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Old 01-05-19, 06:04 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 4th, ’19

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May 4th, 2019




What Happens When the Copyright Pirate Is State Government?

A documentary filmmaker says North Carolina posted his footage without permission. North Carolina claims immunity. Now the Supreme Court is being told that copyright infringement by states is "once again a very serious problem."
Eriq Gardner

A quick hypothetical: A state government, say North Carolina, is running short on cash. To cure the budget shortfall, Gov. Roy Cooper announces that within hours, the state's website will begin streaming Avengers: Endgame for just $1 a view. If Cooper did so without Disney's permission, could he get away with pirating the movie without punishment?

This specific scenario may seem ridiculous and unlikely to happen anytime soon, but nevertheless, the answer may be surprising. Last week, after the U.S. Supreme Court requested North Carolina's thoughts on a petition before the high court, the state argued that it had sovereign immunity from federal copyright claims. The position is disconcerting to some in the entertainment industry. For example, tackling this same petition, the Recording Industry Association of America told the Supreme Court that thanks to recent decisions, "States are once again free to engage in copyright infringement — no matter how widespread or blatant — without fear of having to pay any money as a result. Unsurprisingly, then, despite Congress's efforts, copyright infringement by States is once again a very serious problem."

Rick Allen is the documentary filmmaker challenging the new status quo.

In the mid-1990s, Allen shot footage of researchers salvaging the remains of notorious pirate Blackbeard's flagship, Queen Anne's Revenge, which ran aground at Beaufort, North Carolina, in 1718. Having taken video and still images of the wreck and salvage efforts, Allen registered the works with the U.S. Copyright Office. Those images were subsequently commercialized by Nautilus Productions.

In 2013, Allen accused North Carolina and its Department of Natural and Cultural Resources of copyright infringement because the state had posted a few images of the shipwreck on its website. North Carolina came to a settlement agreement with Allen, paying him $15,000 for the infringements, but after taking the images down, the Department then posted five short videos and one photograph from the recovery expedition. Allen filed suit. Afterwards, North Carolina state lawmakers passed §121-25(b) — Allen dubs it "Blackbeard's Law" — which treats all photographs, video recordings and other documentary materials of a derelict vessel or shipwreck or its contents as "public record."

Can North Carolina insulate itself by putting any copyrighted work in the public domain? That raises a constitutional question.

The Eleventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits federal courts from entertaining citizen suits against a state. In the 1980s, a series of legal decisions took up the issue of whether the Copyright Act abrogated state sovereign immunity. The answer turned out to be "no." It was held that copyright holders suing a state couldn't recover monetary damages for infringements.

This was recognized to be a problem, so after the Register of Copyrights conducted a study of the issue, Congress passed a series of laws in 1990 that attempted to explicitly abrogate state sovereign immunity in regards to copyrights, patents and trademarks.

However, in Florida Prepaid v. College Savings Bank (1999), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law allowing citizens to sue states for patent infringement. In a narrow 5-4 ruling, the justices in the majority rejected the argument that Congress had properly exercised its powers under the Fourteenth Amendment to enforce due process guarantees and held that such a law curtailing state immunity couldn't be justified under Article I of the Constitution.

What followed, of course, were attacks on the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act, giving citizens the right to hold states liable for copyright infringement. In July 2018, in Allen's lawsuit against North Carolina for posting his footage of Queen Anne's Revenge, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals pointed to Florida Prepaid and held that since Congress relied on the Copyright Clause in Article I instead of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress had unconstitutionally abrogated state sovereign immunity.

Now, Allen is seeking review before the Supreme Court and is arguing that absent a review, creators of original expression will be left without a remedy when states trample on their federal copyrights. He asserts that Congress indeed has constitutional authority to abrogate state sovereign immunity for copyright infringement and that various courts have overread Florida Prepaid and similar cases. He also points to "more nuanced instruction" from follow-up Supreme Court precedent (see Central Virginia Community College v. Katz).

North Carolina at first didn't want to respond, but after the case was discussed by the justices on March 1 at a conference, a response was requested.

On April 22, the state formally opposed a review and told the Supreme Court there was consensus by federal courts that the CRCA was unconstitutional and that even if Congress attempted to abrogate immunity under the Fourteenth Amendment, it wouldn't be proper. Congress never identified an instance where a state had violated copyright intentionally, North Carolina posited. And federal lawmakers barely gave consideration to state remedies for copyright infringement and hadn't tailored a solution to the problem at hand.

Give us a chance to write our own laws, North Carolina basically argued.

"Copyright infringement is not categorically unconstitutional," states North Carolina's opposition brief. "Instead, infringement violates the Constitution only when it rises to the level of a property deprivation without due process of law."

The RIAA is somewhat aghast at reasoning by lower courts. In an amicus brief, the lobbying arm of music labels argues that state law is unlikely to provide a viable alternative remedy to infringement since for starters, federal courts generally have exclusive jurisdiction over copyright claims. Moreover, lawsuits premised on state claims (like conversion) would involve untested legal theories.

Now back to what would happen if a state decided to stream Avengers: Endgame.

Disney might not be able to collect damages, but it could at least shoot for an injunction under how appellate courts have been interpreting the current state of law.

Would it be good enough?

"An injunction against a state officer barring copyright infringement is necessarily prospective only," states the RIAA brief. "Accordingly, a State that faces nothing more burdensome than an injunction can infringe with complete impunity until such time as the infringement is detected, a lawsuit against a State official is brought, and a court issues injunctive relief. ... And because any injunction will issue only against particular state officers in their official capacities, and will of necessity cover only specifically defined infringing activity, even in the face of an injunction a State may be able to continue with infringement very similar to the activity that the injunction addresses — especially given that enforcement of an injunction against a State officer through a contempt sanction may be an onerous undertaking."
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/th...rnment-1206827





Malware Infests Popular Pirate Streaming Hardware

Hardware that supports pirated video streaming content comes packed with malware.
Tom Spring

You get what you pay for when you pirate content. That’s the takeaway from the latest report by Digital Citizens Alliance.

It found that pirating hardware, which enables free streaming copyright-protected content, comes packed with malicious malware. The devices give criminals easy access to router settings, can plant malware on shared network devices and are often leveraged to steal user credentials.

According to the Digital Citizens Alliance, 13 percent of 2,073 Americans surveyed use a hardware device for pirating content. One such popular device is called a “Kodi box,” which is sold for between $70 to $100 on grey markets. Kodi is an open-source media player designed for televisions and developed by the XBMC Foundation. It’s widely known for its support of a bevy of copyright-infringing apps that offer free access to premium content from Netfix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, sports networks and paid subscription music services.

“By plugging the device into a home network, [users] are enabling hackers to bypass the security (such as a router’s firewall) designed to protect their system. If apps on the box or that are later downloaded have malware, the user has helped the hacker past network security,” wrote Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA) in a recently released report.

In a review of hardware and pirating apps, such as FreeNetflix, researchers said they found malware piggybacking on illegal apps and preloaded with content. For example, when researchers installed a live sports streaming app called Mobdro, the app forwarded the researcher’s Wi-Fi network name and password to a server in Indonesia.

In other instances, 1.5 terabytes of data was uploaded from a device that shared the same network of the Kodi box. And, in yet another instance, “researchers uncovered a clever scheme that enabled criminals to pose as well-known streaming sites, such as Netflix, to facilitate illegal access to a legitimate subscription of an actual Netflix subscriber,” according to the report.

For its investigation DCA partnered with GroupSense, a security firm that specializes in chatrooms that facilitate black market sales. It claims hackers were discussing how to leverage networks compromised by illicit media streaming services in hopes of recruiting them into DDoS botnets or to mine cryptocurrency.

“Given that users rarely install anti-virus tools on such devices, the opportunities for exploitation are numerous,” wrote researchers.

The unsavory worlds of pirated content and malware are no strangers. Researchers have long warned that patronizing such services is a shortcut to infection. Earlier this month, Kaspersky Lab released a report that found that illegal downloads of HBO’s Game of Thrones accounted for 17 percent of all infected pirated content in the last year.

In Aug. 2018 researchers at ESET said they found DDoS modules had been added to a Kodi third-party add-on. ESET said it also found copyright-infringing apps that came with multi-stage crypto-mining malware that targeted Windows and Linux systems.

As part of its report, DCA reached out to XBMC Foundation. XBMC quickly rebuffed any notion it tacitly supported or endorsed pirated content. “If you are selling a box on your website designed to trick users into thinking broken add-ons come from us and work perfectly, so you can make a buck, we’re going to do everything we can to stop you,” it told DCA.

The Kodi application typically runs on hardware, such as jailbroken media streamer Amazon Fire TV Stick, and is sold by independent resellers on eBay, Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. DCA said it also found Kodi pre-installed on a number of devices including inexpensive China-made media streamers. The software can also be found on “legitimate” devices, that were sold pre-sideloaded with Kodi software.

DCA did its own independent testing over the course of 500 hours of lab testing. It estimates there are 12 million active users of the illicit devices in North American homes. Those users “present a tempting target because they offer hackers a new avenue to exploit consumers and a path to reach other devices on a home network. The findings should serve as a wake-up call for consumers, the technology community, and policymakers to take the threat seriously,” it said.
https://threatpost.com/kodi_box_malware/144191/





‘Avengers: Endgame’ Shows Movie Theaters Can Still Be on Top of the World
Brooks Barnes

Audiences have splintered into a million personalized subsets. Streaming services are sprouting like mushrooms. Attention spans are now measured in seconds.

For those reasons and others — a decade of stagnant attendance, studios that only seem to make sequels of sequels (of sequels) — movie theaters are seen as a dying business. Why trudge to a theater when Netflix is available in your pocket anytime you want?

Yet almost every multiplex on the planet was gridlocked over the weekend. “Avengers: Endgame” took in $1.2 billion worldwide, arriving as the No. 1 movie in at least 54 countries. The euphorically reviewed movie collected a record-breaking $350 million in the United States and Canada, zooming past “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (2015), which had opening-weekend sales of $248 million, or about $270 million in today’s dollars.

“It shows the power of theaters — the ability, even in a hyper-fragmented culture, to deliver that wildly big communal experience,” Megan Colligan, president of Imax Filmed Entertainment, said in an interview.

[Read our review of “Avengers: Endgame.” | Catch up on all the M.C.U. movies in two minutes. | Revisit Princess Shuri with Letitia Wright.]

It also shows that Hollywood is increasingly reliant on spectacle to jolt people away from Facebook, Fortnite, Hulu and Netflix and into movie theaters.

All kinds of movies used to break through at the box office. In 1998, the top 10 grossing movies of the year included an Oscar-nominated war epic (“Saving Private Ryan”), three comedies, a couple of science-fiction extravaganzas (“Armageddon”), the comedic drama “Patch Adams” and a smattering of family films (“Dr. Doolittle”). Last year, there were no comedies and only one drama: “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which doubled as a musical. Big-budget fantasies and animated movies took up eight slots.

When the industry’s new strategy works, it works big.

Demand for “Avengers: Endgame” was so astronomical over the weekend that AMC Theaters, the largest multiplex operator in North America, added 5,000 last-minute showtimes in the United States, lifting its total number to more than 63,000. Nineteen AMC locations played the film around the clock. On Saturday alone, 2.3 million people turned up at AMC cinemas.

“Young moviegoers will remember where they were when they saw ‘Endgame,’ who they saw it with and what it felt like,” John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, wrote in an email. “That will pay off for years to come in the same way that moviegoers who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s still talk about the impact that ‘Star Wars’ had on them.”

And there could be more to come.

Disney’s “The Lion King,” a retelling of the animated musical using photo-realistic visual effects, arrives in July and is generating runaway advance interest. In December, Disney will release “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” the final chapter in a nine-part saga. Also coming this year are giants like “Toy Story 4” (Disney), “The Secret Life of Pets 2” (Universal), “Spider-Man: Far From Home” (Sony) and “It: Chapter 2” (Warner Bros.).

Even so, concerns about the health of theatrical business are unlikely to abate, at least behind closed doors in Hollywood. In some ways, “Avengers: Endgame” could add to them.

People like Steven Spielberg worry that the film business is headed toward a bifurcated future where megamovies play in cinemas and everything else gets squeezed onto streaming-service screens. Given the film industry’s current trajectory, there could soon come a day when you can see popcorn movies like “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” in theaters but must watch more sober fare like “Lincoln” online — to take just two of Mr. Spielberg’s films as examples.

To that end, there is heated debate in Hollywood over what constitutes a movie. Should the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences try to protect the big-screen experience by blocking films — like Netflix’s award-winning “Roma” — that are primarily distributed on the internet from competing for Oscars? Last week, members of the academy board debated what to do, ultimately deciding to keep weighing the options.

Media analysts have also sounded alarms. Doug Creutz, a managing director at Cowen and Company, wrote in a report last month that “the market is concentrating into fewer, but bigger, successful films.” Mr. Creutz noted that the top 10 grossing movies last year accounted for 35 percent of total annual ticket sales. At the start of the decade, the contribution from the top 10 was about 27 percent.

