Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 23rd, ’17

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002

"The solution being offered here won’t be real net neutrality, but an effort to codify federal apathy to a lack of broadband competition into law." – Karl Bode






































December 23rd, 2017




Comcast is Giving its Employees $1,000 Bonuses Because Net Neutrality is Dead

Celebrating the death of consumer protections
Nick Statt

Comcast today announced that it would be doling out $1,000 employee bonuses in response to the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of net neutrality rules last week, as well as the Senate and House’s passing of Republicans’ tax reform bill poised to provide a substantial windfall to wealthy Americans and corporations. Comcast has long been an opponent to Title II classification, which gave the FCC the authority to regulate telecommunications companies and ISPs like utilities. The company sought to kill those consumer protections under the guise they harmed investment, and it celebrated the FCC’s actions last week.

Following the net neutrality repeal, Comcast was unwilling to say it would never block or throttle content or offer paid fast lanes. Those actions are all prevented by robust net neutrality rules and regulatory oversight, yet now are all distinct possibilities since FCC Chairman Ajit Pai gutted Obama-era protections in the name of returning the internet to its prior regulation-free (read: corporation-friendly) regulatory system.

Comcast says it plans to spend “in excess of $50 billion” over the next five years investing in infrastructure and building out physical broadband plants and funding entertainment ventures in TV and film. The news coincides with AT&T’s similar announcement today that it plans to give 200,000 employees $1,000 bonuses each in response to tax reform. AT&T did not mention the FCC or net neutrality, but as an ISP the company stands to benefit in ways similar to Comcast.

Here’s Comcast’s statement in full:

“Based on the passage of tax reform and the FCC's action on broadband, Brian L. Roberts, Chairman and CEO of Comcast NBCUniversal, announced that the Company would award special $1,000 bonuses to more than one hundred thousand eligible frontline and non-executive employees. Roberts also announced that the Company expects to spend well in excess of $50 billion over the next five years investing in infrastructure to radically improve and extend our broadband plant and capacity, and our television, film and theme park offerings. With these investments, we expect to add thousands of new direct and indirect jobs. We will have more to say on capital at our upcoming January 24th earnings report.”

Disclosure: Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/20/...eutrality-dead





Comcast Is Pushing For a Flimsy Net Neutrality Law it Knows Telecom Lobbyists Will Write

Giant ISPs are now pushing for a 'legislative solution' to enshrine net neutrality. Don't trust them.
Karl Bode

The nation’s broadband duopolies scored a major lobbying win last week after the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal net neutrality. But the 3-2 partisan vote at the FCC is only the beginning of the real fight, and ISPs (and the FCC that’s now blatantly pandering to them) have a steep uphill climb in the coming months if they want the repeal to stick.

Once the net neutrality rules are posted to the federal register in January, the FCC will face a flurry of lawsuits from consumer groups, numerous states, and impacted companies. During that legal skirmish, the FCC will need to prove that the broadband market changed dramatically enough in just two years to warrant a wholesale reversal of the popular rules (it didn’t).

FCC lawyers will also need to explain why the FCC ignored not only the millions of angry consumers who supported the rules, but also turned a blind eye to the rampant fraud and identity theft that occurred during the repeal’s public comment period; an apparent effort to undermine faith in the process and downplay the massive public backlash to the FCC’s plan.

Even if the FCC wins in court, large ISPs still need to find a way to prevent any future FCCs from simply reinstating the rules.

That’s why the same giant ISPs that backed the FCC’s assault on net neutrality are now pushing for a “legislative solution” in Congress. The goal: they want a law that contains so many loopholes as to be effectively meaningless, yet prevents the FCC from crafting any real, tough laws down the road. And they know that with this incarnation of Congress so awash in campaign contributions, that big telecom lawyers will be the ones writing it.

The solution being offered here won’t be real net neutrality, but an effort to codify federal apathy to a lack of broadband competition into law

As such, reader skepticism should be high when Comcast’s top lobbyist David Cohen pens a blog post insisting that it’s “time for Congress to act and permanently protect the open internet.”

“It’s now time for all of us to take advantage of this moment in time and end the cycle of regulatory ping pong we’ve been trapped in for over a decade and put this issue to rest once and for all,” Cohen argues. “And there’s a simple way to do this—we really must have bipartisan congressional legislation to permanently preserve and solidify net neutrality protections for consumers and to provide ongoing certainty to ISPs and edge providers alike.”

Cohen would have readers forget that the only reason we’re currently engaged in “regulatory ping pong” is because companies like Comcast keep suing to overturn the popular and modest (by international standards) rules. Cohen also hopes you won’t realize that Comcast wouldn’t be pushing for a “legislative fix” if it thought the end result would be rules that actually prevented it from misbehaving in the absence of real competition.

Cohen repeatedly tries to argue that the real problem here is everybody not named Comcast.

“Unfortunately, there are others who want to continue engaging in a never ending game of back and forth, creating unnecessary anxiety and contributing to an unneeded level of hysteria,” laments Cohen. “Some will undoubtedly continue threatening litigation that does nothing to protect consumers or freedom of the Internet,” says Comcast, which has played a starring role in suing to overturn both the FCC’s 2010 and 2015 net neutrality protections.

So what would a Comcast-approved net neutrality law look like?

It would likely ban most of the more heavy-handed abuses Comcast knows it couldn’t get away with anyway, ranging from the outright blocking of websites and services, to the blatant throttling of the company’s competitors. Comcast long ago gave up on such efforts to instead focus on more subtle, clever abuses of a lack of competition in the broadband space.

As such, you can be certain a Comcast-approved law wouldn’t cover all of the areas where net neutrality violations are actually currently occurring, whether that’s Comcast’s use of arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees (and zero rating of its own content), or the interconnection shenanigans we witnessed when ISPs let peering points congest to drive up costs for content and transit companies.

Keep in mind that net neutrality violations are simply a symptom of the disease that is a lack of competition in both the broadband market.

Expect the ISP push for a new “legislative fix” to ramp up in the new year. The push will likely be cheered by an army of ISP-tied consultants, think tankers, and loyal lawmakers like Senator John Thune, who you should note parroted Comcast’s call for a “bipartisan legislative solution” nearly verbatim

There’s a universe of ways that companies like Comcast can hide this anti-competitive behavior behind faux-technical jargon, whether we’re talking about the years during which Comcast blocked its broadband customers for using Roku or their Playstation to watch HBO Go for no coherent reason, or how it applied arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps under the guise of fairness, with the real goal of making using competing services more expensive.

All told, expect the ISP push for a new “legislative fix” to ramp up in the new year. The push will likely be cheered by an army of ISP-tied consultants, think tankers, and loyal lawmakers like Senator John Thune, who you should note parroted Comcast’s call for a “bipartisan legislative solution” nearly verbatim in a speech applauding the net neutrality repeal last week.

“As I have stated repeatedly, and I will say again today, Congressional action is the only way to solve the endless back and forth on net neutrality rules that we’ve seen over the past several years,” Thune declared. “If my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, and those who claim to support net neutrality rules, want to enshrine protections for consumers with the backing of the law, I call on you today to join me in discussing legislation to do just that.”

Except supporters of net neutrality need to be wary of a such a legislative trap. The solution being offered here won’t be real net neutrality, but an effort to codify federal apathy to a lack of broadband competition into law. With the express purpose of preventing tough, real rules down the road. If you care about net neutrality, your best bet is to either hope the FCC loses its upcoming court cases, or wait until voters can build a Congress not quite so mindlessly beholden to ISP campaign contributions before crafting such a law.

A net neutrality law would be a great idea in a world where Comcast and AT&T don’t literally write and buy awful state and federal telecom legislation on a daily basis. That, if you hadn’t quite noticed yet, isn’t the world we’re currently living in.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...neutrality-law





GOP Net Neutrality Bill Would Allow Paid Fast Lanes and Preempt State Laws

FCC would be permanently barred from using Title II authority over broadband.
Jon Brodkin

A Republican lawmaker is proposing a net neutrality law that would ban blocking and throttling, but the bill would allow ISPs to create paid fast lanes and prohibit state governments from enacting their own net neutrality laws. The bill would also prohibit the FCC from imposing any type of common carrier regulations on broadband providers.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) announced the "Open Internet Preservation Act" in a video posted to Twitter.

"We can do this now that [FCC] Chairman [Ajit] Pai has successfully done his job of getting the net neutrality rules off the books," said Blackburn, who is chairperson of a congressional telecommunications subcommittee.

@AjitPaiFCC has done his job, now it's up to Congress to do theirs. This bill will ensure there is no blocking, no throttling. It is my honor to sign this bill- let's get it to @realDonaldTrump's desk. pic.twitter.com/jOf0fvFwcd

— Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) December 19, 2017

The bill text is available here. It would amend the Communications Act "to prohibit blocking of lawful content, applications, services, and non-harmful devices, [and] to prohibit impairment or degradation of lawful Internet traffic."

Unlike the net neutrality rules repealed by Pai's FCC last week, the bill would not prohibit ISPs from charging websites or online services for prioritization.

Blackburn's bill would define broadband Internet access as an "information service," preventing the FCC from ever regulating home and mobile Internet providers as common carriers. This prohibition would prevent the reinstatement of numerous consumer protections besides the net neutrality rules.

State governments would also be limited in their ability to regulate, as Blackburn's bill would preempt states from imposing "any law, rule, regulation, duty, requirement, standard, or other provision" related to net neutrality.

Blackburn's bill would let the FCC enforce the no-blocking and no-throttling rules, but it would forbid the commission from adding any new requirements to the rules. The FCC would be required to adopt formal complaint procedures to address alleged violations.

This would be a change from Pai's repeal order, which would allow ISPs to block, throttle, and prioritize Internet traffic as long as they disclose such actions publicly.

“Slap in the face to Internet users”

Net neutrality advocates said Blackburn's proposal doesn't offer real protections.

"This is not real net neutrality legislation," Fight for the Future Campaign Director Evan Greer said. "It's a poorly disguised slap in the face to Internet users from across the political spectrum. Blackburn's bill would explicitly allow Internet providers to demand new fees from small businesses and Internet users, carving up the Web into fast lanes and slow lanes."

CEO Craig Aaron of consumer advocacy group Free Press offered a similar reaction:

“This bill's true goal is to let a few unregulated monopolies and duopolies stifle competition and control the future of communications. This cynical attempt to offer something the tiniest bit better than what the FCC did and pretend it's a compromise is an insult to the millions who are calling on Congress to restore real net neutrality.”

The bill is "net neutrality in name only," according to the Internet Association, a lobby group for websites such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Netflix.

"The proposal circulated today does not meet the criteria for basic net neutrality protections—including bright-line rules and a ban on paid prioritization—and will not provide consumers the protections they need to have guaranteed access to the entire Internet," the group said.

Blackburn's embrace of no-blocking and no-throttling rules is a change from 2015 when she authored the "Internet Freedom Act," a failed proposal that would have wiped out net neutrality rules entirely.

FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly, a Republican, said the bill "offers a realistic opportunity for compromise and finality on this much-debated issue."

But Democrats aren't likely to accept Blackburn's proposal. They are trying to force a vote that would reinstate the net neutrality rules in full.

Separately, state attorneys general from New York, Washington, and other states plan to sue the FCC to overturn the repeal. Similarly to Blackburn's legislation, last week's FCC repeal vote attempts to preempt states from regulating net neutrality.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...pt-state-laws/





Bob Duff to Propose Net Neutrality Bill for 2018 Connecticut Legislative Session
Phil Hall

Connecticut Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff plans to introduce a bill in next year’s General Assembly session to address potential changes brought about by the Federal Communications Commission’s rollback of the 2015 net neutrality rules.

Duff, a Democrat representing Norwalk and Darien, said that his legislation will “hold companies to their commitments not to block websites, throttle speeds, or impose prioritization pricing and to establish a process for internet service providers to certify that they will not engage in practices inconsistent with net neutrality principles.”

He also seeks to amend Connecticut’s consumer protection laws to include the principles of net neutrality.

Duff acknowledged that while net neutrality is a federal issue, his bill would seek to mitigate the potential consequences of the FCC’s policy shift at a state level.

