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Old 27-09-17, 07:02 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 30th, ’17

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September 30th, 2017




'Radical and Overreaching': Bell Wants Canadians Blocked from Piracy Websites

Company says a federal agency like the CRTC should create a blacklist of sites
Sophia Harris

Canada is a safe haven for internet pirates, Bell Canada says. The telecom giant wants the federal government to fight back by blocking Canadians' access to piracy websites and stiffening the penalties for violations.

"People are actually leaving the regulated [TV] system, not just because they want to watch Netflix but because they want to watch free content," Rob Malcolmson, Bell's senior VP of regulatory affairs, told federal politicians last week. He was speaking at a government hearing in Ottawa on NAFTA negotiations.

According to Malcolmson, this is how the website-blocking plan would work: an independent agency, such as Canada's broadcast regulator (the CRTC), would create a blacklist of sites that allow people to download or stream pirated content like movies and TV shows.

Internet service providers, like Bell, would then be required to prevent their customers from accessing the sites.

"So you would mandate all [internet providers] across the country to essentially block access to a blacklist of egregious piracy sites," said Malcolmson. Canadians made 1.88 billion visits to piracy sites last year, according to Bell.

In Canada, copyright holders can sue infringing websites. And some countries, like the U.K., routinely block targeted sites with court approval. But critics of Bell's plan claim it appears to involve no judicial oversight, which means it could lead to rampant internet censorship.

"Engaging in extrajudicial attempts to block access to sites, I think, raises all kinds of Charter of Rights and Freedoms issues," argues Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa professor and internet law expert.

Marie Aspiazu, with Vancouver-based internet advocacy group OpenMedia, agrees. "It's radical and its overreaching," she said. "They're going to start blocking any other sites that they don't see fit."

Quebec wants to block sites, too

Another attempt to block targeted websites in Canada has already raised alarm bells among open internet advocates.

Quebec recently introduced a provincial law which would force internet providers to block users' access to online gambling sites not approved by the government.

Quebec argues the legislation is necessary to ensure internet gambling companies maintain responsible gaming rules.

The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association — of which Bell is a member — is actually challenging the legislation in court.

It argues the country's telecom industry falls under federal jurisdiction, and the Quebec law violates the Telecommunications Act by forcing Internet companies to control or influence content.

OpenMedia says the legislation, just like Bell's website-blocking proposal, threatens the concept of a free and open internet.

"It's a slippery slope," says Aspiazu. "Once you have the government having control of what we can see or not see, it becomes problematic."

CBC News asked Bell for more details about its proposal and if it would include any judicial oversight. The company did not respond directly to our questions but did provide CBC News with a written copy of its opening statement for the NAFTA hearings.

U.S. says we have a piracy problem

Current NAFTA renegotiations between the U.S., Mexico and Canada will include discussions on intellectual property issues such as copyright infringement.

Bell's written statement suggested one way to make NAFTA work better for Canadians and our economy would be stronger copyright enforcement.

"Many influential American stakeholders" have complained about widespread piracy in Canada, the telecom said, which is "limiting the growth of the legitimate digital economy."

On the domestic front, Bell suggested beefed-up copyright enforcement would secure the future success of Canadian content providers by ensuring that they get paid for their work.

Besides blocking websites, the telecom recommended that the government direct police to crack down and apply criminal penalties — which could include jail time — to all types of commercial piracy. Bell said that current criminal provisions in the Copyright Act do not necessarily apply to newer forms of digital piracy.

The Android box threat

The telecom did not respond directly to CBC News' questions on this topic, but during his presentation in Ottawa, Malcolmson raised concerns about a new piracy tool that has become popular in Canada: Android TV boxes.

Once loaded with special software, the boxes allow users to access numerous piracy websites and stream the content on their TVs.

"You can buy that [box] for $50 and you can watch live TV for free," Malcolmson said.

Last year, Bell, Rogers and Vidéotron — all of which are both telecoms and content creators — filed a lawsuit against Canadian dealers who sell "free TV" Android boxes. So far, they've targeted dozens of box dealers.

While Bell may have had Android box dealers in mind when it proposed widened criminal penalties, law professor Geist fears it could have far-reaching effects.

He claims the definition of commercial piracy could be expanded to include regular people who, for instance, share a pirated TV show or movie file.

"The slippery slope is, I think, the reality of how these things unfold," said Geist. "Once you normalize website blocking or normalize the idea that infringement should carry with it jail time and criminal penalties, you open the door to targeting a wide range of activities for potential criminal liability."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bell...rnet-1.4308068





Star Trek: Discovery Already Getting Pirated a Lot

‘Discovery’ pilot nearly cracks Pirate Bay’s Top 10 in less than 24 hours
James Hibberd

Of course it is … but now there are some numbers.

Star Trek: Discovery is on the verge of cracking Pirate Bay’s Top 10 most illegally downloaded shows in less than 24 hours.

The Discovery pilot is currently at No. 11 on the list (apparently at No. 15 just a few hours ago), the pilot is up there with the likes of HBO’s Game of Thrones, Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty and, for some reason, TNT’s The Last Ship. The show’s second episode is at No. 17, which is a tad surprising as that was the one that wasn’t free.

CBS rolled out the first episode of Discovery in a special preview telecast on its broadcast network Sunday night and racked up nearly 10 million viewers, then made the show’s second episode — and all the rest to come — available exclusively on CBS All Access streaming service for $6 a month.

Ever since the distribution plan was first announced fans have resisted with some vehemence the idea of paying for “yet another streaming service just to watch a single show” (there’s more than one show on All Access, CBS is quick to point out, and then a debate over the relative merits of NCIS and MacGyver repeats ensues).

Math-wise, however, the company’s pitch is not a terrible one. When you pay iTunes or Amazon to watch an old episode of some random TV show, the service charges $2-3 for an individual episode. All Access is $6 a month; figure there’s four Discovery episodes a month … it’s a price within the current market boundaries for watching a fancy premium TV series that you want to see. Of course, All Access still has commercials, and it’s admittedly a bit annoying to pay to watch ads (the same can be said about Hulu).

At any rate, the Pirate Bay numbers are likely the tip of the, er, pirate-berg as a study on Game of Thrones downloads last month found that most illegal viewing comes from illicit streaming sites nowadays instead of torrents — a new frontier for piracy, and surely not the final one.

Discovery also made news Monday with a photo of several of the show’s stars taking a knee in solidarity with protesting NFL players. For more on Discovery, check out our post-premiere interview with the show’s executive producer Alex Kurtzman breaking down the first two episodes, our critic’s review and our recap.
http://ew.com/tv/2017/09/25/star-tre...overy-pirated/





Showtime Websites Used to Mine Monero, Unclear If Hack or an Experiment
Catalin Cimpanu

Two Showtime domains are currently loading and running Coinhive, a JavaScript library that mines Monero using the CPU resources of users visiting Showtime's websites.

The two domains are showtime.com and showtimeanytime.com, the latter being the official URL for the company's online video streaming service.

The main Showtime domain name, sho.com, does not include the Coinhive Monero mining script.

The Monero miner was first discovered 16 hours ago, at around 17:00 ET (22:00 GMT) by a Twitter user named SkensNet.

Hack or experiment?

It is unclear if someone hacked Showtime and included the mining script without the company's knowledge.

Showtime did not respond to a request for comment from Bleeping Computer in time for this article's publication.

It could also be that Showtime is loading the script on purpose, as part of an experiment. This is the most likely explanation, as the setThrottle value is 0.97, meaning the mining script will remain dormant for 97% of the time. A hacker, knowing his intrusion will likely be detected, would usually set a small throttle value and mine as much Monero before getting discovered.

Coinhive has been advertised as a technology that could replace ads by allowing site owners to mine for the Monero cryptocurrency. The technology is very controversial as it uses the site visitor's resources to mine Monero, driving CPU usage through the roof.

The Pirate Bay previously experimented with Coinhive two weeks ago, but user response was mixed, with the majority not liking the idea that The Pirate Bay is hijacking their CPUs and slowing down their PCs.

A recent report has calculated that a site like The Pirate Bay could make around $12,000 per month by mining Monero in the background.

Seeing that The Pirate Bay is ranked #87 in the Alexa traffic ranking, while Showtime is ranked ~#9,500, Showtime's profits would be even smaller.

Coinhive increasingly adopted by malware devs

Coinhive, as a technology, is only ten days old, being officially launched on September 14.

Despite this, Coinhive has been recently adopted by a large number of malware operations, such as malvertisers, adware developers, rogue Chrome extensions, and website hackers, who secretly load the code in a page's background and make money off unsuspecting users.

At least two ad blockers have added support for blocking Coinhive's JS library — AdBlock Plus and AdGuard — and developers have also put together Chrome extensions that terminate anything that looks like Coinhive's mining script — AntiMiner, No Coin, and minerBlock.

What's your opinion on Coinhive's in-browser mining technology?
— Catalin Cimpanu (@campuscodi) September 25, 2017

UPDATE [September 25, 12:55 ET]: The Coinhive mining scripts have been removed from the Showtime domains. Showtime still hasn't answered Bleeping Computer's request for comment.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...an-experiment/





Terrible Summer Box Office, High-Profile TV Failures Hint at Creative Crisis
Joe Meyers

A combination of creative stagnation and audience indifference suggests there is a major creative crisis in Hollywood.

The box-office returns from theatrical films were a disaster between Memorial Day and Labor Day — the worst summer for the movie business in 20 years — with the high-profile flops including “The Mummy” reboot with Tom Cruise, and the Luc Besson science-fiction epic, “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” grossing only $40 million on a $177 million budget.

In the TV sector, Amazon canceled two high-profile F. Scott Fitzgerald dramas last month — “Z: The Beginning of Everything” and “The Last Tycoon” — and the creative bankruptcy of the medium is illustrated by a forthcoming reboot of “Dynasty.”

The battling “Dynasty” queens Joan Collins and Linda Evans were hot commodities 30 years ago, but does anyone want to see a 2017 variation on an archaic 1980s soap opera?

In recent conversations with three industry observers — screenwriter and novelist David Rich, film festival director Tom Carruthers and historian John DiLeo — it was agreed the money-making formulas of movies and TV seem to be wearing out. And audiences are finding other ways to spend their time.

“I think a lot has to do with cost and process,” Rich, who lives in Ridgefield, says. “Studios all along have faced the question: Are we selling the title or the stars? Over the past five to seven years, stars have faded out. None can really ‘open’ a movie anymore, not even Will Smith.

“What is happening now — not without good reason because of the tremendous budgets — is that they are running to something they think they can hold onto, which are movies where the special effects are the star.”

But when special effects take over, character and story tend to disappear, Rich says, and the resulting movies all begin to look alike.

“Who wanted to see a ‘Mummy’ reboot? Nobody,” says DiLeo, who has done programs at the Palace Theater in Danbury. “I think we are reaching a point of diminishing returns. We’re inundated with movies for kids during the summer, which Hollywood has extended now from April through August. They are rebooting things like ‘The Mummy’ that seem like they just happened (the previous one was in 2008), but of course 15-year-olds don’t remember what just happened.”

Rich and DiLeo agree a big part of the problem is the dominance of wide-releasing, where a new movie opens on more than 3,000 screens and has to deliver mammoth grosses immediately.

“The focus becomes making movies that can play on five out of the 14 screens at a multiplex. There’s no time for word of mouth to build on a good movie that can be (declared) dead after the first three days,” Rich says.

DiLeo believes most of the comic book and action movies geared to young multiplex audiences have become virtually incoherent due to the nonstop action.

“Hitchcock built his suspense on the idea of a movie having a beginning, a middle and an end. The comic book movies all seem to have 20-minute finales, which are the opposite of getting emotionally involved. It’s all special effects and it often feels like the movie could have ended any time during those last 20 minutes,” DiLeo says.

The Marvel and DC Comics-derived films have become so formulaic that even kids are starting to tire of them.

