blockbuster.

Overseas, China was the primary growth driver. Ticket sales in the Middle Kingdom rose 12% to $9 billion. Japan was the second biggest overseas market with $2 billion in revenues, with the U.K. coming in third with $1.7 billion.
https://variety.com/2019/film/news/b...er-1203168974/





The MPAA Says Streaming Video has Surpassed Cable Subscriptions Worldwide

But cable TV still rakes in more money
Andrew Liptak

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) reported today that the world’s entertainment market — encompassing both theatrical and home releases — grew to a new high in 2018: $96.8 billion, 9 percent over 2017. In particular, it highlighted the rapid growth of streaming video, which grew to 613 million subscriptions worldwide, an increase of 27 percent over 2017.

The report lays out the health of the entire motion picture entertainment industry, and it reports that consumers spent $96.8 billion on entertainment around the world. The international theatrical box office grew to $41.1 billion (spending in the US and Canada grew to $11.9 billion), while home entertainment hit $55.7 billion internationally.

Specifically, “digital home entertainment was the driver of growth.” US digital sales grew by 24 percent, while international digital sales grew by 34 percent. At the same time, physical releases dropped in the US and internationally by 15 and 14 percent, respectively. The report lumps together digital sales, VOD, and paid subscription services, but it doesn’t break down how those contribute to the larger picture. Either way, it’s pretty clear that increasingly, more people around the world prefer to buy their entertainment from the internet, rather than buying a physical disc.

When it comes to streaming video, the MPAA reports that subscriptions surpassed cable television for the first time, with 131.2 million new subscriptions added, rising to 613.3 million worldwide, a jump of 27 percent over 2017’s numbers. The report says that cable subscriptions dropped by 2 percent to 556 million.

That said, despite that growth in streaming video and the small decrease in cable subscriptions, cable subscriptions still rake in the most money, increasing in 2018 by $6.2 billion to $118 billion. After cable subscriptions, satellite TV brings in the next highest amount of revenue, while streaming video comes in third. The report also notes that more Americans watch cable (80 percent) followed by streaming services (70 percent).

What the report does lay out, however, is that online streaming video is still growing, and TV programming takes up the lion’s share of what it calls views / transactions. (The fine print in the report says that this includes “views from subscription services and digital transactions” as well as ad-supported viewing.) In 2014, there were 71 billion TV views / transactions and 5.4 billion for movies. In 2018, that grew to 170.6 billion and 11.5 billion views / transactions for TV and film, respectively — a massive increase in just four years.

Along with those increases, the report says that views have more programs to watch than ever before. Citing numbers from FX Networks Research, the report says that since 2014, scripted dramas across all channels have grown by 28 percent to 496 in 2018. That number grew to 1,620 programs when daytime drama, children’s programming, and unscripted shows were included.

When it comes to the theater industry, people spent more (but not by much) when compared to last year’s numbers ($40.5 billion), just a single percentage point to $41.1 billion. Within that subset, international spending dropped slightly, from $29.4 billion to $29.2 billion. There are some interesting things in there, though. While spending in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa dropped, Asian markets grew, especially in China, which was the biggest market for film outside of the US and Canada. It experienced a 12 percent jump in earnings. The global market for 3D films dropped by 20 percent, falling below the rate in 2014.

The continued rise of streaming video isn’t much of a surprise, as companies like Amazon, CBS, Hulu, and Netflix have grown in recent years to compete with traditional television networks. More than that, those figures seem as though they’re sure to go even higher, given that newcomers like Apple, Disney, and NBCUniversal are all set to introduce their own streaming platforms in the coming months. With those streaming services will come even more original content as a means to entice viewers to sign up for their platforms. A recent study found that in 2018, Netflix added more original content than it had acquired from other sources, while companies like Apple and Disney are jumping into the marketplace with their own high-profile catalogs of original programming.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/21/1...tion-worldwide





Did All This Pirated 4K Content Leak From iTunes?
Andrew Liszewski

Many file sharers want the highest quality copy of a film they can find, and until recently, those would most often come from ripping a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray disc. Links to these files are clearly labeled as such, but a few weeks ago a 2160P copy of Aquaman leaked onto the internet claiming it instead originated from an online streaming service. It was soon followed by uploads of 2160P copies of 24 James Bond films, which are currently only available from Apple, leading many to wonder if someone has finally found a way around iTunes’ 4K copy protection and DRM.

Sixteen days ago a Reddit post announced the availability of Aquaman.2018.2160p.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.HDR.HEVC-MOMA; yet another copy of the film among several leaks to date. What set this version apart, however, was the fact that the “216oP” and “WEB-DL” parts of the filename indicate that the file didn’t originate from a Blu-ray disc, but the internet. It’s easy to shrug off as simply being a mistake or a straight-up lie from the people responsible for the leak, but release groups, who are always in competition with each other, aren’t known for making false claims like this. As TorrentFreak pointed out in a story about the release at the beginning of March; the file also predates a 4K copy of Aquaman that’s currently available through Vudu and the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray which isn’t being released until March 26. At the time, a 4K copy of Aquaman was only available on iTunes. Apple did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment on this story and we will update this post when we receive a reply.

Speculation that someone had finally found a way to circumvent iTunes’ copy protections increased when all 24 films from the iTunes-exclusive The James Bond Collection started appearing on file-sharing sites too, as well as 216oP WEB-DL copies of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Bumblebee.

Some suspect that these movies are simply being leaked by someone working in Apple’s iTunes division before DRM and encryption are applied to the files, but that assumes that piracy-paranoid film studios are handing over copies of these films completely DRM-free, which seems unlikely. Others suspect that someone has found a way to decrypt files pulled directly from Apple’s iTunes content servers, or that they’re using a compromised 4th generation Apple TV 4K with custom firmware to retrieve these files, given it’s the only hardware in Apple’s lineup that can stream the company’s 4K content.

Apple is expected to reveal its Netflix-like streaming subscription service early next week, and it’s safe to assume that security was an important discussion topic as the company negotiated with film studios and other content creators. If a way around iTunes’ current encryption methods has been discovered, it couldn’t have come at a worse time for Apple.
https://gizmodo.com/did-all-this-pir...nes-1833466452





A Music Executive at One of the World's Biggest Talent Agencies Says Hip Hop is the New Rock and Roll, and Travis Scott is the New Rock Star
Alison Millington

• Brian Ahern is co-head of the London music division of William Morris Entertainment (WME), one of the biggest talent agencies in the world.
• He told Business Insider that the concept of a "rock star" is evolving.
• He believes hip hip is so widely accepted now that it's "probably the new rock and roll," and the likes of Travis Scott and Kendrick Lamar are the new rock stars.
• Along with traditional musicians like Drake and Rihanna, the agency works with digital stars and influencers like Casey Neistat and Lily Singh.
• Ahern believes these modern artists are rock stars in their own right, too.

