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Old 30-05-18, 06:54 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 2nd, ’18

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"The survey of more than 3,000 Canadians found that about a quarter acknowledged at least one act of digital piracy in the previous three months." – CBC News






































June 2nd, 2018




Five Per Cent of Digital Consumers Say they Always Access Content Illegally, Says Survey

Polling for review of Copyright Act finds three-quarters of digital consumers say they respect copyright

Three-quarters of Canadians who access music, TV, movies and other content online claim to only do so legally, while a solid five per cent claim they consume all of their online content illegally, a new survey on digital copyright infringement suggests.

The figures come from a federally-commissioned survey of 3,301 Canadians over the age of 12, carried out last November. Most of the remaining Canadians surveyed claim they only occasionally access content illegally.

Two federal departments – Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) and Canadian Heritage – ordered the $95,000 research partly to inform a mandatory five-year review of the Copyright Act, now being carried out by a House of Commons committee.

The November 2017 survey of more than 3,000 Canadians found that about a quarter acknowledged at least one act of digital piracy in the previous three months.

The firm Kantar TNS polled its large online panel, supplemented by 253 telephone interviews of Canadians 65 years of age and older, to find out how often and why Canadians are pirating digital content. Results were posted on the web this week.

About half of the consumers surveyed who acknowledged getting some of their digital content illegally said they do it because it's free. Forty per cent said the convenience of illegal access is a big motivation.

Of those who claimed to pay for their digital content, only a third said they do so because they want to avoid illegal downloads and streaming. Convenience was cited by almost half as a primary motivation.

One quarter ignore copyright warnings

One in 10 Canadians surveyed said they've received a notice of alleged copyright infringement from their internet service provider (ISP) through a government-implemented system that came into effect in 2015. The copyright owner who believes content has been stolen initiates the process.

The notices have rattled some consumers, especially when they come with the threat of penalties. The Kantar TNS survey found about a quarter of respondents who received such notices ignored them, while another quarter stopped their illegal downloading or streaming in response.

The broad-ranging survey also compared the behaviour of Canadian digital consumers to those in Australia and Great Britain. The research found Canada and Britain comparable, with about a quarter in each country acknowledging at least one act of digital piracy over the last three months, while 38 per cent of Australians admitted to doing so.

The survey, commissioned by two federal departments, was intended in part to inform a House of Commons committee, which is examining ways to update the Copyright Act.

The survey also found that digital copyright infringement crossed many demographic lines, including gender, region, rural/urban, language and employment status. But piracy did occur more frequently among the young and – perhaps paradoxically – among individuals with household incomes of $100,000 and more.

Eleven per cent of those surveyed reported using "stream-ripping" — capturing streamed content from YouTube, Spotify and other web services as a digital file, which can then be stored on a hard drive or other device, an act that often violates copyright.

"Relative to total internet users, users of stream-ripping are more likely to be male (62%) and are predominantly 18 to 34 (52%) years of age," the study found.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/copy...rvey-1.4682943





Forget The GDPR, The EU's New Copyright Proposal Will Be A Complete And Utter Disaster For The Internet
Mike Masnick

Today is GDPR day, and lots of people are waking up to a world in which EU regulations are having a widespread (and not always positive) impact on how the internet works. As we've detailed over the past couple of years, while there are many good ideas in the GDPR, there are also many ridiculously bad ones, combined with poorly thought out drafting, and we're already seeing some of the fallout from that. But, believe it or not, there's an even larger threat from the EU looming, and it's received precious little attention: the EU's new copyright reform proposal is set to be voted on next month and it will truly be disastrous to the internet. As it currently stands, it will require widespread censorship in the form of mandatory filtering and also link taxes that have already been shown to be harmful to news.

European Parliament member Julia Reda is sounding the alarm and asking people to speak out. As she notes, many of the folks now freaking out about the GDPR wish they got involved over two years ago when it was being debated. And if you're concerned about how problematic this new copyright reform will be for the internet, now is the time to speak out (yes, even if you're not in the EU):

On the topic of copyright, you NOW have the chance to have an influence – a chance that will be long lost in two years, when we’ll all be “suddenly” faced with the challenge of having to implement upload filters and the “link tax” – or running into new limits on what we can do using the web services we rely on.