“I think it’s a much bigger story than a bad summer,” Connecticut Film Festival director Carruthers, of Bethel, says. “We’re in a transition in how we’re consuming content. Kids are getting everything online now, so they don’t need theaters. ... I see big-box theaters dying off as the whole distribution model changes. I think you will see more new movies released (on the internet) during their first day in theaters.

“I don’t go out to movies much anymore,” Carruthers admits, laughing, of his focus on programming special film series at places like the Bethel Cinema. Otherwise, most nights you will find him at home bingeing on British TV mysteries.

Rich does not buy a lot of the PR surrounding “quality TV” and the notion that cable and streaming services are making up for the dire state of Hollywood moviemaking.

“It is exciting to have so many different possibilities after years and years of being prisoners of the (three) networks,” he says. “But most of the (streaming and cable TV) shows aren’t up to the hype.”

In addition to the tired reboots of “Dynasty” and other ancient TV hits, many of the acclaimed streaming series such as “House of Cards” suffer from lots of padding, the writer believes, pointing out the original British version of the political drama told its story in a tight four hours while the first season of the U.S. remake was more than twice as long.

“So much of the new series is filler, which is an economic decision,” he adds of getting 10 hours out of a two- or four-hour story. Rich agrees more and more these days TV viewers are abandoning Netflix and Amazon series after only one episode that doesn’t grab them.

“The only thing that speaks to the deciders is bad ticket sales,” DiLeo says, “and maybe they will get the message after this summer’s (terrible business).”
http://www.newstimes.com/living/arti...V-12227386.php





Critic's Notebook Misunderstood Upon its Release, 'Josie and the Pussycats' was Ahead of its Time
Josie and the Pussycats

“Lame.” “Off-putting.” “Spectacularly bad.”

Movie critics were not kind to “Josie and the Pussycats” when it came out in 2001.

Based on the fantasy girl group from the old Archie comics, the film sought to bring singer-guitarist Josie McCoy and her friends (who’d also been the subjects of an early-’70s cartoon) into the age of ’N Sync and MTV’s “Total Request Live.”

Rachael Leigh Cook, fresh off her success in the teen hit “She’s All That,” donned a pair of fuzzy cat ears to play Josie, while a strong supporting cast featured Rosario Dawson and Tara Reid (as the Pussycats) and Alan Cumming and Parker Posey (as conniving record execs out to exploit the band).

Even so, audiences responded about as enthusiastically as reviewers, with “Josie” earning back less than half of its reported $39 million production budget, according to Box Office Mojo.

The failure “took us out of the movie industry,” Deborah Kaplan, who directed along with Harry Elfont, recently told BuzzFeed News.

Yet “Josie and the Pussycats” quietly stuck around.

The film’s soundtrack, with songs composed by a dream team of ’90s power-pop pros, went gold. And though it convinced few at the time, “Josie’s” sharply satirical vision of the hyper-commercial record industry feels only more relevant at a moment when Taylor Swift’s face can be seen on the side of UPS delivery trucks.

“It’s almost the ‘Idiocracy’ version of the music business,” said Anna Waronker of That Dog, one of those power-pop pros, comparing “Josie” to Mike Judge’s bleakly prescient political comedy from 2006.

Now, timed to — what else? — a new product launch, this enduring cult favorite is getting a second push from some of its creators.

To promote the release of a vinyl edition of the “Josie” soundtrack, the movie will be screened Tuesday evening at the Theatre at Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where Kaplan, Elfont and several cast members (including Cook and Reid) are scheduled to appear for a Q&A session.

But the main event for “Josie” believers is sure to be a one-off live concert that night in which Kay Hanley of the Boston band Letters to Cleo, who provided Josie’s singing voice in the movie, will perform the film’s songs with backing from some of the musicians who played on the album.

Asked how it’s been to revisit tunes like “3 Small Words” and “Pretend to Be Nice” after a decade and a half, Hanley described the rehearsal process as “100% joy.”

“I love these songs — they’re so fun,” she added, and indeed the crisp, hooky music holds up against anything by period acts such as That Dog and Fountains of Wayne (whose Adam Schlesinger was another writer on the soundtrack).

“The energy they give me is just so pure.”

Hanley recalled the experience of recording Josie’s vocals for the movie — a gig she got through her friend Dave Gibbs of the Gigolo Aunts, who’d moved from Boston to L.A. and befriended Kaplan and Elfont — with equal enthusiasm.

She’d worked in movies before: In 1999, Letters to Cleo appeared in “10 Things I Hate about You,” the high-school-set “Taming of the Shrew” update starring Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger.

“But for this I was being hired as a vocalist outside the band,” she said. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe someone’s paying me to sing.’”

Not only that, but she was being paid to do it with Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, the hit-making studio wizard who served as the soundtrack’s executive producer. Hanley said she learned an “incredible” amount from Babyface about music and about an industry then flush with cash from CD sales but which would soon undergo radical change thanks to the spread of digital file-sharing.

Looking back today, the threat of that imminent crisis seems to propel “Josie and the Pussycats,” which lampoons the idea of branding and product placement by putting corporate logos in virtually every scene; the movie is accurately predicting a future in which labels and musicians — even those not on “TRL” — will move beyond selling albums as a means of making money.

“At the time it was anathema to form these alliances with corporations,” Hanley said of an era when the perception of “indie cred” mattered. “Now you get the record deal and you have hits so that you can get the Nokia deal. It’s wild.”

For all its expertly rendered cynicism about the business of music, “Josie” is deeply earnest about music itself — about the drive to make it as well as the love that fans feel for it.

Early in the movie, before Josie and the Pussycats have been signed by Mega Records (and unwittingly enlisted in a government mind-control conspiracy), we see the band members playing happily in an empty bowling alley — they’re giving their all despite the fact that nobody’s listening.

And, sure, the film later depicts Josie’s audience as a bunch of brain-washed victims. But what pop obsessive doesn’t recognize the feeling of powerlessness that a great song can exert on a listener?

As the star of the movie, Cook said she saw an opportunity to flesh out a character that was very thinly drawn in its original incarnation.

“Josie’s a young woman who’s ambitious and passionate about music and loves her friends,” she said. “But that was about it as far as the comics ever got it. So it was up to us to really make her three-dimensional” — to show why Josie wants to be in a band and what it means to her, which the movie makes real progress toward between all the jokes about Clearasil and Carson Daly.

Cook added that she thinks of the role in connection with two other “iconic” parts she played not long before “Josie”: Mary Anne Spier in an adaptation of “The Baby Sitter’s Club” and Becky Thatcher in Disney’s take on “Tom and Huck.”

“The fact that within six years I got to be those three characters that people have a lot of expectations about — that’s pretty damn cool,” she said.

Hanley, who went on to compose for children’s TV, views her work on “Josie and the Pussycats” in a larger context too — in her case as the bookend to a “magical period” in the mid-’90s when smart, female-led rock groups like Letters to Cleo, the Breeders and Veruca Salt were “on the radio and headlining festivals and making music that seemed like it counted.”

Like “Josie,” though, that’s an idea coming back to life in a newly visible way, said Hanley, who pointed to the emergence of young acts such as Speedy Ortiz and Charly Bliss.

“It’s so exciting that that’s happening again,” she said. “The hair on my arms is standing on end just talking about it.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

“Josie and the Pussycats” with Kay Hanley

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Theatre at Ace Hotel, 929 S. Broadway

Tickets: $45

Info: www.acehotel.com

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...925-story.html





The Music Business is Growing Again — Really Growing — and it’s Because of Streaming

Spotify, Apple Music and other services have 30 million U.S. subscribers, and streaming revenue is up 48 percent so far this year.
Peter Kafka

Streaming now represents the majority of U.S. music revenue, which may explain why Taylor Swift has rethought her Spotify stance. Kevin Winter / Getty Images for DIRECTV

Familiar song, new tempo: Music streaming is big, and getting bigger fast. Digital downloads are falling off a cliff.

Oh, and one more familiar refrain: The music industry loves the money it’s getting from subscription services like Spotify and Apple Music, but it wants YouTube to pay them much more.

All of this comes from the RIAA, the music industry’s U.S. trade group, which has a new update on sales figures and a standard complaint about Google’s video service.

First, the numbers: You already know this, but we are fully in the streaming era now, and things are accelerating.

More than 30 million people are now paying for a subscription streaming service in the U.S., which pushed streaming revenue up 48 percent, to $2.5 billion, in the first half of the year. Streaming now accounts for 62 percent of the U.S. music business.

And that’s pushing the overall music business back up again, after a fall that started in 1999, with the ascent of Napster, and didn’t stop until a couple years ago. Retail sales were up 17 percent, to $4 billion, and wholesale shipments were up 14.6 percent, to $2.7 billion.

Meanwhile, iTunes-style digital download sales continue to fall. They’re down 24 percent. Because why buy songs for a dollar when you can legally stream (almost) anything you want for a price that ranges between zero and $10 a month?

One surprise: Physical sales — things you buy that you can hold in your hand, like in the olden days — are nearly flat, down just 1 percent. That’s partly because of you hipsters and your facial hair, who pushed vinyl sales up 3 percent. But it’s also because some of you still like CDs, and maybe you’re always going to like CDs. Those sales were only down 3 percent.

Now the griping: The labels, as they have been for several years, are making a point of complaining that YouTube doesn’t pay them nearly enough for all the streams the service creates.

And they’re not buying YouTube’s arguments, which fall into two buckets: 1) Hey, we’re paying you guys a lot, and 2) Hey, if you don’t like it, take your music off of YouTube.

No need to quote from RIAA boss Cary Sherman’s letter, since it makes the same argument he has been making for some time, but if you want to see it for yourself, head over here.
https://www.recode.net/2017/9/20/163...e-subscription





FCC Paves Way for Wireless Mergers, Net Neutrality Repeal

The Federal Communications Commission’s annual report on wireless competition declares the mobile market competitive. But dissenting members cry foul.
Marguerite Reardon

For the first time in eight years, the Federal Communications Commission has declared the mobile wireless market to be competitive.

The findings were outlined in the FCC's 20th annual report on the state of the mobile wireless market. The FCC is required by Congress to examine the state of competition in the wireless market each year. Previous reports, under Democratic chairs of the agency during former President Barack Obama's administration, declined to make a finding on whether the market benefits from effective competition. Previous reports indicated the market was highly concentrated according to antitrust standards.

The FCC had declared the market competitive during George W. Bush's presidency. And this report, under another Republican administration, returns to that finding.

The report comes as T-Mobile and Sprint are reportedly engaged in merger discussions, and it could play a role in the FCC's review of the merger once it's announced. Because the wireless carriers would have to transfer FCC spectrum licenses, the agency would have jurisdiction to determine if the merger is in the public interest. The FCC opposed T-Mobile's proposed sale to AT&T in 2011 stating the merger would bring "significant harms to competition" if the number of national players was reduced from four to three carriers.

The competition report could also be used to back up the FCC's plans to repeal its 2015 net neutrality rules. In May, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai introduced a proposal to roll back the rules, which reclassify broadband and wireless services as a utility. The rules are meant to prevent broadband providers from exerting too much control over the internet. But broadband and wireless companies argue the new classification imposes outdated rules that were designed for the telephone monopoly. The FCC is currently reviewing comments on the proposal, and the competition report could be used to bolster the argument that strict regulations are unnecessary.

Unlike prior reports, the FCC didn't evaluate the entire wireless ecosystem and instead based its findings on certain factors, such as falling prices and investment in wireless networks. This led the two Democrats on the FCC to oppose the report's findings. Democratic commissioner Mignon Clyburn dissented from the report and called the FCC's conclusion "myopic."

"I can neither understand nor condone why the majority used a truncated analysis to reach this conclusion," she said in a statement. "This is like a doctor looking at one organ and pronouncing a patient fit as a fiddle."

Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel also dissented and said the report failed to define what effective competition actually is. An "I know it when I see it" standard is not good enough, she said. Rosenworcel also cautioned against using this report to allow mergers that would reduce competition.

"While this report celebrates the presence of four nationwide wireless providers, let's be mindful that a transaction may soon be announced that seeks to combine two of these four," Rosenworcel said. "While the commission should not prejudge what is not yet before us, I think this agency sticks its collective head in the sand by issuing this report and implying, 'move along, there is nothing to see here.'"

Wireless carriers said they were encouraged by the report and applauded the agency for its return to "data-driven analysis."

"Today, new leadership at the FCC released a report acknowledging what American consumers have known for years that they are in the driver's seat of the mobile economy," Will Johnson, a Verizon senior vice president, said in a statement.
https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-declar...t-competitive/





Ajit Pai Should be Fired, Petition Says Before Senate Re-Confirmation Vote

Senate Democrats plan "very loud" debate on vote to give Pai a new term.
Jon Brodkin

Net neutrality advocacy group Free Press is gathering signatures on a petition to "fire" Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, who needs a re-confirmation vote from the Senate in order to continue serving on the FCC.

The Senate's Republican majority will almost certainly ensure that Pai gets a new term. But Free Press's petition likely won't go unheeded by Democratic senators, who plan to criticize Pai's positions on net neutrality and broadband consumer privacy rules before the Senate vote.

The Free Press petition, available here, says that "[t]he Senate needs to stand up for what's right and fire FCC Chairman Ajit Pai." Free Press, which says it collected 10,000 signatures on the petition in 24 hours, wrote:

Since he joined the Commission, he's worked to undo policies designed to protect Internet users, communities of color and poor people. While he's supposed to protect the public interest, he's continuously voted against it and sided with the deep-pocketed corporations—like Verizon—that once employed him.

He's failing at his job. And that means we need the Senate to fire him. And we have an opportunity. The Senate has to vote to re-confirm Pai by the end of the year or he's out.

Here's what that means for us: We can get every single member of the Senate on the record about Net Neutrality and a whole lot more.

The petition called out Pai's plan to overturn the commission's net neutrality rules and the FCC's likely approval of the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group's acquisition of Tribune Media Company. Free Press also said a vote for Pai is a vote to "Shut off phone and Internet service for people who are struggling," perhaps a reference to a Pai decision that made it more difficult for companies to provide subsidized broadband to poor people through the

FCC's Lifeline program.

Pai is a critic of Free Press's positions on net neutrality and other issues. When Pai announced his plan to overturn net neutrality rules in April, he singled out Free Press as "a spectacularly misnamed Beltway lobbying group" that wants the government to "assume control of the Internet" and restrict free speech.

Pai and Free Press have disagreed about whether net neutrality rules are harming broadband network investment. Free Press has pointed out that ISPs themselves say that the rules haven't affected investment. Last week, it argued that "Chairman Pai continues to hide the truth about broadband investment to justify his vendetta against net neutrality."

We asked Pai's office today if he has any response to the Free Press petition or the group's most recent statement about broadband investment, but a spokesperson for Pai declined comment.

Democrats fight re-confirmation

Pai's first term on the FCC technically expired in June 2016, but the FCC's rules allow him to stay until the end of 2017. President Donald Trump, who appointed Pai to the chairmanship, nominated Pai for a new five-year term retroactive to July 1, 2016.

A Senate vote on Pai's re-confirmation could come as soon as this week, Politico reported today. Although Republicans would like to push the vote through quickly, Democrats will try to hold it up long enough to detail their opposition to Pai's policies.

“We’re going to be very loud about it,” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) told Politico. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said, "This debate on net neutrality, on privacy, is at a defining historical moment, and we have to ensure there is a full public debate so everyone can understand its importance.”

While unlikely, the FCC would be temporarily left with a 2-2 deadlock between Republicans and Democrats if Pai had to leave the commission. Trump would be able to nominate a replacement and the Senate would decide whether to confirm the nominee to fill the empty slot. While all five commissioners must be approved by the Senate, the president alone decides which of the five serves as chair.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...s-us-senators/





AT&T Seeks Supreme Court Review on Net Neutrality Rule
Greg Stohr and Todd Shields

• Appeal adds to pressure on rule that FCC might weaken
• Rule bars service providers from slowing some web traffic

AT&T Inc. and other broadband providers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Obama-era "net neutrality" rule barring internet service providers from slowing or blocking rivals’ content.

The appeals, filed Thursday, will put new pressure on a rule enacted in 2015 when the Federal Communications Commission was under Democratic control. Filing a separate appeal from AT&T were the United States Telecom Association, a trade group, and broadband service provider CenturyLink Inc.

Now under Republican leadership, the FCC is already considering a plan to replace and weaken the rules. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai wants to remove strong legal authority that critics say over-regulates telephone and cable providers and that defenders say is needed to enforce fair treatment of web traffic.

The embattled net neutrality rules bar internet service providers such as AT&T, Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp. from blocking or slowing some web traffic in favor of other content -- their own or a paying customer’s.

"The practical stakes are immense," AT&T said in its appeal of a ruling that backed the FCC. The company pointed to a dissenting opinion that said the regulation “fundamentally transforms the internet” and will have a “staggering” impact on infrastructure investment.

The rules are backed by tech companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc.

Pai, elevated to chairman by President Donald Trump, hasn’t said when the agency may take final action on the replacement rule. The prospect has produced a public outpouring, with the FCC’s website receiving more than 22 million comments.

Republicans say the Obama-era rules discourages investment and hamstrings broadband companies. The rules were passed at the urging of President Barack Obama. Democrats say they’re needed to prevent unfair treatment of web traffic by companies that control access to homes and smartphones.

A federal appeals court upheld the rules last year.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...igh-court-term





Comcast’s New Skinny Bundle Streaming Service is Charging $18 For What Antennas Offer for Free
Rob Toledo

Comcast announced this week that they plan on rolling out their streaming service, ‘Xfinity Instant TV’ as an option for broadband-only customers. At our very first glance, it seemed like a pretty good deal, a live-streaming service for $18 a month, not bad right?

But once we actually looked into the offering, we noticed something funny. Almost the entirety of what they’re planning on charging $18 a month for could be viewed free with an antenna. According to the WSJ, the antenna as an option is apparently a long lost TV option for many consumers.

Variety is reporting, ‘Xfinity Instant TV’ intro packages, the ones that are $18, will only include a handful of broadcast channels, and a few “freebies” like the Home Shopping Network, and CSPAN… So we’re not exactly talking about getting access to ESPN, CNN, FX, or other more desirable channels for cord cutters, those will cost you at least $45 more a month, so basically the cost of your current cable television package.

Of course, we’re aware that there are areas where some of these broadcast networks aren’t available OTA, but for those people, Comcast already offers access to these networks through a standard cable box for less than $18 a month. And services like Sling TV have $20 packages that have a way better selection of channels without requiring any specific internet provider.

Another thing of note, this service is only available to Comcast internet subscribers, so you’re already on the hook there as well. One positive thing here, though, is that this will include access to on-demand services, so certain TV shows and movies will be available through these streaming packages.

Check out the full pricing options below:

• Sports and News ($30 per month): CNBC, CNN, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN News, ESPNU, Fox Business, Fox News, Fox Sports 1, Golf Channel, MSNBC, NBC Sports, NFL Network and regional sports networks based on market.
• Entertainment ($15 per month): A&E, AMC, Animal Planet, BET, Bravo, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, E!, Food Network, FX, FXX, Hallmark Channel, History, HGTV, Lifetime, OWN, Syfy, TBS, TNT, TV One, USA, VH1.
• Kids and Family ($10 per month): Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, Disney Junior, Disney XD, Freeform, MTV, National Geographic Channel, Nick Jr., Nickelodeon, NickToons, Universal Kids, TeenNick, TLC.
• Latino ($5 per month): BabyFirst, CNN en Español,Cine Dinamita, Cine Latino, Cine Mexicano, Cine Sony Television, Discovery Familia, Discovery en Español, Galavisión, History en Español, Pasiones, Viendo Movies, Vme Kids.
• Deportes ($7 per month): beIN, beINñ, ESPN Deportes, Fox Deportes, LAS, NBCUniverso, Univision tDN. (Telemundo, Unimas and Univision are provided when not included in the broadcast tier)

You’re probably looking at this and thinking, for those prices, I might as well just keep cable, which is probably what Comcast is hoping for.
http://exstreamist.com/comcasts-new-...have-for-free/





Democrats are Pushing a $40 Billion Plan to Bring the Best Internet Access to Rural America
Brian Fung

The Democratic Party is making high-speed Internet access a new plank in its economic agenda as it tries to regain trust among middle-class Americans in the country's heartland.

Democratic lawmakers are calling for $40 billion in new federal funding for infrastructure projects for rural and tribal areas and other regions, whose access to fast, affordable broadband has lagged behind that of dense, urban areas. The proposal, unveiled Thursday, would have Internet providers compete for the right to build out the networks. Also local governments and cooperatives would be eligible for funding, according to a party white paper on the matter.

Drawing parallels to the 1930s-era push for nationwide electricity, Democrats say the plan would benefit farmers, medical patients and students in the most remote and underserved areas.

“The electricity of 2017 is high-speed Internet,” the white paper reads.

The effort suggests Democrats are seeking to turn Internet access into a campaign issue in upcoming midterm races. By incorporating rural broadband into the party's overarching “Better Deal” economic plan, the “digital divide” is gaining a prominence that has rarely been seen before in the party's platform.

“The way we speak in plain-speaking West Virginia, this is a really good deal,” said Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) at a Capitol news conference Thursday. “All of you who've come from urban areas, you take this for granted.”

But Democrats are likely to face competition for the mantle of Internet-access champion. Some Republicans have made spreading Internet access far and wide a key priority. Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, undertook a multistate tour this year of areas that he said are in desperate need of connectivity.

“If you live in rural America, there’s a better than 1-in-4 chance that you lack access to fixed high-speed broadband at home, compared to a 1-in-50 probability in our cities,” Pai wrote in a reflection on his trip in the summer.

Although Pai is a political appointee, not an elected official, he has argued for the Trump administration to include broadband as part of the White House's infrastructure proposal — a commitment Trump vowed to make during a speech in July in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Tech companies have recently begun to develop their own solutions to the rural broadband gap, with Microsoft announcing this year a plan to devote unused TV airwaves for wireless data. And firms, such as OneWeb and SpaceX, have explored the idea of beaming Internet access to earth from low-orbiting satellites.

Some policy analysts say that Democrats have too long ignored Internet access as a rural issue that could win them votes, thinking of it instead as a “high-tech” issue for the affluent.

“If you actually get out to Trump country and talk to folks, you will discover that they are angry and frustrated and pissed off that the companies won't serve them (because it is too expensive to provide service) and won't let them deploy their own networks,” wrote Harold Feld, senior vice president at the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, in a Facebook post this week.

In an email, Feld added Thursday that Democratic outreach on rural broadband could break the partisan deadlock gripping much of the country.

“Traditionally, rural Republicans have been eager to use the tools of government to bring essential services to rural America,” he said. “If this helps pressure rural Republicans to break with the anti-government mantra and return to traditional bipartisan approaches to bringing service to rural America, so much the better.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...rural-america/





Push for Gender Equality in Tech? Some Men Say It’s Gone Too Far

After revelations of harassment and bias in Silicon Valley, a backlash is growing against the women in tech movement.
Nellie Bowles

Their complaints flow on Reddit forums, on video game message boards, on private Facebook pages and across Twitter. They argue for everything from male separatism to an end to gender diversity efforts.

Silicon Valley has for years accommodated a fringe element of men who say women are ruining the tech world.

Now, as the nation’s technology capital — long identified as one of the more hostile work environments for women — reels from a series of high-profile sexual harassment and discrimination scandals, these conversations are gaining broader traction.