Brian Ahern knows the music industry inside and out.

He started in the mailroom of William Morris Entertainment (WME), an Endeavour network talent agency which is one of the biggest in the world and looks after actors, musicians, athletes, and authors like Rihanna, Drake, Ryan Reynolds, Adele, Oprah Winfrey, Lewis Hamilton, LeBron James, and Serena Williams.

Now, he heads up the company's entire music division in London.

Ahern told Business Insider he originally studied finance and was "not really a music guy" until he met with a Hollywood producer in Los Angeles who suggested he try working for a talent agency.

He applied to a number of agencies and was hired by WME in LA, where he worked in the mailroom for nine months before going on to work as a line agent for indie bands. He became an assistant to Lollapalooza cofounder Marc Geiger (head of music at WME), which he said taught him a lot about the "backbone of the music industry."

"He [was] representing bands like The Pixies and Nine Inch Nails," he said. "I got a lot of perspective of the business — not just booking bands. I worked with him for almost two years and then he sent me on the road."

Ahern worked as a tour manager "jumping off trucks and tour buses" across the US, which he said is something "a lot of agents don't have experience doing."

From 2005, he became an agent doing what he called the "normal day job" of booking shows for artists and bands, including rappers and DJs.

He even went on to run the EDM department with a colleague, overseeing the DJ business, which involved Las Vegas and was a "cool experience."

In 2016, Geiger asked him to move to London to run the music department alongside co-head David Levy — a role Ahern has been doing for two and a half years.

His role mainly involves coordinating with the company's offices and teams around the world and working out how to grow the business. However, he still books shows and festivals for his own clients, which he explained is the main job of a talent agent.

The role of the talent agent

Ahern calls the artist the "CEO of their enterprise," but added that they "outsource a lot of their responsibilities on a day-to-day [basis] because they're supposed to be creative individuals."

"I think ultimately the artist is the decision-maker in every equation, [but] they may trust people to make a lot of decisions for them," he added.

These people include lawyers, publicists, an "army of people at record labels" including marketing, in-house publicists, and A&R people, then business managers "doing the finance and number crunching and making sure they can afford to live," financial planners for people who "have a lot of money and want to invest it," plus the manager, who Ahern called "the epicenter of overseeing a lot on their behalf," from "making sure the kids get picked up from school" to "dealing with the finances and talking to the lawyer about what they need to be doing."

Then there's the talent agent, who traditionally books shows and events on behalf of an artist.

"Some artists only require us to book shows and that's a one-dimensional job at times," Ahern said.

The booking process involves looking at the festivals and shows happening over the next few years and figuring out when and where an artist wants to play.

"Somebody we represent globally, we look at when's the best time to be in Australia, when's the best time to be in Asia, similarly Europe, the UK, US, South America, Mexico," Ahern said.

"Lollapalooza is in South America around March, we want to be there, we want to be at Coachella in April, Glastonbury in June, Reading and Leeds in August — we look at those things."

He added that there are some venues that are considered to be prestigious because they've been associated with historic artists.

"If you're a big Zeppelin fan and you know they did something at [London's Royal] Albert Hall, you might say 'I really want to do something at Albert Hall someday,'" he said. "Some of it's alignment with personal goals of the artist — they might be interested in stadiums, they might be interested in small clubs that service their fanbase."

He added that performing at the likes of Coachella, New York's Governors Ball, Glastonbury, or Reading "lends credibility" to an artist.

"In the past it used to be a lot more album cycle driven — the record drops here so we'd have to figure out where to tour on the back of that. Now it's a little bit more [about] where are the looks we want to get, where do we gain notoriety, where do we gain market share [or] the most eyeballs?"

He added that venues have availability issues and there are "bumps along the way."

"Someone gets sick and we have to make adjustments, all the way through to fulfillment when the tour happens," he said.

Artist first, musician second

However, he said that at WME, the role of the booking agent has involved into more of a "consultant."

"We still do our primary function and responsibility, [but] the agency has other wings and departments to service clients needs, so if they want to write a book or star in a movie or go into business or whatever it is, we're here to employ ourselves in that way as well. As a full service agency we want to help the artist build their career across the world."

"We're here to fulfill their desires but also be the expert in the room, the doctor you go to for advice. You don’t go in and tell your doctor 'This is how you’re going to operate on my leg,' the doctor says what’s best for you to get better."

WME has helped artists get into movies (either through acting or getting a spot on the soundtrack) or land brand partnerships, like becoming the face of Coach or Rolls Royce.

"My colleagues are able to jump into those arrangements and say, 'Here's the right brand to be associated with, here's what we can get from that."

"Obviously sometimes [these deals] arise because of their own notoriety, but often times we bring those opportunities to them directly and solicit for them on their behalf."

There are a few other unexpected tasks that come up along the way, too.

"Tyler the Creator built a festival in LA we were heavily involved with," Ahern said. "He's a genius and creative mastermind... but we have a team that were able to help him.

"You may look at an [artist] as an actor first, as a musician first, but we look at them as an artist. Putting them into multiple places is important."

Digital celebrities

Part of Hen's job has also involved learning to adapt to the constantly changing concept of what a celebrity or artist actually is.

Along with its Motion Picture, Television, Endorsement, Music, Theater, Book, Sports, and Speakers divisions, WME also now has a "Digital" business, looking after the likes of YouTube stars and influencers like Joe Sugg (8.5 million YouTube subscribers), gamer JackSepticEye (20 million YouTube subscribers), Casey Neistat (11 million subscribers), and Lily Singh (14.5 million YouTube subscribers.

"Kids are looking into small screens rather than big screens, or both, and that has created new stars and celebrities, which is why we have a digital department at WME that's global," Ahern said. "I think your Jake Paul or Lily Singh or Casper Lee or Joe Sugg or whoever it is, those people are rock stars in their own right now too.

"They may not play music every day — though Joe does music as part of his discipline — but I think some of those other people, they have their own credibility, their own sway in the marketplace as a result of being present in kids' lives every day."