“Small businesses and consumers will be the biggest losers as a result of the FCC’s damaging discarding of net neutrality rules,” Duff said. “You don’t need to be a psychic to predict that the cable giants will raise rates, block content and potentially slow down services for residents across Connecticut.”
https://westfaironline.com/97263/bob...ative-session/





Koch Brothers Are Cities' New Obstacle to Building Broadband

The three Republican commissioners now in power at the FCC voted this week to erase the agency's legal authority over high-speed Internet providers.They claim that competition will protect consumers, that the commission shouldn't interfere in the "dynamic internet ecosystem," and that they are "protecting internet freedom." Now that the vote is done, the agency has little to do but mess around with spectrum allocations. The mega-utility of the 21st century officially has no regulator.

Susan Crawford is a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of The Responsive City and Captive Audience.

In the meantime, fed up with federal apathy and sick of being held back by lousy internet access controlled by local cable monopolies, scrappy cities around the US are working hard to find ways to get cheap, world-class fiber-optic connectivity. It’s always been an uphill climb, as the “incumbents”—giant carriers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T—are constantly working behind the scenes to block competition. (Recently, Comcast spent nearly $1 million opposing a municipal-fiber vote in Fort Collins, Colorado. The company did not prevail, I’m happy to report.) But now there’s an additional obstacle: Powerful right-wing billionaires have joined the fight against municipal fiber efforts, using their deep pockets to fund efforts to block even the most commonsense of plans.

Bad news for internet access—the Koch brothers are fighting low-cost open fiber nets.

Look what happened in Louisville, Kentucky. It's a city of about 750,000, the largest in the state. Earlier this year, the city noticed that the state of Kentucky was funding a "middle mile" fiber network designed to connect the state’s 120 counties and provide cheaper connectivity for municipal buildings—KentuckyWired. As part of the project, Louisville—also known as Jefferson County—would be able to run 100 miles of fiber alongside the state network for just the cost of materials.

That seemed like a great deal to Louisville. The city estimated that if it installed fiber for city use from scratch, it would cost $15 million. With the KentuckyWired offer, the same project would cost just $5.4 million—with half of that amount dedicated to placing fiber nodes in West Louisville, a struggling, de facto segregated area of concentrated poverty, poor health outcomes, and general economic distress.

The public benefits of jumping on the KentuckyWired offer would be substantial: Not only would West Louisville get a chance at better access for its homes and businesses, but the city could install fiber-controlled traffic signals, create better and cheaper connectivity for public-safety agencies, and ship data around inexpensively to improve its operations. In a nutshell, the city would build the infrastructure and lease capacity to private internet-service providers. "We were looking at this as our smart city foundation," Grace Simrall, Louisville's chief of civic innovation, says. At least half of the new fiber capacity would be reserved for open access leases, to encourage last-mile retail providers to wire homes and businesses. All for just the cost of the fiber lines.

It seemed to be a no-brainer. “I can't think of a more sensible plan," Simrall says. "I just didn't think that we were going to face opposition on this. We thought surely people would understand that this was a way for us to leapfrog where we were for a fraction of the cost."

But when Simrall and her colleagues went to talk to members of the Louisville Metro Council in May, they found that interest groups, including the cable trade association in Kentucky and something called the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, had been there already. Suddenly, the city's eminently sensible plan was in trouble. "The cable trade association in Kentucky was very vocal about how they thought that this was a waste of taxpayer money and had just spoken to numerous council members on the record about that," Simrall says.

Then Simrall and the city found out that the Washington, DC-based Taxpayers Protection Alliance had been posting frequently on social media opposing Louisville's fiber plan. (Typical tweet: “Google suspended its fiber efforts in many cities due to cost - now wants Louisville taxpayers to foot the $5.4M bill.” The Louisville plan had nothing to do with Google.)

That's when Simrall learned who had joined the forces determined to block Louisville from spending a dime on fiber for the city's use: Charles and David Koch, the brothers backing environment-hostile fossil fuels and funding politicians who dole out goodies to the super-rich. "It's widely known that they [the Taxpayers Protection Alliance] receive a lot of funding from the Koch brothers," Simrall says.

The connection between the TPA and the Koch brothers emerged from investigative reporting by ProPublica and others. This work has revealed that the Taxpayers Protection Alliance is a front advocacy group, part of a network of dark-money organizations supported in part by the Koch brothers. (The funding seems not to come from the Koch family directly but instead is funneled through other Koch-funded groups.) TPA’s most recent IRS filing shows it received about half a million dollars in contributions in 2016, but the sources of these contributions are blacked out. Tax-exempt organizations are not required to disclose the names of their donors publicly. David Williams, TPA’s president, told the Louisville Courier-Journal earlier this year that the group receives funding from “a lot of different sources," including groups affiliated with the Koch brothers.

A look at the TPA blog shows that the organization fights municipal fiber as part of its general anti-government and pro-private-sector activities, claiming that “taxpayer-funded broadband is a waste of money.” This week’s post, not surprisingly, congratulates the FCC on rolling back net neutrality regulations that TPA believes were “hurting taxpayers.”

That made the Louisville fiber project a battle between those trying to help the city and outside money trying to preserve the status quo. With little time before the council vote in mid-June, and facing the prospect that the city would lose forever the opportunity to participate in KentuckyWired at cost, Simrall and her office swung into action. They patiently explained the economic and operational benefits of the city plan to council members and the public, creating a useful infographic to sum up the story. They urged residents to call council members. Simrall had come from the civic tech community in Louisville, and contacted everyone she knew. "Everybody said, 'This is complete common sense,'" Simrall says. On June 8, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer tweeted: "Tell your council member to back #KyWired and stop the Kochs from meddling in Louisville's progress."

Later that month, there were two dramatic public meetings on the city's budget for the fiber project. The first vote went along party lines, with Republicans voting against any city involvement in fiber. Simrall and her team kept fighting, and managed to convince some Republicans that the city plan made a lot of sense—especially the Republicans from districts that have suffered from digital redlining by incumbents. In the end, at the final budget hearing, the council voted unanimously to approve the request. "It was really quite a thrilling thing," Simrall says.

At the end of the day, the Koch-funded campaign backfired. It helped fire up some council members who might not have understood the importance of city fiber; once they knew the Koch brothers were against it, the city's plan got their attention. "That felt pretty good," Simrall says.

If the Koch brothers were willing to throw money at opposing an incremental, cheap effort to string fiber alongside an existing state network plan, just imagine what they'll be capable of around more ambitious local efforts. There is a major onslaught looming.

Simrall doesn't think the Kochs actually care about fiber. "It's all their way of opposing particular municipal or state efforts," Simrall says.

The scary thing is that the TPA message can be effective to a public that doesn't understand the importance of fiber and can be easily swayed by claims that internet access should be handled solely by the private sector. The same kinds of Koch-like scare-points were rolled out when the unregulated private sector was solely in charge of electricity 100 years ago. But, as Simrall points out, "At this point, who would go to a city that doesn't have electric utilities? Who would go to a city that doesn't have water, or access to highways? Fiber is that type of infrastructure plan."

That doesn’t matter to the funders of groups like TPA. No matter how limited the government involvement is, they're going to go after it.
https://www.wired.com/story/koch-bro...ing-broadband/





In Protests of Net Neutrality Repeal, Teenage Voices Stood Out
Cecilia Kang

When Anooha Dasari, 16, heard the federal government was about to kill rules that guaranteed an open internet, she contacted her United States representatives for the first time, asking them to stop the action.

The Mundelein, Ill., high school junior then passed around a link to classmates for a website that automatically placed calls, web comments and emails to the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that was moving to repeal the so-called net neutrality rules. When the F.C.C. voted last week on the rollback, Ms. Dasari stayed glued to her smartphone for updates while taking her American government class.

“For research, for news, to communicate with friends, the internet is a big part of my life,” Ms. Dasari said. “It has formulated my personality, opinions and political ideology. If it is controlled, my generation of students could be inclined to be just on one part of the spectrum. That’s dangerous.”

Millions of Americans have been caught up in a bitter debate over the repeal of net neutrality rules that prevented broadband providers from blocking websites or demanding fees to reach consumers. But the most vocal and committed activity may have come from generation internet, the digitally savvy teenagers in middle and high school who grew up with an open internet.

The repeal of net neutrality has gotten many of these teens politically engaged for the first time, with fears that the dismantling of rules could open the door for broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast to distort the experience of accessing anything online with equal ease. For them, a dry issue that has often been hard to understand outside of policy circles in Washington has become a cause to rally around.
Continue reading the main story

“For students that have used an internet that is open and without tolls their whole life, as complicated as net neutrality is, kids can get their heads around it pretty easily,” said John Lewis, the head of Gunston School, a private high school in Centreville, Md.

Net neutrality’s repeal will not take effect for several weeks. Internet service providers including AT&T and Comcast have promised they won’t block or throttle sites or create fast lanes for certain content. And several efforts are underway to scale back the rollback, including the introduction of a congressional bill and potential lawsuits.

The opposition by many teenagers is rooted in how they are among the most avid users of the internet and smartphones. Virtually all youth between ages 13 and 17 own or have access to a smartphone and 94 percent use social media, according to an April 2017 study by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Many are gaining access to devices at younger ages, with 98 percent of children from newborn to 8 years old accessing a mobile device at home, compared with 52 percent in 2011.

Many became digital users when net neutrality was in effect. Net neutrality has existed in various forms since about 2006, when the F.C.C. first created open internet guidelines for broadband providers known as the “Four Internet Freedoms.” In 2015, the F.C.C. declared that broadband had become utility-like and deserved extra government oversight. Since 2006, more and more children began using Netflix, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube and all manner of other apps and online services.

In the days before the F.C.C. voted on net neutrality repeal last week, children and teenagers organized protests in Sioux Falls, S.D., and Keene, N.H. They wrote letters and sent tweets to F.C.C. commissioners and volunteered for texting and phone campaigns to push members of Congress to use their authority to overturn or dilute the F.C.C. decision.

Alli Webb, 18, a senior at Gunston, missed school last week ahead of the F.C.C. vote with permission from Mr. Lewis and her parents. With three other students, she drove two hours to downtown Washington to stand in front of a Verizon store during lunch hour. There, she hollered slogans to save net neutrality rules with signs that read “Stop F.C.C.!” and “Equal Opportunity: Still Loading.”

“This is really bad for technology, innovation and our future,” said Ms. Webb, who wants to study computer science in college. “This is going to totally change the internet.” She said she feared start-ups would have to submit to the demands of internet service providers to showcase their sites, which could hold back entrepreneurs.

At Southside High School in Rockville Centre, N.Y., net neutrality dominated conversation in the lunchroom last week and throughout the day of the vote, last Thursday as students checked for updates.

“I’ve met lots of friends on Instagram and I communicate with my mom and with all my friends at least 10 times a day on social media,” said Matthew Baxley, 15, a 10th grader who recently participated in a texting effort to protest the repeal. “The internet is at the center of a lot of what I do and care about.”

Some teachers had to make adjustments. Laurie Crowe, a high school history teacher in Kyle, Tex., tried to give an exam to 11th graders at Lehman High School last Thursday but couldn’t get her students off their phones and laptops. She was surprised to find them streaming the F.C.C. vote. Eventually, she postponed the exam so they could watch the five commissioners cast their votes and explain their positions.

When the F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, cast the final vote to dismantle the rules, students slammed their laptops shut and tore off their earphones in disappointment, Ms. Crowe said.

“These kids felt very indignant and betrayed by this decision because they feel entitled to information and the internet,” she said.

Ms. Dasari remains determined to fight. She said she would continue to push lawmakers to salvage open internet rules through legislation and she is following the news for lawsuits challenging the repeal.

“I will tweet and email and call and stay in the process,” she said. “We have time and we won’t go away.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/t...eal-teens.html





A Plan to Rescue the Web from the Internet
André Staltz

My previous article, The Web began dying in 2014, here’s how, raised much more awareness than I thought it would. Many people found it to be an insightful analysis of the Web under the control of tech giants, but the article ended without providing anything positive to hold on to.

I actually have hope for the Web. There are legimately viable ways of preserving freedom on the Web while taking the platform forward and keeping it competitive against proprietary alternatives from tech giants. But it can only happen if the Web takes a courageous step towards its next level. If it stays in its current form, the Web has little chance of being relevant while America’s FCC kills Net Neutrality rules, the W3C favors DRM, and tech giants build their Web-less vision of the future.