“Avengers: Endgame,” which cost roughly $350 million to make and $150 million to market worldwide, played in 4,662 theaters in North America over the weekend. In another show of Marvel’s dominance, the No. 2 movie of the weekend was “Captain Marvel,” which took in $8 million at 2,435 theaters in its eighth week, according to Comscore, which compiles box-office data. The weekend’s third-best performer, the horror movie “The Curse of La Llorona” (Warner), collected about $7.5 million from 3,372 theaters.

Hollywood has long expected “Avengers: Endgame” to be a sensation. When tickets became available for presale on April 2, the demand crashed AMC servers. In addition to its own ads, which began running late last year, Disney secured promotional partnerships worth an additional $200 million. Ziploc started selling Avengers-themed sandwich bags; McDonald’s, teaming with Marvel for the first time, introduced 24 Avengers toys.

“We wanted it to feel like an epic, important, seminal, can’t-miss event,” said Asad Ayaz, president of marketing at Walt Disney Studios. Mr. Ayaz and his lieutenants devised a strategy in which Disney spent massively on television ads around a few important moments (the day tickets went on presale, for instance) and then went completely dark for a week or more.

“The idea was to stun and surprise people with new creative messaging and then leave them wanting more,” Mr. Ayaz said.

The movie ended up defying all kinds of conventional wisdom — that sequels are not supposed to be critical darlings, that there is no center of the culture anymore, that marathon running times (three hours in this case) drive people away, that every studio has hits and misses. Marvel is now 22-0 when it comes to the box office.

Alan Horn, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, called the results “monumental” and noted that Marvel had challenged “the notions of what is possible at the movie theater.”

About 44 percent of the global total came from 3-D screenings, according to the technology company RealD. Disney said on Sunday morning that the movie set a record for the largest opening weekend in 44 overseas markets, with Imax theaters contributing an outsized portion of ticket sales, particularly in China.

Ticket sales for “Avengers: Endgame” were assuredly helped by improvements that multiplex chains have introduced in recent years. For instance, after the subscription-based ticketing service MoviePass proved to be popular with millennials, AMC and other theater operators created their own subscription programs. Apps like Atom Tickets and Fandango have made buying tickets in advance more popular, which helps to create buzz and reduce the need to wait in line at box-office windows.

But the movie, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, arrived as a cultural and commercial thunderclap because of the way in which Kevin Feige, Marvel’s president, built the “Avengers” series to a storytelling climax. In the last installment, “Avengers: Infinity War,” a lantern-jawed villain named Thanos (Josh Brolin) snapped his fingers and turned half the creatures in the universe to dust, including a vast number of superheroes. “Avengers: Endgame” finds battered survivors like Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) joining together in one final attempt to restore order.

“It is likely to be the last film with the original — and beloved — Avengers cast,” Mr. Creutz said.

If so, plenty of people made sure they were there to see it. And they appear to have been satisfied: In CinemaScore exit polls, ticket buyers gave the film an A-plus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/28/m...ox-office.html





The Remarkable Story of a Woman Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV History

Thousands of hours of Marion Stokes’s personal recordings will now be digitized, one tape at a time.
Noor Al-Samarrai

About 71,000 VHS and Betamax cassettes are sitting in boxes, stacked 50-to-a-pallet in the Internet Archive’s physical storage facility in Richmond, California, waiting to be digitized. The tapes are not in chronological order, or really any order at all. They got a little jumbled as they were transferred. First recorded in Marion Stokes’s home in the Barclay Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased solely for storage purposes during her life. Later, they passed on to her children, into storage, and finally to the California-based archive. Although no one knew it at the time, the recordings Stokes made from 1975 until her death in 2012 are the only comprehensive collection preserving this period in television media history.

In 1975, Stokes got a Betamax magnetic videotape recorder and began recording bits of sitcoms, science documentaries, and political news coverage. From the outset of the Iran Hostage Crisis on November 4, 1979, “she hit record and she never stopped,” said her son Michael Metelits in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, a newly released documentary about his mother and the archival project that became her life’s work.

“She was interested in access to information, documenting media, making sure people had the information they needed to make good decisions,” says the film’s director, Matt Wolf.

The year 1980 brought the launch of CNN, and the 24-hour news cycle. Soon, three, four, five, and sometimes as many as eight tapes were spinning away at once in Stokes’s apartment, recording news broadcasts, commercials, and everything in between on multiple networks. While many people assumed that television networks held on to everything they aired, that wasn’t the case. Studios were constantly erasing and recycling broadcast tapes in order to save money and free up storage space.

“We’d be out at dinner and we’d have to rush home to swap tapes.”

Stokes was no stranger to television and its role in molding public opinion. An activist archivist, she had been a librarian with the Free Library of Philadelphia for nearly 20 years before being fired in the early 1960s, likely for her work as a Communist party organizer. From 1968 to 1971, she had co-produced Input, a Sunday-morning talk show airing on the local Philadelphia CBS affiliate, with John S. Stokes Jr., who would later become her husband. Input brought together academics, community and religious leaders, activists, scientists, and artists to openly discuss social justice issues and other topics of the day.

“Our vision is really aligned with Marion’s,” says Roger Macdonald, director of the television archives at the Internet Archive. “It’s really bold and ambitious: universal access to all knowledge.” Marion’s son had contacted the Internet Archive when he was trying to find a home for her tapes in 2013. Macdonald immediately seized the opportunity. Within 20 minutes, the two were on the phone.

Macdonald recalls asking Metelits, “How could you physically manage taping all this stuff? And he said, ‘Well, we’d be out at dinner and we’d have to rush home to swap tapes’ … that was one of the cycles of their lives, tape swapping.”

In addition to her son Michael and her husband, Stokes’s nurse, secretary, driver, and step-children were enlisted to assist in her around-the-clock task of capturing every moment on television. She would also involve them in active conversations, asking those around her what they thought about how the issues of the day were being handled on broadcast television.

Having been surveilled by the government for her early political activism––she and her first husband, Melvin Metelits, had attempted to defect to Cuba together before splitting up––Stokes was exceedingly cautious about her recordings while she was alive. She eschewed Tivo, and although she was an early and evangelical investor in Apple Inc., she never sent an email in her life. She even managed to convince the rest of the already-wealthy Stokes clan to buy Apple stock, which paid off in spades. She funneled these funds into her recording project and the massive storage space she required as the sole force behind it.

“She’s already excluded from power and established institutions, so it makes sense that she’d want to pursue her life’s work privately,” says Wolf.

Now, Stokes’s work will be made publicly available on the Internet Archives, bit by bit, offering everyone the opportunity to examine history––and perhaps to set the record straight.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/article...n-news-archive





Samsung Thinks Millennials Want Vertical TVs

And Samsung might be right
Vlad Savov

The latest addition to Samsung’s TV range is the Sero, a 43-inch TV that was designed with the millennial generation in mind and therefore pivots between horizontal and vertical orientations. It’s a much smarter idea than the phrase “vertical TV” would lead you to believe. Acknowledging that most mobile content is vertical, Samsung says the Sero is designed to encourage young people to project more of their smartphone stuff onto the TV by allowing it to go vertical. Throwing in 4.1-channel, 60W speakers along with an integrated navy stand and a minimalist rear design, Samsung seems to hope this TV will function as both a music streaming hub and a handsome piece of furniture.

When it’s not used as a conventional TV or a phone enlarger, the Sero can also serve as a huge digital photo frame or a music visualizer, and Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant will be on hand, too. Samsung intends to put the Sero on sale for 1.89m KRW (around $1,600) in its home market of South Korea at the end of May.

The Sero occupies a weird middle ground between a concept and a real product. Opening a pop-up store in Seoul today and showing off the Sero alongside its existing Serif and Frame TV lines, Samsung is adding to its so-called lifestyle TV lineup. It is putting a price and release date on the Sero. But the company also calls this new TV a concept, and its efforts will surely include close monitoring of consumer feedback to the entire premise. Will millennials warm to the expanded flexibility, or will they feel subtly attacked for the Sero exposing the intensity of their (okay, our) smartphone addiction?
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/29/1...te-millennials





Huawei’s First Television Could Also be the World’s First 5G 8K TV

Those fast network speeds would come in handy for downloading high-res content.
Amrita Khalid

Huawei is reportedly working on the first 5G 8K television and could unveil it as early as this year, according to Nikkei Asian Review. The Chinese tech giant, which makes its own 5G chips, would be a newcomer in the television space. Few companies, if any, have floated the idea of a 5G TV, but that kind of connectivity would allow users to quickly download VR and other data-heavy content and watch it on an equally high-res display.

Engadget reached out to Huawei, but the company declined to comment. Despite being banned from selling most of its products in the US on national security grounds, Huawei remains popular in Europe and Asia. The company overtook Apple in 2017 as the world's second largest smartphone maker in terms of shipments, next to Samsung. As sales of Samsung phones and iPhones begin to slump, Huawei keeps growing. But Huawei's global success has run into some obstacles, largely thanks to US authorities. The Trump administration has threatened to reconsider intelligence sharing with allies if they use Huawei's 5G networking gear.

While 8K television broadcasts are still rare, 4K televisions are quickly becoming standard, which means TV makers are looking toward the next big thing. The next PlayStation is expected to support 8K resolution. Samsung and Sony have both begun selling 8K televisions, despite 8K content still being relatively rare. Samsung recently released its Q900 8K television, which costs an eye-watering $70,000. Sony released an 8K TV this year will also set you back $70,000.

While 8K may be too pricey for the average consumer, it's only a matter of time until that changes. As more households buy smart home appliances that run on 5G, a connected smart television becomes a useful hub. As VentureBeat notes, the Huawei 5G TV could serve as a router for other devices as well.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/01/...s-first-5g-8k/





Why is there No US Rival to Compete with Huawei?

• Telecoms insiders blame government and industry decisions in 1990s for stymying innovation
• Huawei’s closest rivals are Ericsson and Nokia, both European companies

Kiran Stacey

The UK’s decision to allow Huawei to supply equipment for its 5G networks has disappointed officials in Washington. But it has also reignited a debate at the top of the administration: why is there no US rival to the Chinese company?

American diplomats have been warning US allies of the danger of using the Chinese company’s telecoms equipment, which they say could be used by Beijing for spying. But they have been unable to recommend or support a US company to step in and provide the same equipment instead.

“The White House keeps asking why we can’t do what Huawei does, and how long it would take for us to be able to do so,” said one US telecoms executive. “They don’t seem to understand — we gave that capability up a long time ago.”

Huawei is the world’s biggest telecoms equipment maker, with a 28 per cent market share — according to Dell’Oro, the market research company — and more 5G contracts around the world than any other company.

Its closest rivals are Ericsson and Nokia, the European companies. But there is no US group that can build the equipment to transfer signals between mobile phones and the towers or sites that make up the network.

“This is a serious problem, and one that we probably engineered over a long period of time,” said Robert Mayer, senior vice-president of cyber security at the industry group US Telecom. “Now that Huawei has captured the level of market share they have, and with more recognition of the security concerns that poses, a lot of people are asking, ‘How did this happen?’”

In the early days of landline telecoms, the US was dominant, with companies such as AT&T, which was the successor to the old Bell System monopoly, providing network equipment to countries around the world. Bell Labs, the research arm of the old monopoly, was known as “the idea factory”, reflecting the pre-eminence of US telecoms innovation.

“US vendors got very powerful and strong in the old landline world,” said Dan Hesse, a former chief executive of Sprint and before that of AT&T Wireless. “But because of that, it was difficult for them to make the change aggressively and quickly enough towards the mobile and internet future.”

Industry veterans say that supremacy disintegrated because of choices made during the 1990s, both by government and the companies themselves.

In 1996, the US passed a Telecommunications Act, which prompted a flurry of new entrants into the market.

But some say the battle that followed left large US telecoms equipment makers — such as Lucent, which was spun out of AT&T and included Bell Labs — financially stretched, and the market as a whole fragmented.

Tom Lauria, a telecoms analyst and former director at Lucent, said: “After the Telecoms Act of 1996, we had a massive number of entrants into the market. To keep them going, we would finance almost everything they bought until they became mature enough to pay the money back. This was not a sustainable model.”

Others point out that the 1996 act allowed companies to develop and use their own network technologies, while in Europe companies all agreed to use GSM, which became the worldwide standard for mobile communications.

At the same time, said Mr Lauria, companies such as Lucent were also looking to sell into the fast-growing Chinese market, helping keep revenues afloat, but also sewing the seed for China’s eventual domination.

“Whenever we sold to the Chinese, they would demand that we manufacture locally and that we hand over the technology to our Chinese partners,” he said. “Western companies needed the revenue growth, and that meant we had to play by their rules.”