In stark contrast to the GDPR, experts near-unanimously agree that the copyright reform law, as it stands now, is really bad. Where in the case of the GDPR the EU institutions pushed through many changes against the concerted lobbying efforts of big business interests, in the copyright reform they are about to give them exactly what they want.

Parliament and Council have had over a year and a half to fix the glaring flaws of the Commission proposal – but despite their growing complexity, the latest drafts of both institutions fail to meet basic standards of workability and proportionality


Reda's post goes on to detail the many, many problems of the current copyright proposal -- in which merely linking to a news site may require paying money (link tax) and where concerns about how that might negatively impact the entire internet are being woefully ignored. Perhaps even worse is the mandatory filtering idea. The big record labels and movie studios have, of course, been pushing for this kind of thing for years to get back at Google (mainly) and Facebook (a little bit). But, here's the thing: both Google and Facebook already have those filters (and spent tens of millions of dollars on them). This kind of law fucks over everyone else.

And, it's actually even worse than a mandatory filtering rule -- because the EU realized that such a rule would violate other EU laws. So, instead, it decided to hack away at intermediary liability protections to make mandatory filtering necessary:

Make platforms directly liable for all copyright infringements by their users, and then offer that they can avoid that unreasonable liability if they can show they’ve done everything in their power to prevent copyrighted content from appearing online – namely, by deploying upload filters (Article 13, paragraph 4). Which remain totally optional, of course! Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Tragically, the only remaining point of disagreement in Council is whether this proposal is bad enough, or should be made worse.


We've already spent years explaining how this will lead to widespread censorship online, but it will also be a disaster for basically all of the non-Google/Facebook platforms out there. Mid-size companies like Github have already talked about how this could effectively destroy its ability to operate, and lots of other sites would be impacted as well. Any kind of forum site would be at serious risk. Reddit, Pinterest, Twitch, Imgur, Wordpress, Medium, Vimeo. This would create massive liability for all of those sites, making it nearly impossible for many of them to function in the EU.

Reda notes that a new draft could make this situation even worse in noting that even having filters won't be enough to avoid liability:

Mr Voss’ latest draft expands the scope of the censorship machines proposal to all web platforms (a) whose purpose is to “give access to copyrighted content uploaded by users” and which (b) “optimise” that content. What counts as optimising? Among a long list of actions, we find that “displaying” the uploads already makes platforms legally liable for any copyright infringement they may include (Recital 37a).

And in his version, web services can’t even avoid liability by implementing upload filters. To protect themselves from being sued, they would need to get licenses from all rightsholders that exist on the planet before allowing user uploads to go online, just in case the upload may contain (parts of) any of their works.

He also claims that checking every new user upload for whether it includes one of hundreds or thousands of specific copyrighted works somehow does not constitute “general monitoring” (Recital 39), which would be forbidden – now that’s some wishful lawmaking.


As Reda also points out, most of the EU member states appear to be supportive of these horrible ideas (or even pushing to make it worse). What now stands between this horrible law making a mess of the internet is just the EU Parliament which is currently scheduled to vote on this in late June (probably the 20th or 21st). If you are in the EU now is absolutely the time to speak up. If you're outside the EU, it also would help to speak up and let the EU Parliament know that this is a horrible idea that will have significant problems for the wider internet, free speech and innovation.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...internet.shtml





FCC asks Amazon and eBay to Stop Selling Fake Pay TV Boxes
Sarah Perez

On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and eBay CEO Devin Wenig asking their companies to help remove the listings for fake pay TV boxes from their respective websites. These boxes often falsely bear the FCC logo, the letter informed, and are used to perpetuate “intellectual property theft and consumer fraud.”

With the rise in cord cutting, a number of consumers have found it’s just as easy to use a software app like Kodi on a cheap streaming media device to gain access to content — like TV shows and movies — that they would otherwise miss out on by dropping their pay TV subscription. As an added perk, various software add-ons enable consumers to stream movies still in the theaters, too. It’s an easier way to access pirated content than visiting The Pirate Bay and downloading torrent files.