The community of peer-to-peer technologists has brought to the world several revolutionary technologies: USENET, Napster, BitTorrent, Kazaa, Skype, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and actually even the Web itself. Once again, we can turn to this community to seek digital solutions that defend freedom. Many months ago I quit my job in order to join a group of peer-to-peer programmers and help build technology that can rescue our digital freedoms. I want to share with you our plan, which in short is:

Build the mobile mesh Web that works with or without Internet access, to reach 4 billion people currently offline

To explain this plan, we need to realize that the Web can be independent from the Internet. The core weaknesses of the Internet have to be recognized, and how exactly they were exploited by middlemen businesses. The problem we are solving is both social and technical, so the solution must be a harmony of these two. Finally, all the tools and opportunities we need to supersede them are already in our hands: smartphones, peer-to-peer protocols, and mesh networks.

The rise of closed cyberspaces

The Web is an open cyberspace, a digital context where society can happen, where no single organization, company, or government has the final word on what is allowed or forbidden. It is also an access point to other cyberspaces. Every time you “sign in” with an account on a website, you are entering a closed cyberspace. These cyberspaces are hosted by servers owned by the company or organization behind that website.

Most closed cyberspaces don’t threaten the Web’s role as a public space. A school’s intranet is a closed cyberspace, and so is a private discussion forum or a company’s internal discussion platform. Most people will understand how it is necessary for those cyberspaces to be closed and controlled.

The real threat comes with giant closed cyberspaces that disguise themselves as public spaces. Facebook, for instance. Many of its users think of it as a neutral public space where society comes together, and in fact Facebook often efficiently carries out that role. It is, nevertheless, closed and controlled. It started as one of those justifiably closed cyberspaces: it was a private community of Harvard students. With its explosive growth, though, it had to quickly evolve to encompass all types of social structures.

While Facebook was growing on the Web, Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, and the world was revolutionized by smartphones after that. Zuckerberg saw the mobile megatrend before many others did, and as early as 2009 there was a Facebook mobile app with explosive growth. Facebook began re-imagining itself as a platform independent from the Web.

Fast forward to December 2016, and 94% of all Facebook monthly active users access the blue closed cyberspace routinely through mobile apps (divide mobile MAU by MAU), while 62% access it only from mobile (divide mobile-only MAU by MAU). As a result, 84% of FB’s revenue comes from mobile advertising. As an extrapolation of this data, their mobile-only users likely comprise today (December 2017) between 70% – 79% of all their users.

Those are large enough numbers to admit that the open Web is already rather irrelevant to Zuckerberg’s products. By now, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp are arguably non-Web closed cyberspaces of comparable scale to the Web (users of FB products are roughly 2/3 of all Internet users). Facebook even has its own concept of cyberwarfare.

It competes with the Web in many use cases that people want from a public cyberspace: sharing notes and images, engaging with communities, doing business, marketing services and products, and organizing events. Similarly, this argument can also be made for YouTube. In fact, any closed cyberspace that grows too much could become a threat to the open Web.

Which brings me to the question: is it fundamentally inevitable that a closed cyberspace will use the open cyberspace to eventually outgrow it? I would answer: no. The Web only got to this current situation because of fundamental flaws in the Internet’s architecture which rigged the system. Closed cyberspaces thrive because they have artificially imposed incentives to thrive.

Technical flaws that supported middlemen businesses

The Internet that supports the Web (as well as other applications such as email, Skype, WhatsApp, online mobile apps) is a technical marvel, but it shares similarities with some archaic systems.

The way data travels through the Internet is quite similar to how the postal system works. Each recipient needs a unique address. On the Internet, these are the so-called “IP addresses”, which are simply numbers given to each computer. A computer may be assigned the number 198.153.192.40, where the first part 198 refers to a specific region in the USA, and the other numbers help specify which particular computer in that region is the recipient.

Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them. When the Internet was being planned, it was initially a system of military and university networks. They did not account for the massive popular adoption of the Internet that made it mainstream in business, commerce, and for inter-personal communication. Imagine if there could only be a limited number of mailboxes in the postal system – that is virtually what occured to the Internet.

There was a quick solution to this, though: a mechanism called Network Address Translation (NAT). Jargon aside, it’s a simple idea: one computer gets a real IP address and acts as an intermediate for other computers which do not have real IP addresses. Imagine that your neighborhood would share a single mailbox, then one person would be responsible for sorting and forwarding each received mail to the correct final destination. That is what NAT accomplishes for Internet addresses, and it is commonly deployed on local routers, such as the box you might have installed in your home or office. The advent of NAT routers also allowed for that intermediate computer to become a guardian and protect other computers from some dangers of the open Internet.

It also meant that some computers were first-class citizens on the Internet, while other computers were subordinates. In addition, the scarcity of IP addresses caused them to be considered valuable assets, and so it became a business opportunity. IP addresses are being sold so that some computers can become first-class citizens on the Internet.

It seems easy to solve this problem, though: just provide more IP addresses, since they are after all just artificial resources. That is what IP version 6 is all about, and its purpose is to make sure there would always be enough addresses for everyone (the limit is more than a trillion trillions). However, IPv6 was declared ready for use in 1998 – two decades ago – but its adoption among organizations around the world is still just catching up, because it demands teaching every Internet-connected machine to understand and utilize the new types of addresses.

There isn’t enough economic incentives for IPv6, though, since the information industry has made its nest in massive systems that assume IPv4 plus NAT. Companies that sell IPv4 addresses see little benefit in adopting IPv6 and companies that depend on IPv4 + NAT systems prefer to avoid the risks associated with disturbing the infrastructures that power their always-online businesses. Even if all the computers started using IPv6, too many programs were built with NAT in mind, which could reveal many security vulnerabilities when exposed to a world without NAT. In other words, the Internet economy simply isn’t ready for a scenario where IPv6 is used everywhere and NAT is abandoned. We are stuck with what we have.

As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown too large to remove without killing the host. The technical flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world where middlemen business models thrive. Google and Facebook connect consumers with advertisement publishers, and charge fees for each ad. Amazon is a middleman business as well: it connects retailers with consumers, and takes a cut on transactions. Many popular ‘sharing economy’ startups and services are also middlemen: Airbnb, Uber, Kickstarter, Patreon, and many others.

It is hard to imagine how things could be different, yet the incentives for these businesses to exist were artificially erected. It is not fundamentally necessary to have any intermediate company profiting whenever a person reads news from their friends, rents an apartment from a stranger, or orders a ride from a driver. This is why it is important to analyze technical systems from an economical and societal perspective: because early design decisions foreshadow certain social orders.

We can – and urgently must – provide alternative ways of digitally supporting popular use cases for Web services. It is possible to escape middlemen businesses by decreasing reliance on the infrastructure that plugs their systems together: wires.

The Internet, on a leash

The physical foundation of the Internet is a global network of thick bundles of privately-owned fiber optic undersea cables spanning oceans to connect all the continents together. Undersea communication cables exist since the 1850s.

These cables follow a hierarchical layout: continents are connected to other continents, countries connected to countries, and within those countries, different companies (Internet Service Providers, ISPs) have to agree with their local government in order to plug into that network of cables. This well organized hierarchy is the only way the wired Internet can be feasible. Otherwise, a grassroots wired internet would be a true mess of cables. Countries and organizations also manage the distribution of IP addresses.

Although the Internet is praised as the technology that ushered us into a new era, the information age, it is just a fancy way of transfering data from computer A to computer B. It is highly efficient in transferring data globally at almost instantenous speeds, but it is nevertheless much like a USB cable that connects your computer to an external hard drive. In fact, transfer speeds are almost always better through USB cables than through the Internet. The real benefit of the Internet is instant globalization through the fact that it makes all computers in the world seem like they are in the same room.

The global real-time economy enabled by the wirenet is a historical achievement with permanent implications to humanity. That said, often we engage with apps that have no need for global connectivity. For instance, staying in contact with friends in the same city – a naive but likely the most popular use case for technology – requires no connections to countries on the other side of the planet. Yet we overutilize the global tangle of inter-connected cables to run proprietary and foreign (often American) apps which deliver messages that travel around the world just to reach a colleague nearby. This has opened our lives and our nations to digital colonialism from surveillance capitalism corporations (pick your favorite Silicon Valley company) married to three-letter intelligence agencies.

What could be the alternative? So much of our digital lives depend on technologies that are out of our reach, physically, legally, and economically. Gladly, technology itself has recently provided the first building blocks that can be put together to create a new cyberspace.

Untapped opportunities

Technological innovation is quick to introduce amazing things such as smartphones, 4G connectivity, cryptocurrencies, and digital social networks. None of these existed when the Internet was being planned. Yet all of them rely on the very old idea (from the 19th century) of telecom companies, not as a fundamental requirement, but due to lack of alternatives.

As a thought experiment, how would the Next Internet look like if it were reinvented using all the accumulated knowledge from the last 3 decades of global cyberspaces? There are three promising things that can enable a reinvented Internet:

• The people-centered Web
• Mobile mesh networks
• 4 billion people

The Web is classically a location-centered cyberspace. When you access the Web, you visit locations (URLs, like wikipedia.org) that contain content. You often don’t see the people who created that content, but they are implicitly assumed to be there. The problem with location-centered content – prefigured by the way HTTP was designed – is that it’s not easy to archive for posteriority. An image hosted through some link may be there today, but maybe not tomorrow.

Novel peer-to-peer protocols such as IPFS and Dat help replace HTTP and make the Web a content-centered cyberspace. This way the link to an image can be something like QaPdNnDWRLF1b – a so-called hash of the image, summarizing it – instead of mywebsite.com/pic.jpeg so that even if mywebsite.com servers are removed, you can still get the image by fetching it from any computer that has stored QaPdNnDWRLF1b. If you don’t like the unreadable code, you can just use a link shortener like bit.ly to create a shortcut to the unreadable code. This way, even if your bit.ly short link disappears, the content can still be recovered from the crowd of online computers.

Browsers can be made to work like that, and although it’s a small tweak to how the Web works, it has massive effects on social structures in cyberspace. The Beaker Browser is the best demonstration of that, which you can easily install and start using today. It allows your browser to directly share content with other people’s Beaker installations, without intermediate servers (like YouTube servers, Medium, blogs, etc).

These above mentioned technologies fix the Web by making it truly content-centered instead of location-centered. That said, the Web is good at putting content on stage, while keeping content authors in the backstage. While there are many use cases where it’s desirable to de-emphasize people, such as anonymous reports, crowd-sourced encyclopedias, and cat videos, in the recent years we have discovered a game-changing way of structuring cyberspaces: the Social Web, where content orbits the author like planets orbit a star.

It makes sense for a cyberspace, a digital context for people to engage with each other, to be people-centered. Websites in the social realm took a daring approach of making You a location: the URL twitter.com/andrestaltz means that this content is a person. In fact, one of the earliest large social networks was named Myspace, emphasizing the location and its association with a person. We all have experienced how revolutionary this concept has been, and how it has pervasively reached to many corners of the Web: you can sign in with a Facebook account or insert blog comments using your Facebook profile.

Three types of Web arrangements

Now that we have experience with some of the intricacies of the social Web, we can reinvent it to put people first without intermediate companies. The peer-to-peer protocol Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) does that, designed with diversity-first principles that prefigure (hopefully) social structures with freedom, subjectivity, and political structures that can prevent capitalistic monopolies. SSB was envisioned and created by a nomad programmer who had unreliable Internet connection and wanted to enable social networks for off-grid lifestyles. A growing community of pioneers and programmers are using SSB on a daily basis as their main social network. I really hope you click through all those links and explore SSB in more depth.

The mix of off-grid lifestyles with digital social networks is unusual, because we tend to associate technology with dependency on the Grid for energy and Internet connectivity. However, to create an alternative to the Grid, we need to look for technologies that provide energy and connectivity without the Grid. Solar panels provide the former and are a staple of the off-grid sustainability movement known as Solarpunks. To provide the latter, we can use wireless technologies.

Cables gave birth to the information age, but wireless gave us wings to go untethered. And today, digital society gets together through smartphones more than it does through desktop computers. While smartphones enable us to easily share files directly to other devices – without intermediates – using Bluetooth or Apple’s AirDrop, we don’t transfer data through that as compulsively as we do through cables. Wireless technology exists today as a mere extension of the wired world, but it could be so much more than that. It could be, in fact, the opposite: wires as a mere extension of the wireless world.