Ahern added that the distribution of content "leads to more opportunities for these artists, more tours, more everything."

"We took a company mandate a few years ago to sign as many of them as humanly possible right off the bat to make sure we were positioning ourselves to be competitive in the long run with the next crop of talent. Digital talent is just talent in general... they're just traditional talent, traditional actors, musicians in the making, they're just breaking in a different medium and they're doing it themselves in a lot of ways."

"We recognized that eventually they were going to populate a lot of the big screens just like they did the little screens, and [we'd] probably see them some day next to a Hugh Jackman or Matt Damon or whomever it is... Some of them want to stay in their bedrooms and do what they do because they're good at it and they get paid well, that's what they're comfortable with, but some of them want to go on tour and do a podcast and so different stuff."

He added that the money they earn is comparable to other non-digital A-list celebrities, too.

"Digital talent doesn't have a ceiling," he said. "You can't draw a distinction between an entire genre and another genre to say this one sells better than that one, but demand is demand — if people want to see something, they want to pay to see it.

"Some of the digital or YouTube stars or podcasts that we tour, tour similarly to some of the other live events that we book."

The new 'rock stars'

Ahern said within the company, there are a lot of debates about "what a rock star is any more."

"I think obviously there are people that are popular for very different reasons, whether it's their fashion influence or their musical influence or whatever it is. I grew up looking at a rock star as a Robert Plant or a Kurt Cobain or whatever it was, [but that has] certainly evolved.

"There are examples like that now, but the Travis Scotts of the world are rock stars. They definitely are. The Kendrick Lamars are rock stars... It doesn't mean you're not a rock star if you just rap now."

He added that hip hop is "so across the board accepted now [that] it's grown to a place where it's probably the new rock and roll."

"You play guitar, you can be a rock star. You can be a DJ [too] — Skrillex is a rock star.

"When you become an iconic artist who has influence culturally, not just with your music but with the words you say and the associations you make and the choices you make as a brand filter or cultural filter or whatever you want to call it, those people are rock stars. They're the people people want to look up to."

'I want to remember what I was capable of doing'

While his mindset may have changed throughout his career, Ahern has had the chance to work with plenty of traditional rock stars, too.

He's also seen plenty of them live — a clear perk of the job.

He recalled seeing the Foo Fighters with his mom when he was a kid — she worked for Delta Air Lines and was able to bring him on trips for free.

"I missed Nirvana which is my favourite band ever," he said. "I begged my mom to let me go see the Foos... I saw this amazing show. I've never sweated so much in my life. It was great."

Other gig highlights for Ahern include a sound check with Nine Inch Nails when they re-formed the band, and standing on stage when the Pixies got back together in 2004.

"I have every laminate, every ticket, every backstage pass because I want to remember what I was capable of doing and what I had access to," he said. "I'm very lucky."
https://www.newstimes.com/technology...t-13710924.php





Hated and Hunted

The perilous life of the computer virus cracker making powerful enemies online
Joe Tidy

Fabian is world renowned for destroying ransomware - the viruses sent out by criminal gangs to extort money.

Because of this, he lives a reclusive existence, always having to be one step ahead of the cyber criminals.

He has moved to an unknown location since this interview was carried out.



For the photographer from Yorkshire, UK, it was nothing short of a disaster.

Late one night he was putting the finishing touches to his latest set of wedding photographs due for delivery to his excited newly-wed clients. Then everything on his computer screen changed. Not just the folder of pictures, but his entire body of work, emails and invoices were gone.

For the school head teacher in Texas, US, it didn’t hit home how serious it was until she remembered what her computer contained.

The detailed, long-term financial plan for her already stretched high school. It had taken months of work and huge investment to plan for the future and, with the click of mouse, the hackers now had control.

For the senior manager of a large corporation in Hong Kong, it was instant cold sweat.

He had heard about this type of computer virus and how dangerous it could be. But he never thought that he would be tricked into clicking on a wrong link. Now, as he read the ransom note, he panicked. This could cost him his job.

Ransomware is a particularly nasty type of computer virus.

Instead of stealing data or money from victims, the virus takes control of computers and scrambles every single document, picture, video and email.

Then the ransom demand is issued. Sometimes it’s written inside a note left on a desktop, sometimes it just pops up on a screen without warning.

They always come with a price tag. Pay the hackers a few hundred pounds - or sometimes thousands - and they’ll restore your files.

All of the victims mentioned above were hit with some form of ransomware. But the Hong Kong businessman didn’t lose his job and the photographer and head teacher were able to recover their work.

None had to pay any money, and once they’d got their lives back in order, all sent emails of thanks to the same person.

He’s a man who has devoted himself, at huge personal cost, to helping victims of ransomware around the world. A man who guards his privacy dearly to protect himself, because for every message of gratitude he receives, almost as many messages of abuse come at him from the cyber criminals who hate him.

In fact, they hate him so much that they leave him angry threats buried deep inside the code of their own viruses.

To the untrained eye, the code of a computer virus is just a jumbled mess of letters, numbers and symbols.

But to Fabian Wosar, each line is a clear instruction. He knows and understands every digit and dot in the same way a pianist would read a page of musical notes.

About a year ago, as his eyes darted around the screen looking for a clue to help him crack the latest ransomware, he was stopped in his tracks. Standing out amongst the code, in glaring green letters, were expletives referring to Fabian. By name.

“I was shocked but I also felt a real sense of pride,” says Fabian. “Almost like, a little bit cocky. I’m not going to lie, yeah, it was nice. It’s clear that the coder is really pissed.

“They’ve taken the time and effort to write a message knowing that I’ll probably see it and I’m clearly getting under their skin. It’s a pretty good motivator to know that my work is upsetting some really nasty cyber-criminal gangs.”

Fabian shows me other messages. It takes me a while to spot them as I scroll through endless strings of code. When I find one it stands out like a beacon in the sea of otherwise unreadable characters.

Nearly all are obscene, offensive and threatening. There are frequent references to Fabian’s mother, and descriptions of sexual acts are common. Many are goading and taunting Fabian.

One virus was even named “Fabiansomware” in an attempt to fool the victim into blaming Fabian.

There are some, though, that are more pleading in their tone, such as this one he found a few months ago.

“They tried to make me feel guilty with this one. But obviously I still cracked their virus and released a decrypter,” he says.

“Surprise, surprise it didn’t stop them and they released another version.”