While Kodi’s open-source software itself doesn’t facilitate piracy, through a number of downloadable add-ons, it’s relatively easy for consumers to figure out how to stream pirated content thanks to online tutorials and YouTube videos.

It’s not clear if people know that they’re doing something illegal, or just don’t care because there are seemingly no repercussions related to their behavior.

Amazon, Netflix and major Hollywood studios have gone after these box makers through the court system already. In January, for example, a U.S. District Court judge handed down a preliminary injunction against TickBox TV, a Georgia-based set-top box maker that was profiting from the sale of its so-called “Kodi boxes.”

Columbia Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Disney, 20th Century Fox Film, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. were also plaintiffs in that case, along with Netflix and Amazon.

Amazon and eBay also proactively remove devices facilitating piracy from their websites, the FCC acknowledged in its letter.

Amazon, for example, prevented the sale of “tens of thousands of unlawful devices” through its “automated proactive detection, preventative investigations, and notices of infringement from rights holders,” the letter stated. Ebay, meanwhile, also removes devices reported as infringing and removes those that say things like “never pay another cable bill” or “fully loaded” in their descriptions.

But the FCC wants the companies to do more, and faster, it seems.

“Unfortunately, despite your good work in this area, devices continue to make it to consumers through your website,” writes FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly. “Many of these devices contain harmful malware that will most certainly be passed on to the consumer. Moreover, the consumer may unwittingly believe that the device is lawful since they were able to purchase it from a legitimate company.”

The FCC is additionally concerned because many devices use the FCC logo to aid in their attempt to defraud consumers.

It notes that nine set-top box distributors were referred to the FCC in October for streaming pirated content, and seven of those displayed the FCC logo even though there was no record of their compliance with the commission’s requirements.

The letter specifically asks both Amazon and eBay to step up their enforcement, by “swiftly removing” devices the FCC alerts them to; it also asks the companies to provide the FCC with information about the manufacturers, distributors and suppliers, when requested.

The move not only pushes Amazon and eBay to more quickly and thoroughly cooperate with the FCC, it also serves as a warning about the U.S. government’s plan to further its crackdown on these fake pay TV boxes.

Of course, there’s a bit of irony here regarding Amazon’s participation in this fight — its Amazon Fire TV Stick, or “firestick” as consumers tend to refer to it, is one of the most popular devices out there today for enabling piracy.

People either buy the “firestick” themselves and install Kodi and various add-ons or they buy a slightly more expensive, hacked firestick from a local reseller who’s hawking them on under-the-radar backchannels, like Facebook Groups or online message boards. The hacked firestick is set up with Kodi pre-installed and the various add-ons for free streaming already configured. (A search for “kodi box” on Amazon.com also returns the Fire TV Stick and Fire TV as the top two results thanks to “sponsored” placements by Amazon. Hmmm.)

The U.S. is not alone in its Kodi box crackdown. Recently, business owners in Wales who sold fully loaded Kodi boxes were sentenced to prison, for example, and its courts have ruled Kodi boxes illegal before. Canada has gone after websites that enable piracy through Kodi, as well.

In response to the letter, eBay says it plans to cooperate with the FCC:

We’re committed to working in collaboration with the FCC to prevent the sale of these illegal products. As outlined in the letter, eBay utilizes a variety of measures to prevent these products from being sold on our platform. These include proactive filtering and manual site reviews to identify illegal products, as well as taking action on direct referrals received from the FCC. We look forward to continuing to work in partnership with the FCC to keep these illegal products off our site.

Amazon has shared its statement, which was written in its own letter to the FCC.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/29/fc...-pay-tv-boxes/





AT&T Wants to Settle with FTC to Avoid Unlimited Data Throttling Lawsuit

AT&T finally gives up attempt to cripple FTC authority over broadband.
Jon Brodkin

AT&T has given up its years-long quest to cripple the Federal Trade Commission's authority to regulate broadband providers.

Just weeks ago, AT&T said it intended to appeal its loss in the case to the US Supreme Court before a deadline of May 29. But today, AT&T informed court officials that it has decided not to file a petition to the Supreme Court and did not ask for a deadline extension.

AT&T had been trying to limit the FTC's authority since October 2014, when the FTC sued AT&T for promising unlimited data to wireless customers and then throttling their speeds by as much as 90 percent.