In the end, Lucent was bought by France’s Alcatel in 2006. Nokia Siemens Networks bought Motorola’s network infrastructure division in 2011, before going on to purchase the combined Alcatel-Lucent in 2015.

Until recently, what some in the sector see as a commercial failure by US companies was not a political problem. But with the imminent roll-out of 5G, many in President Donald Trump’s administration are worried that the US will fall behind further.

As a result, some are promoting unlikely solutions, such as getting the US government to develop and build 5G networks instead.

“To get to 5G in America, you need to go to the defence department,” Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives, recently told a conference in Washington.

Others, however, are urging Mr Trump to accept the reality that much of the world’s 5G equipment will be built outside the US, and to compel allies to use European products rather than cheaper Chinese ones.

“The cost of replacing an entity on the scale of Huawei would be prohibitive,” said Mr Mayer. “The genie is already out of the bottle.”
Listen: Investigating the Huawei leak, Change UK launches its Euro campaign
https://www.ft.com/content/18d3823a-...c-98bf1d35a056





Walmart Bets on TV Shows for Families, Date Night in Media Push
Lucas Shaw and Matthew Boyle

• Retailer is said to line up slate of programs for Vudu service
• Decade-old streaming service plans to tout new ad technology

Walmart Inc. already sells more TVs than anyone. Now it wants to make the shows you watch on them, too.

The retailer plans to bankroll at least a half-dozen original programs over the next year, and will unveil the first few to advertisers in New York this week, people familiar with the plans said. Walmart has talked with several Hollywood studios about rebooting family-friendly projects from years ago, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public yet.

Walmart’s slate is supposed to lure more viewers to Vudu, a company-owned streaming service that already offers free programs with commercials, along with online rentals and sales of movies and shows. The strategy has worked for Netflix Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Hulu LLC.

The world’s largest retailer, Walmart sells the most TVs of any chain and ranks among the biggest marketers of movies and TV shows. With streaming starting to supplant DVDs, Walmart acquired Vudu in 2010 to gain a foothold in the burgeoning market for online entertainment. But the service has been an also-ran, while Netflix, Google, Apple Inc. and Amazon built global audiences in the tens of millions.

“They’ve struggled to figure out their role in the new streaming environment,” said Edward Yruma, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets. “Walmart sells almost 50 percent of all TVs in the U.S., so clearly they have some opportunities to better leverage the purchase.”

‘Shoppable’ Content

While some aspects of Walmart’s plans have trickled out over the past few months, many details are being reported here for the first time.

Unlike Netflix and Amazon, Walmart isn’t going to sell its customers a subscription. It sees an opportunity to generate cash by using shows on Vudu to advertise products. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer has been pitching advertising agencies in recent weeks, eager to line up deals in time for its presentation this week.

The company will tout new advertising technology at the event, and has already convinced some of its biggest suppliers to commit tens of millions of dollars in upfront advertising sales, the people said.

The new shows will test the potential of “shoppable” content -- programming that can directly lead to sales in stores or online. Not only will viewers see ads, they will have the option to buy products seen in the shows, such as paper towels or soft drinks.

“A lot of our advertisers haven’t worked with Vudu before, but having a new name out there, and having that name connected to Walmart, should spark interest,” said Alex Stone, a vice president at Horizon Media, whose clients have included Corona beer and Geico insurance. “Vudu is much more popular in the Midwest and middle of the country than the coasts.”

Measured Approach

Walmart signaled its intent to venture deeper into entertainment last year when it invested in Eko, an interactive media company, and struck a deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio behind “Ben-Hur” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Their first collaboration is “Mr. Mom,” based on the 1983 movie written by John Hughes. In the original, Michael Keaton starred as dad who stays at home to care for his young children after he gets laid off and his wife gets a high-paying job at an advertising agency. The reboot will debut on Vudu in June, one of the people said.

The show is typical of what Walmart has told Hollywood executives it wants -- programs that families can watch at home together. The company wants to appeal to kids, parents and couples on date night. It’s close to deals for a science-fiction show and a procedural program like “CSI.’’

With just days to go before its presentation, Walmart was still scrambling to get deals done, and had yet to reach agreements on at least a couple shows that it wanted to announce, according to the people.

While Walmart’s strategy looks similar to Apple’s and Amazon’s -- investing in media to support the company’s main business -- it’s not in the running to produce the next “Game of Thrones.”

The retailer is taking a relatively measured approach by spending just a couple of million dollars per episode -- at most -- suggesting budgets that are more in line with original programming on basic cable channels.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-in-media-push





How the Dream of Cheap Streaming Television Became a Pricey, Complicated Mess
Steven Zeitchik and Craig Timberg

The dream of cutting the cord on pricey cable TV services went something like this: Consumers could get what they wanted, when they wanted, while saving money because they wouldn’t be paying for expensive bundles of channels they never watched.

Snip, save, enjoy.

But this entertainment nirvana never actually arrived. First came pricey broadband services required to stream Internet video, often delivered by the same cable wires consumers longed to cut. Then came a proliferation of services — offered by Netflix, Amazon, Hulu plus and more — each with a bill of its own. Then came more boxes, wires and remotes.

And finally came the question: How exactly do I get my “Star Wars” fix?

The answer, it became clear with an announcement here at Disney’s Southern California headquarters Thursday night, is that most consumers eventually will need yet another service to stream many of the staples of American entertainment: “Frozen,” the Avengers and, yes, all those “Star Wars” sequels, prequels and spinoffs.

While many of these favorites will remain available on other services for a time, gradually Disney will pull them into its own service, Disney+. The cost: $6.99 a month.

“If cord cutters thought there was some way they were going to evade the tyranny of annual price increases, they were deluding themselves,” said industry analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson. “Every economist in the world tried to warn that the outcome of that system would be higher prices and less choice. And lo and behold, that’s where we landed.”

Those who study the entertainment industry debate the underlying reasons for this. One group blames the industry’s biggest players for reasserting their control over pricing in a way that disadvantages consumers — and Washington for allowing that to happen. Streaming services are the profitable beneficiaries of these shifts, while consumers’ wallets are the losers.

The other side, including Moffett, says the outcome was inevitable for a range of predictable reasons: Americans want the best, coolest shows, and these cost a lot of money in actors, set costs, big-name directors and special effects. Even for a television show, these expenses can run into the millions of dollars per episode.

But there is no real debate about the outcome: The dreams of cord cutters are largely unfulfilled. A transition that some hoped would provide more choice, lower prices and more simplicity instead has delivered frustrating levels of complexity. There still may be more choice, but each choice comes with price tags that, taken together, may well approach the cable bills of old.

“It’s not going to come for free,” said Michael Powell, president of trade group NCTA, representing pay television and broadband providers. “People want to watch their ‘True Detective,’ ‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Mad Men,’ and that stuff costs a fortune.”

The shift is visible in the falling number of traditional cable video subscribers and the rising numbers of broadband subscribers. The two lines crossed a few years ago, according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence. Broadband customers are more profitable for cable companies, too — because they don’t have to share those monthly fees with the media companies providing the shows.

In other words, as television consumers pared back on cable packages, they spent more on Internet. This hurt satellite television companies, but relatively few actual cords got cut. And many of those that got cut were replaced by new cords from other companies, with bills of their own, not to mention the ones from streaming services that delivered the actual shows, movies and sporting events.

“Paying five different streaming services a total of 50 or 60 dollars to get some of what we want instead of a little more to get a lot of what we want — well, I think a lot of people would prefer the package deal,” said Atlas Media founder Bruce David Klein, a veteran television producer and cable expert. “It’s getting harder to piece all this together in a way that doesn’t cost a fortune.”

Disney officials said their service would offer advantages viewers can’t get anywhere else.

“Never before has our content been as broadly, conveniently or permanently available as it is on Disney+," said Disney executive Kevin Mayer while standing on the studio’s lot. “We’re confident consumers will love the service.”

Company officials portrayed Disney+ as particularly attractive to consumers craving simplicity. Rather than the thousands of scattershot shows and movies on Netflix, Disney executives said they would offer a streamlined set of offerings from their popular content brands including Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilm.

Investors seemed pleased — Disney stock closed up 11 percent Friday.

But Tim Wu, author of “The Attention Merchants,” argues that Disney’s announcement and other recent developments signal that a halcyon era is ending, one in which disruption in the entertainment industry unleashed opportunities for better consumer deals.

The deals came for those willing to cancel their cable services while being careful in adding new streaming services. Such restraint has gotten harder as the industry has fractured, with many entities, including sports leagues and genre-focused producers, now offering their own packages.

“Everything is about funding, a way to make people pay more money,” Wu said. “The incentives are to have streaming be as bad a deal as cable already was.”

Streaming began as the domain of the digital-minded Netflix and soon attracted a slew of entrants. Legacy companies, frustrated that Netflix was growing its influence on the backs of their shows, made plans to take back rights and launch competitors.

Technology giants such as Amazon soon began moving in. Apple, which has a roster of new high-end content it will launch later this year, is the latest to join the fray. And a host of niche services have sprung up, from the animecentric Crunchyroll to multiple platforms specializing in British television. HBO parent WarnerMedia is expected to launch its own streaming service as soon as this year. (Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)

"It is quite an Excel spreadsheet to dissect all the options,” said Trip Miller, founder of the investment firm Gullane Capital.

When consumers do decide on a service, they might find it costs more than they expect. Netflix recently raised its monthly prices by as much as 18 percent. The hikes have been imposed partly to fund original shows, whose costs have risen thanks to a heated content market and the audience’s desire for higher production values.

While figures don’t suggest a cable television resurgence, the sector has slowed its losses. Comcast and Charter Communications, the nation’s two largest cable providers, reported cable-revenue growth in the mid-single digits for the most recent quarter, suggesting that the rate of attrition has lessened. Shows on Hallmark and History regularly attract 2 million to 3 million viewers, an impressive number given that Netflix mostly does not reveal how many people are viewing its shows.

Still, streaming could undermine consumer choice. Netflix’s emergence has put the squeeze on what has historically been a large supplier of original programs — cable networks.

In the fall, a critically acclaimed show on Lifetime, “You,” foundered as many of its core customers had turned to Netflix. The cable network decided against funding a second season because of low viewership. Netflix then stepped in to finance the season. Many in Hollywood saw it as proof that only a few well-capitalized players could keep the pipeline flowing.

And newer suppliers, like Apple, could decide to exit if consumer adoption doesn’t happen quickly.

A study by Ovum analyst Tony Gunnarsson cited at the recent NAB trade show noted that the majority of consumers will subscribe to only 2.25 streaming services, leaving many players out in the cold.

Experts say that while the market can probably accommodate Disney, others may not be as lucky.

"Netflix got there first and is far and away the biggest, so Disney is trying to play Avis to their Hertz,” said Lloyd Greif, a Los Angeles-based investment banker who closely follows the media space.

Disney’s service will cost just over half the monthly price of the most popular Netflix plan, and even less if consumers make an annual commitment. The company can afford to do this in part because, unlike Netflix, it draws revenue from box office, theme parks, TV ad revenue and other non-subscription services.

The goal is to achieve revenue through reach, not overcharging, company officials said. Disney+ plans to launch 25 new episodic series and 10 movies in its first year. But within five years, the number of episodic shows is expected to double to 50. Over the next few years, the company will also reacquire rights to all the properties it had licensed out on long-term deals to other platforms and companies. Executives also said they expect losses through 2023. “Disney is loved by so many millions of people around the world,” said Robert Iger, its chief executive, at the investor presentation. “This is our first serious foray into this space, and we want to reach as many people as possible.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...plicated-mess/





YouTube Will Make ‘Cobra Kai,’ Other Originals Free to Watch Later This Year
Todd Spangler

YouTube is officially bringing all of its original series and specials — available for free, with ads — starting this year.

It’s shift in strategy for YouTube, which has previously made premium content available only to subscribers of YouTube Premium, which costs $11.99 monthly in the U.S. In some cases, however, YouTube will selectively window shows on the free, ad-supported side of the platform.

YouTube last fall revealed its intent to release its premium originals for free viewing, under what it calls a “Single Slate” strategy.

Now it has some details: The free-to-watch shows from YouTube will include the first two seasons of “Cobra Kai,” YouTube’s popular series that continues the story of the “Karate Kid,” beginning this fall — and which it just renewed for season 3. For two weeks, from Aug. 29 to Sept. 11, YouTube will make all of “Cobra Kai” season 1 available for free. Then on Sept. 11, YouTube will serve up the second season of “Cobra Kai” globally for free, with new episodes released weekly.

“For today’s viewers, primetime is personal and our content resonates so strongly due to the diversity and richness of our unmatched library and platform capabilities,” YouTube chief business officer Robert Kyncl said at the Brandcast event for ad execs Thursday in New York. “While every other media company is building a paywall, we are headed in the opposite direction.”

According to YouTube, its originals amassed over 2.5 billion views across 50 shows last year — and it’s hoping the free-window strategy boosts views even more.