Fabian keeps every message he finds. They form a large collection on his computer and are just another motivator that keeps him dedicated, even obsessed, with his work.

From the minute you step inside Fabian’s home you can see how that dedication manifests itself in his life.

His unassuming terraced house on the outskirts of London has no decorative furnishings at all. No pictures or paintings adorn the walls. No lamps or plants. The shelves are empty except for a collection of Nintendo games and some computer coding manuals.

He owns one board-game called Hacker: The Cyber Security Logic Game, which he admits he’s very good at - although he’s only ever played it alone. In short, his home isn’t very homely but this cheery, energetic young German doesn’t seem to mind. He even admits to spending “98%” of his time at home as he works from his office upstairs.

“I’m one of those people who if I don’t really have a reason to go outside, I won’t,” he says.

“I don’t really like to leave the house unless I have to. I do nearly all my shopping online and get everything delivered. I don’t really like too many things around as I spend nearly all of my time working.”

Strangely, Fabian has chosen the smallest room in his house to set up his office. This is where, with the curtains closed, he toils away for most of his waking life gaining grateful fans and hateful, dangerous enemies around the world.

He works remotely for a cyber security company, often sitting for hours at a time working with colleagues in different countries.

When he’s “in the zone”, the outside world becomes even less important and his entire existence focuses on the code on his screen. He once woke up with keyboard imprints all over his face after falling asleep during a 35-hour session.

All of this to create anti-ransomware programs that he and his company usually give away free. Victims simply download the tools he makes for each virus, follow the instructions and get their files back. You can see how he has built up such a vengeful group of angry cyber criminals.

“We are never completely sure who we are dealing with, but my guess is that I have upset or angered around 100 different cyber gangs over the past few years,” says Fabian.

“Writing code is like writing a novel. You can tell from the style. You can tell that you’re dealing with the same gangs quite often. It’s also pretty easy to follow the money. By looking at the Bitcoin wallets that the gangs ask victims to pay into, you can see who is responsible for each variation of ransomware and how much money they’re making.”

He says that one group he “annoyed a lot” had made about $250,000 (£191,000) in three months - until he found their virus and stopped it.

Ransomware is one of the most profitable ways for cyber criminals to make money.

Stealing data is fine but you still need to find a buyer. In these attacks the victim is the buyer. Individuals rarely have backups of precious family photos, so are likely to pay the few hundred pounds to save those memories.

Businesses often pay without alerting the authorities or upsetting shareholders. In some cases, local authorities pay after weighing up the cost of replacing their systems at taxpayers’ expense.

In March, officials in Jackson County, Georgia, US, reportedly paid $400,000 (£301,000) to cyber criminals to get rid of a ransomware infection and regain access to their IT systems. It was reported that they had estimated it would cost millions to replace the computer network.

The most successful cyber-crime gangs are run like mafia organisations with specific structures and divisions of labour.

There are the virus coders, the money launderers, the protection heavies and the bosses who decide on targets and sometimes funnel the money into other, potentially more serious, criminal enterprises.

Catching these gangs is extremely challenging. One of the most prolific recent ransomware gangs, responsible for two major ransomware families - CTB-Locker and Cerber - made an estimated $27m and eluded police for years.

It took a global police operation involving the FBI, the UK’s National Crime Agency, and Romanian and Dutch investigators to bring them down. In December 2017, five arrests were made in Romania.

According to research from Emsisoft, the cyber security company Fabian works for, a computer is attacked every two seconds.

Their network has managed to prevent 2584105 infections in the past 60 days - and that’s just one anti-virus firm of dozens around the world.

Some of the most destructive cyber-attacks in recent years have been carried out with ransomware.

In May 2017, hundreds of British hospitals were plunged into chaos as a ransomware virus called WannaCry spread like wildfire through the NHS computer network.

An estimated 70,000 devices – including computers, MRI scanners, blood-storage refrigerators and theatre equipment - were taken offline by the virus, which encrypted machines and demanded a payment in Bitcoin to save the files.

Doctors and nurses were forced to resort to pen and paper and thousands of appointments and operations were cancelled or postponed.

Worldwide, the ransomware claimed an estimated 300,000 computers in 150 countries, with systems in Russia, Ukraine, Taiwan and India worst affected.

It didn’t take long for experts to blame hackers in North Korea for the attack, which is estimated to have caused hundreds of millions of pounds of damage.

Another piece of ransomware called Not Petya is responsible for what is often described as the most devastating cyber attack of all time. This one is estimated to have caused $10bn (£7.6bn) in damages with around $300m of that coming from one company.

It was in June 2017 when the infection began.

It originated in an otherwise benign piece of accountancy software popular with Ukrainian companies and spread throughout the country encrypting computers at energy companies, transport networks, airports and banks. Quickly, the virus scrambled files on computers in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and the UK.

NotPetya was particularly cruel in that although it looked and acted like ransomware, it was effectively a “wiper” - even if victims did pay the ransom (and many did), the files could never actually be recovered.

The company worst hit was Maersk, the largest logistics and container ship firm in the world. The entire business nearly ground to a halt and in the 10-day scramble to rebuild thousands of networked computers the price of commodities like bananas began to soar as shop shelves went bare.

It’s believed this attack was politically motivated against Ukraine but no-one really knows who was to blame.

“It’s pretty much an arms race,” says Fabian. "They release a new ransomware virus, I find a flaw in its code and build the decryption tool to reverse it so people can get their files back.”

“Then the criminals release a new version which they hope I can’t break. Sometimes they figure out what they did wrong and fix it, but a lot of the time they can’t see the flaw in their code.

“In one case this back and forth with one cyber-crime gang went on for like six or seven months. It escalates with them getting more and more angry with me.”

When he’s immersed in the race against these anonymous criminals, Fabian admits it is hard to keep on top of even the most basic functions like eating and drinking, and looking after himself.

Amongst the mess of coding books and paperwork on his desk I spot two pill boxes. The containers with labels for each day of the week point to health issues, which he admits are a direct result of his lifestyle.

“I’m heavily overweight and I have trouble with my blood pressure so I take some meds for that. I also struggle with hyperthyroidism,” he says.

“It’s definitely down to my work and how I live. I’m actually thinking of getting a puppy to force me to leave the house for walks. And the companionship would be nice too.”

It was another message specifically about his weight that led him to flee Germany and end up in the UK.