With AT&T having ruled out a Supreme Court appeal, the FTC can finally pursue its case against AT&T and try to secure refunds for affected customers. AT&T's decision also means that traditional phone companies will have to face some net neutrality oversight from the FTC after the Federal Communications Commission finalizes its net neutrality repeal.

AT&T said it will try to settle the case with the FTC instead of going to trial. AT&T's decision might indicate that it is already having settlement talks with the agency.

"We have decided not to seek review by the Supreme Court, to focus instead on negotiating a fair resolution of the case with the Federal Trade Commission," AT&T said in a statement to Ars.

The FTC is barred from regulating common carriers, and AT&T has long been a common carrier for its mobile voice and landline phone services. AT&T previously argued that the FTC can't regulate any product offered by AT&T, whether it is or isn't a common carrier service.

Though ultimately unsuccessful, AT&T's attempt to deny the FTC's authority to regulate any aspect of its business has delayed the throttling case for years.

FTC and net neutrality

The other upshot here is that the FTC will be able to regulate broadband providers in general after the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules is finalized on June 11.

The net neutrality repeal will also eliminate the FCC's 2015 classification of broadband providers as common carriers. But AT&T's decision to drop its appeal means that the FTC will be able to regulate broadband services sold by companies that also offer common carrier phone service.

A preliminary AT&T victory in the throttling case in August 2016 put the FTC's regulatory authority in doubt. But the FTC triumphed in February 2018 in a ruling from an en banc session of the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

Until changing course today, AT&T planned to appeal that 9th Circuit decision to the Supreme Court.
FTC authority still limited

Even though the FTC's authority has been preserved, there will still be fewer consumer protections for broadband customers after June 11. The FCC is eliminating its rules against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization, along with numerous other consumer protections.

The FTC can't impose strict net neutrality rules on ISPs. Instead, the FTC can only try to punish ISPs if they make net neutrality promises and fail to keep them.

To avoid FTC-enforced restrictions, ISPs can simply change their promises—as Comcast did last year when it removed a pledge that it won't charge websites or other online applications for "fast lanes."

Democratic attorneys general from more than 20 states are suing the FCC to reverse the net neutrality repeal. Democratic members of Congress are also trying to prevent the repeal, and several state governments (including California's) are pursuing their own net neutrality rules.

Broadband providers aren't done pursuing lawsuits to avoid net neutrality rules. USTelecom, which represents AT&T and other telcos, has said it will "aggressively" sue states that impose net neutrality regulations.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...tling-lawsuit/





Charter Claims NY Lawsuit Over Crappy Broadband Speeds Just An Evil, Netflix 'Cabal'
Karl Bode

Early last year, Charter Spectrum was sued by New York State for selling broadband speeds the company knew it couldn't deliver. According to the original complaint (pdf), Charter routinely advertised broadband speeds executives knew weren't attainable -- while simultaneously refusing to upgrade their network to handle added consumer demand (a problem that only got worse in the wake of its merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks).

Buried in the suit were all manner of interesting allegations, including claims that Charter executives discussed via e-mail how they hoped to manipulate congestion to drive up costs for companies like Netflix (you'll recall this was part of the whole interconnection slowdowns Netflix and companies like Level3 complained about a few years ago). The suit also highlights how Charter gamed the results of a program the FCC has traditionally used to measure real-world broadband speeds using custom-firmware embedded routers in consumer volunteer homes.

Charter has since been trying to tap dance out of the suit by flinging pretty much every legal argument against the wall to see what sticks. Most recently, the company tried to claim that the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal contains language banning states from trying to protect consumers. And while that was certainly the hope of Ajit Pai's FCC, legal experts have argued that the agency's claims don't hold water. More specifically, when the FCC rolled back its Title II authority over ISPs, it also ironically dismantled its legal authority to tell states what to do.

Amusingly, Charter has now shifted its argument to the claim that the entire lawsuiit is somehow part of an unholy cabal orchestrated by Google and Netflix. You might recall that ISPs (and Ajit Pai) have long tried to claim that the entrenched telecom monopolies are innocent daisies, and that net neutrality is simply a conspiracy concocted by Google and Netflix to ruin AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Charter's livlihood. This narrative has been routinely driven by ISP policy folks despite the fact net neutrality is very much a bipartisan, grassroots consumer welfare issue.