YouTube said it will announce additional free ad-supported premiere dates for other programming at a later date, including supernatural drama “Impulse” and comedy “Liza On Demand,” starring digital star Liza Koshy. Other originals that have been stashed behind the paywall include “Step Up: High Water,” based on the dance-movie franchise.

For YouTube, the Single Slate is an effort to better monetize its original productions through ads — across the site’s massive 2 billion-plus monthly users. It’s also part of its refocusing originals on music, learning and personality-driven projects and away from scripted fare, which may not have been delivering the hoped-for payback in driving subscriptions to YouTube Premium. YouTube recently canceled multiple scripted shows, including “Champaign ILL,” “Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television,” “Sideswiped,” “Do You Want to See a Dead Body,” “Overthinking With Kat & June,” “Youth & Consequences” and “Origin.”

YouTube scripted originals include “Liza on Demand” and “Impulse,” both of which have been renewed for second seasons and are slated to premiere this fall, initially on YouTube Premium.

The half-hour “Liza On Demand” will return with a 10-episode run following the chaotic misadventures of Liza (Liza Koshy) and her roommates Oliver (Travis Coles) and Harlow (Kimiko Glenn) as Liza takes on various tasks and odd jobs while trying to get ahead in the gig economy. The series is produced by Above Average, founded in 2012 by Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video.

“Impulse” stars Maddie Hasson as Henrietta “Henry” Cole, a rebellious 16-year-old girl who discovers she has the extraordinary ability to teleport, and her newfound power confirms her conviction that she really was different from everybody else — but it now makes her the focus of those who want to control her. The series is produced by Universal Content Productions, Hypnotic, and showrunner Lauren LeFranc.

Other YouTube announcements at Brandcast included a deal teased with Justin Bieber for a special project premiering next year, a renewal of Kevin Hart’s “What the Fit?” for season 3, and a deal to live-stream the Lollapalooza music festival this summer.
https://variety.com/2019/digital/new...nd-1203203604/





Australia Falls to the Ridiculously-Low 62nd Place in Global Internet Speed Rankings
David Ross

• Australia falls to 62nd in global broadband rankings, but is doing much better in mobile data at 5th place.
• Expert says issue is not a question of size as nations of similar sizes do better.
• The 2013 decision to change technologies used in the National Broadband Network is key to understanding how it all went wrong.

Australia is now ranked in the 62nd spot in the global broadband speed rankings, falling down three spots from last year and well behind similar advanced economies.

According to the Ookla Speedtest Global Index, Australia ranks behind Kazakhstan and Cape Verde, but above Jordan, Brazil and Saudi Arabia, with an average download speed of 35.11 Mbps. This is well below the global average download speed of 57.91 Mbps.

The top spot is held by Singapore on 199.62 Mbps, followed by Hong Kong at 168.69 Mbps and Monaco at 137.86 Mbps.

However, Australia does rank much better in mobile broadband, at 5th place – with a speed of 58.87 Mbs. Norway took out the top spot with a speed of 67.54 Mbps.

The National Broadband Network (NBN) in Australia has been touted as a game-changer to Australian internet speeds, offering speeds of up to 100 Mbps but the ACCC in 2018 found only 69 per cent of all speed tests achieved download speeds of above 90 per cent of maximum plan speeds, while seven per cent of tests recorded less than 50 per cent of the maximum.

Recent figures from the NBN show there are now more than 4.6 million premises with the NBN, up 38 per cent from 2018. Despite this, speeds across the country have not increased.

NBN said in a statement that 57 per cent of activated premises were “connected to the 50 Mbps wholesale download speed tier plans or above” compared to 16 per cent for the same time last year.
Source: NBN

RMIT University Associate Professor of Engineering Mark Gregory told Business Insider Australia anyone looking at the Ookla rankings “needs to temper their consideration” given the NBN is a national rollout and that some countries with access to high speeds compared to Australia had a much smaller user base.

“There’s a big difference between an outcome that’s national and an outcome that might only cover 10% of a population in a country,” Gregory said.

While Kazakhstan ranks above Australia, 86 per cent of the population lacks access to fixed broadband, according to stats cited by a spokesman for Communications Minister Mitch Fifield in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Gregory added that despite the comparison being a difficult one, Australia is still not kicking any goals in the speed department.

“It’s a bit of comparing apples with oranges, but I would say that if you look at it in terms of the trend and the numbers of connections and what those connections are providing then you would have to say Australia is doing very poorly,” he said.

Gregory said nations of similar size, or significantly greater numbers of connections, outperformed Australia.

In March, the Labor party ruled out overhauling the NBN, with Labor communications spokeswoman Michelle Rowland telling the Sydney Institute the Liberal-National Coalition had driven up costs and done serious damage to the project.

She said that the Labor party, if elected, would spend $185 million on improving the network, with a review of the $50 billion project to follow.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports Labor plans to spend $125 million on fixing in-home wiring problems for up to 750,000 people, with the leftover $60 million used on adding 20,000 people to the high-speed fibre network.

Gregory said he supports Labor’s proposal and believes that the Ookla figures demonstrate that the decision taken in 2013 to change technologies used in building the NBN was wrong.

Ex-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was the communications minister responsible for the NBN when the government, under the leadership of Tony Abbott, reworked the network with different technologies. In 2014, the majority of the network design switched from fibre to the premises (FTTP) to fibre to the node (FTTN), creating a mix of technologies. In 2016, the government announced another change to fibre to the curb (FTTC).

Alex Choros, Managing Editor at WhistleOut, told Business Insider the mix of technologies created issues around cost and maintenance as copper wiring degrading faster than fibre optic.

“Over a long period of time there may be some savings from using fibre to the premises,” he said.

He said that because NBN did not mix technologies within areas it made maintenance in some places easier, as the mix of technologies did not compete. However, he said the problem was more for consumers who were locked into technology types and connection speeds based on where they live and when they got the NBN.

“From a consumer perspective, it makes it more complicated in some ways and not in others,” he said.

“There are seven technologies in the multi-technology mix but as a consumer, you can only get one.”

The Coalition’s multi-technology NBN model was marketed as delivering a cheaper network sooner but ultimately faced huge cost blowouts.

“The one that is going to have the most impact in the medium to longer term is if Labor is able to identify how to move us back toward an all-fibre network whilst maintaining competition,” Gregory said.

NBN told Business Insider Australia they were unable to make a comment at this time due to caretaker provisions from the government during this election period.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/a...ankings-2019-4





Charter Communications’ Quarterly Revenues Rise
Paul Schott

Cable-and-internet giant Charter Communications reported Tuesday rising revenues and profits for the past quarter, as it saw growing demand for its internet services but a decline in video and phone customers.

First-quarter revenues increased about 5 percent year-over-year, to $11.2 billion. Profits totaled about $253 million, compared with $168 million in the same period in 2018, reflecting higher adjusted earnings, lower depreciation and amortization costs and lower merger and restructuring costs.

“We performed well in the first quarter,” Charter CEO and Chairman Tom Rutledge said on a call Tuesday with investment analysts. “Our three-year effort to deliver better products, at better prices, via a single operating entity, with a unified product-and-marketing service infrastructure is beginning to pay off.”

Charter shares closed Tuesday at about $371 , nearly flat compared with their Monday finish.

Nearly three years after the company acquired Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks for about $65 billion, Charter now serves about 26.6 million residences and 1.9 million small and medium-size businesses. Its total customer base grew about 4 percent in the past year.

Its internet consumer base rose about 5 percent in the past year, to about 24 million. In the same time frame, its video business dropped 2 percent, to nearly 16 million customers.

“As part of a (product) bundle, video drives internet sales and reduces (customer) churn,” Charter Chief Financial Officer Christopher Winfrey said on the call. “It remains an integral part of our business strategy for connectivity services, as it drives less stand-alone profit over time.”

The company’s “voice” phone-service business counts about 10 million customers, down 3 percent from a year ago.

During the past year, the company has rolled out its mobile platform, which is available to customers of its Spectrum-branded internet service. About 176,000 mobile lines were added in the past quarter.

Among other recent developments, Charter earlier this month reached an agreement with regulators to stay in New York state by expanding its internet service, nine months after the state’s Public Service Commission had ordered the firm to leave for allegedly violating the terms of its merger with Time Warner Cable.

Last December, the company settled, for $174 million, a lawsuit by the New York State Attorney General’s office alleging that Charter and TWC, when it operated independently, denied customers reliable and fast internet service that had been promised.

Meanwhile, construction continues at 406 Washington Blvd., the future site of Charter’s headquarters and a few blocks from its current home at 400 Atlantic St.

Earlier this month, Charter gained the Stamford Zoning Board’s approval to add a second building on the site, complementing its originally planned 500,000-square-foot tower next to the downtown Metro-North station.

Charter plans to move into the new headquarters in 2021.
https://www.newstimes.com/business/a...e-13806796.php





Putin Signs Law to Isolate Russian Internet
Max Seddon

Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a law on Wednesday that intends to give the country a “sovereign internet” the Kremlin could disconnect from the global web.

Moscow says the move is to “ensure the safe and sustainable functioning” of Russia’s internet in the event that hostile powers attempt to switch it off from abroad. But critics say the move is intended to further clamp down on dissent amid already-tightening restrictions on freedom of speech.

The bill, which goes into force on November 1, requires internet service providers to filter all traffic through special nodes under the control of Roscomnadzor, the Kremlin’s internet censor. The Kremlin will compel ISPs and other communications services to test the system at an unspecified time later this year.

Though it remains largely unclear how — or even whether — the disconnect would work in practice, the move would theoretically make it easier for Roscomnadzor to enforce its highly inefficient blocks of banned websites, messaging app Telegram, and non-compliant VPN services.

Though Russia has increased its control over the internet in recent years — including a recent law banning “fake news” and insulting public officials — its laws are applied selectively and are mostly easy to bypass.

Roscomnadzor boss Alexander Zharov said last month that the move was “a pretty serious weapon, but I hope that, like nuclear weapons in the possession of several countries, it’ll remain dormant”.
https://www.ft.com/content/9ba46770-...7-60ee53e6681d





Inside the Shrinking Newsroom of the Paper That Shapes the Primaries
Tim Alberta

Tony Leys is a newspaperman. He has covered murders. He has worked the copy desk. He has knocked on doors and taken verbal battering. Most reporters evolve to become editors, but Leys, bored behind a desk 20 years ago, did the opposite. After spending much of his career assigning stories—as city editor, state editor, politics editor—he returned to writing them. His beat became health care, and he owned it, reporting with soul-wringing realism on the flaws of the American medical apparatus. He has won numerous awards, including two years ago for reporting on the impact of Medicaid privatization, as told through the eyes of poor, suffering patients, and last year for authoring a stellar package of Sunday print edition stories about mental health.

There will be no such series this year. Not because Leys has lost his job, but because he’s being reassigned—sort of. He’ll continue to cover health-related stories. But for the next 10 months, his priority will be covering presidential politics. Leys is used to this. It happens every four years. Because this is Iowa. Because this is the Des Moines Register.

Since the dawn of the modern nominating process, no single event has done more to winnow the field of aspiring presidents than the Iowa caucuses—and no single publication has done more to capture its characters, narratives and rhythms than the Register. But the scythe of technological change and economic pressure that is killing the news industry, and especially local journalism, is coming for Iowa’s paper of record, too. There are fewer and fewer political gatekeepers like the Register these days: influential publications staffed by reporters who live among the voters they cover, understanding their lifestyles and livelihoods in ways that can’t be mimicked by their peers parachuting in from Washington or New York or Los Angeles.

It’s almost impossible to imagine the first-in-the-nation nominating contest without Iowa’s biggest newspaper. Its editorial endorsements are national news. Its front-page stories, on subjects ranging from politics to agriculture policy, demand attention from every campaign. And its celebrated statewide survey—“The Iowa Poll,” a Register tradition since 1943—is met with nearly as much anticipation and external media hype in the political world as the caucus results themselves. “When I land at DSM,” says Jonathan Martin, national political reporter for the New York Times, “the first thing I do is pick up the Register.”

When Leys was first asked to “pinch-hit” during the 2004 cycle—filling in for political reporters, when asked, to write about Democratic candidates—he was thrilled. Any journalist who comes to Iowa pines to cover the caucuses, and Leys, who had been with the Register since 1988, was finally getting his shot. He felt fortunate whenever called upon, unsure how often the opportunity would present itself. The next time around, however, in 2008, Leys was pulled into political coverage more frequently. Then, in 2012, he became something of a hybrid, devoting nearly as much time to reporting on elections as he did health care. By the 2016 cycle, Leys was a full-time political correspondent, finding time to cover his regular beat when the presidential churn paused or when a major health-related story demanded it.