One of those who said there had been a change is James Altizer, an engineer at the chip maker Nvidia. Mr. Altizer, 52, said he had realized a few years ago that feminists in Silicon Valley had formed a cabal whose goal was to subjugate men. At the time, he said, he was one of the few with that view.

Now Mr. Altizer said he was less alone. “There’s quite a few people going through that in Silicon Valley right now,” he said. “It’s exploding. It’s mostly young men, younger than me.”

Mr. Altizer said that a gathering he hosts in person and online to discuss men’s issues had grown by a few dozen members this year to more than 200, that the private Facebook pages he frequents on men’s rights were gaining new members and that a radical subculture calling for total male separatism was emerging.

“It’s a witch hunt,” he said in a phone interview, contending men are being fired by “dangerous” human resources departments. “I’m sitting in a soundproof booth right now because I’m afraid someone will hear me. When you’re discussing gender issues, it’s almost religious, the response. It’s almost zealotry.”

Mr. Altizer is part of a backlash against the women in technology movement. While many in the tech industry had previously dismissed the fringe men’s rights arguments, some investors, executives and engineers are now listening. Though studies and surveys show there is no denying the travails women face in the male-dominated industry, some said that the line for what counted as harassment had become too easy to cross and that the push for gender parity was too extreme a goal. Few were willing to talk openly about their thinking, for fear of standing out in largely progressive Silicon Valley.

Even so, “witch hunt” is the new whispered meme. Some in tech have started identifying as “contrarians,” to indicate subtly that they do not follow the “diversity dogma.” And self-described men’s rights activists in Silicon Valley said their numbers at meetings were rising.

Others are playing down the women-in-tech issue. Onstage at a recent event, the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said harassment in Silicon Valley was “rarer than in most other businesses.”

Many men now feel like “there’s a gun to the head” to be better about gender issues, said Rebecca Lynn, a venture capitalist at Canvas Ventures, and while “there’s a high awareness right now, which is positive, at the same time there’s a fear.”

The backlash follows increasingly vulgar harassment revelations in Silicon Valley. Several female engineers and entrepreneurs this year named the men they accused of harassing them, and suddenly tech’s boys’ club seemed anything but impervious. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder, resigned as chief executive after the ride-hailing service was embroiled in harassment accusations. Dave McClure, head of the incubator 500 Startups, called himself “a creep” and stepped down. This month, the chief executive of Social Finance, Mike Cagney, also quit amid a harassment scandal.

In the aftermath, many stood up for gender equality in tech. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, asked investors to sign a “decency pledge.” Many companies reiterated that they needed to improve work force diversity.

“In just the last 48 hours, I’ve spoken to a female tech executive who was grabbed by a male C.E.O. at a large event and another female executive who was asked to interview at a venture fund because they ‘feel like they need to hire a woman,’” said Dick Costolo, the former chief of Twitter, who now runs the fitness start-up Chorus. “We should worry about whether the women-in-tech movement has gone too far sometime after a couple of these aren’t regularly happening anymore.”

But those who privately thought things had gone too far were given a voice by James Damore, 28, a soft-spoken Google engineer. Mr. Damore, frustrated after another diversity training, wrote a memo that he posted to an internal Google message board. In it, he argued that maybe women were not equally represented in tech because they were biologically less capable of engineering. Google fired him last month.

After months of apologizing by Silicon Valley for bad behavior, here was a young man whom some in tech’s leadership could potentially get behind.

Paul Graham, who founded an influential start-up incubator, Y Combinator, posted two articles about how the science behind Mr. Damore’s memo was accurate. Another start-up investor, John Durant, wrote that “Charles Darwin himself would be fired from Google for his views on the sexes.”

And the investor Peter Thiel’s business partner, Eric Weinstein, tweeted, “Dear @Google, Stop teaching my girl that her path to financial freedom lies not in coding but in complaining to HR.”

Dear @Google,
Stop teaching my girl that her path to financial freedom lies not in coding but in complaining to HR.
Thx in advance,
A dad
— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) Aug. 8, 2017

Mr. Durant declined to comment. Mr. Graham said in an email that there needed to be more distinction between fact and policy, and Mr. Weinstein said there was “a sea of brilliant women” and that more needed to be done to “figure out how to more fully empower them.”

Now men’s rights advocates in Silicon Valley have galvanized.

“What Google did was wake up sectors of society that weren’t into these issues before,” said Paul Elam, who runs A Voice for Men, a men’s rights group. He said his organization had seen more interest from people in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley has always been a men’s space, others said. Warren Farrell, who lives in Marin, Calif., and whose 1993 book, “The Myth of Male Power,” birthed the modern men’s rights movement, said, “The less safe the environment is for men, the more they will seek little pods of safety like the tech world.”

This turn in the gender conversation is good news for Mr. Damore. “The emperor is naked,” he said in an interview. “Since someone said it, now it’s become sort of acceptable.”

He added, “The whole idea that diversity improves workplace output, it’s not scientifically decided that that’s true.”

Mr. Damore filed a labor complaint against Google in August and said more than 20 people had reached out about joining together for a class-action suit about systemic discrimination against men. He is represented by Harmeet Dhillon, a local firebrand lawyer.

“It’s become fashionable in Silicon Valley for people like James, a white man, to be put into a category of less desirable for promotion and advancement,” Ms. Dhillon said. “Some companies have hiring goals like ‘We’ll give you a bonus if you’re a hiring manager and you hire 70 percent women to this organization.’ That’s illegal.”

Two men who worked at Yahoo sued the company for gender discrimination last year. Their lawyer, Jon Parsons, said the female leadership — Yahoo’s chief executive was Marissa Mayer, before Verizon bought the company — had gone too far in trying to hire and promote women. He tied the suit into today’s women-in-tech movement.

“When you’re on a mission from God to set the world straight, it’s easy to go too far,” Mr. Parsons said. “There was no control over women hiring women.”

He said that his clients, Greg Anderson and Scott Ard, had faced gender discrimination in Yahoo’s media teams and that other teams like cars were headed by women, which to Mr. Parsons was a sign of problems.

“No eyebrows are going to rise if a woman heads up fashion,” Mr. Parsons said. “But we’re talking about women staffing positions — things like autos — where it cannot be explained other than manipulation.”

Those leading Silicon Valley’s gender equality push said they were astonished that just as the movement was having an impact, it opened up an even more radical men’s rights perspective.

“It’s exhausting,” said Joelle Emerson, who runs Paradigm, a company that designs diversity strategies. “It’s created divides that I didn’t anticipate.”

One radical fringe that is growing is Mgtow, which stands for Men Going Their Own Way and pronounced MIG-tow. Mgtow aims for total male separatism, including forgoing children, avoiding marriage and limiting involvement with women. Its message boards are brimming with activity from Silicon Valley, Mr. Altizer said.

Cassie Jaye, who lives in Marin and made a documentary about the men’s rights movement called “The Red Pill,” said that the tech world and the men’s rights community had “snowballed” together and that the rise in the number of people in Mgtow is new.

On the Mgtow message boards, members discuss work (“Ever work for a woman? Roll up your sleeves and share your horror story”), technology (“The stuff girlfriends and wives can’t stand — computers, games, consoles”) and dating (mostly best practices to avoid commitment).

“I think there are a lot of guys living this lifestyle without naming it, and then they find Mgtow,” said Ms. Jaye, who calls herself a former feminist.

Mr. Altizer leads Bay Area Fathers’ Rights, a monthly support group for men to talk about the issues they uniquely face. He became interested in the community after a divorce and said his eyes were opened to how few rights men have. As for the numbers of women in tech, the effort for parity is absurd, he said.

“I’ve been on the hiring side for years,” Mr. Altizer said, adding that he is not currently hiring people. “It would be nice to have women, but you cannot find applicants.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/t...-scandals.html





Radical Leftists Built Their Own Reddit After It Banned Them

"I decided to delete my Reddit account and make a site where socialists and anarchists wouldn’t get punished for talking out against fascism.”
Louise Matsakis

Last December, Reddit banned a subforum called r/LeftWithSharpEdge, for "multiple violations of site wide rules." The relatively small anarchist community—a screenshot from the Internet Archive last year shows that it had less than 400 members—was a satirical reaction to a similarly named forum, r/LeftWithoutEdge. Sharp Edge was more radical, and intended to counter r/LeftWithoutEdge's "inoffensive, milquetoast brand of socialist," ziq, one of subreddit's members, told me in a direct message.

Then it got banned, for what ziq says are unclear reasons. "The Reddit admins refused to explain why they deleted our sub," they said. What is known is that Sharp Edge was deleted the same day it was featured on r/SubredditOfTheDay, a popular forum that highlights subreddits across the site.

After r/LeftWithSharpEdge was taken down, ziq decided to leave Reddit and create an independent anarchist community free from its rules. Raddle.me, which was originally called Raddit.me, is an "alternative that is focused on community building and openness, and not controlled by a corporation," ziq told me. The original name was intended to sound similar to Reddit, but was later changed to avoid potential trademark issues.

"The anger from the Reddit left sphere was big enough that I decided to delete my Reddit account and make a site where socialists and anarchists wouldn't get punished for talking out against fascism, joking about 'eating the rich' and sharing 'subversive' anti-capitalist memes and literature," they explained.

Raddle isn't the first site to emerge out of outrage at Reddit's policies. When Reddit instituted new harassment rules in 2015, and subsequently banned several hateful communities, Redditors built a new site called Voat. It became a favorite among the alt-right, and promised to never censor its users posts. Far-right online communities often build their own spaces after getting kicked off bigger, mainstream platforms, like 8chan, for whom the forum 4chan was too tame, or Gab, which is intended loosely as an alternative to Twitter.

While Voat's free-wheeling, hate speech-is-free-speech culture could reasonably be called the opposite of Raddle's, both sites were created because of perceived censorship by Reddit's administrators. They're evidence of how large platforms often struggle to moderate communities whose beliefs are seen as outside the norm.

"We are very clear in our site terms of service that posting content that incites violence or harasses will get users banned from Reddit," a spokesperson for Reddit said in an email. "We have banned r/leftwithsharpedge due to repeated violations of the terms of our content policy, which we communicated clearly to the moderators."

Raddle, which has a poison dart frog as its logo, feels like a simpler version of Reddit. It's fast, relatively easy to navigate, and has familiar Reddit features like upvote and downvote buttons that push posts to the top of the site. There are a number of political subforums, like "EatTheRich," as well as more typical fare, like "books" or "tech."

Like r/LeftWithoutEdge, Raddle's user population appears fairly tiny, but there are no exact numbers. Raddle doesn't have advertisements or run analytical software, so its size is difficult to calculate—but that's by design. The site is meant to be an alternative to social networks that profit by monitoring user behavior and serving advertisements.

"We have no ads, no tracking, no user profiling and we don't collect or share any user data with anyone," ziq said. The site is community-built and anyone can contribute to the code.

Ziq's commitment to privacy is an appealing virtue for Raddle's users. "I'm always very uneasy about the lack of concern for privacy online," Tequila_Wolf, a user who posts frequently to Raddle, told me in a direct message. "When you have friends on government lists who get harassed at every border because, say, they are members of Anarchists Against The Wall, you know you don't want to get on that list."

Ziq originally built Raddle on WordPress, but a skilled developer soon stepped in to create a more sophisticated version of the site with less limitations. "I spent five hours straight putting together new software that could run the site and threw it on GitHub," Emma, the lead developer, designer, and system administrator behind Raddle told me in an email. "After three months of coding (including one month off due to burnout), we switched to the new software."

Raddle is moderated differently from other sites—the focus is on completely excluding bigotry. "Socialists of all stripes, social democrats, liberals, conservatives and anyone else who wants to partake in a community where bigotry isn't tolerated in the name of 'free speech' is welcome to join. The one condition is that bigotry stays out of the picture," Emma explained. "Our belief is that freedom from harm trumps freedom of speech."