New York State brought in Tim Wu, the Columbia Law Professor who coined the term "net neutrality," to consult on the case. And because Wu had at points talked to both Google and Netflix (who were concerned that Charter was abusing its last-mile monopoly to drive up costs), Charter hopes to use this "unclean hands defense" to try and scuttle the lawsuit by claiming it was a vast conspiracy against Charter:

"Charter's unclean-hands defense is that Plaintiff actively conspired with private parties through Tim Wu (a leading critic of ISP business practices) to investigate and sue Time Warner Cable Inc.," he wrote. "Thus, Plaintiff delegated what should have been an objective law enforcement investigation to third parties whose pecuniary and political interests are adverse to TWC's, and who had preconceived notions of how and why to penalize TWC."

The letter then goes on to talk about documents produced by the other side that allegedly show how Wu and third parties "manufacture[d] fraud claims" and how his "co-conspirators boasted of having orchestrated Mr. Wu's work."

The names of the individuals who allegedly were in cahoots with Wu include Google's Meredith Whittaker, who in a 2015 email to a colleague, discussed having gotten off the phone with Wu about the NY AG consumer protection complaint and how it would frame interconnection as a consumer harm issue."

Of course since interconnection was a consumer harm issue that's not really substantive or damaging. Charter, a company that routinely uses its own funded think tanks to pollute public discourse and erode accountability is also upset that Wu happened to (gasp) talk to a think tank partially funded by Google:

"Charter is taking the notion of a "cabal" seriously, also pointing to communications with several individuals at the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank."

Ironically, both Google and Netflix's interest in standing up for consumers on this subject has waned proportionally with their growing power over the years. Still, Netflix and Google had every right to be concerned about what Charter and other ISPs were up to, since they were effectively trying to use their last-mile broadband monopoly to unfairly jack up costs for consumers, content creators, and transit operators alike. That Wu corresponded with companies with legitimate anti-competitive concerns over what broadband monopolies are up to isn't likely to scuttle the case and has the faint whiff of desperation.

Charter's other legal efforts to derail the case haven't gone well so far, and it's unclear whether this latest gambit will work. But it's abundantly clear that Charter is particularly worried about the ramifications of this case, given they appear to have been caught on e-mail routinely lying to the public and regulators. As we've been noting, uncompetitive monopolies like Charter are working together to demolish FTC, FCC, and state authority over their businesses, and they're using every trick in the book to do so.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...ix-cabal.shtml





Top U.S. Antitrust Official Uncertain of Need for Four Wireless Carriers

The head of the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division, Makan Delrahim, declined on Friday to support the Obama administration’s firm backing of the need for four U.S. wireless carriers.

Asked about T-Mobile’s plan to buy Sprint for $26 billion, Delrahim declined to reiterate the view of President Barack Obama’s enforcers, who had said that four wireless carriers were needed.

Instead, Delrahim told reporters, “I don’t think there’s any magical number that I’m smart enough to glean.”

He also said the department would look at the companies’ arguments that the proposed merger was needed for them to build the next generation of wireless, referred to as 5G, but that they had to prove their case.

Bill Baer, a former head of the antitrust division, had told the New York Times in 2014: “It’s going to be hard for someone to make a persuasive case that reducing four firms to three is actually going to improve competition for the benefit of American consumers.”

Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Dan Grebler
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-s...-idUSKCN1IX5AS





California Senate Votes to Restore Net Neutrality
Makena Kelly

The California Senate voted on Wednesday to approve a bill that would reinstate the net neutrality regulations repealed by the Federal Communications Commission in December.

The bill, S.B. 822, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), was introduced in March and passed through three committees, all along party-lines. The bill was approved 23–12 and will now head to the state Assembly.

“Under President Obama, our country was moving in the right direction on guaranteeing an open internet, but the Trump-led FCC pulled the rug out from under the American people by repealing net neutrality protections,” Wiener said in a statement last month after the bill passed its final committee vote.