About a year ago, he came across a hidden message which, unlike most, was terrifyingly personal:

This one he couldn’t ignore. Not because it hurt his feelings but because it showed that the cyber criminals knew something about him.

Up to this point he had kept everything except his name a closely-guarded secret.

Not even his boss or co-workers knew where he lived in his hometown in east Germany, and now it seemed the net could be closing in with the criminals.

“It definitely got to me. Not because of the overweight thing - because I clearly am overweight - but because I realised people were kind of stalking me online,” he says.

Fabian describes it as a creepy time. He scoured his social media accounts and web forums for any pictures or references to his appearance. He found that years ago, a throwaway tweet had mentioned the Keto diet.

“That was when I removed my birthdate everywhere and things like that to not give too many clues,” he says. “I remember thinking I had to get out of Germany, where you can easily have your location found with a few pieces of information.

“It was very scary. I don’t think they would have killed me but these guys are highly dangerous. I know how much money they make and it would be literally nothing for them to drop 10 or 20,000 for like some Russian dude to turn up to my house and beat the living hell out of me.

“I moved to the UK as soon as I could. You can hide here, there are no registers or anything and I can be anonymous.”

Fabian still hasn’t told his co-workers exactly where he is in the UK.

He only agreed to have a visit from me because he is just about to leave the area and won’t tell me where he’s going.

Fabian accepts that moving around and restricting his life and circle of friends is just a part of the sacrifice for his hobby-turned-profession.

He first discovered his passion for computers at the age of seven when he played on his dad’s work computer. Coming from a poor family in the former East Germany it was up to him to pursue his dream. He spent three years saving up the money for his first computer by collecting recyclable bottles and cans and selling them back to the council.

At the age of 10 he had enough money to buy the machine and he began experimenting. This really took off when he got his first computer virus.

“The virus was called TEQUILA-B. It messed my system up in all kinds of ways and I got really, really fascinated by it. I went to a library and they actually had a couple of books about computer viruses. I got into it and wrote my own antivirus program.”

By 14, he was known throughout the municipality as the go-to-guy for computer problems and managed to save enough to help his family get a better house in a better neighbourhood.

By 18, with no formal education or training, he joined cyber security firm Emsisoft where he has built his profile and is known in the industry as one of - if not the - best ransomware expert.

With his skillset and notoriety, Fabian could be one of the biggest names and personalities in the cyber world but he chooses a more modest life.

He earns a very good salary but looking around his home and at his life it’s hard to see how he spends it.

“I don’t really spend my money, no. I like to play tabletop games online but that doesn’t cost much,” he says. “A lot of my money I send to my sister who has a little girl. I like to make sure she has everything she needs.”

He gets offered thank yous and rewards all the time but doesn’t like to accept.

One gift he was happy to accept, though, was a cartoon picture of what a grateful illustrator imagined he might look like. It shows a portly man wearing a polar bear hat. Bizarrely, she has managed to capture his essence (and love of polar bears) without looking much like him.

He uses it as his online avatar, happy knowing that it came from another person he’s helped, but safe in the knowledge that his secret identity is secure.

As I leave him, I feel privileged to have been invited to his home - one of very few people to be trusted with his location, albeit temporarily. I wish him good luck with his house move and the hunt for a puppy companion to share his strange life with.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources...ware_crack er





19-Years-Old WinRAR Vulnerability Leads to Over 100 Malware Exploits
Adam Westlake

After being a staple on PCs for so many years, last month it was discovered that WinRAR, software used to open .zip archive files, has been vulnerable for the last 19 years to a bug that’s easily exploited by hackers and malware distributors. Fortunately, the software has been patched with the recent release of version 5.70, but after being unchecked for so long and installed by so many people, a new wave of malware is taking advantage.

Check Point, the security researchers that revealed the WinRAR bug, explain that the software is exploited by giving malicious files a RAR extension, so that when opened they can automatically extract malware programs. These programs are installed in a PC’s startup folder, allowing them to start running anytime the computer is turned on, all without the user’s knowledge.

Once the bug was disclosed, however, hacker groups really began using it to their advantage, with various nations becoming the target of state-backed cyber-espionage campaigns attempting to collect intelligence. The latest comes from McAfee, the software security firm, which notes that it has identified over 100 unique exploits that use the WinRAR bug, most of them targeting the US.

Malware distributors are well aware of WinRAR’s prevalence among those who prefer to illegally download their media, as McAfee notes that one of the more popular exploits targets victims with a bootleg copy of Ariana Grande’s latest album, Thank U, Next.

The WinRAR software isn’t nearly as popular as it was years ago, but since it’s racked up over 500 million users in almost 20 years, there’s no way to know how many have been affected by the bug. The other big problem is that while version 5.70 was released in late January, it must be manually downloaded and installed from the website, leaving most users unaware of the critical update.
https://www.slashgear.com/19-years-o...oits-16569928/





Hacked Tornado Sirens Taken Offline in Two Texas Cities Ahead of Major Storm

City officials took hacked tornado sirens offline ahead of major storm. Luckily, they weren't needed.
Catalin Cimpanu

A hacker set off the tornado emergency sirens in the middle of the night last week across two North Texas towns. Following the unauthorized intrusion, city authorities had to shut down their emergency warning system a day before major storms and potential tornados were set to hit the area.

The incident impacted DeSoto and Lancaster, two cities in Dallas County, Texas --both suburbs located south of the main Dallas metropolitan area.

On the night of March 12, between 02:30 and 04:00 AM (local time), a hacker set off the two cities' tornado sirens, waking locals in the middle of the night.

Over 30 sirens went on and off, with 10 in DeSoto and 20 in Lancaster.

@NBCDFW pic.twitter.com/vtqnui1njN
— Mike Flo (@DynaMIKE_GoBOOM) March 12, 2019

The hell these Lancaster/ Desoto sirens goin off. Got work at 8 A.M I ain't seen 1 tornado comin thru.
— Jay! (@FraudBomb) March 12, 2019

@DemondFernandez #Desoto #Lancaster #CedarHill #RedOak all experienced Tornado "Malfunction" sirens from 2:30 AM until 4 AM this morning at the same time but it was just coincidence? Hmmmmmm
— Butler Enterprises (@TheButlerEnt) March 12, 2019

Who in Lancaster/ desoto etc . Is those tornado sirens ?
— babygirl✨ (@yourfave_ken) March 12, 2019

��♀️why do we have a false tornado siren going off in Lancaster Tx? Smh Thanks Lancaster for waking us all up at 2:30 am.
— Deanna Laurence (@LaurenceDeanna) March 12, 2019

I’m in DeSoto.
The (tornado?) sirens stopped but started right back.
Any insight? This is scary. @wfaaweather @Fox4Weather
We need answers please.
— Summer G™️ (@summer_galvez) March 12, 2019

Some residents also reported alarms going off in the nearby suburbs of Red Oak, Cedar Hill, and Glenn Heights, but the incidents didn't affect the entire cities, and sirens didn't blare for hours.