Today, with the 2020 Democratic caucuses already in full swing—20 declared candidates marauding across the state, and several more soon to join them—Leys can only chuckle at the quaintness of those old days. Fourteen reporters at the Register are currently assigned to Democratic candidates, responsible for tracking their every move and covering their every stop in the state, but only three of them are practiced political journalists. The paper’s business reporter is covering Bernie Sanders; its agriculture reporter is responsible for keeping tabs on not-yet-declared Montana Governor Steve Bullock; its metro reporter is assigned to the long-shot Maryland Congressman John Delaney, who has all but lived in Iowa for the past two years.

Chasing every candidate to every part of the state might seem like overkill—OK, it is overkill—but it’s essential to making the Register’s reporting distinct and prescient, allowing the newspaper to spot critical trends before they become national headlines. It’s also what maximizes the Register’s value to parent company Gannett and its “USA Today Network,” more than 100 newspapers operating under the model of one unified newsroom. The Register is effectively Gannett’s Iowa bureau for the next 10 months, responsible for producing caucus-related content that can be shared across the network.

Because of this, what was once a luxury—beat reporters moonlighting as political correspondents—is now key to the Register’s survival. The newspaper is but a shadow of the behemoth it once was. A decade's worth of layoffs and buyouts have gutted the editorial operation and purged the administrative staff crucial to running a metro daily. The institutional knowledge critical to covering a state—and paramount to reporting on the Iowa caucuses—has been all but eradicated. And yet, the reality is that many comparable small-city newspapers have it much worse; if it weren’t for the global obsession with Iowa’s role in choosing leaders of the free world, the Register bullpen would be even emptier.

After 30 years at the paper, Leys understands better than anyone the good fortune brought by the caucuses—and the value of journalistic versatility. His health care beat, thanks to perpetual drama surrounding Iowa’s privatized Medicaid system, remains one of the newsroom’s busiest. Meanwhile, his assigned White House hopeful, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, continues to be active on the campaign trail. And, as one of the Register’s most senior reporters, Leys is often asked to float above the fray, authoring or contributing to big-picture stories or news analyses.

During one recent stretch, Leys wrote up the results of the latest Iowa Poll; reported a canny feature about the racially integrated and now-lost town of Buxton, Iowa, where Booker’s family has roots; broke the news that dozens of severely disabled Iowans were being evacuated from their care facility amid flooding on the west side of the state; penned a clever enterprise article about a group of Democratic voters who are attempting to read every candidate’s memoir before caucus day; and published at least five other health-related stories, including a deeply reported investigative piece about the alarming spike in patient deaths at a state-managed institution with high staff turnover.

This was in a span of 3½ weeks.

The effort is noble, valiant, even inspiring: a shrinking team of Swiss-army-knife reporters hustling across all 99 Iowa counties in pursuit of presidential candidates, clinging to the Register’s outsized role in narrating the path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, all while reporting other beats essential to preserving its identity and publishing a daily newspaper.

But from the perspective of the public interest, it’s also deeply depressing. Local journalism is going extinct across America. According to Pew Research, the number of newsroom employees working for newspapers was cut nearly in half between 2008 and 2017, dropping from 71,000 to an estimated 39,000. In the past year alone, crippling layoffs have hit the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Dallas Morning News and many of the newspapers owned by Gannett.

The good news for Register staffers: Never have they been more indispensable. At a time of extraordinary interest in the presidency and national politics, the big game is once again being played in their own backyard, and by more players than ever before. There will be no story more important these next 18 months—to Iowans and Americans, to Register editors and Gannett executives—than Trump’s fight for reelection, and the Democrats’ attempt to stop him. In a show of this, Gannett recently lured Annah Backstrom Aschbrenner, a well-respected Register alum who left journalism last year, back to the company to serve as USA Today’s Iowa-based 2020 editor, responsible for coordinating coverage across the network.

The bad news: Never has the future looked so bleak.

MNG Enterprises, also known as Digital First Media, is attempting a hostile takeover of Gannett. Nicknamed the “destroyer of newspapers” for its dismembering of the Denver Post and numerous other properties, MNG is operated by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. It made an unsolicited offer earlier this year to purchase Gannett for $1.36 billion—a premium of $12 per share—and is trying to install loyalists on the board of directors to muscle through a deal. Claiming to already be the company’s largest shareholder, MNG has considerable leverage. The growing perception is that a sale will happen sooner or later; Gannett’s CEO had announced plans to retire before the MNG offer, but conspicuously, no successor has yet been named.

Gannett has long been criticized in media circles for its slashing of newsroom budgets. Yet the company has at least offered a veil of rationale—that restructuring is necessary for long-term viability, that by cutting 10 jobs now they are saving 50 jobs later. By contrast, MNG barely even pretends to be interested in the sustainability of journalism; it is transparently interested in profits first and foremost. Over the past few years, MNG has ravaged newsrooms large and small with sweeping staff reductions aimed at making money to offset Alden Global’s losses elsewhere.

The sale likely would spell doom for hundreds and hundreds of journalists at Gannett-owned newspapers, and the most vulnerable would likely be those older, better-paid veterans such as Leys. There was a time when a 53-year-old would be in the prime of his journalism career; that time has passed. Leys is one of the longest-tenured reporters at the Register and appreciates the implications of the MNG offer. “The pirate ship just appeared over the horizon,” he smiles.

For television networks, glitzy new-media giants and those legacy publications fortunate enough to have billionaire owners, it’s a wonderful time to be working in journalism. But for a newspaperman at the Des Moines Register, there are more stories to write than ever, fewer colleagues than ever to help shoulder the load and an industry shriveling up around him. And now, there is a vulture circling its carcass.

It’s enough to make Leys throw up his hands in defeat—or it would be, if only he weren’t enjoying himself so much. “At this point, if you’re still in journalism, it should be because you love it,” he says. “So many people in this world wake up every morning and work jobs they hate. I get to work a job I love. And that’s such a privilege.”

At 9 o’clock they gather around a rectangular table framed by a menacingly bare wall of blue. The white grids slapped across the canvass delineate three sets of plans, one for each of the beasts the Register must constantly feed. The first chart, labeled “DIGITAL,” houses subcategories for stories pegged to specific themes (“Family Forward”) or those aimed toward broader, viral audiences (“Trending/SEO”). The second chart, labeled “DAILY EDITION,” contains a Monday-through-Saturday table for plotting stories in the paper’s main, metro, business, life and sports sections. The third chart, labeled “SUNDAY,” is for the publication’s crown jewel, that meaty, delicious, advertising-stuffed edition that people still bother reading.

Every weekday morning here they sit, a dozen or so Register editors, doing the daunting work of putting together a newspaper. They download new story assignments. They share updates on existing ones. They debate which articles are ready to run, how long they should be and where they should be placed. They try like hell to fill in as many blue boxes as possible.

And yet, this morning—a Thursday in late March—is different from the rest. For the first time since the midterm elections the previous November, not a single Democratic presidential contender will be in Iowa this weekend.

Carol Hunter can breathe a sigh of relief. Ordinarily, this lack of on-the-trail coverage would leave a yawning hole in all three planning departments—digital, daily and Sunday. But in this case, Hunter, the newspaper’s executive editor, realizes the timing is fortuitous. Iowa has been gashed by biblical flooding this week, and for the next few days, Des Moines will be a host to the opening round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Not only is there plenty of news to cover; there are lots of warm bodies to throw at these big stories, bodies that wouldn’t be available if a half-dozen Democrats were roaming around the state as they are most weekends.

To run any major metro daily is to attempt a balancing act: generating more stories for both print and the web, with fewer reporters and fewer resources, all while attempting to maintain quality in reporting, editing and production. But the Register, thanks to the circus-like environment created by the caucuses, requires a special breed of ringmaster. That’s Hunter.

Sixty-two years old, with a soft voice and placid expression, the executive editor doesn’t fit the Hollywood archetype of a hard-charging, piss-and-vinegar newspaper boss. Then again, Hunter’s own style seems to suit everyone here just fine. She doesn’t speak up often in the story-planning meeting, but when she does, people snap to attention. Hunter’s subordinates past and present rave about her, and the reputation she has gained commands respect: Raised on a farm in southeast Kansas, fighting “drought and flood and whatever else came our way,” Hunter climbed the journalism ladder rung by rung, becoming the first woman editor to lead the Courier-News in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and then the first woman editor to lead the Green Bay Press-Gazette, before coming to the Register in 2004 to run the editorial page.

There was no glass ceiling to shatter in Des Moines. Several of Hunter’s predecessors were women, and though she claims it’s incidental, almost all of her lieutenant editors are women—a rarity even in today’s diversifying media world. One of them, Rachel Stassen-Berger, is particularly vital to the publication’s success. As politics editor, Stassen-Berger oversees a team of five “full-time” campaign reporters (including Leys, who hardly fits that description) and nine part-time campaign reporters (including, for example, Kevin Hardy, who splits his time between covering Bernie Sanders and the Des Moines business community).

It’s the job of Stassen-Berger to organize and schedule, to direct traffic and avoid turf wars. On any given day, there could be a 10,000-strong Sanders rally and a major corporate makeover downtown. The question Stassen-Berger is constantly asking of other editors, when attempting to assign political stories to their reporters, is, “Does this screw you?” If the answer is yes, then Stassen-Berger juggles personnel and tries to find someone else to write the story. If the answer is no—which is far more frequent—the reporter takes the campaign assignment and pushes his or her normal daily beat to the back burner.

This is the central dilemma facing the Register. Because “politics is the franchise topic for us,” as Hunter says, her resources have shifted disproportionately toward campaign coverage. (There are only so many resources; to keep the Iowa Poll alive, the Register partnered with Bloomberg in 2016 and is teaming up with CNN and Mediacom in 2020.) The prioritization of politics makes sense from a corporate perspective: Gannett wants each local property to deliver something relevant to its national readership of the USA Today Network, and naturally sees campaign reporting as the priority from Iowa.

But the Register also serves a substantial number of Iowans who care nothing for turn-of-the-screw caucus coverage, whose loyalty to the publication owes to generations of commitment to issues like agriculture and energy. Serving both of these masters—the click-happy corporate honchos in suburban Washington and the core readership in central Iowa—would be difficult enough with a robust staff. But Hunter does not have a robust staff.

Sipping a Diet Mountain Dew in her glass-walled office, Hunter looks out over an ultramodern newsroom that has conspicuous amounts of white space. The Register moved into this headquarters, on the fifth floor of the downtown square, in 2013. It wasn’t a popular decision: For nearly a century, the newspaper had thrived at its musty, charming old home a few blocks away at 715 Locust Street. It was there that an estimated 300 to 400 journalists published two daily newspapers, the Register and the Evening Tribune; where the Register alone reached a peak circulation in excess of 250,000 daily and 550,000 Sunday readers; where these journalists won more than a dozen Pulitzers and established the Des Moines Register as one of America’s great daily newspapers.

It was also in that old newsroom where the red flags became apparent: dropping circulation, diminishing ad revenues, decreasing daily sales. When the newspaper’s longtime owners, the Cowles family, sold it to Gannett in 1985, it was national news, a portentous indicator for an industry already in decline—and still a decade away from the dawn of the digital age. Whatever hope there was for new ownership stopping the paper’s slide was soon lost. According to the Des Moines Cityview, the Register suffered a circulation drop of nearly 50,000 and a Sunday drop of 90,000 between 1988 and 1998, thanks in some part to the shuttering of its bureaus around the state. Even as Gannett’s profits surged, its local papers continued their brutal, inexorable contraction, and in 2011 a symbolic blow was struck: Amid 700 layoffs by Gannett nationwide—roughly coinciding with its CEO’s salary being doubled—the Register fired 13 staffers, including a Pulitzer winner and its D.C.-based agriculture reporter. The paper closed its Washington bureau permanently.

Two years later, when the Register relocated down the road, Gannett executives hyped the move as a leap into the 21st century, “including a state-of-the-art video production studio and 42 large display screens to project news and information,” read an article in the newspaper. The new space, according to the article, “houses 525 employees.”

Today, after several subsequent rounds of layoffs, the Register has 60 authorized positions.

There is talent remaining; the newspaper, which is still a plum destination for young journalism-school graduates in the greater Midwest, won a Pulitzer in 2018 for Andie Dominick’s editorial writing. But the continued drops in print consumption and personnel leave little room for celebration. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, in the fourth quarter of 2018, Sunday circulation for the Register was 91,524. Its daily circulation was just 59,854.

There has been no discussion of cutting back on print production, officials with both Gannett and the Register say. But there is an obvious urgency when it comes to juicing web traffic; without drawing repeat visitors to the website and app, it’s hard to sell digital subscriptions, and without selling digital subscriptions, new revenue is hard to come by.

Some of this depends on good journalism—and some of it depends on good luck. During the Thursday morning meeting, amid discussions of numerous stories, one idea generates the most buzz around the table: Bill Murray is in town for the NCAA tournament, and Aaron Calvin, the young “trending reporter” tasked with attracting eyeballs by any means necessary, suggests a photo gallery of the actor cheering on his team. Sure enough, a few hours later, it’s the top traffic-driver on the Register’s website.