After the FCC moved to eliminate net neutrality rules, states began implementing their own measures. In January, over 20 attorneys general sued the commission before the order was even published. Some governors attempted to use executive orders, while others worked with legislators. California’s bill to restore protections in the state is one of the toughest responses to the FCC’s rollback.

"California’s bill is one of the toughest responses to the FCC’s rollback"

The bill would reinstate rules similar to those in the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order. It forbids ISPs from throttling or blocking online content and requires them to treat all internet traffic equally.

But the bill also takes the original rules further by specifically banning providers from participating in some types of “zero-rating” programs, in which certain favored content doesn’t contribute to monthly data caps.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a statement on Tuesday that called the bill “a gold standard for states looking to protect net neutrality.”

Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who spearheaded the Obama-era regulations, supports the bill. In March, he wrote a letter to the California Senate Energy, Utilities, and Communications Committee with two other former chairmen approving of the measure.

“These protections are essential to our economy and democracy. SB 822 steps in to protect Californians and their economy by comprehensively restoring the protections put in place in the 2015 net neutrality order,” the chairmen said.

If the bill goes on to pass in the Assembly, providers will no longer be able to obtain government contracts in the state of California without obeying the regulations.

"“A gold standard”"

After receiving final approval last month from the Office of Management and Budget, the federal net neutrality rules are set to end on June 11th, leaving states to legislate their own protections. California would be the third state to pass a net neutrality law, following Washington and Oregon.

“In California, we can lead the effort to clean up this mess and implement comprehensive, thorough internet protections that put California internet users and consumers first,” Wiener said.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/30/1...eutrality-vote





Geoffrey Starks Nominated as FCC Commissioner to Fill Democratic Gap Left by Clyburn
Devin Coldewey

The President has officially named Geoffrey Starks as his pick to fill the FCC Commissioner role left open by Mignon Clyburn’s departure. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai confirmed the news, rumored over the past few weeks, in a statement.

“I congratulate Geoffrey Starks on his forthcoming nomination to serve as a Commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission,” said Pai. “He has a distinguished record of public service, including in the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau, and I wish him all the best during the confirmation process.”

Starks isn’t exactly a well known figure, but in public service that’s actually something of a compliment. He has worked in the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau for three years and is currently one of several assistant bureau chiefs. Previously he was at the Justice Department, which makes sense, as the Enforcement Bureau’s responsibility is “to investigate and respond quickly to potential unlawful conduct.”

It’s unclear as yet what his position is on the various measures currently being addressed by the FCC, from net neutrality to the revamping of media regulations.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly settled on Starks as long as a couple months ago, the interim no doubt being spent on due diligence, cultivating endorsements, and so on. The Senate will have to confirm Starks, but there’s no timeline on that yet. Commissioners generally serve five-year terms.

The FCC is kept at an uneven split between the two parties, ideally 3:2 in favor of the current administration. At the moment it has three Republican Commissioners and one Democrat, Commissioner Clyburn having left just a few weeks ago.

I’ve asked the FCC for more information on Starks and no doubt his nomination will trigger considerable scrutiny by press and politicians alike.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/01/ge...lyburn-at-fcc/





When Did TV Watching Peak?

It’s probably later than you think, and long after the internet became widespread.
Alexis C. Madrigal

Americans still watch an absolutely astounding amount of traditional television. In fact, television viewing didn’t peak until 2009-2010, when the average American household watched 8 hours and 55 minutes of TV per day. And the ’00s saw the greatest growth in TV viewing time of any decade since Nielsen began keeping track in 1949-1950: Americans watched 1 hour and 23 minutes more television at the end of the decade than at the beginning. Run the numbers and you’ll find that 32 percent of the increase in viewing time from the birth of television to its peak occurred in the first years of the 21st century.

Over the last 8 years, all the new, non-TV things—Facebook, phones, YouTube, Netflix—have only cut about an hour per day from the dizzying amount of TV that the average household watches. Americans are still watching more than 7 hours and 50 minutes per household per day.

The thing that Americans do most often with their free time is not cooking or exercising or hiking or any other seemingly salutary activity. No, Americans watch TV. That’s the default the current move to even tinier screens has to be measured against.