The false alarm caused quite the panic in the two towns, as locals were already on the edge of their seats regarding incoming storms. The city had run tests of the tornado alarm sirens a week before, but the tests were set during the middle of the day and had long concluded.
It was a hack

According to CBS Dallas, DeSoto and Lancaster officials who investigated the incident confirmed the two emergency alarm systems had been hacked and set off "intentionally," excluding the possibility of a freak technical accident in the two cities at the same time.

"Based on the widespread impact to the outdoor sirens located in two separate cities, including Lancaster, it has become evident that a person or persons with hostile intent deliberately targeted our combined outdoor warning siren network," Lancaster officials said in a statement.

"Sabotage against a public warning system is more than vandalism. It is a criminal act and those responsible are subject to arrest and prosecution," officials said said.

The two hacked systems were taken offline the next morning, and remained offline ever since.
Major thunderstorm hit the towns a day later

Bad weather, including storms and potential tornadoes, was announced for all last week in the North Texas area. A severe thunderstorm hit the two cities the following night, on March 13.

Thunderstorms are known to produce brief tornadoes, but luck had it that no tornado formed and hit the towns that day.

Tornadoes are frequent in Texas, as the state is located in Tornado Alley, and tornado season, a period of the year between March and May when most tornadoes happen, had officially begun.

Nevertheless, a tornado didn't form on March 13, and, luckily, the sirens weren't needed.

The powerful thunderstorm did hit the two cities hard, and the Dallas area as a whole, knocking down trees, destroying houses, and leaving several neighborhoods without power.

DeSoto and Lancaster’s tornado siren systems were hacked last night so they turned them off, according to the news. A whole twister could be headed this way and we’re just stuck in the dark. Literally. ��
— Summer G™️ (@summer_galvez) March 13, 2019

Someone hacked the tornado sirens in #Lancaster and #Desoto the day before dangerous weather. No humanity behind the greasy keyboard that did that. They have no sirens now.
— Lane (@writerlane) March 13, 2019

A repeat of the 2017 Dallas incident

This is not the first time that something like this happened in Dallas County.

In April 2017, a hacker exploited a "radio issue" to set off 156 tornado sirens for hours across the city of Dallas in the middle of the night. Dallas city officials answered that hacking event by adding encryption to the radio signal that controlled the city's sirens, preventing any amateur radio enthusiasts to hijack their control signal.

The tornado sirens in DeSoto and Lancaster are not part of the Dallas tornado emergency system, according to this map, hence, they didn't feature the same protection.

In April 2018, security researchers from Bastille published a report about the SirenJack vulnerability affecting a popular emergency alert system. SirenJack could allow hackers to hijack sirens and trigger alarms.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/hacked...f-major-storm/





Vladimir Putin Signs Sweeping Internet-Censorship Bills

Publishing "unreliable socially significant information" can lead to big fines.
Timothy B. Lee

President Vladimir Putin has tightened his grip on the Russian Internet Monday, signing two censorship bills into law. One bans "fake news" while the other makes it illegal to insult public officials.

Russia has never really been a liberal democracy. It lacks an independent judiciary, and the government has found a variety of techniques to harass and intimidate independent media in the country.

But the new legislation gives the Russian government more direct tools to censor online speech. Analyst Maria Snegovaya told The Washington Post that the legislation "significantly expands the repressive power of Russia’s repressive apparatus."

Under one bill, individuals can face fines and jail time if they publish material online that shows a "clear disrespect for society, the state, the official state symbols of the Russian Federation, the Constitution of the Russian Federation, and bodies exercising state power."

Insults against Putin himself can be punished under the law, The Moscow Times reports. Punishments can be as high as 300,000 rubles ($4,700) and 15 days in jail.

A second bill subjects sites publishing "unreliable socially significant information" to fines as high as 1.5 million rubles ($23,000).

"Russia has not historically had major constraints on Internet freedom," analyst Matthew Rojansky told the Post. "The Internet has thus been one realm in which full diversity of opinion and free expression, even on the most sensitive political topics, were generally permitted."

Now, however, the Russian government has "essentially unconstrained authority to determine that any speech is unacceptable. One consequence may be to make it nearly impossible for individuals or groups to call for public protest activity against any action taken by the state."

The Russian government has steadily tightened its grip over the Russian Internet, The Moscow Times notes. "Tougher Internet laws introduced over the past five years require search engines to delete some search results, messaging services to share encryption keys with security services, and social networks to store users' personal data on servers within the country."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ish-fake-news/





U.S. Firms Are Helping Build China’s Orwellian State

Tech partnerships are empowering new methods of control.
Lindsay Gorman

When a Dutch cybersecurity researcher disclosed last month that Chinese security contractor SenseNets left a massive facial recognition database tracking the movements of over 2.5 million people in China’s Xinjiang province unsecured on the internet, it briefly shone a spotlight on the alarming scope of the Chinese surveillance state.

But SenseNets is a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: Tech firms in the United States are lending expertise, reputational credence, and even technology to Chinese surveillance companies, wittingly or otherwise.

The SenseNets database logged exact GPS coordinates on a 24-hour basis and, using facial recognition, associated that data with sensitive personal information, including national ID numbers, home addresses, personal photographs, and places of employment. Nearly one-third of the individuals tracked were from the Uighur minority ethnic group. In a bizarre juxtaposition of surveillance supremacy and security incompetence, SenseNets’ database was left open on the internet for six months before it was reported and, according to the researcher who discovered it, could have been “corrupted by a 12-year-old.”

The discovery suggests SenseNets is one of a number of Chinese companies participating in the construction of a technology-enabled totalitarian police state in Xinjiang, which has seen as many as 2 million Uighurs placed into “re-education camps” since early 2017. Eyewitness reports from inside the camps describe harsh living conditions, torture, and near constant political indoctrination meant to strip Uighurs of any attachment to their Islamic faith. Facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and speech monitoring enable and supercharge the Chinese Communist Party’s drive to “standardize” its Uighur population. Uighurs can be sent to re-education camps for a vast array of trivial offenses, many of which are benign expressions of faith. The party monitors compliance through unrelenting electronic surveillance of online and physical activities. This modern-day panopticon requires enormous amounts of labor, but is serving as a testing ground for new technologies of surveillance that might render this process cheaper and more efficient for the state.