You probably haven’t heard of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), also known as meshes. One of the reasons for their lack of popularity is that meshes would threaten the business of telecom operators, so there is little incentive from the establishment to develop and deliver mobile ad-hoc networks to you. A MANET is like AirDrop, but automatically and seamlessly connects to devices around you and delivers data in multiple hops between those devices. Even if Bluetooth connections can only reach a few meters, after multiple jumps, you can connect to devices a few kilometers away. Information literally spreads through the air to a mesh of devices in a region. It is propelled even more by the fact that mobile devices are moving around, doing half of the work of transporting data.

On the other hand, the primary reason why MANETs are underappreciated is that they do not yet provide data transfer speeds comparable to those in the wirenet. A MANET upholds principles like freedom from fixed intermediate organizations, but it is simply too slow for transfer-intensive use cases like streaming video or instant messaging. Their adoption would feel like a step backwards to the early days of the Web when speeds were measured in a few Kilobits per second, not the usual Megabits per second you are used to in developed countries.

Mesh networks are nevertheless still promising, for two facts. First, the technology is evolving, with Apple MultipeerConnectivity and Bluetooth Mesh as a few cutting-edge examples. Novel protocols are being developed that envision IPv6 without ISPs, ideal for meshes. Second, because many developing countries do not yet have Internet access. This accounts for 4 billion people, out of the total 7.6 billion, with currently zero bits per second of transfer speeds. Even if it seems like the Internet encompasses the whole world, it still barely reaches 45% of the planet. Some may have Internet connectivity, but it’s intermittent or not consistently speedy. For people with intermittent or unexistent connectivity, ISP-free mesh networks with moderate but consistent speeds become quite attractive.

Facebook and Google are desperate for getting an early grip of those 4 billion people, e.g. through Internet.org and Project Loon. However, because their middlemen businesses are tethered to the Internet, all of these projects require the old hierarchical structures of ISPs and cables. Their businesses and modus operandi are inherently infrastructure-heavy. The difficulties are several: balloons cannot reliably cover all the regions, local ISPs or local governments may be corrupt, and any other wired infrastructure project takes years or decades.

The exciting part is that we can actually beat the tech giants at this game by simply giving local and regional connectivity to people in developing countries. With mobile apps that are built mesh-first, the smartphones would make up self-organizing self-healing MANETs. Frankly, this is quite easy to do, if we are willing to gift mobile devices without expecting anything back, unlike tech giants. It won’t be an easy fight, though, Facebook is working hard to build a compromise that still gives them the middleman upper hand. Zuckerberg’s 10-year roadmap puts connectivity projects in the long-term spectrum (5–10 years). That’s basically our deadline, we need to get grassroots meshes in Africa before that.

The mobile apps for meshes would have to be best suited for the particular limitations of (current) MANET technologies. Video streaming and instant messaging are not the first options, but lightweight websites in content-addressed style (like in the Beaker Browser with Dat) and text-first social news feeds are applications that can be realistically delivered in the short term. Such apps don’t even require constant connection to other devices in the mesh. For text-based social news feeds, it suffices to occasionally sync the latest news with other devices whenever they are in range.

Even the mobile apps themselves can be deployed through MANETs, and I have already developed an “app store” mobile app that fits that use case, called Dat Installer. My main project at the moment is to build a mesh-friendly social network mobile app running on SSB. It is important to highlight that while these apps are built for meshes, they know how to ‘surf’ the Internet and utilize it as a fallback.

When talking about decentralized peer-to-peer protocols in 2017, it is imperative to mention blockchains and cryptocurrencies. These are great innovations and directly tackle intermediate organizations (mostly banks) as a problem, much like IPFS, Dat, and SSB. On the other hand, most blockchain protocols were designed with high Internet speeds, powerful hardware, and global connectivity in mind. What most of these innovations share in common is the accomplishment of a distributed global database where no single actor is to be trusted above the others. There are legitimately useful use cases of this, such as decentralized Web domain registration. On the other hand, requiring global consensus, high Internet speeds, and powerful hardware makes it difficult to utilize blochchains for mesh networks in developing countries. Alternative not-quite-blockchain experiments like IOTA might change this, though.

The plan

While growing local mesh networks for-charity in developing countries is the proposed strategy, how is it connected to a plan for countering the tech oligarchy in developed countries? In Internet-less regions there is potential for scaling quickly, and through that we can spawn a new industry around peer-to-peer wireless mesh networks. If this industry grows, it can also support meshes in the developed world. Scaling fast is important to make meshes more than just niche projects by a few enthusiasts, but instead become a thriving ecosystem. The mega-projects listed below are a plan to rescue the Web from the Internet:

In the next year or two:

• Developers improve peer-to-peer protocols that support the content-centered Web (IPFS, Dat) and the people-centered Web (SSB)
• Developers and hardware manufacturers write open protocols for mesh networking (comparable to MultipeerConnectivity, CJDNS, Open Garden)
• Developers bring peer-to-peer protocols to smartphones and build mobile apps that use those
• Web enthusiasts and archivers help migrate content from the old Web to the new protocols
• Hardware startups compete in the market for regional mesh networks (e.g. goTenna, Beartooth, and others)

In two years or more:

• Smartphone manufacturers sell mesh-first mobile devices for the developing world
• Developers work with regional communities to localize mesh mobile apps (note the possibility of forking open source projects and customizing them to different cultures)
• Charitable organizations or companies offer mesh-first smartphones for free (or subsidized and cheap) to people in developing nations
• Mesh-based cyberspaces start to thrive in some countries
• Similar mesh cyberspaces in the developed world also gain relevance, specially in countries with unfair ISPs

In six years or more:

• Ecosystem of wireless mesh networks expands from regional “airnets” to national airnets
• National airnets are weaved together through a global mesh of satellites (much like Blockstream)
• Make the global airnet competitive with the wirenet

As a result of having competition between the two, we can hope to fix the overutilization of the wirenet and the underutilization of airnets, bringing balance to the wire-versus-air dichotomy, providing choice in how data should travel in each case.

Choice is freedom.
https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-...-internet.html





Barbed Wire Telephone Lines Brought Isolated Homesteaders Together

And then let them snoop on each other.
Natasha Frost

American patent clerks in the 1870s could scarcely have imagined how two inventions, filed two years apart, would together change the lonely lives of frontier Americans. In 1874, there was barbed wire, and in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary telephone. Together, in an amazing display of rural ingenuity, they connected isolated homesteads to their rural neighbors and the rest of the world.

Left to telephone companies and their bottom lines, farm people would not have had telecommunications at all. Building lines was expensive, and hardly worth the effort in sparsely populated areas. But, according to historian Ronald R. Kline, manufacturers underestimated the entrepreneurial, innovative spirit of these men and women. “Ranchers and farm men built many of the early systems as private lines to hook up the neighbors,” writes Kline, “often using the ubiquitous barbed-wire fences that divided much of the land west of the Mississippi.”

By the 1880s, thousands of miles of barbed wire snaked their way up and down the country. To turn the steel fence wires into telephone lines, they simply had to be connected to a telephone in a house or barn with a piece of smooth wire. The signal then passed through the smooth wire, and along the length of the barbed wire, either to a switchboard or to other houses down the line. In some cases, as many as 20 telephones were wired together—all of which would ring simultaneously with each call, regardless of who was making it and who they were trying to reach. Agreed-upon codes—three short rings for you, two long rings for me—helped people know if the call was for them.

This connectivity fundamentally changed the nature of life on the frontier. In Big Bend Country, Texas, the advantage of the network was not the way it connected farmers to the outside world, but how it linked so-called neighbors who lived miles apart. “Wherever these country telephones have been introduced, and they may appear extremely primitive, they are regarded as an indispensable convenience,” writes Richard F. Steele in An Illustrated History of the Big Bend Country. In the event of a medical emergency, a doctor could be summoned in minutes, without the agonizing wait for a messenger boy on horseback to make it into town and back again.

In Colfax, New Mexico, the barbed wire telephones provided entertainment, too, in a time when ordinary pastimes might have been limited to reading and rereading newspapers and books. “The operator got everyone to listen to the Floyd boys and others playing a banjo, or a piano or a guitar and singing. Five rings also meant that someone with a radio had the evening news on so that all the farmers could get the news and weather report.”

When, elsewhere in the state, two expensive purebred bulls were killed by new trains that ran to Arizona, the railroad company compensated local homesteaders in Hidalgo County by allowing them to use the barbed wire in the railroad right-of-way fence as a telephone line. Emma Marble, a young woman homesteading in the area in 1899, remembered how the line kept loneliness at bay and brought neighbors closer together. “The theory was that we would answer only when our own ring sounded, but whenever the bell rang, every woman on the line rushed to a receiver,” she recalled.

Homesteaders often suffered from what today might be thought of as crippling clinical depression, brought on by days, if not weeks, of solitude, isolation, and physical labor. Marble herself lived alone on a property of 160 acres. “News and gossip were common property, like the sunlight, and we never had any privacies when we went to the telephone.” This bonhomie must have seemed as warming as the sun’s rays, particularly for women, whose role as “angels of the home” often left them stuck in cabins or sod houses. That said, the number of people on the line at any given moment could be irritating. Every now and then, someone cut into a conversation, while multiple listeners reduced what any one of them would be able to hear. “Get off the line!” was a familiar refrain.

The barbed wire telephone also helped homesteaders escape the scrutiny of the government land inspector, who made frequent trips through Hidalgo to make sure homesteaders were obeying the letter of the law. “There was only one road to travel,” remembered Marble. As the inspector reached Lordsburg, friends quickly flashed the news over the barbed wire telephone to update one another on his progress as he went. “He always found the women working at some household task and all surprised as all-get-out to see him!”

The line was far from perfect, of course. Early telephone wires were shoddy, even when they used the “correct” copper wire. Barbed wire was particularly thick and heavy, and grew weightier when it rained. Even with closely spaced posts, the wire had a tendency to snap. Outside intervention, both nefarious and otherwise, was also a risk. The American Telephone Journal, in 1908, described how a prosperous farmer’s private line gave him “little to no trouble … except when mischievous boys ground the line by the aid of baling wire.” The Hidalgo County homesteaders’ line worked only in dry weather, and “hummed a great deal when the green mesquite would grow and touch the wire.”

Writing in Telephony magazine in 1886, J.L.W. Zietlow described the resulting chaos when cattle broke down the fence wire, cutting off people who had come to rely on their telephone. “It goes without saying that I have been prejudiced against fence wire telephone lines ever since,” Zietlow wrote. “I know of many bad mishaps; and in one particular case, the loss of a human life is attributed to a barbed wire telephone line failing to work.” It seems far more likely that barbed wire telephone lines saved lives, especially in cases of high-risk pregnancies or falls from horses.

Until the phone companies eventually wired the rest of rural America decades later, these inconveniences were minor—someone had to go out and ride the fence anyway—for a connection to the outside world, one that shrank the open frontier to a much, much more manageable size.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/article...merica-history





Belgium Ends 19th-Century Telegram Service
Kevin Connolly

Belgium's telegram service is about to stop. Stop.

One hundred and seventy-one years after the first electrical message was transmitted down a line running alongside the railway between Brussels and Antwerp the final dispatch will be sent and received on 29 December.

The fact that this 19th-Century technology is still up and running in the age of Instagram and Snapchat may seem rather odd - especially when you consider that the UK, which invented the telegram in the 1830s, abandoned it as long ago as 1982.

The United States followed suit in 2006 and even India, which had been by far the world's biggest market for the telegram, finally closed its system down in 2013.

Just 10 businesses and a handful of individual customers have kept the Belgian system going until now. It has been chiefly used by bailiffs, who had need of a system which provided legal guarantees of dispatch and receipt.

The buyer can call up a telephone operator to spell out their message, which is then sent by post.

But with a "flash" telegram costing €23.75 (£21) for a basic 20 words, plus €0.90 for delivery in and around Brussels, it is not difficult to see why the system is struggling to survive in the age of unlimited texting on cheap mobile phone tariffs.

Brevity is key

Before the invention of the telephone, the telegram was the first system that allowed the more-or-less instant transmission of electrical messages over long distances.

The electrical impulses from the sender's machine - Morse code became the commonest system - were translated into text at the receiving end, first by human operator and then eventually by machine.

The printed text was then delivered to the ultimate recipient - post offices all over the world employed armies of telegram boys on bicycles.

The technology created a certain style of writing - just like text messaging.