It was an ordinary Tuesday in July 2015, the nascent presidential race barely yawning to life, when Donald Trump declared war on the Des Moines Register.

Three days earlier in Ames, Iowa, the GOP newcomer—just a month into his candidacy—had sparked a five-alarm political blaze by mocking Senator John McCain for having been captured in Vietnam. In response, the Register ran an editorial, “Trump should pull the plug on his bloviating side show,” that called him “wholly unqualified to sit in the White House” and concluded, “The best way Donald Trump can serve his country is by apologizing to McCain and terminating this ill-conceived campaign.”

Ricocheting across social media, the editorial made instant national news. And so did what came next.

“The Des Moines Register has lost much circulation, advertising, and power over the last number of years,” Trump said in a statement later that day. “They will do anything for a headline, and this poorly written ‘non-endorsement’ got them some desperately needed ink.”

These were the earliest days of Trumpism—long before cries of “Fake News!”—and his counterattack was genuinely surprising. It’s foolish enough, as the axiom goes, to pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel; picking a fight with the biggest newspaper in the first-in-the-nation nominating state seemed suicidal. Except that it wasn’t. Trump’s broadside against the Register—whose unabashedly liberal editorial board, in the minds of Republicans, had long been a blight on the state’s body politic—helped to turn the page on the McCain controversy and rally support from the right. Sensing this, Trump escalated the feud, denying the paper credentials to cover his event a few days later.

All of this—the editorial, Trump’s rejoinder, the credentialing ban—commanded the sort of wall-to-wall treatment that might be associated with the New York Times or the Washington Post instead of a paper whose daily circulation couldn’t fill the Iowa Hawkeyes’ football stadium. The episode served to highlight the singularity of the Register: Political junkies couldn’t help but read the editorial, Trump couldn’t help but return fire, and reporters couldn’t help but cover the news of his campaign taking the virtually unprecedented step of barring a newspaper from his rallies. (The practice of blacklisting media would become a staple of Trump’s candidacy.)

Iowa’s biggest newspaper was never credentialed to cover a Trump event for the remainder of the campaign. But that didn’t stop the GOP nominee from seeking out its pages. In November 2015, Trump spotted Kathie Obradovich, the longtime Register writer who was then the paper’s lead political columnist, co-moderating a Democratic debate on CBS. He requested an audience with her. When one of Trump’s aides reached out, Obradovich thought it was a prank; she had been the first Register journalist banned from covering his events four months earlier. But it wasn’t a prank. Trump insisted on sitting down with her between campaign stops, giving her 20 minutes for an interview, and making sure to say, as she recalls, “You’ve been fair to me, but I can’t say the same for your newspaper.”

It’s this type of unique attention that has long made Register reporters the envy of their peers. While national reporters parachuting into Dubuque or Boone have all the perks—big expense accounts, cable news hits, invitations to screenings in New York and black-tie dinners in Washington—rarely can they compete with the access given to the local journalists making half the salary with a fraction of the Twitter followers.

“You always got singled out for special treatment,” recalls David Yepsen, the legendary Iowa journalist whose Register career stretched from 1974 to 2009, including an 11-year run as the paper’s chief politics reporter. “The smart campaigns knew to take care of the local press corps, which could easily get overlooked. There’s a lot of 20-something staffers on these campaigns, they’re very self-important and inexperienced, and they think it’s more important to take care of NBC News.”

His favorite anecdote dates back to 1984, when the state party chairman tried explaining to a national correspondent why the campaigns paid so much attention to Yepsen. “He’s a Cinderella story,” the party boss said of the Register reporter. “They fawn over him nonstop until the clock strikes caucus day, and then he turns into a pumpkin.”

Indeed, it’s a great ride while it lasts, and many of Yepsen’s successors have parlayed it into something more. Jeff Zeleny, a Register alumnus who reported on the 2000 caucuses, later became a New York Times’ top political reporter before ultimately joining CNN, where he’s now the senior White House correspondent. Tom Beaumont, who led the Register’s caucus coverage in 2004 and 2008, jumped to The Associated Press, where he’s now a national correspondent. And Jennifer Jacobs, the chief politics reporter for the 2012 and 2016 cycles, now covers the White House for Bloomberg and regularly breaks news on the Trump beat.

Today, these proverbial big shoes are being filled by Brianne Pfannenstiel, a 30-year-old Kansas native who took over as chief politics reporter last June. It was a rapid ascent: At this point four years ago, she was struggling just to wrap her head around the scope of the caucuses. Pfannenstiel recalls walking into her first major presidential cattle call, an agriculture summit in the spring of 2015, and being overwhelmed—not by the candidates and the staffers and the voters, but by “the horde of national reporters, the circus of media, descending on the state for what was a relatively small event … with a bunch of people who may or may not run for president.”

Pfannenstiel got used to the circus. After her initial assignment, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, flamed out that fall, she was transferred to the Trump beat. The excitement of covering the unlikely GOP front-runner, for some reporters, might have been dampened by the ban on gaining press access to his events. But Pfannenstiel was undeterred. She began registering for Trump rallies as a member of the public, waiting in lines for two or three hours to gain general admission. Pfannenstiel credits this experience—the intimate “focus groups” she held with Trump voters standing in those lines—with guiding her reportage on his appeal to elements of the electorate that were not widely understood. It also improved her understanding of the distrust many conservatives feel for the mainstream media: The Register might seem folksy to coastal commentators, but to conservative rural Iowans it’s an arm of the militant left.

Interestingly, even while covering a hostile campaign, Pfannenstiel says she experienced that “special treatment” Yepsen describes. Trump aides knew that she entered events via general admission and wrote about them from the cheap seats. Not only did they turn a blind eye, but one campaign official actually sneaked Pfannenstiel into a rally when he saw the line was too long for her to make it inside.

In this sense, Pfannenstiel shares a common bond with her Register ancestors, the privilege of representing the largest media platform in the state and offering candidates a direct line to its readers. And yet, almost everything else has changed: the nationalized state of campaigning, the tribalized consumption of information, the monetized disruption of media. That Trump won the presidency by largely stiff-arming the local press, in Iowa and elsewhere, suggests that social media posts and viral videos are influencing more voters than exclusive interviews and editorials. That Beto O’Rourke launched his campaign on the cover of Vanity Fair, rather than above the fold of the Des Moines Register, suggests a bet on macro-momentum over micro-appeal. That Pfannenstiel was promoted to the biggest reporting gig in Iowa after her millennial-aged predecessor left journalism for a job in Democratic politics suggests that maybe, for a young journalist, being chief politics reporter for the Register doesn’t guarantee the blindingly bright future it once did.

Pfannenstiel concedes that her new role is punishing—too many candidates, too few reporters, not enough hours in the day. But she’s having too much fun to dwell on the downsides.

“Even those times when you’re grumpy and have been on the road all day and nothing is going right, you still just pinch yourself and say, ‘Wow, they pay me to do this,’” she says. “As some of our senior reporters have told me, it’s like sitting in the front row of history.”

Carol Hunter is thinking about a different kind of history.

Despite her journalistic bona fides and the confidence she clearly enjoys among her staff, it doesn’t escape Hunter that people like her are considered prehistoric in today’s media ecosystem—fossils from a time before the internet, before smartphones, before push alerts and direct messages and live-streaming.

She isn’t going to run the Des Moines Register forever. And while Hunter is openly obsessive about improving the paper’s reporting today—having authored lengthy autopsies of its 2012 and 2016 coverage, the lessons of which are being pounded into the newsroom’s collective subconscious—she is increasingly preoccupied with the long-term state of the publication.

“Some of it might be being a farmer’s daughter, but I think a lot about stewardship,” Hunter says. “My father was a conservationist, and you always try to leave the land better than how you found it. I’m a short-term steward. I want to leave the paper in better shape than when I came.”

It’s a funny thing, though: Sometimes even the most careful stewardship can’t account for the changing times. Hunter’s father nurtured his parcel in southeast Kansas, yielding decades’ worth of corn, wheat and soybeans. But his children, baby boomers with dreams beyond the homestead, all went off to college and earned degrees. The legacy of his land reached its natural conclusion. The family farm was sold.

Hunter realizes that her newspaper might be gobbled up by the Wall Street vultures; that it might be drastically downsized; that next time, she could be the one receiving a pink slip rather than giving it. But stewardship is limited to one’s sphere of control—and none of those things fall within hers.

As she steers the ship, Hunter believes the surest way to find smooth waters is by “holding to the fundamentals—that our work has to be accurate, it has to be clear and it has to be really compelling.” She adds, “I’ve said for a long time, our competition isn’t the television station in town. It’s not POLITICO. It’s time. Are we putting out something so compelling that people feel like they have to make it part of their day?”

This is a Catch-22, of course, because it’s hard to be accurate with fewer editors, it’s hard to be compelling with fewer reporters, and yet failures on this front contribute to declining revenue that prompt the cuts themselves. Not everyone seems to grasp the dilemma. Staffers at the Denver Post led an insurrection against the MNG overlords on the merits of this very argument, penning editorials with the hedge fund’s ink, pleading for a sale to other owners who might allow the newsroom a chance to escape its death spiral. These appeals were answered with more layoffs.

Although Gannett is publicly resisting MNG’s attempted annexation, there is a feeling among some in the company and many in the media industry that it’s a fait accompli. Even with its deep, well-documented cuts to newsroom budgets, Gannett has struggled to make its papers profitable. Sooner or later, by some combination of fiduciary responsibility and corporate exasperation, it might see no choice but to sell some of its highest-profile properties to someone willing to make far deeper cuts. (Gannett declined to comment on the impending acquisition; MNG did not respond to a request for comment.)

“What I tell them some of my old colleagues is, you can’t worry about the specter of Denver. You just have to worry about your own job and the story you’re working on,” Yepsen says. “Newspapers have folded, the mass media has been fractured into niches, and that’s all a reporter there can do now: write good stuff and bust their ass. Anybody left in American journalism today knows they could be out tomorrow.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, this outlook is shared by Tony Leys, the newspaper’s closest thing to a grizzled old-timer.

Leys is sanguine about the situation at hand—“I’m not excited about them buying us,” he shrugs—in part because he’s stopped paying attention. Instead, he’s pouring himself into his twin beats and trying to savor the ride he’s on, all while adopting a renewed commitment to mentoring younger colleagues. The politics editor, Stassen-Berger, holds regular “boot camps” for her reporters, training the political neophytes on how to cover the caucuses. Leys is somewhat less formal with his tutelage. He warns them about social media (“Twitter rewards smart-asses, and this profession attracts smart-asses, myself included.”). He advises them on best practices for reporting from rallies (tape rolling, notebook out, eyes on the crowd to gauge reactions and potential interviewees). He hands down the lessons, campaign lore and institutional knowledge he learned from the Register veterans that came before him.

This, Leys says, has proven just as rewarding as the reporting itself. “Sometimes I hear the old, retired journalists crabbing about ‘the kids these days,’ and I’m like, you’ve gotta be kidding me,” he says, shaking his head. “These kids are running circles around what we did at their age. There’s less hand-holding, there’s fewer editors, they’ve having to do a lot more than we did and cover a lot more ground. And a lot of them are doing a really great job.”

This gives Leys a certain peace about the future, whatever it might bring. When he arrived at the Des Moines Register as an intern in 1988, freshly graduated from the University of Wisconsin, he wasn’t sure how long it would last. Three decades later, he’s still waiting to be told it’s time to go.

“This job is so interesting. It can be very hard, and it can be draining. But I love it,” Leys says. “So, if the sidewalk opens and I lose this job—which could happen—I’ll go find something else to do. And I’ll be good at it.”
https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...es-2020-226748





Samantha Bee's Brutal Trump Taunts: Why Her Not the White House Correspondents' Dinner is Necessary

"Once a year the current president should face someone who calls them out," Bee said at her Not the WHCAD event
Sophia A. McClennen

This past weekend marks the third year in a row Donald Trump has refused to attend the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner (WHCAD), which honors the First Amendment, especially a free press, and typically includes a comedic roast of the president. Instead, Trump followed his own tradition of holding a rally where he took the opportunity to bash the press on the exact same night that our nation honors it. This year was different, though, because the WHCAD chose to feature a historian rather than a comedian as the main speaker, and because the administration announced days before the event it would completely boycott the celebration. There was reason to wonder whether these shifts might affect our longstanding tradition of roasting the president while celebrating the First Amendment.

Historically, making jokes about our sitting president while honoring our free press was an important reminder that our nation has one of the strongest free speech protections in the world. Not only did the event honor the way that the First Amendment protects journalists; but it also served to underscore the ways that it protects comedians. The fact that a comedian would roast the president to his face proved that our nation had an exceedingly strong commitment to free speech. So, the decision to remove a comedian from the event was cause for concern. Was Trump dismantling our ability to mock him without fear of reprisal? Had the Trump administration succeeded in chilling comedic free speech?