Toward this goal, the party is leveraging China’s vibrant tech ecosystem, inviting Chinese companies to participate through conventional government-procurement tools. Companies built the re-education camps. Companies supply the software that watches Uighurs online and the cameras that surveil their physical movements. While based in China, many are deeply embedded in the international tech community, in ways that raise serious questions about the misuse of critical new technologies. Foreign firms, eager to access Chinese funding and data, have rushed into partnerships without heed to the ways the technologies they empower are being used in Xinjiang and elsewhere.

In February 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced a wide-ranging research partnership with Chinese artificial-intelligence giant and global facial-recognition leader SenseTime. SenseTime then held a 49 percent stake in SenseNets, with robust cross-pollination of technical personnel. SenseNets’ parent company Netposa (also Chinese) has offices in Silicon Valley and Boston, received a strategic investment from Intel Capital in 2010, and has invested in U.S. robotics start-ups: Bito—led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University—and Exyn, a drone software company competing in a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) artificial-intelligence challenge. This extensive enmeshing raises both moral and dual-use national-security questions. Dual-use technology is tech that can be put to both civilian and military uses and as such is subject to tighter controls. Nuclear power and GPS are classic examples, but new technologies such as facial recognition, augmented reality and virtual reality, 5G, and quantum computing are beginning to raise concerns about their dual applicability.

Beyond SenseNets, Chinese voice-recognition leader iFlytek may also be supplying software to monitor electronic communications in Xinjiang. A 2013 iFlytek patent identified by Human Rights Watch specifically touted its utility in “monitoring public opinion.” Nonetheless, like SenseTime, iFlytek recently established a multiyear research partnership with MIT. These partnerships lend reputational weight to activities that undermine freedom abroad.

Equally concerning is that the details of technical and research collaborations with Chinese companies can be opaque to international partners, concealing ethically objectionable activities. When Yale University geneticist Kenneth Kidd shared DNA samples with a scientific colleague from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Institute on Forensic Science, he had no idea they would be used to refine genetic surveillance techniques in Xinjiang. Massachusetts-based company Thermo Fisher is also implicated: Until it was reported last month, the company sold DNA sequencers directly to authorities in Xinjiang for genetic mapping. Western companies and institutions must be far more vigilant in scrutinizing how Chinese partners are using their products, especially emerging technologies.

Facial recognition is a good place to start. The industry needs to establish global standards for appropriate applications—use that respects human rights and the rule of law. In the United States, Microsoft has been an industry leader in calling for regulation and has tapped employees, customers, public officials, academics, and civil society groups to develop a set of “principles for facial recognition,” which it plans to launch formally this month. When it comes to building out regulation, the devil may be in the details. But the principles—fairness, transparency, accountability, nondiscrimination, notice and consent, and lawful surveillance—are sound. Surprisingly, SenseNets lists Microsoft itself as a partner on its website, along with American chip manufacturer AMD and high-performance computing provider Amax.

In the case of SenseNets, these partnerships could be false claims by a company looking to boost credibility, unwitting collaboration on the part of U.S. tech firms, or true business relationships. “We have been able to find no evidence that Microsoft is involved in a partnership with SenseNets,” a spokesperson for Microsoft told the authors, “We will follow up with SenseNets to cease making inaccurate representations about our relationship.” But if these partnerships are real, they would violate all six of Microsoft’s principles. California-based Amax, which specializes in high-performance computing for deep-learning applications, touts a partnership with Chinese state-owned Hikvision, the world’s largest supplier of video surveillance products. AMD is also involved in a Chinese joint venture supplying proprietary x86 processor technology.

Despite a general awareness of the ways American companies and individuals are abetting surveillance in Xinjiang, U.S. Congress and government officials have yet to call for a review of the extent of U.S. investment and research partnership entanglements. The Commerce Department’s proposed rule-making on controls for certain emerging technologies is a start, but its scope remains unclear.

The international tech community can help guide the ethical application of its developments. After employee protests, Google reportedly suspended plans to launch Dragonfly, a censored version of its search engine custom-built for China, although there are suspicions the project may not be entirely dead. Authoritarianism has proven it can use emerging technologies to undermine democratic norms and freedoms. As such, U.S.-based research-and-development organizations should perform basic due diligence on partnerships to assess their connection to surveillance regimes.

International scientific exchange has yielded awe-inspiring achievements, from the discovery of the Higgs boson to the eradication of smallpox. And cooperation is growing faster than ever. But by taking basic steps to understand their partners, investors can mitigate some of the unintended risks of that cooperation. If they fail to do so, they will end up owning some of the responsibility for human rights abuses in Xinjiang and elsewhere.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/19...-surveillance/





Telcos Block Access to 4chan, Other Sites
AAP

Several websites including 4chan have been blocked by major Australian telcos for continuing to host footage of the Christchurch terrorist attack.

Telstra on Tuesday blocked access to 4chan, 8chan and Voat, the blog Zerohedge and video hosting platform Liveleak.

"We understand this may inconvenience some legitimate users of these sites, but these are extreme circumstances and we feel this is the right thing to do," Telstra networks and IT executive Nikos Katinakis said in a statement.

Optus and Vodafone declined to name which domains they blocked but the same platforms also failed to load on their networks on Tuesday afternoon.

The ban on 4chan was lifted a few hours later.

Vodafone said while blocking requests normally came from the courts or law enforcement agencies "this was an extreme case which we think requires an extraordinary response".

"While there were discussions at an industry level about this issue, this is a decision Vodafone Australia came to independently," a spokeswoman said in a statement.

Optus said it had blocked the domains after "reflecting on community expectations".

The telco industry's peak body said the decision to voluntarily block domains was made due to the "extraordinary circumstances" involved.

"These ISPs have sought to balance community expectations to remove access to the video with the need to minimise any inconvenience that may arise from legitimate content being blocked as an unavoidable, temporary consequence," Communications Alliance chief executive John Stanton said in a statement.

Another large internet service provider, TPG, has been contacted for comment.