The use of the word "Stop" for example, often written out in full, originated from the need to tell the receiver when the end of a sentence had been reached.

And because telegrams were expensive - you paid per word - there was always pressure to come up with phrases that literally displayed economy of language.

Famous telegrams

• When Evelyn Waugh was despatched to Africa to cover the war in Abyssinia for the Daily Mail in the 1930s he displayed the kind of linguistic ingenuity to be expected from a great English novelist. Finding it necessary to kill a story which said that an American nurse had been blown up in the town of Adowa, Waugh managed it in a message back to London consisting of just two words: "Nurse Unupblown"

• No-one could rival Oscar Wilde for brevity. He is said to have once asked his publisher how a book was doing, by telegraphing simply "?". To which the publisher replied enigmatically "!"

• When the British General Charles Napier conquered the fractious tribes of Sindh during the British conquest of the Indian subcontinent he was popularly rumoured to have celebrated the event with a one-word telegram back to the War Office in London. It said simply: "Peccavi" which is the Latin for 'I have sinned'. It later emerged the pun's true author was an English schoolgirl who submitted it to the satirical magazine Punch

The system was costly and labour-intensive for a start and began to feel outdated as more and more ordinary families acquired telephones.

But even as the telegram died out, it remained a part of popular culture.

No wedding scene in a Hollywood movie was complete for decades without a scene in which the best man read out the telegrams - humorous or cheeky or poignant - which guests who couldn't make the service had sent from afar.

In the UK any loyal subject reaching the age of 100 traditionally received a telegram from the monarch - a huge honour for the recipient.

And in the years when we are commemorating the 100th anniversary of the grim battles of the Great War it is only right to record that for decades the sight of a telegram boy coming up the path with a message was something to be dreaded in many countries.

The telegram was the chosen method by which the authorities informed grieving mothers and widows that husbands, sons or brothers were killed, injured or missing in action.

I've known widows who never forgot the agonising moments between the arrival of the delivery boy and the first reading of the words that began: "I regret to inform you".

So the world won't really change when Belgium finally pulls the plug on its telegram system, but it is another milestone in the long, slow death of a method of communication that once changed the world and which, in its glory days 100 years ago, seemed as though it would never stop. Stop.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42359914





You’re Not Imagining It: The Internet Is Really Slow Right Now
April Glaser

Everyone has a sluggish Monday sometimes. This week it’s the turn of…what fees like the entire internet? Right now, two major backbone internet service providers, Level 3 and Cogent, appear to be suffering from massive outages and downgraded service, according to the ISP monitoring service Downdetector, which collects and analyses network status reports to determine early interruptions.

My internet's slow AF at work this morn and it's really frustrating when you're tryna stream music.... pffft!
— I Heart Moosiq (@iheartmoosiq) December 18, 2017

It appears that, in celebration of #NetNeutrality , the internet is slow today generally.
— Greg Lavallee (@elgreg) December 18, 2017

The internet is so slow��
— Claire �� (@feelingmedolan) December 18, 2017

According to Downdector’s outage maps, internet users in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., are being hit the hardest. Comcast also appears to be suffering outages, though they’re less severe than those hitting Cogent and Level 3. Backbone internet service providers work directly with large internet platforms like Netflix to deliver large amounts of data across networks, and also work behind the scenes of consumer-facing ISPs. Since the internet is an interconnected mess of wires, disruptions with Level 3 and Cogent could impact service for Comcast and Verizon users in turn.

Slate reached out to Level 3 and Cogent to ask if they’ve determined the cause of the disruptions.

The internet is a network of networks, and slowdowns can happen all the time for any number of reasons. These could be regular, vanilla network maintainance problems. More worryingly, it could be the side effect of a massive botnet, like the Mirai botnet that was identified last October when hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of internet-connected devices sent junk traffic to Dyn, a major domain name service provider, to cause severe outages across the internet.

Sometimes outages are the result of disputes over peering, a term used to describe the connections between websites and internet service providers that determine how they exchange traffic so that data can be carried from one part of the internet to another. Peering depends on pacts between internet companies, but sometimes, these companies don’t always get along. Take what happened in 2010 between Comcast and Netflix: Comcast said that Netflix’s high bandwidth video traffic demanded more from Level 3’s network then what they originally agreed to, and for a time, Comcast refused to upgrade its networks to handle Netflix’s increased traffic until they struck a new deal. Even worse, in 2008, a peering dispute between Cogent and Sprint became so bad that the two companies stopped exchanging traffic entirely, and the internet was momentarily portioned to the point where different parts of the internet couldn’t communicate with each other. But since this time the outages are happening with host Cogent and Level 3, a peering dispute is unlikely the culprit here.

This slowdown is also a reminder of what kind of internet we may well have once the new Federal Communications Commission rules axing network neutrality protections hit the books: They’ll allow internet providers to legally block or throttle access to websites, and are slated to go into effect as early as January 2018. The current outages are probably not a case of your ISP behaving badly—but come next year, that very well could be the case.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_te...right_now.html





High-Speed Broadband to be Legal Right for UK Homes and Businesses

Government says internet providers will be legally obliged from 2020 to meet user requests for speeds of at least 10Mbps
Jessica Elgot

British homes and businesses will have a legal right to high-speed broadband by 2020, the government has announced, dismissing calls from the network provider BT that it should be a voluntary rather than legal obligation on providers.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said only a universal service obligation (USO) would offer certainty that broadband speeds of at least 10Mbps would reach the whole of the UK by 2020.

Broadband providers will now have a legal requirement to provide high-speed broadband to anyone who requests it, no matter where they are in the country.

BT had said it would pledge to voluntarily close the digital gap in broadband speeds between cities and rural areas, and would start work immediately, but it argued that secondary legislation could slow progress down.

However, the department said it did “not feel the proposal was strong enough for us to take the regulatory USO off the table, and have therefore decided not to pursue BT’s proposal, in favour of providing a legal right to broadband”.

The culture secretary, Karen Bradley, said she was grateful to BT for its proposal but had decided that only a regulatory approach would ensure high-speed broadband for everyone in the UK, regardless of where they lived or worked.

“We know how important broadband is to homes and businesses and we want everyone to benefit from a fast and reliable connection,” she said.

BT, which provides broadband to its own customers and to other suppliers via its Openreach network, said it respected the government’s decision.

“BT and Openreach want to get on with the job of making decent broadband available to everyone in the UK, so we’ll continue to explore the commercial options for bringing faster speeds to those parts of the country which are hardest to reach,” it said.

“We look forward to receiving more details from the government outlining its approach to defining the regulatory USO, including the proposed funding mechanism.”

The digital minister, Matt Hancock, said the rollout would not mean high-speed broadband was automatically delivered to every property. “It’s about having the right to demand it. It’s an on-demand programme. If you don’t go on the internet and aren’t interested then you won’t phone up and demand this,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “The ‘access’ is being able to demand it.”

Hancock admitted the UK still lagged behind many parts of the world in terms of broadband speeds – in Japan, for example, 97% of connections have full-fibre lines, compared with 3% in the UK.

“This is the next big drive we have got to do as a country,” he said. “Our rollout of super-fast has been the fastest among comparable countries. The drive to get the full fibre connections, the future-proof connections, started only a year ago. I’m absolutely determined to see that rolled out.”

Earlier this month, Ofcom said more than 1m “forgotten homes” across the UK were unable to get sufficiently fast broadband to meet a typical family’s needs, such as streaming films or music.

The communications regulator said 4% of UK homes and offices, about 1.1m properties, could not access broadband speeds of at least 10Mbps.

Rural families were more likely to be left behind, with 17% of homes not receiving decent internet, compared with 2% in cities and towns.
https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...and-businesses





Germany Blocks its Largest Telecom Company From Violating Net Neutrality

Regulators are protecting net neutrality after Telekom—which owns T-Mobile—began prioritizing content.
Motherboard Staff, translated byDaniel Stächelin

One day after the lost net neutrality battle in the United States, officials in Germany arrived at an important decision. Last Friday, the Bundesnetzagentur, or Federal Network Agency, forbade the company Deutsche Telekom from throttling the streaming speeds of videos as part of its additional StreamOn service. The highest German regulatory officials responsible for issues relating to the internet ordered Telekom to restructure StreamOn accordingly—and to keep all data streaming fair and equal. Telekom criticized the decision as “very puzzling.”

Deutsche Telekom is the parent company of T-Mobile (including T-Mobile in the US).

With the StreamOn option, Telekom customers have the ability to stream songs and videos from certain service providers without it appearing on their monthly data bill, a practice known as “zero rating,” which violates what we traditionally think of as net neutrality. Depending on the chosen package, users are able to access content from Telekom partners like Netflix, Apple Music, and YouTube. The Federal Network Agency didn’t bring up zero rating in its decision, however. Instead, it say that Telekom and StreamOn prioritizes certain types of streaming content. It throttles video (and allows it to be streamed only at standard definition), while prioritizing music and other audio content. The agency argues that video streaming should also be offered at an uncurbed rated.

StreamOn is a similar program to T-Mobile US's BingeOn program.

In a press release, the agency justified its decision by saying it wished to preserve net neutrality in Germany. Prohibiting the limiting of video streaming not only “allows for a greater Internet diversity, but also bolsters the providers of video-streaming services who place worth on higher-definition content,” Jochen Homann, the head of the agency, said in the release. Furthermore, the agency also pointed to the standpoint that it is enforcing a decision set by European law. “Fair treatment is a cornerstone of European regulations for net neutrality,” Hohmann added.

Andrus Ansip, EU Commissioner for Digital Single Market, tweeted that “to access the open internet without discrimination or interference (like blocking or slowing down)” is enshrined in EU law. In an article in the French newspaper Le Monde, Ansip claimed that the elimination of net neutrality in the United States had “no effect on Europe.”

Telekom is defending itself against the decision made by the Federal Network Agency and signaled its intention to pursue legal action. The decision of the “Bonn-based regulatory” is, according to the company, “very puzzling” and targets 700,000 customers and 150 partners of Telekom, a spokesperson wrote in a blog post. StreamOn has been a “great success story,” which the Federal Network Agency “seems to resent.”

Telekom did not comment on the accusation that it intends on carving out net neutrality in Germany. However, the company defended bandwidths throttling for video streaming: the streaming of videos in DVD quality instead of in HD is “absolutely sufficient,” as evinced by the high number of subscriptions for the StreamOn option, according to Telekom.

Even Vodafone offers its customers certain packages for so-called “zero-rating” streaming not applied to their monthly data plans, and the Federal Network Agency is investigating zero rating as a possible infraction upon net neutrality.

Telekom now has until March 2018 to adjust its StreamOn offering according to the demands set by the network authority.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...lity-violation





The FCC's Next Stunt: Reclassifying Cell Phone Data Service as 'Broadband Internet'

The agency is expected to make this change in February, which will make America's broadband situation look better than it actually is.
Kaleigh Rogers

The Federal Communications Commission’s decision last week to repeal net neutrality was a major blow to internet freedom, but it’s only the first in a long line of actions that the FCC will take to tell itself that America’s broadband situation is better than it actually is. Up next: redefining high speed wired internet to include cell phone service. Because, according to FCC chair Ajit Pai, that’s totally the same thing.

This idea to reclassify smartphone data as broadband was first proposed in August, but with the net neutrality repeal out of the way, the FCC is expected to vote on the proposal by February 3. Currently, the FCC defines broadband connection as 25Mbps download speeds and 3Mbps upload speeds minimum. The new proposal would keep these minimums in place for fixed wireline broadband but also expand the definition to include cell phone data coverage.

This would not only camouflage many of the communities in the US with no access to the internet, but could prevent them from getting necessary funding to build that access. Cell service is often slower, more expensive, and comes with data caps, and even tethering a computer to a phone for internet isn’t a long-term solution, especially for families with multiple people trying to log on at once to do homework, or work, or watch Netflix.

“It seems antithetical to all the other efforts we’re doing,” said Deb Socia, the executive director of Next Century Cities, a coalition of municipalities aimed at expanding local broadband access. “I spent a good part of my life as a teacher and a principal. If I had a classroom full of children that included a lot of failing students, I wouldn’t change my standards [to increase the number of passing grades,] I’d change the intervention.”

Though the process to change these definitions is not as formal as what was required to roll back net neutrality rules, there was still an opportunity for groups to comment this summer, and if there’s enough public backlash, it could potentially meet a different fate. Like net neutrality, it ultimately just comes down to the FCC to make the decision, but groups like Next Century Cities are hoping to hold the agency’s feet to the fire in the meantime.