Emma said that whether someone should be banned from Raddle is determined on a case-by-case basis. "We recognize that we aren't all flawless beings, so an otherwise decent person who slips up and says something that can be construed as bigotry will probably get away with a warning," she told me. "On the other hand, we won't tolerate users who post in bad faith and who consistently step over or skirt the line."

Raddle ultimately came out of more broad problems ziq and Emma saw with Reddit. Ziq complained about how it has increasingly become a recruiting ground for the alt-right, the social network's overemphasis on America (r/politics, a major subreddit, only discusses US-based politics, for example), and the fact that the site's code isn't open source, among other issues. Emma mentioned what she says is a problem with harassment on the site.

"To me, the biggest problem with Reddit is how its administrators ignore the routine harassment and witch-hunts of marginalized people that takes place, with r/The_Donald being the most prominent example," she said.

r/The_Donald is an enormously popular subreddit that rallies for President Trump and his policies. "I could forgive Reddit if T_D [r/The_Donald] owed its existence to a doctrine of absolute free speech (which I'd still think is misguided), but the reality is that T_D is their big cash cow," Emma told me.

Raddle is ultimately a place where leftists can be themselves, without constant confrontation from users who arrive from subreddits like r/The_Donald. "Having a space where you don't have to constantly listen to or defend yourself from fascists is important, and Reddit has shown that it isn't willing to provide that," Emma said.

More broadly, Raddle, like every good internet community, provides an escape from the outside world. "I want to contribute to the building of an online community that allows me and others to exist, and allows us to resist the world as it rains down harms upon us," Tequila_Wolf told me.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...it-banned-them





DOJ Demands Facebook Information from 'Anti-Administration Activists'

DOJ wants anti-Trump Facebook users' info
Jessica Schneider

Trump administration lawyers are demanding the private account information of potentially thousands of Facebook users in three separate search warrants served on the social media giant, according to court documents obtained by CNN.

The warrants specifically target the accounts of three Facebook users who are described by their attorneys as "anti-administration activists who have spoken out at organized events, and who are generally very critical of this administration's policies."

One of those users, Emmelia Talarico, operated the disruptj20 page where Inauguration Day protests were organized and discussed; the page was visited by an estimated 6,000 users whose identities the government would have access to if Facebook hands over the information sought in the search warrants. In court filings, Talarico says if her account information was given to the government, officials would have access to her "personal passwords, security questions and answers, and credit card information," plus "the private lists of invitees and attendees to multiple political events sponsored by the page."

These warrants were first reported by LawNewz.com.

Facebook went through seven months of legal proceedings so it could make all three of the Facebook users aware that the government attorneys wanted their online details.

"We successfully fought in court to be able to notify the three people whose broad account information was requested by the government," a Facebook spokesperson said Friday. "We are grateful to the companies and civil society organizations that supported us in arguing for people's ability to learn about and challenge overly broad search warrants."

The American Civil Liberties Union, representing the three Facebook users, filed a motion to quash the warrants Thursday.

"What is particularly chilling about these warrants is that anti-administration political activists are going to have their political associations and views scrutinized by the very administration they are protesting," said ACLU attorney Scott Michelman.

Facebook was initially served the warrants in February 2017 along with a gag order which barred the social media company from alerting the three users that the government was seeking their private information, Michelman said. However, Michelman says that government attorneys dropped the gag order in mid-September and agreed that Facebook could expose the existence of these warrants, which has prompted the latest court filings. Michelman, however, says all court filings associated with the search warrant, and any response from Facebook, remain under seal.

The Justice Department is not commenting on these search warrants, but government attorneys have issued a similar search warrant to the web provider DreamHost seeking wide-ranging information about visitors to the website disruptj20.org, which provided a forum for anti-Trump protestors. In that case, DOJ modified its initial search warrant seeking millions of IP address for the visitors who merely clicked on the disruptj20.org website. But DC Superior Court Judge Robert Morin largely granted prosecutors' request to collect a vast set of records from the company, which will include emails of the users who signed up for an account associated with the website, and membership lists.

In addition to the account of Talarico and her disruptj20 page, the search warrant also seeks all information about the personal accounts of Lacy MacAuley and Legba Carrefour. Carrefour is a self-described political activist and pushed back against the search warrant in court filings, saying that his Facebook account "contains a significant amount of private material concerning my personal life." Carrefour denied that he was involved in any of the riots in Washington, DC, on Inauguration Day, but acknowledged that he has "participated in or helped to organize dozens of demonstrations and events of various types in service of political causes."
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/28/politi...sts/index.html





Obama Tried to Give Zuckerberg a Wake-Up Call Over Fake News on Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg

Nine days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as "crazy" the idea that fake news on his company's social network played a key role in the U.S. election, President Barack Obama pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call.

For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia's brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. Weeks after Trump's surprise victory, some of Obama's aides looked back with regret and wished they had done more.

Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump's inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race.

Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem posed by fake news. But he told Obama those messages weren't widespread on Facebook and that there was no easy fix, according to people briefed on the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of a private conversation.

The conversation on Nov. 19 was a flashpoint in a tumultuous year in which Zuckerberg came to recognize the magnitude of a new threat - a coordinated assault on a U.S. election by a shadowy foreign force that exploited the social network he created.

Facebook says it sold political ads to Russian company during 2016 election

Like the U.S. government, Facebook didn't foresee the wave of disinformation that was coming and the political pressure that followed. The company then grappled with a series of hard choices designed to shore up its own systems without impinging on free discourse for its users around the world.

One outcome of those efforts was Zuckerberg's admission on Thursday that Facebook had indeed been manipulated and that the company would now turn over to Congress more than 3,000 politically themed advertisements that were bought by suspected Russian operatives.

But that highly public moment came after months of maneuvering behind the scenes that has thrust Facebook, one of the world's most valuable companies - and one that's used by one-third of the world's population each month - into a multi-sided Washington power struggle in which the company has much to lose.

Some critics say Facebook dragged its feet and is acting only now because of outside political pressure.

"There's been a systematic failure of responsibility" on Facebook's part, said Zeynep Tufekci, as associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies social media companies' impact on society and governments. "It's rooted in their overconfidence that they know best, their naivete about how the world works, their expensive effort to avoid oversight, and their business model of having very few employees so that no one is minding the store."

Facebook says it responded appropriately.

"We believe in the power of democracy, which is why we're taking this work on elections integrity so seriously, and have come forward at every opportunity to share what we've found," said Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy and communications. A spokesperson for Obama declined to comment.

This account - based on interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the government's investigation and Facebook's response - provides the first detailed backstory of a 16-month journey in which the company came to terms with an unanticipated foreign attack on the U.S. political system and its search for tools to limit the damage.

Among the revelations is how Facebook detected elements of the Russian information operation in June 2016 and then notified the FBI. Yet in the months that followed, the government and the private sector struggled to work together to diagnose and fix the problem.

The growing political drama over these issues has come at a time of broader reckoning for Facebook, as Zuckerberg has wrestled with whether to take a more active role in combatting an emerging dark side on the social network - including fake news, suicides on live video, and allegations that the company was censoring political speech.

These issues have forced Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies to weigh core values, including freedom of speech, against the problems created when malevolent actors use those same freedoms to pump messages of violence, hate and disinformation.

There has been a rising bipartisan clamor, meanwhile, for new regulation of a tech industry that, amid a historic surge in wealth and power over the past decade, has largely had its way in Washington despite concerns raised by critics about its behavior.

In particular, momentum is building in Congress and elsewhere in the federal government for a law requiring tech companies - like newspapers, television stations and other traditional carriers of campaign messages - to disclose who buys political ads and how much they spend on them.

"There is no question that the idea that Silicon Valley is the darling of our markets and of our society - that sentiment is definitely turning," said Tim O'Reilly, an adviser to tech executives and chief executive of the influential Silicon Valley-based publisher O'Reilly Media.

Thwarting the Islamic State

The encounter in Lima was not the first time Obama had sought Facebook's help.

In the aftermath of the December 2015 shooting in San Bernardino, California, the president dispatched members of his national security team - including Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and top counter-terrorism adviser Lisa Monaco - to huddle with leading Silicon Valley executives over ways to thwart the Islamic State's practice of using U.S.-based technology platforms to recruit members and inspire attacks.

The result was a summit, on Jan. 8, 2016, which was attended by one of Zuckerberg's top deputies, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. The outreach effort paid off in the view of the Obama administration when Facebook agreed to set up a special unit to develop tools for finding Islamic State messages and blocking their dissemination.

Facebook's efforts were aided in part by the relatively transparent ways in which the extremist group sought to build its global brand. Most of its propaganda messages on Facebook incorporated the Islamic State's distinctive black flag - the kind of image that software programs can be trained to automatically detect.

In contrast, the Russian disinformation effort has proven far harder to track and combat because Russian operatives were taking advantage of Facebook's core functions, connecting users with shared content and with targeted native ads to shape the political environment in an unusually contentious political season, say people familiar with Facebook's response.

Unlike the Islamic State, what Russian operatives posted on Facebook was, for the most part, indistinguishable from legitimate political speech. The difference was the accounts that were set up to spread the misinformation and hate were illegitimate.

A Russian operation

It turned out that Facebook, without realizing it, had stumbled into the Russian operation as it was getting underway in June 2016.

At the time, cybersecurity experts at the company were tracking a Russian hacker group known as APT28, or Fancy Bear, which U.S. intelligence officials considered an arm of the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, according to people familiar with Facebook's activities.

Members of the Russian hacker group were best known for stealing military plans and data from political targets, so the security experts assumed that they were planning some sort of espionage operation - not a sweeping disinformation campaign designed to shape the outcome of the U.S. presidential race.

Facebook executives shared with the FBI their suspicions that a Russian espionage operation was in the works, a person familiar with the matter said. An FBI spokesperson had no immediate comment.

Soon thereafter, Facebook's cyber experts found evidence that members of APT28 were setting up a series of shadowy accounts - including a persona known as Guccifer 2.0 and a Facebook page called DCLeaks - to promote stolen emails and other documents during the presidential race. Facebook officials once again contacted the FBI to share what they had seen.

After the November election, Facebook began to look more broadly at the accounts that had been created during the campaign.

A review by the company found that most of the groups behind the problematic pages had clear financial motives, which suggested that they weren't working for a foreign government.

But amid the mass of data the company was analyzing, the security team did not find clear evidence of Russian disinformation or ad purchases by Russian-linked accounts.

Nor did any U.S. law enforcement or intelligence officials visit the company to lay out what they knew, said people familiar with the effort, even after the nation's top intelligence official, James Clapper, testified on Capitol Hill in January that the Russians had waged a massive propaganda campaign online.

The sophistication of the Russian tactics caught Facebook off-guard. Its highly regarded security team had erected formidable defenses against traditional cyber attacks but failed to anticipate that Facebook users - deploying easily available automated tools such as ad micro-targeting - pumped skillfully crafted propaganda through the social network without setting off any alarm bells.

Political post-mortem

As Facebook struggled to find clear evidence of Russian manipulation, the idea was gaining credence in other influential quarters.

In the electrified aftermath of the election, aides to Hillary Clinton and Obama pored over polling numbers and turnout data, looking for clues to explain what they saw as an unnatural turn of events.

One of the theories to emerge from their post-mortem was that Russian operatives who were directed by the Kremlin to support Trump may have taken advantage of Facebook and other social media platforms to direct their messages to American voters in key demographic areas in order to increase enthusiasm for Trump and suppress support for Clinton.

These former advisers didn't have hard evidence that Russian trolls were using Facebook to micro-target voters in swing districts - at least not yet - but they shared their theories with the House and Senate intelligence committees, which launched parallel investigations into Russia's role in the presidential campaign in January.