In 1949-1950, American households were already watching 4 hours and 35 minutes of TV per day. Viewing time grew every decade. In an era of technological thinking that now seems long, long ago—2008—the media theorist Clay Shirky argued that the Internet was tapping into the post-war affluent “cognitive surplus” that television had, theretofore, soaked up. This was a good thing, he said.

“However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf [online], I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter,” Shirky said, referring to two characters from Gilligan’s Island. “And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, ‘If you have some sans‐serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.’”

To Shirky’s point, sometimes doing something equaled making lolcats, but other times people were doing something better. According to Shirky, the time put into making the entirety of Wikipedia, as it existed in 2008, added up to just 1/2000th of the time Americans spent watching TV each year in the ’00s.

Even though phones have pulled attention into this new kind of glowing rectangle to do new things, TV remains the biggest monopolizer of Americans’ attention. Whatever else we might say about Facebook as an ever-optimizing attention-mining machine or the clickbaity excesses of YouTube, Americans still watch as much TV as they did before the creation of Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...g-peak/561464/





Reddit Surpasses Facebook to Become the 3rd Most Visited Site in the US
Callum Booth

According to Alexa – the Amazon-owned web traffic analyzing platform – more people now visit Reddit than Facebook in the US.

Spotted, of course, on Reddit by user IamATechieNerd, the stats will be a big boost for the social sharing platform, especially with many users still irked about the recent re-design.

It’s important to note that analyzing web traffic using a tool like Alexa is not an exact science, but it’s interesting that it has now put Reddit ahead of Facebook.

If the stats are to be believed, Google is still the most visited site, followed by YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook, with Amazon rounding out the top five.

On average, Reddit users spend 15 minutes and 10 seconds on it everyday, a figure substantially higher than its competitors. Google users spend 7 minutes 16 seconds, YouTube 8 minutes 31 seconds, Facebook 10 minutes 50 seconds and Amazon 7 minutes 37 seconds on the sites each day.

This isn’t great news for Facebook on the face of things. The social media company’s audience is ageing and shifting to other platforms and, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company’s lost a lot of sheen.

Still, the Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp are thriving, so Zuckerberg won’t be panicking too much yet.

Whether long-term Reddit users will be happy with this increased traffic is another matter. But, let’s be honest, when are they ever satisfied?
https://thenextweb.com/facebook/2018...ite-in-the-us/





New File Sharing Site Smash has No Ads, No File Size Limits, and a Creative Twist
Cat Ellis

File sharing can be a dull business – particularly if you're using a free service that's packed with ads. Smash takes a different approach. A new file transfer service designed with artists, designers and tech enthusiasts at heart, it has no file size limits and replaces ugly ads with fun creative projects.

There's no need to create an account – just drag and drop your files to get started. You can then create a unique download page with a custom background image and title, and select a creative project to display while the files download.

Free users can pick from a selection of projects from a list curated by Smash, while premium account holders can add their own videos from YouTube or Vimeo (plus a custom logo).

You can send files via a web link (with a custom URL in the format fromsmash.com/yourtitle), by email, or through Slack.

Safe and secure

Smash uses Amazon Web Services to provide secure cloud storage, and links expire after a set period of time (up to seven days in the free plan), eliminating the problem of sensitive data hanging around in the recipient's inbox indefinitely.

You can also remove file previews if you're sending something confidential, and use a password to secure your links (check out the full privacy policy).

Premium accounts start at US$5 (about £4, AU$7) per month, and offer the ability to display your own projects during downloads, links that remain live for up to a year, priority transfers for files over 2GB, file transfer history, and reporting.
https://www.techradar.com/news/new-f...creative-twist





German Spy Agency Can Keep Tabs On Internet Hubs: Court
AFP

Germany's spy agency can monitor major internet hubs if Berlin deems it necessary for strategic security interests, a federal court has ruled.

In a ruling late on Wednesday, the Federal Administrative Court threw out a challenge by the world's largest internet hub, the De-Cix exchange, against the tapping of its data flows by the BND foreign intelligence service.

The operator had argued the agency was breaking the law by capturing German domestic communications along with international data.