In January, the group is launching a campaign called #MobileOnly, challenging people to spend one day in the month using only their cell phone data for internet access—no laptops, no computers, and no Wi-Fi. It’s a challenge that’s so unappealing I refuse to even entertain the idea, but it’s one that millions of Americans will be left with as an only option if these broadband definitions are changed. Socia herself will be doing the challenge, as will the two Democrat commissioners on the FCC, Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel.

“Promoting deployment of mobile broadband services alone is not sufficient to bridge digital divides in underserved rural and urban communities,” Clyburn said in a press release for the campaign. “By standing together through this movement, we will demonstrate why it is so
essential for all Americans to have access to a robust fixed broadband connection.”
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...classification





Cable TV’s Password-Sharing Crackdown Is Coming

Using someone else’s credentials to stream for free will soon be a $10 billion problem for pay-TV companies.
Gerry Smith

On Twitter, they are openly bartered, donated, even celebrated.

“Anyone have a Spectrum user ID & password I can trade for?” one Twitter user wrote last month. Another thanked her friend “for giving me his Spectrum username and password to watch the World Series Game 7.” A third tweeted: “Totally figured out my parents Spectrum password and can watch cable now through my Apple TV. I literally love my life.”

blessed to have shawn michael and his family’s xfinity password
— Sydney Irene (@sydneyip) December 3, 2017

Tom Rutledge has had enough. The chief executive officer of Charter Communications Inc., which sells cable TV under the Spectrum name, is leading an industrywide effort to crack down on password sharing. It’s a growing problem that could cost pay-TV companies millions of subscribers—and billions of dollars in revenue—when they can least afford it.

“There’s lots of extra streams, there’s lots of extra passwords, there’s lots of people who could get free service,” Rutledge said at an industry conference this month. The CEO has said that one unidentified channel owner had 30,000 simultaneous streams from a single account.

Charter, which operates in cities including New York and Los Angeles, isn’t the only company tackling the issue. Researchers at Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN network recently asked a group of about 50 millennial sports fans how many of them shared passwords. Everyone raised their hand, said Justin Connolly, executive vice president for affiliate sales and marketing for ESPN and other Disney networks.

“It’s piracy,” Connolly said. “It’s people consuming something they haven’t paid for. The more the practice is viewed with a shrug, the more it creates a dynamic where people believe it’s acceptable. And it’s not.”

Cable and satellite carriers in North America have lost 3 million customers this year alone. But the prevalence of password sharing suggests many of those customers, and possibly many more, are watching popular shows like “The Walking Dead” for free, robbing pay-TV providers and programmers of paying subscribers and advertising dollars.

Most pay-TV companies only require users to re-enter their passwords for each device once a year. During contract negotiations this fall, Charter urged Viacom Inc., home of Comedy Central and MTV, to help limit illicit password swapping. The cable company wants programmers to restrict the number of concurrent streams on their apps and force legitimate subscribers to log in more often, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations.

ESPN, meanwhile, has reduced the number of simultaneous streams that it allows on its app to five from 10 and is considering cutting that to three, Connolly said. ESPN wants to work more closely with distributors to validate subscribers when there are high volumes of streaming on its app outside the cable company’s territory.

The problem stems from an industry concept called TV Everywhere. Started in 2009, the idea was an attempt to appeal to young consumers by letting them access cable or satellite shows on any device. TV Everywhere was slow to catch on but is gaining popularity as more people get used to streaming on phones or tablets.

About one-third of internet users stream cable TV without paying for it by using credentials of someone they don’t live with, according to Parks Associates. The TV industry’s losses from password sharing are expected to rise to $9.9 billion by 2021 from $3.5 billion this year, the research firm estimates. That lost revenue is especially important because the pay-TV industry is already losing subscribers to cheaper online rivals like Netflix Inc.

“It’s become more of an issue, and it’s being exacerbated by cord cutting,” said Campbell Foster, director of product marketing at Adobe Systems Inc., which sells software that media companies use to monitor the location and number of people streaming their apps from each account.

Media executives have insisted for years that password sharing wasn’t a big problem, viewing it as a way to market their content to the next generation. In fact, some companies still say they’re not worried.

Password sharing “is still relatively small and we are seeing no economic impact on our business,” said Jeff Cusson, a spokesman for HBO.

Most credentials are being swapped among friends or relatives, Foster said. Parents, for instance, will often let their children at college stream from their accounts. The TV industry, for the most part, is fine with that but worried about those students sharing credentials with their friends. Some passwords are sold in dark corners of the internet, Foster said. Adobe sees an uptick in illicit streaming before major sporting events.

“You’ll see legit owners of accounts who don’t know their username and password is being shared with 50 people,” he said.

But cracking down on password sharing can be risky. If logging in gets too cumbersome, cable subscribers could get frustrated and cancel. ESPN wants to make it easier by automatically recognizing subscribers who are on their home Wi-Fi or using their own device.

“You’ll see legit owners of accounts who don’t know their username and password is being shared with 50 people”

“I’d hate to see this go the other way and become a bad consumer experience and people wonder, ‘Why can’t my son access TV?’” said Himesh Bhise, CEO at Synacor Inc., which manages streaming service log-ins for HBO Go and other programmers and TV distributors such as Altice, Dish and PlayStation Vue.

For now, the industry can’t agree on a crucial question: How many people should stream from one account while also preventing widespread password swapping? The policies among pay-TV operators, programmers and streaming services vary.

Netflix allows four streams for its most expensive subscriptions and one at a time for its cheapest plans. HBO lets three people stream simultaneously from one account. DirecTV’s satellite customers get five concurrent streams, while its online service, DirecTV Now, allows two.

The number of streams is important, Charter’s Rutledge says, because about one-third of homes have just one person living in them. If those single homeowners share the extra streams with friends and relatives, Charter is losing out on potential customers, he said.

So who’s to blame for the lost revenue from password sharing? Rutledge points the finger at channel owners for not doing enough to secure their apps.

“They devalued their own product in a dramatic way,” Rutledge said.

But programmers say they need to work with cable operators like Charter to tackle the problem because distributors often have different approaches. For example, if a distributor allows 10 streams from its app and ESPN allows five from the ESPN app, that’s potentially 15 people who could be streaming a sporting event from one account simultaneously.

“Programmers and distributors have to work in close collaboration to create any effective solution for this,” said Disney’s Connolly. “This is not something we feel we can ignore.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...down-is-coming





Cord Cutting Isn't Just for Millennials — Even 50-Somethings Want their Internet TV
Troy Wolverton

Cord cutting has long been linked to Millennials — but maybe not for much longer. For years, many in that age group have forsaken traditional broadcast and cable TV in favor of watching shows streamed from the internet. Now that activity is catching on with Millennials' elders.

As we can see in this chart from Statista — which is based on data from PwC — the vast majority of Americans from 18 to 59 now watch at least some of their TV shows via the internet. Perhaps most surprising is the rapid adoption of internet TV by the over-50 set. Less than half of that group went online to tune in their shows last year.
http://www.newstimes.com/technology/...n-12448916.php





FCC Fines Sinclair Broadcast Group $13.4 Million for Running Sponsored Content as News
Ted Johnson

The FCC is slapping Sinclair Broadcast Group with a $13.4 million fine for running news stories on a cancer foundation but failing to disclose that the foundation was paying for them to air.

The FCC said that the programming was broadcast more than 1,700 times, “either as stories resembling independently generated news coverage that aired during the local news, or as longer-form stories aired as 30-minute television programs.” The agency said that it was the largest fine ever imposed for a violation of its sponsorship identification rules.

The fine is also expected to give critics of Sinclair’s proposed merger with Tribune Media fodder for the argument that the transaction is not in the public interest. The FCC is currently reviewing the transaction.

Sinclair said in a statement that it would challenge the FCC’s sanction.

“Sinclair proudly supports the Cancer Foundation and its educational mission. Any absence of sponsorship identification in these public service segments was unintended and a result of simple human error.

“After working to reach a reasonable settlement, we are disappointed by this [fine], which we believe is unreasonable, given the circumstances of our case and the absence of any viewer harm. We disagree with the FCC’s action and intend to contest this unwarranted fine.”

The cancer center was founded by Jon Huntsman Sr., the businessman who has long been active in Republican politics and whose son, Jon Huntsman Jr., is the current U.S. ambassador to Russia.

Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel , the two Democrats on the FCC, dissented from the decision because they believe the fine should be greater.

Clyburn called it “meager.”

“On first read, one might easily conclude that today’s enforcement action by the Republican-led FCC represents a strong stand against a company with a history of skirting FCC rules,” she said. “But take a closer look: contrary to what the FCC majority would have you believe, the nearly $13.4 million fine levied against Sinclair Broadcast Group represents a mere slap on the wrist.”

She added, “Simply put, the ‘punishment does not fit the crime’ against a company that grossed more than $2.7 billion in revenue last year.”

The FCC said that it acted on an anonymous complaint that Sinclair had aired paid programming about the Huntsman Cancer Center during its news programs, but did not tell viewers that Huntsman paid for the stories to air. The FCC’s enforcement bureau found that Sinclair and the foundation entered into an agreement “under which Sinclair produced and supplied programming to both Sinclair and non-Sinclair television stations.”

“This programming promoted the Foundation and the Institute and included 60- to 90-second sponsored stories made to look like independently generated news coverage and 30-minute paid television programs,” the FCC said.

Clyburn noted in her statement that Sinclair has been fined repeatedly over the years, including a $9.5 million settlement in 2016 for failing to negotiate in good faith for retransmission consent negotiations, and sanctions for violating other regulations, including children’s television rules.

Rosenworcel said, “In light of this substantial history of failure to comply with our policies and the sheer number of violations before the agency now, the immediate notice should seek the highest fines permissible under our rules. But instead of doing so, we offer unreasonable and suspicious favor to a company with a clear record of difficulty complying with the law.”
http://variety.com/2017/politics/new...on-1202647175/





'The Last Jedi' Opens with $220M, 2nd Best Weekend All-Time
Jake Coyle

"Star Wars: The Last Jedi" rocketed to a debut of $220 million at the North American box office, landing the second-best opening ever and slotting in behind only its predecessor, "The Force Awakens," according to studio estimates Sunday.

The Disney blockbuster became just the fourth film to open above $200 million domestically. Aside from "The Force Awakens" ($248.8 million), the others are "The Avengers" ($207.4 million) and "Jurassic World" ($208.8 million). Accounting for inflation, the debut of 2012's "The Avengers" would rank just ahead of "The Last Jedi."

"The Last Jedi" is off to a similar start overseas, too, with $230 million in international ticket sales, said Disney. That brings its three-day global haul to $450 million.

As anticipated, "The Last Jedi" fell shy of the opening weekend for J.J. Abrams' 2015 franchise reboot, which eventually grossed $2.1 billion worldwide. But the massive debut not only puts "The Last Jedi" in the record books, it singlehandedly brightens what has been a disappointing year for Hollywood. The weekend was far and away the highest grossing of the year.

The opening also gave the Walt Disney Co. the opportunity to flex its muscles on the heels of its deal announced Thursday to purchase 21st Century Fox for $52.4 billion. As part of the acquisition, Disney will take control of 20th Century Fox, one of Hollywood's six major studios.

Fox, as it happens, was the only studio to open another new wide-release film against "The Last Jedi." Its family film, "Ferdinand," was essentially stampeded by "The Last Jedi," grossing $13.3 million.

"Ferdinand" and other upcoming releases will look for more room in the coming weeks, once the "Star Wars" tsunami has waned.

While Abrams' reboot capitalized on a decade's hiatus for "Star Wars," Rian Johnson's sequel didn't have the same luxury of freshness. It follows not only "The Force Awakens," but last year's spinoff, "Rogue One." That release opened with $155.1 million, and ultimately took in a little more than $1 billion globally.

Johnson instead aimed to distinguish "The Last Jedi" by introducing some new tones to George Lucas' space opera. "The Last Jedi" is more irreverent than previous chapters.

The plan has seemed to work. Critics gave Johnson's film a 93 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences endorsed it, too, with an A CinemaScore.