A spokesman for the eSafety commissioner said she did not provide "any direction or advice to Australian ISPs in regard to the blocking of websites".

The office does not have the authority to direct ISPs to block domains but can take action to remove content shared on Australian-hosted websites.

The commissioner is encouraging social media users to report the video and any content supporting the attacks directly to the platforms.

LiveLeak said in a statement it would not carry the video filmed by "the psychopath who murdered 49 innocent people in New Zealand" and continue to remove it whenever it is discovered.

"Whilst we may carry media showing the most terrible of events we don't want to be a vehicle of choice for those who carry these events out. This is a very important distinction for us," it said.

Voat, ZeroHedge, 4chan and 8chan have been contacted for comment.
https://www.9news.com.au/2019/03/19/...4chan-liveleak





ISPs in AU and NZ Start Censoring the Internet Without Legal Precedent
Caleb Chen

Several websites including Voat, ZeroHedge, Archive.is, LiveLeak, and others have been blocked in Australia and New Zealand in direct contravention to civil liberties that citizens are supposed to have. The biggest of these internet providers, Telstra, has published a blog post defending their censorship action – even acknowledging that free speech has been sacrificed by company decision:

“We appreciate that it is necessary to ensure free speech is carefully balanced against protecting the community – but with these sites continuing to host disturbing content we feel it is the right thing to do to block them.”

In fact, some of the blocked sites have been unfairly lambasted in mainstream media as “refusing” to take down offending material. Let’s be clear, each and every one of the blocked websites operates lawfully – that includes removing illegal material when requested. These internet service providers (ISPs) in Australia and New Zealand have taken it upon themselves to play judge, jury, and executioner in their condemnation of these websites and their visitors just for exercising free speech.

In New Zealand, mobile internet service providers take it upon themselves to enact censorship

Starting over the weekend, Spark NZ, Vodafone NZ, and Vocus NZ were the three New Zealand ISPs that have taken it upon themselves to block these sites. On their part, the ISPs and smartphone network providers are claiming that these are only temporary blocks. Temporary blocks that have lasted multiple days – more than long enough to change people’s’ browsing habits. Even the perpetrators of this censorship are aware how unprecedented it is. Geoff Thorn, a chief executive at New Zealand Telecommunications Forum (TCF), commented to CIO:

“This is an unprecedented move by the telecommunications industry, but one that they all agree is necessary.”

CIO additionally confirmed that the ISPs are working together to ban the same sites.

In Australia, censorship also happens at the whim of the internet providers

Unsurprisingly, the over-reactive censorship has even started spreading around the world. Starting Monday the 18th, Telstra and Vodafone in Australia have also implemented these blocks network wide – that means even the many Australians using Vodafone reseller networks are affected by Vodafone’s censorship decisions. Of course, Facebook is not one of the sites that has been blocked.

Are these blocks due to legal request, or is Telstra now censoring entire sites due to internal policies? Setting a very dangerous precedent

— James Franklin (@James23235689) March 18, 2019


Vodafone has even confirmed that they were told to place the blocks, and they will remove the blocks when they are “advised” that the illegal content has been removed.

Censoring free speech is never “the right thing to do”

The internet providers in Australia and New Zealand are sliding down an incredibly slippery slope against free speech. Previously, in Australia and other parts of the world like Russia and Philippines, ISPs would not censor access to websites unless clearly told to by the government. The precedent that internet providers can decide when to start blocking sites seemingly arbitrarily has now both been set and abused… All in the name of “doing the right thing.”

Simply put: It’s not the right thing to do. Free speech is an absolute concept and by that virtue alone – this is not the right thing to do.

A full list of blocked websites can be found below:

• voat.co
• 4chan.org
• 8ch.net
• liveleak.com
• archive.is
• bitchute.com
• zerohedge.com
• kiwifarms.net
• eztv.is
• dissenter.com
• documentingreality.com
• bestgore.com
• archive.fo

Please let us know in the comments below if any blocked websites are missing from this list.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.co...gal-precedent/





Opera Adds Unlimited VPN Service to its Android Browser for Free
Manish Singh

Opera today added its free VPN service to its Android browser app. The Norwegian company, which went public last year, also addressed concerns about potential hidden costs of free VPN offerings.

As users become more cautious about privacy, many are exploring VPN services. According to a GlobalWebIndex estimate, more than 650 million people worldwide use such tools to mask their online identity and fend off web trackers. Opera has long recognized this need; in 2016, it launched Opera VPN, a standalone VPN app for iOS and Android. A few months later, it baked that feature into its desktop browser. Last year, however, the company discontinued Opera VPN.

Now, Opera is integrating the VPN service into its Android browser. Opera began testing the free VPN service in its beta Android browser app last month, and now Opera 51 for Android enables users to establish a private connection between their mobile device and a remote VPN server using 256-bit encryption. Users can pick a server of their choice from a range of locations. Unlike some VPN apps, Opera’s offering does not require users to open an account to use the service.

Market share

By offering a free built-in VPN service — a feature not available in other popular mobile browsers — Opera could win back some users it has lost to Google, Samsung, and China’s UC Browser. Chrome dominated browsing with 56.74 percent mobile usage share (both Android and iOS combined) at the end of February, according to web analytics service StatCounter. Apple’s Safari was second with 21.29 percent, followed by UC Browser with 7.28 percent and Samsung Internet with 7.14 percent.

Opera, which had just 3.53 percent browsing usage share, has grown aggressive with its feature offerings in recent quarters. Last year, it introduced a browser-based Ethereum wallet and an optional night mode theme. In November, the company added a feature to its Android browser that disables in-page cookies.

On the flip side, a free VPN service may also stoke fear among some users. In recent years, we have seen instances of VPN services caught selling information about their customers. Furthermore, a recent study found that the vast majority of free VPN services are either owned by Chinese companies or have other suspicious connections to the nation.

Jan Standal, VP of product marketing at Opera, told VentureBeat that the VPN service in the Android app neither logs “activity of data” nor attempts to monetize any aspect of the feature. “The service is provided fully free of charge as a unique feature to improve the privacy and security. Opera monetizes from other unrelated mechanisms, and unlike other VPN services, Opera doesn’t depend on monetizing the browser VPN service,” he said.

The company, which claims to have 320 million users across all its services, says its latest Android browser version is available to download from Google Play and will be rolled out gradually across the globe. Standal declined to comment on whether the company plans to bring its VPN service to Opera’s iOS browser.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/20/o...wser-for-free/

















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