The decision to move away from having a comedian as a featured speaker came in the wake of fallout over Michelle Wolf’s appearance at it last year. While some of us found her roast to be sharp and ironic, for many in the mainstream media her comments targeting the appearance of Sarah Huckabee Sanders crossed a line. Chris Cillizza of CNN found this line about Sanders from Wolf’s speech to be an example of bullying: "I think she's very resourceful, like she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's lies." The crack led many to say that “going after [Sanders’] looks” was too much, even though it isn’t clear that reading of the joke even makes sense.

In any case, both the White House and the news media thought Wolf had gone too of far. Thus, this year The White House Correspondents’ Association caved to pressure and decided to plan the event without a comedic roast of the president, choosing to tap historian Ron Chernow to keynote instead.

Well before Trump took office, some speculated that the WHCAD, sometimes referred to as “nerd prom,” had morphed into a love fest between the Washington power elite, celebrities, and journalists. The chummy, glitzy event seemed more like a celebration of U.S. oligarchy than the First Amendment.

There is much truth to that view, but it would be a mistake not to remember the various times that the event helped make history and reinforced our free speech traditions. Despite its flaws, it was the one event that underlined the connection between a free press and the ability to mock those in power without penalty. And in the past there have been truly epic nights. Recall Stephen Colbert’s extraordinary roast of George W. Bush in 2006 and Seth Meyers powerful roast of Trump in 2011—a roast some still think caused Trump to run. And we shouldn’t forget Hasan Minhaj’s 2017 roast during the first WHCAD that Trump skipped, where he reminded the audience that

“Only in America can a first-generation, Indian American Muslim kid get on the stage and make fun of the president. The orange man behind the Muslim ban. And it’s a sign to the rest of the world. It’s this amazing tradition that shows the entire world that even the president is not beyond the reach of the First Amendment.”

The administration boycott, the flagrant ways the President mocks our free press, and the WHCA surrendering to pressure, canceling a comedic presence, and choosing an anodyne speaker instead were not good signs. But luckily, there was another event that aired night.

Starting in 2017, satirical comedian Samantha Bee, who regularly hosts “Full Frontal” for TBS, launched an alternative event called the “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.” When it first launched, the same year Minhaj hosted the “main” event, it served as an important complement. This year, as the WHCAD became almost irrelevant, it proved that it may well take over the mantle of protecting free speech and making sure we can laugh at those in power.

When Bee announced the decision to host the event again she stated: “I vowed never to host a NWHCD ever again. But the White House Correspondents’ Association has left me no choice — it is now up to comedy journalists to take care of real journalists…. It’s bigger than just the Free Press this time around. This is about the non-sexy parts of the First Amendment too — and if the White House Correspondents’ Association won’t defend them, we will.”

Bee’s event offered the feisty, edgy, gloves-off comedy our nation needs in the Trump era. As Bee opened the event, she made her mission clear: “I really believe that once a year the current president should face someone who calls them out on their shit.” She then went on to say, “Tonight I want to focus on what a f**king coward he is. Imagine being the most powerful man in the world and you can’t listen to a comedian razz you for five minutes?”

She spared no words for Sarah Huckabee Sanders as well. Making it clear she would never make fun of her looks, an ironic nod to Michele Wolf from last year, Bee complemented Sanders on hair and skin to then say that on the inside, she is "as hideous as a pinworm in an anus. On the inside that woman is 90 percent taint. And I mean that medically."

As Bee ended her opening monologue she explained that she wanted to put Trump at ease on the chance that he was watching “because Tucker Carlson had run out of racism.” She then turned to the camera and said, “Hey there champ. I know you are scared of being the butt of a joke, but we could try to fix that. …The next time you are feeling a little weak in the knees and aren’t sure how to face something scary. Maybe you can go down to the holding facility in Brownsville and ask a preschooler you’ve stolen from his parents for some pointers. You’ll be able to face big bullies like me in no time.”

In those few moments Bee did an excellent job of putting the hoopla over jokes into context. What exactly is the outrage over? A joke about Sanders’s eye makeup? Or an administration that separates young children refugees from their families?

In addition to performances from Bee, the “Not the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner” event included skits from professors and critics on the flaws to thinking that the news needs to be “fair and balanced.” Even Robert De Niro, a vocal Trump critic, appeared at the event to say that he looked forward to "the exquisite release” of voting the president out of office in 2020.

Bee’s show was scathing satire and it proved that, even if Trump succeeds in intimidating those in the press, the comedians are ready and willing to fight for the First Amendment. It also showed us that the comedians may be better at responding to Trump’s bullying than the press may be.

While the press responds to Trump’s accusations of bias, often accommodating to him more than they should, the comedians refuse to entertain Trump’s snowflake hysterics. If there is one thing a comedian knows how to handle, it is how to make fun of someone who can’t take a joke.
https://www.salon.com/2019/04/29/sam...-is-necessary/





New Report Reveals that the UK Police are Secretly Downloading Content from Suspects' Mobile Phones on a Massive Scale

Key points:

• Privacy International have today published a report entitled 'Digital Stop and search: how the UK police can secretly download everything from your mobile phone', based on Freedom of Information requests to 47 police forces across the UK about their use of 'mobile phone extraction' technologies, which enable them to download all the content and data from a mobile phone.
• Police forces across the UK are secretly downloading data from the smartphones of people across the UK, including phones belonging to people not convicted of any crime, and even phones belonging to witnesses and victims.
• Police forces are not obtaining warrants, or seeking permission from people whose phones they search, and neither are they operating within any clear legal framework, meaning that these powers enable discriminatory policing to go unnoticed.
• What the police are doing is potentially unlawful and Privacy International is seeking urgent answers from the Home Office.
• David Lammy MP, author of the Lammy Review, has welcomed the report.

...

Privacy International have today published a new report examining technology UK police forces are secretly deploying, which enables them to download all of the content and data from people's phones. 'Digital Stop and search: how the UK police can secretly download everything from your mobile phone' is based on Freedom of Information requests to 47 police forces across the UK about their use of such 'mobile phone extraction' technologies.

For over six years police forces throughout the UK have secretly been deploying highly intrusive technology that allows them to gather vast amounts of data on individuals in the UK, including those convicted of no crime, witnesses and victims. Contracting with notorious companies such as Cellebrite, UK police forces are able to use sophisticated tools to take all data from your phone, including hidden and deleted data. This includes data about your friends, family and colleagues.

Privacy International have exposed a potentially unlawful regime operating with forces who are confused about the legal basis for the technology they are using. The police are acting without clear safeguards for the public, and no independent oversight to identify abuse and misuse of sensitive personal information. Seen in the light of ongoing issues of discrimination within the criminal justice system, this presents a serious cause for concern.

Data can be taken from victims, witnesses and suspects without informing them. With no clear policies or guidance on the use of this technology, individuals are unaware of their legal rights in terms of:

• Whether data is only taken when necessary and proportionate;
• Getting the police to delete this data when there is no legal reason to retain it, particularly if they are innocent of any crime;
• Ensuring data is held securely to prevent exposure of their personal data as a result of loss of records, misuse or security breach.

Key statistics:

• 26 out of 47 police forces (55%) that we submitted Freedom of Information requests to admitted they are using mobile phone extraction technology.

• Out of the remaining 21 police forces (45%):

• Eight police forces (17%) have trialed or intend to trial this technology

• Thirteen police forces (28%) either failed to respond to our questions or stated they hold no information on the use of this technology

Key recommendations from our report:

Privacy International's report 'Digital Stop and Search’ includes eleven key recommendations including:

• There needs to be an urgent independent review into this widespread, intrusive but secretive practice;
• There should be a requirement for police to obtain a warrant for searching the contents of a mobile phone, issued on the basis of reasonable suspicion;
• The Home Office must publish guidance for the public, regarding their rights if the police want to search their mobile phone.

Millie Graham Wood, Solicitor, Privacy International, said:

"You could search a person, and their entire home, and never find anywhere near as much information as you could from searching their phone. Yet the police can take data from your phone without your consent, without your knowledge and without a warrant. It is disturbing that the police have such a highly draconian power, operating in secret, without any accountability to the public. Given the serious problems we still face in the UK with discriminatory policing, we need to urgently address how this new frontier of policing might be disproportionately and unfairly impacting on minority ethnic groups, political demonstrators, environmental activists and many other groups that can find themselves in the crosshairs of the police.

The police are continually failing to be transparent with the thousands of people whose phones they are secretly downloading data from. An immediate independent review into this practice should be initiated by the Home Office and College of Policing, with widespread consultation with the public, to find the right balance of powers for the police and protections for the public. Let's be clear - at the moment, the police have all the power and the public have no protections."

David Lammy, MP for Tottenham and author of the 2017 Lammy Review into the treatment of, and outcomes for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the criminal justice system, said of Privacy International's report:

"The lack of transparency around new policing tools such as mobile phone extraction is a serious cause for concern. There are no records, no statistics, no safeguards, no oversight and no clear statement of the rights that citizens have if their mobile phone is confiscated and searched by the police.

My Review of our criminal justice system found that individuals from ethnic minority backgrounds still face bias in parts of our justice system, and it is only because we have transparency and data collection for everything from stop and search incidents to crown court sentencing decisions that these disparities are revealed and we are able to hold those in power to account. Without the collection and audit of data about the use of mobile phone extraction powers scrutiny will be impossible.

Given the sensitive nature and wealth of information stored on our mobile phones there is significant risk of abuse and for conscious or unconscious bias to become a factor without independent scrutiny and in the absence of effective legal safeguards.

We entrust so much personal information to our phones that the police having the power to download every message and photo we have sent or received without any rights and protections is another worrying example of regulations not keeping up with advances in technology."
https://privacyinternational.org/pre...uspects-mobile





U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand Over Your Private Data

Crime victims and witnesses in Britain will now be asked to sign a consent form allowing the police to extract data from their electronic devices.
Iliana Magra

The British police delivered a striking warning to crime victims on Monday: If you want the case to be pursued, be prepared to turn over personal data from your mobile phone, laptop, tablet or smart watches.

“Police have a duty to pursue all reasonable lines of enquiry,” Assistant Commissioner Nick Ephgrave, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for criminal justice, said in a statement. “Those now frequently extend into the devices of victims and witnesses as well as suspects — particularly in cases where suspects and victims know each other.”

But the new policy raised concerns about potential invasions of privacy and the risk of discouraging people from reporting crimes, particularly offenses like sexual assault that are already underreported because victims fear being treated like the guilty ones.

In many cases, the police already search digital trails, which can produce evidence that either backs up an accusation or casts doubt on it. Privacy advocates say that police departments often improperly download cellphone data from people they detain, without their knowledge or consent.

Under the new approach, victims and witnesses will routinely be asked to sign a form saying that they consent to the police extracting data from their electronic devices, which can mean text messages, emails, contacts, social media records, internet browsing history and more. Otherwise, the case might not proceed.

How much data the police extract will vary from one investigation to another, and the police say they will focus on collecting information that may be relevant to the case at hand. But, they warned, if investigators stumble across something incriminating — even if it is irrelevant to the original case — the accuser can become the accused.

“If information is identified from your device that suggests the commission of a separate criminal offense, other than the offense(s) under investigation, the relevant data may be retained and investigated by the police,” according to written statement to victims and witnesses that will accompany the consent form.

Anything the police find, it says, will be handed over to prosecutors. And in some cases, devices might not be given back to their owners for weeks or even months.

“These excessive digital trawls set an alarming precedent for the criminal justice system,” Griff Ferris, a legal and policy officer at Big Brother Watch, a nonprofit civil liberties group, said in an email on Monday. “Treating rape victims like suspects in this way delays investigations and trials, prolongs distress for both victims and suspects, deters victims from reporting and obstructs justice.”

Most sexual assaults are committed by people who are known to the victims, and there might be electronic proof of friendly communications between them. As a result, according to Victim Support, a nonprofit group in England and Wales, the new policy could discourage victims from reporting, fearing that they will not be believed.

Mr. Ephgrave, the assistant commissioner, acknowledged such concerns in his statement.

“We understand that how personal data is used can be a source of anxiety,” he said. “We would never want victims to feel that they can’t report crimes because of ‘intrusion’ in their data.”

“That’s why a new national form has been introduced,” replacing policies that varied from place to place, “to help police seek informed consent proportionately and consistently.”

But the form was criticized because of the possible repercussions for victims who refuse to lay bare their digital lives: The police and prosecutors might drop their cases.

Victim Support argued that the policy could leave victims feeling coerced into agreeing to the electronic searches.

Katie Russell, the national spokeswoman for Rape Crisis England and Wales, an umbrella organization for rape crisis centers, said it was a misnomer to refer to the forms for victims and witnesses as “consent forms,” because “complainants don’t have a full and free choice as to whether to agree to the scrutiny and storage of their personal data.”