Signaling its faith in Johnson's course for "Star Wars," Lucasfilm earlier announced that Johnson is developing another trilogy for the franchise, the first of which he'll write and direct. Abrams is set to return to direct Episode IX after he was brought in to replace Colin Trevorrow.
http://www.courant.com/entertainment...217-story.html





Former TV Boss Michael Grade Invests in British Music Rights Business

Michael Grade, the British media executive who chaired the BBC and ITV, has invested in One Media IP Group, a music rights holder that he said was set to benefit from the growth in streaming services.

Grade has teamed up with Ivan Dunleavy, former chief executive of Pinewood Studios, which Grade has also chaired, to take a stake in OMIP, spending 375,000 pounds in total for two holdings of 8.715 percent each.

He said that the popularity of services like Spotify was helping revitalise an industry that was facing a bleak future only a few years ago.

“Streaming is now seen as real growth engine for people who own intellectual property in the music sector whether they be composers, writers or music publishers,” he told Reuters by phone on Monday.

“This is a really exciting space to be in, and there are very few companies that enable you to have a pure play in music publishing, because all the big music publishers are owned by massive international conglomerates.”

OMIP’s catalogue comprises 250,000 nostalgic music tracks from the last 50 years, including artists such as Ricky Valance, Anita Harris, The Tremeloes, the Troggs and Marv Johnson.

Grade said the tracks, some of which are rarely played on radio, could find a new lease of life on streaming services thanks to play lists and algorithms that curate music for users.

He said that he and Dunleavy, who both become non-executive directors, would use their industry contracts to gain more rights.

Shares in the company rose 29 percent on Monday, valuing the group at about 3.9 million pounds.

Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Adrian Croft
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-on...-idUKKBN1EC1B6





YouTube, Music Labels End Standoff, Move Toward Paid Service
Lucas Shaw

• New Universal, Sony agreements allow video uploads to continue
• Deals establish royalty rates between YouTube, rights holders

YouTube signed a new long-term agreement with the top two music labels, promising stronger policing of user uploads of copyrighted songs and paving the way for a new paid service after two years of tumultuous negotiations.

Universal Music Group said its deal with YouTube will give artists more flexibility and better pay. Sony Music Entertainment also signed a new agreement, according to people familiar with the matter. The Tokyo-based parent company declined to comment.

The accords establish royalty rates between YouTube and rights holders for professional music videos and user-uploaded clips, and pave the way for YouTube to introduce a new paid music service early next year. Warner Music Group, the third major label, signed a new deal with YouTube in May.

YouTube expects to convert some of the millions of people who listen to music for free on its video site into paying subscribers. That would help strengthen its relationship with the major label groups after years of tension over whether the Google-owned site was paying enough to copyright holders.

Universal, owned by Vivendi SA, got control for the first time over what appears on ad-supported channels and persuaded YouTube to improve scanning for user uploads that include copyrighted content, a person familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified discussing private information. Some songs and videos will only be available on the paid service, differentiating it from the free service, the person said.

YouTube is one of the most common ways people all over the world consume music, and one of the most important promotional organs for managers and record labels. Yet the site and its parent company Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., have struggled to persuade consumers to pay for music.

Paid services Spotify and Apple Music have spurred a recovery in the music business, converting people who listened for free or bought the occasional album into monthly subscribers. U.S. music industry sales grew 15 percent in the first half of 2017, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, while global sales grew 5.9 percent, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Record labels have pilloried YouTube for a lax approach to copyright and insufficient compensation of artists, arguing sales would be growing more quickly if they generated more money from YouTube.

Universal and Sony operate both recorded music and publishing divisions, and their label groups represent both in negotiations with YouTube.

It’s unclear how long YouTube’s new deals would last. Warner Music’s agreement with the video site was shorter than normal to allow for flexibility in the future, according to a May memo from the label.

YouTube and the record labels have had to overcome disagreements over the sharing of advertising revenue, the features and music available to free users and viewers outside the U.S. But YouTube is so popular that labels would rather work with the service than pull their music off.

The major music groups can now turn their attention to Facebook Inc., owner of the world’s largest social network. Facebook has been talking to music groups for more than a year about licensing rights for user-generated video, and, potentially, professional videos as well.

— With assistance by Pavel Alpeyev
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...w-paid-service





Facebook, Universal Music Strike Multi-Year Licensing Deal
Jessica Toonkel, Arjun Panchadar

Facebook Inc and Universal Music Group on Thursday announced a global agreement that will enable users to upload videos featuring music from Universal’s library across the social media network as well as Instagram and Oculus.

Through the agreement, which is Facebook’s first with a major record label, the social media company will no longer have to require users to take down videos featuring music from Universal’s catalog due to copyright infringement. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Facebook’s deal with Universal Music Group comes as the world’s largest social media site is making a big push into video to keep users on its site and attract advertisers.

Earlier this year it launched its Watch video service, which features shows from the likes of Buzzfeed, Discovery Communications as well as some sports like Major League Baseball.

The partnership comes days after Bloomberg reported that YouTube had signed a long-term agreement with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. (bloom.bg/2yYCYPs)

The licensing deal could help Facebook better compete with Alphabet Inc’s YouTube since music videos are the most popular category on the site, said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research.

“With this deal, Facebook has licensed content from the biggest player in the biggest genre of video on YouTube,” he said.

The multi-year agreement with Universal will be expanded to include Facebook Messenger, Universal said.

Reporting by Arjun Panchadar in Bengaluru and Jessica Toonkel in New York; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila and James Dalgleish
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-fa...KBN1EF296?il=0





Amazon Music Scraps Storage Subscriptions for MP3 Imports
Brittany A. Roston

Amazon is planning to retire its Music storage subscription service, the plan that enabled Amazon customers to upload their own music to the company’s servers. Mind you, this doesn’t mean the Amazon Music or Amazon Music Unlimited products are being retired; rather, just the option to upload personal music libraries to the platform. You have until January 15 to sign up if you want this subscription.

Amazon quietly revealed its plans to retire the product, with customers first noticing a warning on the Amazon Music Storage Subscriptions page that states both free and paid plans will soon end. Amazon has confirmed to us that it is indeed ending the music storage option, but this does not affect any music bought from the company.

Amazon customers who have purchased MP3s from the online retailer, as well as those who have purchased music discs from it that include AutoRip digital versions, will still have access to those downloads in the cloud. You can now and still will be able to access both those varieties of digital content on your desktop and mobile devices.

If you’re new to Amazon Music storage, it comes in two varieties: free, which supports up to 250 songs, and paid, which supports up to 250,000 songs. For the free plan, Amazon says the ability to upload music was removed on December 18 (that was yesterday).

If you’re one of these customers, you can still play that uploaded music until January 2019, as well as download it at any point between then and now. You won’t be able to download it once that date arrives, though. You have until January 15 to sign up for the paid plan.
https://www.slashgear.com/amazon-mus...orts-19512374/





Scientists Tune into Brain to Uncover Music's Healing Power

The National Institutes of Health is bringing together musicians, music therapists and neuroscientists to tap into the brain’s circuitry and find new ways that music might improve health.
Lauran Neergaard

Like a friendly Pied Piper, the violinist keeps up a toe-tapping beat as dancers weave through busy hospital hallways and into the chemotherapy unit, patients looking up in surprised delight. Upstairs, a cellist strums an Irish folk tune for a patient in intensive care.

Music increasingly is becoming a part of patient care — although it's still pretty unusual to see roving performers captivating entire wards, like at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital one fall morning.

"It takes them away for just a few minutes to some other place where they don't have to think about what's going on," said cellist Martha Vance after playing for a patient isolated to avoid spreading infection.

The challenge: Harnessing music to do more than comfort the sick. Now, moving beyond programs like Georgetown's, the National Institutes of Health is bringing together musicians, music therapists and neuroscientists to tap into the brain's circuitry and figure out how.

"The brain is able to compensate for other deficits sometimes by using music to communicate," said NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, a geneticist who also plays a mean guitar.

To turn that ability into a successful therapy, "it would be a really good thing to know which parts of the brain are still intact to be called into action. To know the circuits well enough to know the backup plan," Collins added.

Scientists aren't starting from scratch. Learning to play an instrument, for example, sharpens how the brain processes sound and can improve children's reading and other school skills. Stroke survivors who can't speak sometimes can sing, and music therapy can help them retrain brain pathways to communicate. Similarly, Parkinson's patients sometimes walk better to the right beat.

But what's missing is rigorous science to better understand how either listening to or creating music might improve health in a range of other ways — research into how the brain processes music that NIH is beginning to fund.

"The water is wide, I cannot cross over," well-known soprano Renee Fleming belted out, not from a concert stage but from inside an MRI machine at the NIH campus.

The opera star — who partnered with Collins to start the Sound Health initiative — spent two hours in the scanner to help researchers tease out what brain activity is key for singing. How? First Fleming spoke the lyrics. Then she sang them. Finally, she imagined singing them.

"We're trying to understand the brain not just so we can address mental disorders or diseases or injuries, but also so we can understand what happens when a brain's working right and what happens when it's performing at a really high level," said NIH researcher David Jangraw, who shared the MRI data with The Associated Press.

To Jangraw's surprise, several brain regions were more active when Fleming imagined singing than when she actually sang, including the brain's emotion center and areas involved with motion and vision. One theory: it took more mental effort to keep track of where she was in the song, and to maintain its emotion, without auditory feedback.

Fleming put it more simply: "I'm skilled at singing so I didn't have to think about it quite so much," she told a spring workshop at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where she is an artistic adviser.

Indeed, Jangraw notes a saying in neuroscience: Neurons that fire together, wire together. Brain cells communicate by firing messages to each other through junctions called synapses. Cells that regularly connect — for example, when a musician practices — strengthen bonds into circuitry that forms an efficient network for, in Fleming's case, singing.

But that's a healthy brain. In North Carolina, a neuroscientist and a dance professor are starting an improvisational dance class for Alzheimer's to tell if music and movement enhance a diseased brain's neural networks.

Well before memory loss becomes severe, Alzheimer's patients can experience apathy, depression and gait and balance problems as the brain's synaptic connections begin to falter. The NIH-funded study at Wake Forest University will randomly assign such patients to the improvisation class — to dance playfully without having to remember choreography — or to other interventions.

The test: If quality-of-life symptoms improve, will MRI scans show correlating strengthening of neural networks that govern gait or social engagement?

With senior centers increasingly touting arts programs, "having a deeper understanding of how these things are affecting our biology can help us understand how to leverage resources already in our community," noted Wake Forest lead researcher Christina Hugenschmidt.

Proof may be tough. An international music therapy study failed to significantly help children with autism, the Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported, contradicting earlier promising findings. But experts cited challenges with the study and called for additional research.

Unlike music therapy, which works one-on-one toward individual outcomes, the arts and humanities program at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center lets musicians-in-residence play throughout the hospital. Palliative care nurses often seek Vance, the cellist, for patients anxious or in pain. She may watch monitors, matching a tune's tempo to heart rate and then gradually slowing. Sometimes she plays for the dying, choosing a gently arrhythmic background and never a song that might be familiar.

Julia Langley, who directs Georgetown's program, wants research into the type and dose of music for different health situations: "If we can study the arts in the same way that science studies medication and other therapeutics, I think we will be doing so much good."

___

This Associated Press series was produced in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/scienc...s-12440756.php





U.S. Blames North Korea for 'WannaCry' Cyber Attack
Dustin Volz

The Trump administration has publicly blamed North Korea for unleashing the so-called WannaCry cyber attack that crippled hospitals, banks and other companies across the globe earlier this year.

“The attack was widespread and cost billions, and North Korea is directly responsible,” Tom Bossert, homeland security adviser to President Donald Trump, wrote in a piece published on Monday night in the Wall Street Journal.

“North Korea has acted especially badly, largely unchecked, for more than a decade, and its malicious behavior is growing more egregious,” Bossert wrote. “WannaCry was indiscriminately reckless.”

The White House was expected to follow up on Tuesday with a more formal statement blaming Pyongyang, according to a senior administration official.

The U.S. government has assessed with a “very high level of confidence” that a hacking entity known as Lazarus Group, which works on behalf of the North Korean government, carried out the WannaCry attack, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the government’s investigation.

Lazarus Group is widely believed by security researchers and U.S. officials to have been responsible for the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment that destroyed files, leaked corporate communications online and led to the departure of several top studio executives.

North Korean government representatives could not be immediately reached for comment. The country has repeatedly denied responsibility for WannaCry and called other allegations about cyber attacks a smear campaign.