Sen. Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, initially wasn't sure what to make of Facebook's role. U.S. intelligence agencies had briefed the Virginia Democrat and other members of the committee about alleged Russian contacts with the Trump campaign and about how the Kremlin leaked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks to undercut Clinton.

But the intelligence agencies had little data on Russia's use of Facebook and other U.S.-based social media platforms, in part because of rules designed to protect the privacy of communications between Americans.

Facebook's effort to understand Russia's multifaceted influence campaign continued as well.

Zuckerberg announced in a 6,000-word blog post in February that Facebook needed to play a greater role in controlling its dark side.

"It is our responsibility," he wrote, "to amplify the good effects [of the Facebook platform] and mitigate the bad - to continue increasing diversity while strengthening our common understanding so our community can create the greatest positive impact on the world."

‘A critical juncture’

The extent of Facebook's internal self-examination became clear in April, when Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos co-authored a 13-page white paper detailing the results of a sprawling research effort that included input from experts from across the company, who in some cases also worked to build new software aimed specifically at detecting foreign propaganda.

"Facebook sits at a critical juncture," Stamos wrote in the paper, adding that the effort focused on "actions taken by organized actors (governments or non-state actors) to distort domestic or foreign political sentiment, most frequently to achieve a strategic and/or geopolitical outcome." He described how the company had used a technique known as machine learning to build specialized data-mining software that can detect patterns of behavior - for example, the repeated posting of the same content - that malevolent actors might use.

The software tool was given a secret designation, and Facebook is now deploying it and others in the run-up to elections around the world. It was used in the French election in May, where it helped disable 30,000 fake accounts, the company said. It was put to the test again on Sunday when Germans went to the polls. Facebook declined to share the software tool's code name. Another recently developed tool shows users when articles have been disputed by third-party fact checkers.

Notably, Stamos's paper did not raise the topic of political advertising - an omission that was noticed by Capitol Hill investigators. Facebook, worth $495 billion, is the largest online advertising company in the world after Google. Although not mentioned explicitly in the report, Stamos's team had searched extensively for evidence of foreign purchases of political advertising but had come up short.

A few weeks after the French election, Warner flew out to California to visit Facebook in person. It was an opportunity for the senator to press Stamos directly on whether the Russians had used the company's tools to disseminate anti-Clinton ads to key districts.

Officials said Stamos underlined to Warner the magnitude of the challenge Facebook faced policing political content that looked legitimate.

Stamos told Warner that Facebook had found no accounts that used advertising but agreed with the senator that some likely existed. The difficulty for Facebook was finding them.

Finally, Stamos appealed to Warner for help: If U.S. intelligence agencies had any information about the Russian operation or the troll farms it used to disseminate misinformation, they should share it with Facebook. The company is still waiting, people involved in the matter said.

Breakthrough moment

For months, a team of engineers at Facebook had been searching through accounts, looking for signs that they were set up by operatives working on behalf of the Kremlin. The task was immense.

Warner's visit spurred the company to make some changes in how it conducted its internal investigation. Instead of searching through impossibly large batches of data, Facebook decided to focus on a subset of political ads.

Technicians then searched for "indicators" that would link those ads to Russia. To narrow down the search further, Facebook zeroed in on a Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency, which had been publicly identified as a troll farm.

"They worked backwards," a U.S. official said of the process at Facebook.

The breakthrough moment came just days after a Facebook spokesman on July 20 told CNN that "we have seen no evidence that Russian actors bought ads on Facebook in connection with the election."

Facebook's talking points were about to change.

By early August, Facebook had identified more than 3,000 ads addressing social and political issues that ran in the United States between 2015 and 2017 and that appear to have come from accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

After making the discovery, Facebook reached out to Warner's staff to share what they had learned.

Congressional investigators say the disclosure only scratches the surface. One called Facebook's discoveries thus far "the tip of the iceberg." Nobody really knows how many accounts are out there and how to prevent more of them from being created to shape the next election - and turn American society against itself.
http://www.courant.com/nation-world/...924-story.html





Meet Shadowsocks, the Underground Tool that China’s Coders Use to Blast Through the Great Firewall
Josh Horwitz & Nikhil Sonnad

This summer Chinese authorities deepened a crackdown on virtual private networks (VPNs)—tools that help internet users inside the mainland access the open, uncensored web. While not a blanket ban, the new restrictions are shifting the services out of their legal grey area and further toward a black one. In July alone, one popular made-in-China VPN abruptly ceased operations, Apple removed dozens of VPN apps from its China-facing app store, and some international hotels stopped offering VPN services as part of their in-house wifi.

Yet the government was targeting VPN usage well before the latest push. Ever since president Xi Jinping took office in 2012, activating a VPN in China has been a constant headache—speeds are slow, and connectivity frequently lapses. Especially before major political events (like this year’s upcoming party congress in October), it’s not uncommon for connections to drop immediately, or not even form at all.

In response to these difficulties, China’s tech-savvy programmers have been relying on another, lesser-known tool to access the open internet. It’s called Shadowsocks, and it’s an open-source proxy built for the specific purpose of jumping China’s Great Firewall. While the government has made efforts to curb its spread, it’s likely to remain difficult to suppress.

How is Shadowsocks different from a VPN?

To understand how Shadowsocks works, we’ll have to get a bit into the cyberweeds. Shadowsocks is based on a technique called proxying. Proxying grew popular in China during the early days of the Great Firewall—before it was truly “great.” In this setup, before connecting to the wider internet, you first connect to a computer other than your own. This other computer is called a “proxy server.” When you use a proxy, all your traffic is routed first through the proxy server, which could be located anywhere. So even if you’re in China, your proxy server in Australia can freely connect to Google, Facebook, and the like.

But the Great Firewall has since grown more powerful. Nowadays, even if you have a proxy server in Australia, the Great Firewall can identify and block traffic it doesn’t like from that server. It still knows you are requesting packets from Google—you’re just using a bit of an odd route for it. That’s where Shadowsocks comes in. It creates an encrypted connection between the Shadowsocks client on your local computer and the one running on your proxy server, using an open-source internet protocol called SOCKS5.

How is this different from a VPN? VPNs also work by rerouting and encrypting data. But most people who use them in China use one of a few large service providers. That makes it easy for the government to identify those providers and then block traffic from them. And VPNs usually rely on one of a few popular internet protocols, which tell computers how to talk to each other over the web. Chinese censors have been able to use machine learning to find “fingerprints” that identify traffic from VPNs using these protocols. These tactics don’t work so well on Shadowsocks, since it is a less centralized system.

Each Shadowsocks user creates his own proxy connection, and so each looks a little different from the outside. As a result, identifying this traffic is more difficult for the Great Firewall—that is to say, through Shadowsocks, it’s very hard for the firewall to distinguish traffic heading to an innocuous music video or a financial news article from traffic heading to Google or some other site blocked in China.

Leo Weese, a Hong Kong-based privacy advocate, likens VPNs to a professional freight forwarder, and Shadowsocks to having a package shipped to a friend who then re-addresses the item to the real intended recipient before putting it back in the mail. The former method is more lucrative as a business, but easier for authorities to detect and shut down. The latter is makeshift, but way more discreet.

What’s more, tech-savvy Shadowsocks users often customize their settings, making it even harder for the Great Firewall to detect them wholesale.

“People use VPNs to set up inter-company links, to set up a secure network. It wasn’t designed for the circumvention of censorship,” says Larry Salibra, a Hong Kong-based privacy advocate. With Shadowsocks, he adds, “Each person can configure it to look like their own thing. That way everybody’s not using the same protocol.”

Calling all coders

If you’re a luddite, you’ll probably have a hard time setting up Shadowsocks. One common method to use it requires renting out a virtual private server (VPS) located outside of China and capable of running Shadowsocks. Then users must log in to the server using their computer’s terminal, and enter the Shadowsocks code. Next, using a Shadowsocks client app (there are many, both free and paid), users input the server location and password and access the server. After that, they can browse the internet freely.

Shadowsocks is often difficult to set up because it originated as a for-coders, by-coders tool. The software first reached the public in 2012 via Github, when a developer using the pseudonym “Clowwindy” uploaded it to the code repository. Word-of-mouth spread among other Chinese developers, as well as on Twitter, which has long been a hub for anti-firewall Chinese programmers. A community formed around Shadowsocks. Employees at some of the world’s largest tech companies—both Chinese and international—work together in their free time to maintain the software’s code. Developers have built third-party apps to run it, each touting various custom features.

One such developer is the creator behind Potatso, a Shadowsocks client for iOS. Based in Suzhou and employed at a US-based software company, he grew frustrated at the firewall’s block on Google and Github (the latter is blocked intermittently), both of which he relied on to code for work. He built Potatso during nights and weekends out of frustration with other Shadowsocks clients, and eventually put it in the app store.

“Shadowsocks is a great invention,” he says, asking to remain anonymous. “Until now, there’s still no evidence that it can be identified and get stopped by the Great Firewall.”

Not quite underground, not quite above ground

It’s difficult to know how many people use Shadowsocks. The developers for Potatso and Surge, another iOS client, separately told Quartz their paid apps have gathered enough downloads to make for a lucrative hobby on top of other work. But neither could estimate the popularity of the core Shadowsocks software.

Still, anecdotes suggest that the software has reached at least some people in China who aren’t professional developers. One Shadowsocks user Quartz spoke to says he relies on it to watch videos on Vimeo and YouTube. Both sites are blocked in China, but he visits regularly for his job at a production company.

Another Shadowsocks user, 25-year-old Steffie Chao, told Quartz she began using the software four years ago. While preparing to study abroad, she used a VPN to access YouTube and watch university lectures. When her VPN stopped working, she searched for an alternative and discovered Shadowsocks on a Chinese-language internet forum. She ran it on her computer using some rudimentary coding skills she picked up in a class.

At the very least, Shadowsocks is widespread enough that Chinese authorities are aware of its existence. The government has made some attempts to clip its wings. In 2015, around the time of a parade in China celebrating the 70th anniversary of WWII, Clowwindy posted a message on Github announcing he had been visited by the police, and would have to stop working on Shadowsocks. And when Apple removed dozens of firewall-jumping apps from its Chinese-facing app store, it didn’t just target VPNs—several Shadowsocks apps were removed as well, including Potatso.

Yet Shadowsocks will continue to live on. That’s in part because the code is open-source, meaning that anyone can maintain, alter it, and release it in a different form (the source code remains on Github, it’s simply more difficult to find there than it was previously).

Should Shadowsocks give us hope for freedom on China’s internet? Yes and no.

On the one hand, it’s unlikely that any Shadowsocks app will ever become as widespread as brand-name VPNs, like VyperVPN or AnchorFree. According to Weese, the privacy advocate, Shadowsocks’s underlying technology is difficult to “scale” business-wise compared to a VPN. That means that even though Shadowsocks might be a better tool for jumping the Great Firewall, VPNs will have an advantage when it comes to reaching consumers.

Not that there’s a lot of incentive for an enterprising Chinese coder to build and promote a “mainstream,” easy-to-use Shadowsocks app. After all, if it gets popular enough in China, authorities could take notice, and there could be serious consequences (link in Chinese)—or more government effort towards figuring out how to detect and block users.

Shadowsocks might not be the “perfect weapon” to defeat the Great Firewall once and for all. But it will likely lurk in the dark for some time.

Echo Huang contributed to reporting.
https://qz.com/1072701/meet-shadowso...reat-firewall/





FalconSAT-3 Now Open for Amateur Radio Use

The Air Force Academy satellite FalconSAT-3 is now open for Amateur Radio use as a digital store-and-forward system. Built in 2005 and 2006 by cadets and faculty in the Space Systems Research Center at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, FalconSAT-3 was launched in 2007.