Who decides what is relevant, and by what standards, will not be clear to people reading the forms, she said, and the policy could result in victims being subjected to greater scrutiny than suspects.
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Survivors of sexual assault often decide not to go to the police because of “fear of the criminal justice system and of being made to feel ‘like the one under investigation/on trial,’ ” Ms. Russell wrote in an email.

“In some cases, suspects’ phones aren’t even requested.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/w...rivacy-uk.html





We Got U.S. Border Officials to Testify Under Oath. Here’s What We Found Out.
Hugh Handeyside, Nathan Freed Wessler, Esha Bhandari

In September 2017, we, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sued the federal government for its warrantless and suspicionless searches of phones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry.

The government immediately tried to dismiss our case, arguing that the First and Fourth Amendments do not protect against such searches. But the court ruled that our clients — 10 U.S. citizens and one lawful permanent resident whose phones and laptops were searched while returning to the United States — could move forward with their claims.

Since then, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have had to turn over documents and evidence about why and how they conduct warrantless and suspicionless searches of electronic devices at the border. And their officials have had to sit down with us to explain — under oath — their policies and practices governing such warrantless searches.

What we learned is alarming, and we’re now back in court with this new evidence asking the judge to skip trial altogether and rule for our clients.

The information we uncovered through our lawsuit shows that CBP and ICE are asserting near-unfettered authority to search and seize travelers’ devices at the border, for purposes far afield from the enforcement of immigration and customs laws. The agencies’ policies allow officers to search devices for general law enforcement purposes, such as investigating and enforcing bankruptcy, environmental, and consumer protection laws. The agencies also say that they can search and seize devices for the purpose of compiling “risk assessments” or to advance pre-existing investigations. The policies even allow officers to consider requests from other government agencies to search specific travelers’ devices.

CBP and ICE also say they can search a traveler’s electronic devices to find information about someone else. That means they can search a U.S. citizen’s devices to probe whether that person’s family or friends may be undocumented; the devices of a journalist or scholar with foreign sources who may be of interest to the U.S. government; or the devices of a traveler who is the business partner or colleague of someone under investigation.

Both agencies allow officers to retain information from travelers’ electronic devices and share it with other government entities, including state, local, and foreign law enforcement agencies.

Let’s get one thing clear: The government cannot use the pretext of the “border” to make an end run around the Constitution.

The border is not a lawless place. CBP and ICE are not exempt from the Constitution. And the information on our phones and laptops is no less deserving of constitutional protections than, say, international mail or our homes.

Warrantless and suspicionless searches of our electronic devices at the border violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects us against unreasonable searches and seizures – including at the border. Border officers do have authority to search our belongings for contraband or illegal items, but mobile electronic devices are unlike any other item officers encounter at the border. For instance, they contain far more personal and revealing information than could be gleaned from a thorough search of a person’s home, which requires a warrant.

These searches also violate the First Amendment. People will self-censor and avoid expressing dissent if they know that returning to the United States means that border officers can read and retain what they say privately, or see what topics they searched online. Similarly, journalists will avoid reporting on issues that the U.S. government may have an interest in, or that may place them in contact with sensitive sources.

Our clients’ experiences demonstrate the intrusiveness of device searches at the border and the emotional toll they exact. For instance, Zainab Merchant and Nadia Alasaad both wear headscarves in public for religious reasons, and their smartphones contained photos of themselves without headscarves that they did not want border officers to see. Officers searched the phones nonetheless. On another occasion, a border officer searched Ms. Merchant’s phone even though she repeatedly told the officer that it contained attorney-client privileged communications. After repeated searches of his electronic devices, Isma’il Kushkush, a journalist, felt worried that he was being targeted because of his reporting, and he questioned whether to continue covering issues overseas.

Crossing the U.S. border shouldn’t mean facing the prospect of turning over years of emails, photos, location data, medical and financial information, browsing history, or other personal information on our mobile devices. That’s why we’re asking a federal court to rule that border agencies must do what any other law enforcement agency would have to do in order to search electronic devices: get a warrant.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-te...-testify-under





Insurers Know Exactly How Often American Drivers Touch Their Phones

With distracted driving on the rise, phone-tracking startups try to show us we’re the problem. It’s not quite working.
Kyle Stock

The distracted driving report by Zendrive, a traffic-data startup, makes it clearer and clearer each year that millions of Americans can’t stop themselves from talking, texting and livestreaming—yes, even using FaceTime—while driving. The results have been increasingly unsettling, showing that drivers in the U.S. are becoming more likely to use their smartphones more often.

This year, in a new twist, the company took the usage data from the tens of millions of cellphones it monitors and combined it with a self-assessment to the same drivers: Are you good at focusing on the road? The worrying verdict: American drivers have no idea how often they use their phones. The most distracted drivers in Zendrive’s sample gave themselves high marks for paying attention, with roughly one-third of the worst multi-taskers considering themselves “extremely safe.”

“It’s just terrifying,” said Zendrive Chief Executive Office Jonathan Matus. “We’ve built these highly addictive experiences and people can’t help themselves.” Matus should know—he helped design Facebook’s mobile app before launching Zendrive, a service intended to help insurance companies and fleet managers identify bad drivers. Basically, he’s now trying to short-circuit all of the work he did in his previous job to hook us to our phones.

Fully autonomous vehicles that will safely subtract humans, leaving us free to focus on our screens, remain a long way out. The laws that prohibit drivers from touching smartphones are patchy and difficult to enforce. In the meantime, safety regulators, insurance companies and technologists have turned to an incremental fix for distraction: monitoring the driver, not the vehicle. The hope is that awareness may just succeed where policies and penalties haven’t.

Zendrive now has its monitoring technology on 60 million phones, roughly one of every four U.S. drivers. TrueMotion, a rival, is tracking distraction and other driving metrics for eight of the top 20 U.S. auto insurers, and an additional 30,000 drivers have voluntarily downloaded the TrueMotion system in attempt to self-regulate tendencies to talk and text at the wheel.

A third provider, Cambridge Mobile Telematics, monitors distracted driving for 35 insurers, including State Farm. In addition to siphoning smartphone data, Cambridge Mobile uses a Fig Newton-sized puck that provides even better metrics on vehicle performance and phone use. This quarter, the company shipped 8 million of the devices.

The reason for all this data is that at least one in five U.S. auto insurance policies now offers a potential discount if the customer consents to a vehicle monitor. Taken together, there’s a very complete picture of the dangerous driving that has led to the 15 percent surge in annual U.S. traffic fatalities from 2014 to 2016.

Early indicators suggest simple awareness may be an effective antidote. Cambridge Mobile said distraction levels drop by 35 percent among participants who check their data regularly. “Just seeing the results helps,” said Ryan McMahon, vice president of marketing. “It’s almost like going into a restaurant and being able to see calories on a menu.”

ConnectedTravel, an app maker, is now rewarding tens of thousands of drivers in Las Vegas and San Diego for driving as they did before cellphones. “Nobody believes you can change peoples’ behaviors—that’s a common view in the industry,” said CEO Bryan Biniak. “But when you start to create awareness, it’s impactful.”

Early trials among those using the ConnectedTravel app show a 40 percent reduction in phone use; four out of five participants check their driving metrics daily. “We just provide you with stats, just like fantasy sports or anything else,” Biniak said.

The early results point to a market triumph over bad behavior that lawmakers, police and advocacy groups have struggled to deter. Underwriters who are best able to identify distracted-driving tendencies are better able to price the accompanying risk. Most insurance companies still only offer discounts for good cell-phone behavior, but a growing number are using the findings to raise rates on serial tap-and-swipers.

Distracted driving is more predictive of an eventual loss claim than virtually any other behavior, including speeding and braking. Those who tend to use cellphones at the wheel have 20 percent more insurance claims than others in the risk-pool, according to TrueMotion. “This is creating a pretty clear picture,” said Matt Fiorentino, the company’s marketing director.

Eventually, the margins of underwriters who best identify inattentive drivers will improve, he argued, while their worst customers will get nudged to less vigilant rivals, further muddying those risk pools. As a result, insurance companies of all sizes are hustling to roll out smartphone monitoring systems.

While the proliferation of robot chaperones is encouraging, the data they are collecting is grim. Distraction has increased in every part of the country, despite a rash of new laws intended to curb cellphone use at the wheel. Zendrive said distracted driving levels increased by 10 percent in the past year. Today, the company considers one in 12 drivers a phone addict—on their phones at least one-third of the time at the wheel—and that measure is climbing fast. At the current rate, one in five will fall into that category within three years.

“It’s a massive epidemic,” Zendrive’s Matus said. “And there is clearly a dissonance between what people believe the state of the world is, and what they’re doing.”

Distraction “is embedded in the culture of driving,” said Thomas Dingus, director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. His recent research, which tracks eye patterns, shows drivers are distracted more than half of the time.

Curbing phone use is even a growing problem among self-driving startups. Most of the vehicles in robot-driven fleets still require human chaperones, at least for the time being. That means recruiting and training a safety workforce that has almost nothing to do, if all is going as planned; often, however, it doesn’t. Uber halted its autonomous-car program’s road testing a year ago after one of its vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian. The backup driver in that instance was watching The Voice on her mobile phone at the time.

Ford, which has backed self-driving startup Argo AI, has struggled with driving chaperones falling asleep. Alphabet’s Waymo, widely considered at the front of the self-driving pack, still has two humans in its vehicles much of the time. It turns out people aren’t wired for the kind of “passive vigilance” required to monitor a sentient vehicle. Federal safety regulators have sounded the warning on this, noting that cognitive limitations could be a dangerous stumbling block on the long path from analog driving to fully automated vehicles.

Little of this is surprising, even among the most inattentive drivers. The majority of Americans now consider distracted driving the top threat to safety on the road, far more dangerous than driving under the influence or speeding, according to a recent survey by Volvo. About one-third of respondents say they turn on “do not disturb” modes on their phones, and three out of four people surveyed would pay more for a vehicle with features designed to prevent distraction.

But it’s now becoming clear that distracted drivers seldom have a good sense of their own conduct. TrueMotion found that those using its monitoring technology reduce their distraction levels by 20 percent after receiving a push notification that identifies their phone use while driving. Those who don’t see their own records of distracted driving, however, use their phones 25 percent more often.

Late last week, Cambridge Mobile co-founder Hari Balakrishnan said in a phone interview that he was optimistic, in part, because the accident claims rate among the drivers on his platform is 47 percent lower than average. “I think I lot of people do, in fact, want to get better,” he said. “They just don’t have the granular information.”

The call ended abruptly when Balakrishnan—talking on a hands-free system—was rear-ended at a red light. The other driver got out of his car with cellphone in hand. “Thankfully it was just a nudge,” Balakrishnan said when he called back. “But honestly, you can’t make this up.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...h-their-phones





NSA Says Warrantless Searches of Americans’ Data Rose in 2018
Zack Whittaker

The intelligence community’s annual transparency report revealed a spike in the number of warrantless searches of Americans’ data in 2018.

The data, published Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), revealed a 28 percent rise in the number of targeted search terms used to query massive databases of collected Americans’ communications.

Some 9,637 warrantless search queries of the contents of Americans’ calls, text messages, emails and other communications were conducted by the NSA during 2018, up from 7,512 searches on the year prior, the report said.

The figures also don’t take into account queries made by the FBI or the Drug Enforcement Administration, which also has access to the database, nor do they say exactly how many Americans had their information collected.

The NSA conducts these searches under its so-called Section 702 powers, reauthorized in 2018 despite heated opposition by a bipartisan group of pro-privacy senators. These powers allow the NSA to collect intelligence on foreigners living overseas by tapping into the phone networks and undersea cables owned by U.S. phone companies. The powers also allow the government to obtain data in secret from U.S. tech companies. But the massive data collection effort also inadvertently vacuums up Americans’ data, who are typically protected from unwarranted searches under the Fourth Amendment.

The report also noted a 27 percent increase in the number of foreigners whose communications were targeted by the NSA during the year. In total, an estimated 164,770 foreign individuals or groups were targeted with search terms used by the NSA to monitor their communications, up from 129,080 on the year prior.

It’s the largest year-over-year leap in foreign surveillance to date.

The report also said the NSA collected at most 434.2 million phone records on Americans, down from 534.3 million records on the year earlier. The government said the figures likely had duplicates.

The phone records collection program was the first classified NSA program disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, which revealed a secret court order compelling Verizon — which owns TechCrunch — to turn over daily phone records on millions of Americans. The program was later curtailed following the introduction of the Freedom Act.

Earlier this month, the NSA reportedly asked the White House to end the program altogether, citing legal troubles.

Despite the apparent rollback of the program, NSA still reported 164,770 queries of Americans’ phone records, more than a five-fold increase on the year earlier.

Last week, the Trump administration revealed it had been denied 30 surveillance applications by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a specialist closed-door court that grants the government authority to spy inside the U.S., where surveillance is typically prohibited.

Since figures were made available in 2015 following the Edward Snowden disclosures, the number of denials has trended upwards.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/30/ns...illance-spike/

















Until next week,

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