However, the court in the eastern city of Leipzig ruled that internet hubs "can be required by the federal interior ministry to assist with strategic communications surveillance by the BND".

De-Cix says its Frankfurt hub is the world's biggest internet exchange, bundling data flows from as far as China, Russia, the Middle East and Africa, which handles more than six terabytes per second at peak traffic.

De-Cix Management GmbH, which is owned by eco Association, the European internet industry body, had filed suit against the interior ministry, which oversees the BND and its strategic signals intelligence.

It said the BND, a partner of the US National Security Agency (NSA), has placed so-called Y-piece prisms into its data-carrying fibre optic cables that give it an unfiltered and complete copy of the data flow.

The surveillance sifts through digital communications such as emails using certain search terms, which are then reviewed based on relevance.

De-Cix said in a statement Thursday that it believed the ruling shielded it from criminal liability for violations of the law protecting German domestic communications against tapping by stating that the German government bore responsibility.

However it said it would review whether it would take its complaint to the Federal Constitutional Court.

Given the mass of daily phone calls, emails, chats, internet searches, streamed videos and other online communications, an effective fire-walling of purely German communications is unrealistic, activists argue.

Germany had reacted with outrage when information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that US agents were carrying out widespread tapping worldwide, including of Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone.

Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany where state spying on citizens was rampant, declared repeatedly that "spying among friends is not on" while acknowledging Germany's reliance on the US in security matters.

But to the great embarrassment of Germany, it later emerged that the BND helped the NSA spy on European allies.

Berlin in 2016 approved new measures, including greater oversight, to rein in the BND following the scandal.
https://phys.org/news/2018-05-german...-internet.html





Sonic and Ultrasonic Attacks Damage Hard Drives and Crash OSes

Sounds played over off-the-shelf or embedded speakers often require a reboot.
Dan Goodin

Attackers can cause potentially harmful hard drive and operating system crashes by playing sounds over low-cost speakers embedded in computers or sold in stores, a team of researchers demonstrated last week.

The attacks use sonic and ultrasonic sounds to disrupt magnetic HDDs as they read or write data. The researchers showed how the technique could stop some video-surveillance systems from recording live streams. Just 12 seconds of specially designed acoustic interference was all it took to cause video loss in a 720p system made by Ezviz. Sounds that lasted for 105 seconds or more caused the stock Western Digital 3.5 HDD in the device to stop recording altogether until it was rebooted.

The device uses flash storage to house its firmware, but by default it uses a magnetic HDD to store the large quantities of video it records. The attack used a speaker hanging from a ceiling that rested about four inches above the surveillance system’s HDD. The researchers didn’t remove the casing or otherwise tamper with the surveillance system.

“For such systems, the integrity of the recorded data is vital to the usefulness of the system, which makes them susceptible to acoustic interference or vibration attacks,” the researchers wrote in a paper titled “Blue Note: How Intentional Acoustic Interference Damages Availability and Integrity in Hard Disk Drives and Operating Systems.”

The technique was also able to disrupt HDDs in desktop and laptop computers running both Windows and Linux. In some cases, it even required a reboot before the PCs worked properly. The technique took as little as 45 seconds to cause a Dell XPS 15 9550 laptop to become temporarily unresponsive when it was exposed to a “self-stimulation attack”—meaning when the laptop played malicious audio over its built-in speaker. When the sound played for two minutes or more, the computer had to be rebooted for the drive to work properly again.

The technique works because audible sound can cause an HDD’s head stack assembly to vibrate outside of normal bounds. The vibrations push the head far enough from the center of the drive track to temporarily prevent writing. Ultrasonic sound, by contrast, can create false positives an HDD’s shock sensor, which is designed to prevent a head crash. This causes a drive to unnecessarily park its head. Besides being used against computers and surveillance systems, the researchers said the attack might also target medical devices that use magnetic HDDs.

The research is largely esoteric, because there are already much easier ways to temporarily take down computers and embedded systems. Still, it raises the possibility that, one day, attackers may have a new means to perform denial-of-service attacks. The researchers, who demonstrated the technique at last week’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, have proposed several methods for detecting and preventing the attacks, some of which can be implemented with simple firmware tweaks.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...rders-and-pcs/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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