The satellite has completed its scientific and training missions, and the Academy now is making it available for Amateur Radio use. The Packet Bulletin Board System operates at 9,600 baud with a 145.840 MHz uplink/435.103 MHz downlink. Output power is 1 W, and the downlink is continuously on. Digipeating is enabled for live QSOs, but unattended digipeating operation is not authorized at this time.
http://www.arrl.org/news/falconsat-3...teur-radio-use





American Red Cross Asks ARRL’s Assistance with Puerto Rico Relief Effort

The American Red Cross (ARC) has asked the ARRL for assistance with relief efforts in Puerto Rico. ARC needs up to 50 radio amateurs who can help record, enter, and submit disaster-survivor information into the ARC Safe and Well system. In the nearly 75-year relationship between ARRL and ARC, this is the first time such a request for assistance on this scale has been made. ARRL now is looking for radio amateurs who can step up and volunteer to help our friends in Puerto Rico.

Requirements

• There are very specific requirements and qualifications needed for this deployment.
• Due to the nature of this deployment you will need to process in as ARC volunteers. This includes passing a background check. The ARC has indicated that it will cover all expenses for transportation, lodging, and feeding while on deployment. ARC will also provide liability coverage for volunteers. The only out-of-pocket expense to the volunteer would be personal items purchased during deployment.
• ARRL and ARC will require training for volunteers being deployed. ARC will provide general deployment training and advanced training in working in austere environments. ARRL will provide to ARC training on Amateur Radio equipment and modes to be used, reporting guidelines, and operating guidelines.
• Deployment will be for up to 3 weeks.

Qualifications

• General class Amateur Radio license or higher
• Familiarity with WinLink, HF voice, and VHF simplex communications
• Strong technical skills
• Ability to work under difficult conditions
• Ability to deploy for up to 3 weeks
• Ability to work as part of a team

Helpful Skills

• Spanish language skills
• Previous experience in disaster response
• Previous or current work as a Red Cross volunteer
• Previous experience with shelter operations

If you feel that you meet these qualifications and would like to be considered for this deployment, please contact ARRL Emergency Preparedness Manager Mike Corey, KI1U (860-594-0222), who will make the introduction of qualified volunteers to ARC.
http://www.arrl.org/news/american-re...-relief-effort





Ex-NSA Hacker Drops macOS High Sierra Zero-Day Hours Before Launch

The vulnerability lets an attacker steal the contents of a Keychain — without needing a password.
Zack Whittaker

Just hours before Apple is expected to roll out the new version of its desktop and notebook operating system, macOS High Sierra, a security researcher dropped a zero-day.

Patrick Wardle, a former NSA hacker who now serves as chief security researcher at ‎Synack, posted a video of the hack -- a password exfiltration exploit -- in action.

Passwords are stored in the Mac's Keychain, which typically requires a master login password to access the vault.

But Wardle has shown that the vulnerability allows an attacker to grab and steal every password in plain-text using an unsigned app downloaded from the internet, without needing that password.

Wardle tested the exploit on High Sierra, but said that older versions of macOS and OS X are also vulnerable.

He tweeted a short video demonstrating the hack.

Wardle created a "keychainStealer" app demonstrating a local exploit for the vulnerability, which according to the video, can expose passwords to websites, services, and credit card numbers when a user is logged in.

That exploit could be included in a legitimate-looking app, or be sent by email.

"If I was an attacker or designing a macOS implant, this would be the 'dump keychain' plugin," said Wardle.

He reported the bug to Apple earlier this month, "but unfortunately the patch didn't make it into High Sierra," he said, which was released Monday.

"As a passionate Mac user, I'm continually disappointed in the security of macOS," he said. "I don't mean that to be taken personally by anybody at Apple -- but every time I look at macOS the wrong way something falls over. I felt that users should be aware of the risks that are out there I'm sure sophisticated attackers have similar capabilities."

"Apple marketing has done a great job convincing people that macOS is secure, and I think that this is rather irresponsible and leads to issues where Mac users are overconfident and thus more vulnerable," he added.

In his tweet, Wardle suggested that Apple should launch a macOS bug bounty program "for charity." Right now, Apple only has a bug bounty for iPhones and iPads, which pays up to $200,000 for high-end secure boot firmware exploits.

It's the second zero-day that Wardle found for the operating system this month -- the first shows how the new software's secure kernel extension loading feature is vulnerable to bypass.

Apple provided sister-site CNET with a statement, after publication:

"MacOS is designed to be secure by default, and Gatekeeper warns users against installing unsigned apps, like the one shown in this proof of concept, and prevents them from launching the app without explicit approval. We encourage users to download software only from trusted sources like the Mac App Store, and to pay careful attention to security dialogs that macOS presents."

Apple did not say if or when it will patch the bug.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-m...stealing-hack/





Internet Explorer Bug Leaks Whatever You Type in the Address Bar

All your private addresses and search queries are belong to us.
Dan Goodin

There's a bug in the latest version of Internet Explorer that leaks the addresses, search terms, or any other text typed into the address bar.

The bug allows any currently visited website to view any text entered into the address bar as soon as the user hits enter. The technique can expose sensitive information a user didn't intend to be viewed by remote websites, including the Web address the user is about to visit. The hack can also expose search queries, since IE allows them to be typed into the address bar and then retrieved from Bing or other search services.

The flaw was disclosed Tuesday by security researcher Manuel Caballero. This proof-of-concept site shows the exploit works as described on the latest version of IE.

The proof-of-concept makes it transparent that the attacking website is viewing the entered text. The hack, however can easily be modified to make the information theft completely stealthy. Either way, this weakness may allow malicious sites to view information the user presumed was private. People should strongly consider using Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or another non-IE browser. In an e-mailed statement, Microsoft officials wrote: "Windows has a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues, and proactively update impacted devices as soon as possible. Our standard policy is to provide solutions via our current Update Tuesday schedule."
https://arstechnica.com/information-...n-address-bar/





If Data is the New Oil, are Tech Companies Robbing Us Blind?
Luke Dormehl

Why it matters to you

Could a radical way of rethinking data ownership provide a new payment system for future humans?

Data is the new oil, or so the saying goes. So why are we giving it away for nothing more than ostensibly free email, better movie recommendations, and more accurate search results? It’s an important question to ask in a world where the accumulation and scraping of data is worth billions of dollars — and even a money-losing company with enough data about its users can be worth well into the eight-figure region.

The essential bargain that’s driven by today’s tech giants is the purest form of cognitive capitalism: users feed in their brains — whether this means solving a CAPTCHA to train AI systems or clicking links on Google to help it learn which websites are more important than others. In exchange for this, we get access to ostensibly “free” services, while simultaneously helping to train new technologies which may one day put large numbers of us out of business.

This problem becomes more crucial in a world in which AI is threatening jobs.

Viewed uncharitably, companies like Google and Facebook can appear almost like the unscrupulous oil man Daniel Plainview from Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood; offering little more than tokenistic gestures in exchange for what amounts to a goldmine.

“The defense of this practice is that these companies provide ‘free’ services, and that they deserve some reward for their innovation and ingenuity,” Dr. John Danaher, a lecturer at the School of Law at NUI Galway, who writes about the intersection of the law and emerging technology, told Digital Trends. “That may well be true, but I would argue that the rewards they receive are disproportionate. The other defense is that many companies provide for some revenue-sharing agreements with more popular users, such as YouTube. That’s becoming more true, too, but it’s only a handful of users who can make decent money from this.”

This problem becomes more crucial in a world in which AI is threatening jobs. According to a famous 2013 study carried out by the U.K.’s Oxford Martin School, 47 per cent of jobs in the U.S. are susceptible to automation within the next 20 twenty years. Could rethinking the way that data is gathered — and, more crucially, remunerated — offer one possible solution?

Paid for your data

In an age in which concepts like universal basic income are increasingly widely discussed, one of the most intriguing solutions is one first put forward by virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. In his book Who Owns the Future?, Lanier suggests that users should receive a micropayment every time their data is used to earn a company money.
data typing

For example, consider the user who signs up to an online dating service. Here, the user provides data that the dating company uses to match them with a potential data. This matching process is, itself, based on algorithms honed by the data coming from previous users. The data resulting from the new user will further perfect the algorithms for later users of the service. In the case that your data somehow matches someone else successfully in a relationship, Lanier says you would be entitled to a micropayment.

In scenarios like this, a formula could easily be established to determine both where data originated and how important the data was in shaping certain decisions. Not all data is created equal. While some of the systems human data helps train just requires us to click a link or upvote a comedy special, other types require high levels of expertise. One illustration of this is translating a document from one language to another. Although tools like Google Translate are increasingly effective, the reason these machines are able to work as they do is because they draw on data that was previously provided by human users. That means taking individual words and phrases that have been painstakingly matched up previously by human translators, and then applying these micro-translations to new pieces of text.

Translation isn’t about literally translating each word in turn, as illustrated by the (possibly apocryphal) story of early machine translation systems which turned, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” into, “The liquor is holding out all right, but the meat has spoiled,” or “Out of sight, out of mind” into “Invisible idiot.” In his introduction to the English translation of Dante’s Inferno, translator John Ciardi likens good translation to playing the same tune on two different instruments. “When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords,” he writes. “It can, however, make recognizably the same ‘music,’ the same air. But it can only do so when it as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.”

At present, translators are not paid for the overwhelming bulk of their translation tasks. Hanna Lützen, who translates the Harry Potter books into Danish gets paid for that particular job by a publishing house, but Google then pays her nothing if those combined 1 million+ words help make its language translation system smarter so it can translate your love letter to a girlfriend in Denmark. With a universal micropayment system, it may be possible for certain types of data to carry higher remuneration than others — much as a lawyer currently commands a higher hourly rate than a bricklayer.

A moral, not legal argument

While it sounds an extreme proposal, in some ways a revenue split such as this is no different to the one currently offered by companies like Apple and Google to the content creators who help prop up their services. As John Danaher notes, YouTube personalities are rewarded for the number of viewers they can attract to their videos, because this helps make Google money. Apple gives developers 70 percent of money they generate in the App Store, since this drives more people to use Apple’s services. Micropayments would be this, but on a more widespread basis. The amount of money per usage of data would be tiny, but — combined — it could add up to a reasonable amount.

This micropayment idea isn’t wholly without legal precedent, and isn’t totally dissimilar to the way musicians are paid when their music is “sampled” by another artist. This also once sounded an unlikely idea, but has now been the subject of successful lawsuits — such as when German electronica band Kraftwerk argued in court that even a few bars of a drum beat was sufficient to be protected by copyright.

Laws are still catching up with the realities of new digital technology.

Precedents like the E.U.’s “right to be forgotten” ruling against Google show how laws are still catching up with the realities of new digital technology. But according to John Danaher, enforcing this may be a tough legal case to argue.

“The case I would make against the practice is moral, not legal,” Danaher continued. “General rules of contract law are taken to apply to the agreements that users click when signing up for a service like Facebook. As long as Facebook draws the user’s attention to their terms and conditions, and as long as those terms and conditions do not breach public policy and unfair terms rules, they are held to be binding on the user. In my opinion, this just shows the inadequacy of current approaches to contract law, since it is well-known that people are willing to accept even the most outlandish terms and conditions.” (During a 2014 experiment, unwitting participants in London agreed to give up their eldest child by agreeing to public Wi-Fi terms.)

This wouldn’t necessarily be bad news for companies though. While it would initially cut into the profits made by tech giants, such a scheme could also encourage greater levels of engagement with services. If using internet services — and therefore helping make them smarter and their creators more competitive in the marketplace — was able to provide a living wage it would likely have a significant impact on the number of users using a particular service.

Users, on the other hand, would get a new robot-proof (for now!) job out of the equation. Everyone’s a winner. Right?
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-t...ship-question/





Three-Year Old Startup Vera Scores Huge Deal to Protect All of GE’s IP
Ron Miller

When Box landed GE as a customer in 2014, it marked a turning point for the cloud content management company, giving them momentum ahead of their IPO. Three years later, Vera, a data rights management startup is getting a similar feeling, announcing GE’s 300,000 employees would be using Vera to protect the company’s intellectual property as it moved through the world.

“This is a seminal moment for us in a lot of ways. It brings together a lot of work we have been doing since the inception of the company three years ago,” CEO Ajay Arora told TechCrunch.

While Arora made it clear this wasn’t his company’s first swing at a Fortune 100 company, the size and scope of the deal make it a different proposition. The needs of the company’s different divisions are so dramatically different with GE covering everything from aviation to healthcare to energy and more, that as Arora points out, each one is like a large company unto itself.

“GE has every system under the sun. They have multiple cloud services, including obviously Box. The initial hook was, how do they create a central plane of security that they can manage across these cloud services and their traditional data stores, and protect data wherever it travels across services,” Arora explained

What Vera is providing for GE is a way to protect data in motion, a problem every company, no matter the size, faces. Vera gives customers control over files as they move through the world by encrypting every one, then enabling customers to control who can see it and if they can print, copy/paste or forward a document. What’s more, documents can be expired on the fly. The beauty of their approach is that security policy travels with the document no matter where it goes or what device is being used.

This problem is particularly acute for a data-driven organization as large and varied as GE where its IP is moving around constantly and it has struggled to protect it, Nasrin Rezai, VP, Global Chief Information and Product Security Officer at GE explained.

“When product designs and specifications are shared without continuous protection as part of our supply chain collaboration and technical processes, they’re susceptible to theft or illegitimate use in today’s digital economy. Vera addresses this problem because we know even when shared externally, these files are protected at the source,” he said in a statement.

Arora says with all of the recent highly public data leaks from Equifax, Deloitte and the SEC, this deal signals a shift in the way companies protect data. It’s no longer about trying to keep data protected behind the firewall.

“Security exists to protect IP that companies have been spending billions of dollars to create. If there is no [effective firewall anymore], they have to apply security to the data itself,” he said.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/28/th...all-of-ges-ip/





Apple is Being Sued for Patent Infringement by a Native American Tribe

New IP rules: Patents can be reviewed, "unless you pay off some Indian tribe."
Joe Mullin

Apple gets sued for patent infringement dozens of times each year, mostly by little-known shell companies with no products—the types of companies often derided as "patent trolls." But the newest lawsuit seeking royalty payments from iPad sales is likely a first: the recently created plaintiff, MEC Resources LLC, is wholly owned by a Native American tribe. The MEC lawsuit appears to be using Native American legal rights to avoid having the US Patent Office perform an "inter partes review" that could invalidate the patent.

The case had a typical beginning. In March, a Texas company named Prowire LLC filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Apple in Delaware federal court, claiming that the iPad 4 infringes its US Patent No. 6,137,390.

Apple asked the judge to transfer the case to California. Prowire lawyers opposed that motion, but they didn't hang around to see the litigation through. In August, they informed the court that the patent had been handed off to MEC Resources LLC, a North Dakota firm. Shortly thereafter, the Delaware judge granted a transfer to California, noting that MEC is a "North Dakota citizen" and that keeping Apple in Delaware's overcrowded courts made little sense.

MEC Resources is wholly owned by the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes. Neither MEC's CEO nor its lawyers responded to a request for comment from Ars. However, recent developments in other patent cases shed light on why there's suddenly a connection between patents and Native Americans.

Earlier this month, the New York-based St. Regis Mohawk Tribe disclosed that it was given a set of valuable patents belonging to the drug company Allergan. In return for holding on to those patents, which were licensed back to Allergan, the company would pay the tribe an annual royalty of $15 million, as long as the patents remained valid.

Both the tribe and Allergan were explicit about why they executed the deal: to avoid having the US Patent Office review their patents in a procedure called inter partes review, or IPR. The IPR process, which went into effect in 2012, is a kind of mini-litigation system that takes place before the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB), rather than in district courts. Because it's faster and cheaper than the courts, IPR has been one of the most efficient ways to get rid of bad patents. That has made it loved by tech companies, who are often patent defendants—and hated by the drug companies, who are usually asserting their patents against generic competitors.

But there are certain parties that can't be challenged with an IPR because of "sovereign immunity," an old legal concept codified in the 11th Amendment of the US Constitution. Sovereign immunity prevents states from being sued in federal court unless they agree to the suit. It dates back to pre-revolutionary times, in which laws prevented anyone from suing a sovereign ruler, like a king or queen, without their consent.

In the patent world, sovereign immunity protects public universities, which are viewed as essentially arms of the state. Two PTAB cases so far have established that patents owned by public universities can't be challenged in IPRs. (Sovereign immunity also protects state entities from "declaratory judgment" lawsuits seeking to invalidate their patents preemptively, so public university patents can only be invalidated in court if the university initiates a lawsuit.)

As expected, last week the St. Regis Mohawk tribe filed papers requesting that the IPR filing against Allergan's patents be thrown out on the basis that the tribe is a sovereign government and therefore qualifies for immunity. Mylan Pharmaceuticals, which initiated the IPR, has said it will fight it out, calling the deal a "sham transaction."

An attractive strategy

When the St. Regis-Allergan deal became public a few weeks ago, it was immediately clear that if the strategy could successfully shield patents from invalidity challenges, it wouldn't be limited to pharmaceuticals. The St. Regis tribe is already holding 40 patents from a technology company and acknowledges it plans to make money from using those patents in lawsuits.

The tribe wouldn't identify the tech company in question, but by reviewing patent office records, others have discovered that it's SRC Labs, a high-performance computing company founded by Seymour Cray. The patents haven't yet been used in court, but they will be, as the tribe made clear in an FAQ about its patent business.

"The Tribe owns 40 of this company’s patents through assignments and expects that it will earn a significant amount of money through the Shore firm’s enforcement of the patents in federal court," stated the tribe. "Right now a federal court case is being prepared for filing. These cases take a year or more so the money judgment would not be expected until the case is finished—at least 18 months from now."

The patent in question describes a type of "enhanced" inductor that reduces electromagnetic resistance. It was filed in 1999 and assigned to a Taiwanese state-run research institute named the Industrial Technology Research Institute, or ITRI. A few years ago, ITRI and other state-sponsored patent holders started looking to US courts to assert their patents.

It isn't clear what relationship the '390 patent presently has to ITRI, if any. It was acquired by Prowire LLC in mid-2016. Texas corporate documents show that company is owned by Yih-Gwo Ching and Zhou Ye, but little else is known about the company. The two named inventors on the patent are, as far as anyone knows, still in Taiwan.

Will it work?

Even though sovereign immunity has helped at least two public universities dodge IPRs, it isn't clear that the strategy will work for Native American tribes. Their sovereign immunity is granted by Congress and, thus, can be revoked or changed by Congress. States, on the other hand, derive their sovereign immunity from the 11th Amendment.

Patent owners aren't the first to attempt to use Native American legal rights as a shield. In California, certain payday loan companies tried to avoid state lending laws by affiliating with the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and the Santee Sioux Nation of Nebraska.

That scheme didn't work. Last year, the California Supreme Court found "scant evidence that either tribe actually controls, oversees, or significantly benefits from the underlying business operations of the online lenders."

In April, the US Supreme Court decided the case of Lewis v. Clarke (PDF), which held that an employee of Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority wasn't entitled to use sovereign immunity to protect himself from a lawsuit related to a car crash.

Cases like that give hope to Josh Landau, a patent reform lobbyist for the Computer and Communications Industry Association, that certain patent-holders' plans to dodge IPRs will fail.

"My sense is that the PTAB is skeptical of this claim," Landau said in an interview with Ars. "There are real problems that can occur if sovereign immunity can be bought and sold in this way."

IPRs have fundamentally changed the economics of patent litigation by increasing risks and lessening rewards for asserting weak patents. If Native American tribes are allowed to bypass the normal rules, the only ones who benefit will be "people who own shaky patents that they want to assert, patents that would have been invalidated in IPRs," writes Landau.

"'The validity of your patents is subject to review, unless you pay off some Indian tribe' does not seem like a good way to run an intellectual property system," notes Science columnist Derek Lowe.

There's no telling how this turns out until we see some rulings from courts or the Patent Trial and Appeals Board. If the patent-licensing shops see even a glimmer of hope that they could avoid IPRs, we're likely to see whole patent portfolios transferred to tribes in short order.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...merican-tribe/





Probe Estimates Billions of Delayed Mail Pieces; Postal Service Acknowledges Some Coverups
Joe Davidson

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

Mail carriers do their best in all kinds of weather, no question.

But the unofficial Postal Service motto promise of "swift completion" can be derailed by in-house human factors. And in some cases, those delays have been covered up, an investigation found, by intentional employee manipulation.

The number of late deliveries is staggering.

In a letter last week to Postmaster General Megan J. Brennan, Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., expressed his "great concern about the U.S. Postal Service Inspector General (OIG) audit report finding that the US Postal Service has been inaccurately reporting delayed mail across a number of facilities, directly impacting mail service for millions of customers."

The OIG estimated that during the year ended Feb. 28, "mail processing facilities underreported late arriving mail by about 2 billion mailpieces" — that's billion with a "b."

Furthermore, another OIG investigation substantiated allegations of "time manipulation and inaccurate reporting of delayed mail."
Postal Service, citing losses, seeks higher stamp prices

During the investigation that followed an inquiry from Tester, Christopher P. Cherry, a deputy assistant inspector general, said in a letter to the senator, "Four employees admitted to failing to report delayed mail. We learned that parcels were scanned as undeliverable to stop the clock. One of the four employees admitted to swiping employees' time cards and manipulating ... data at the direction of Postal Service management. Postal Service management denied directing clerks to scan the PO Box section barcode early."

Tester was emphatic that those who engaged in manipulation or false reports should be sacked.

"To be clear," he told Brennan, "any employee who deliberately delayed mail delivery or who knowingly misreported mail delivery should be terminated for violating the trust of America's hardworking taxpayers and postal ratepayers."

Cherry's letter said one of the four employees decided to leave the Postal Service. It did not have an immediate response to questions about the OIG report or the letters from Tester and other senators.

In addition to Tester's letter, one to Brennan from Democratic Sens. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, said the Postal Service should "take immediate action to develop and implement formal training requirements for managers at Processing Distribution Centers."

The OIG report said that at five of eight centers visited by investigators "did not accurately count on-hand delayed mail." Over two days of observation, the centers did not report more than one-third of the late mail.

"This occurred," the report said, "because employees were not properly supervised and trained in counting and reporting delayed mail."

"When mail condition reports are not accurate, management uses incorrect information to make decisions on staffing, mail processing equipment use, preventative maintenance, and the transportation of mail," the OIG concluded. "These decisions affect the Postal Service's ability to meet its mail service commitments."

Postal Service says it lost $200 million over holiday season

Citing an OIG estimate, the McCaskill and Heitkamp letter said "these delays cost customers and businesses valuable time and put an estimated $85.1 million of Postal Service revenue at risk. This comes at a time when the Postal Service is suffering severe financial difficulties due to declines in mail volume even after a decrease in the price of its products."

In a written response included in the report, Robert Cintron, a Postal Service vice president for network operations, agreed with OIG recommendations on required training for staffers involved in mail counts and for managers to validate the accuracy of reports.

But Cintron also had a serious disagreement with the inspector general.

"The Postal Service disagrees entirely with the OIG's suggested monetary impacts of $85.1M," he wrote. "It is not clear from the audit how the late arriving mail data from eight judgmentally selected (targeted) plants is a statistically valid representation of all plants in the Postal Service network. In addition, although the target is to have zero late arriving mail, this is not an indicator of delayed mail. In many instances, late arriving mail is processed and delivered within the service standard."

But rather than overstating the issue, Tester's letter said the OIG report indicates the late delivery problem "is not only a clear oversight of management at the Postal Service, but it also implies the Postal Service may be overlooking other essential tasks at across the country."
http://www.courant.com/nation-world/...926-story.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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