Washington’s public condemnation does not include any indictments or name specific individuals, the administration official said, adding the shaming was designed to hold Pyongyang accountable for its actions and “erode and undercut their ability to launch attacks.”

The accusation comes as worries mount about North Korea’s hacking capabilities and its nuclear weapons program.

‘PATTERN OF MISBEHAVING’

Many security researchers, including the cyber firm Symantec , as well as the British government, have already concluded that North Korea was likely behind the WannaCry attack, which quickly unfurled across the globe in May to infect more than 300,000 computers in 150 countries.

Considered unprecedented in scale at the time, WannaCry knocked British hospitals offline, forcing thousands of patients to reschedule appointments and disrupted infrastructure and businesses around the world.

The attack originally looked like a ransomware campaign, where hackers encrypt a targeted computer and demand payment to recover files. Some experts later concluded the ransom threat may have been a distraction intended to disguise a more destructive intent.

A separate but similar attack in June, known as NotPetya, hit Ukraine and other nations and caused an estimated $300 million in damages to international shipper FedEx.

Some researchers have said they believed WannaCry was deployed accidentally by North Korea as hackers were developing the code. The senior administration official declined to comment about whether U.S. intelligence was able to discern if the attack was deliberate.

“What we see is a continued pattern of North Korea misbehaving, whether destructive cyber attacks, hacking for financial gain, or targeting infrastructure around the globe,” the official said.

WannaCry was made possible by a flaw in Microsoft’s Windows software, which was discovered by the U.S. National Security Agency and then used by the NSA to build a hacking tool for its own use.

In a devastating NSA security breach, that hacking tool and others were published online by the Shadow Brokers, a mysterious group that regularly posts cryptic taunts toward the U.S. government.

The fact that WannaCry was made possible by the NSA led to sharp criticism from Microsoft President Brad Smith and others who believe the NSA should disclose vulnerabilities it finds so that they can be fixed, rather then hoarding that knowledge to carry out attacks.

Smith said WannaCry provided “yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem.”

U.S. officials have pushed back on those assertions, saying the administration discloses most computer flaws that government agencies detect.

Last month, the White House published its rules for deciding whether to disclose cyber security flaws or keep them secret as part of an effort to be more transparent about the inter-agency process involved in weighing disclosure.

Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Peter Cooney
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-us...-idUKKBN1ED00Q





Internet Giants Told: Accept Cyber Curbs to be Welcome in China
Tom Miles

Google and Facebook will have to accept China’s censorship and tough online laws if they want access to its 751 million internet users, Chinese regulators told a conference in Geneva on Monday.

Google (GOOGL.O) and Facebook (FB.O) are blocked in China, along with Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) and most major Western news outlets.

“That’s a question maybe in many people’s minds, why Google, why Facebook are not yet working and operating in China,” said Qi Xiaoxia, director general of the Bureau of International Cooperation at the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC).

In Google’s case, it left China of its own accord in 2010.

“If they want to come back, we welcome,” Qi told the Internet Governance Forum at the U.N.’s European headquarters.

“The condition is that they have to abide by Chinese law and regulations. That is the bottom line. And also that they would not do any harm to Chinese national security and national consumers’ interests.”

China’s Communist Party has tightened cyber regulation in the past year, formalizing new rules that require firms to store data locally and censor tools that allow users to subvert the Great Firewall that blocks sites including Facebook and Google.

Their rival Apple (AAPL.O) operates subject to strict censorship, having removed dozens of popular messaging and virtual private network (VPN) apps from its China App Store this year to comply with government requests.

In June, China introduced a new national cybersecurity law that requires foreign firms to store data locally and submit to data surveillance measures.

“We are of the idea that cyberspace is not a space that is ungoverned. We need to administer, or supervise, or manage, the internet according to law,” Qi said.

“Can you guess the number of websites in China? We have five million websites. That means that the Chinese people’s rights of speech and rights of expression are fully ensured.”

It was not clear what her figure of five million was based on. According to the website internetlivestats.com, there are 1.3 billion websites on the World Wide Web, defining a website as a unique hostname which can be resolved, using a name server, into an IP address.

Reporting by Tom Miles, additional reporting by Cate Cadell in Beijing, Editing by William Maclean
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-ch...-idUKKBN1EC1MQ





Romanian Hackers Infiltrated 65% of DC's Outdoor Surveillance Cameras
Miranda Green

Two Romanian hackers infiltrated nearly two-thirds of the outdoor surveillance cameras in Washington, DC, as part of an extortion scheme, according to federal court documents.

In a criminal complaint filed last week in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the US government alleges that the two Romanian hackers operating outside the United States infiltrated 65% of the outdoor surveillance cameras operated by DC city police — that's 123 cameras out of 187 in the city. The alleged hacking occurred during a four-day period in early January.

The hacking suspects, Mihai Alexandru Isvanca and Eveline Cismaru, are also accused of using the computers behind the surveillance cameras to distribute ransomware through spam emails, according to an affidavit by Secret Service agent James Graham in support of the government's criminal complaint. The affidavit alleges the hackers meant to use the malware to lock victims' computers and then extort payments from them to regain access.

In the affidavit, the Romanians are accused of "intent to extort from persons money and other things of value, to transmit in interstate and foreign commerce communications containing threats to cause damage to protected computers."

They were traced through their registered email addresses, one of which roughly translates into "selling souls" in Romanian, according to the affidavit.

CNN's Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/20/po...rs-dc-cameras/





For Russian ‘Trolls,’ Instagram’s Pictures Can Spread Wider Than Words
Sheera Frenkel

The enduring popularity of a provocative post on Instagram, created by a company with connections to the Kremlin, demonstrates why fighting propaganda on social media will be an uphill battle.

The photograph in the post, of a smiling woman wearing a black hijab, seems innocent. But the text around it was crafted to push buttons. This is a woman, readers are warned, who hates everything from Jews and Christians to lesbians and wine — yet she “complains about Islamophobia.”

Since it was posted on Nov. 8, the image has been “liked” by more than 6,000 people on Instagram, the image-sharing site owned by Facebook. What those people probably did not know was that it was created by the Internet Research Agency, or I.R.A., a so-called Russian troll farm that employed hundreds to influence discussions online by stirring debate in comment sections below online stories and creating provocative posts on social media.

The account where the post first appeared was banned by Instagram this year, but other accounts continue to spread the image.

Congress took Facebook, Twitter and Google to task in October for allowing the spread of Russian disinformation on their platforms during the 2016 election campaign, but little attention was paid to Instagram. Some researchers believe that the platform — which has 800 million monthly users, 470 million more than Twitter — is as full of disinformation and propaganda as any other social media service.

“Instagram is a major distributor and redistributor of I.R.A. propaganda that’s at the very least on par with Twitter,” according to a report published last month by Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

A Facebook spokesman said the company takes disinformation seriously and was continuing its efforts to “stop foreign interference.”

“As part of our investigation, we found and removed around 170 I.R.A. accounts on Instagram that were responsible for approximately 120,000 posts,” the spokesman, Tom Reynolds, said.

He added, “Our review of this activity is ongoing, and we continue to monitor for and remove fake accounts.”

Mr. Albright’s research documented how the photo-friendly service was widely used by Russian trolls, and how it continues to be a hub for those images to be shared and shared again. He analyzed 28 of the 170 accounts that Instagram removed from its platform after discovering that they had been created by the I.R.A., which is based in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Using publicly available information on sites that archive social media posts, Mr. Albright found 2.5 million recorded interactions with posts from the accounts, as well as 145 million likely interactions with people who had passively viewed them.

Mr. Albright said that those figures were not the complete picture — he was not able to account for how many people had shared images on Instagram by taking screen grabs or through a variety of third-party apps that allow for reposting of images.

The image of the woman in the hijab was originally posted by an account called Merican Fury. According to evidence presented during a congressional hearing in October, that account was part of a coordinated disinformation campaign run by the Internet Research Agency.

This month, it was shared to a popular Instagram account called Republican.s, which says it represents “the Republicans and Conservatives of Instagram.” It has more than 100,000 followers.

An administrator of Republican.s declined to answer why the account had shared the image, or if the person running the account was aware of the image’s Russian origin. When reached on Instagram, which allows users to send a message to any account they follow, the administrator said he or she had only recently taken over the account.

The person responding to messages refused to answer any other questions about who he or she is or who previously controlled the account and managed its posts. No information was provided on the Instagram account other than a brief description.

Mr. Albright said it was not unusual for accounts to share images without checking their source.

“Instagram has all the social aspects of Facebook, but it is more powerful for visual messaging than Facebook,” he said. “It’s all about sharing images from many different sources with a community. It’s more focused on the conversations sparked by those images, on the controversy around them.”

Nir Eyal, author of “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products,” said Instagram was expressly designed to make images quick and easy to share.

“Instagram is a much more intimate place than Facebook and Twitter,” Mr. Eyal said. “People on Instagram have a more targeted list of people they follow. It’s a tight network of people who share images with each other.”

Within Instagram, users often share one another’s posts, a process known as “regramming,” or copy and post images they have spotted from other social media platforms. That makes it difficult to entirely eliminate an image from the site.

The images created by the Russian accounts were designed to draw both interest and anger on divisive issues. In one image, a father and son hold guns, and the text asks whether all fathers wouldn’t choose to protect their families, given the chance. In another, a young child, presumably a Syrian refugee, holds a jagged knife. The text around his head suggests that Americans are being killed for “political correctness.”

In comments below the images, thousands weighed in on whether the United States should allow refugees from Syria to enter the United States. Mr. Albright said it was a typical example of how Instagram had become more than just a site for sharing images — and had become a hub for debate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/17/t...an-trolls.html





Police Search Finnish Reporter's Home after Security Article

Finnish police searched a reporter’s home and seized her computer after she tried to destroy the hard drive to protect sources linked to a security story, her newspaper reported.

The journalist, Laura Halminen, said she tried to smash up her computer with a hammer in her home, but the laptop then started smoking and she called the fire brigade, according to an interview published by her employer Helsingin Sanomat.

Police officers who came to her home with the fire service to investigate the blaze then took her computer and searched her property, police said - a rare operation in a country rated high for protecting press freedom.

The case centred on a story that Halminen and another journalist wrote on Saturday about a Finnish intelligence centre that they said monitored neighbouring Russia and, they reported, was about to get new powers to watch Finns online.

After the article’s publication, Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto released a statement saying authorities had launched an investigation in to the leaking of material used in the story.

The reporter Halminen told her newspaper in the interview she had decided to destroy the computer “to make sure sources were protected in the best possible way”.

On Sunday, the police’s National Bureau of Investigation said, officers went to the property and found the computer burning in the basement. “After that, a special home search was ordered to be carried out in the apartment and basement,” the force added.

It said officers had had to act quickly because they feared material linked to an investigation could be destroyed. There were no reports of anyone being arrested or charged.

The newspaper said the police also took phones and memory sticks in what it called a “very worrying” raid. “A house search of this scale targeting a journalist is totally exceptional in Finland,” Editor-in-chief, Kaius Niemi, said.

Campaign group Reporters Without Borders ranked Finland third in its 2017 World Press Freedom Index, behind only Sweden and Norway.

Reporting by Jussi Rosendahl; Editing by Andrew Heavens
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-fi...-idUKKBN1EC1L4





Urgent: We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill
Rainey Reitman

According to reports published Tuesday evening by Politico, a group of surveillance hawks in the House of Representatives is trying to ram through a bill that would extend mass surveillance by the National Security Agency. We expect a vote to happen on the House floor as early as tomorrow, which means there are only a few hours to rally opposition.

The backers of this bill are attempting to rush a vote on a bill that we’ve criticized for failing to secure Americans’ privacy. If this bill passes,we will miss the opportunity to prevent the FBI from searching through NSA databases for American communications without a warrant. Worse, nothing will be done to rein in the massive, unconstitutional surveillance of the NSA on Americans or innocent technology users worldwide.

As we wrote, the bill, originally introduced by Chairman Devin Nunes before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “allows warrantless search of American communications, expands how collected data can be used, and treats constitutional protections as voluntary.”

The bill would create an easy path for the NSA to restart an invasive type of surveillance (called "about" searches) that the agency voluntarily ended earlier this year because of criticisms from the FISA court. It would also give FBI agents the power to decide whether or not to seek a warrant to read American communications collected under Section 702.

Backers of this bill are rushing because they know that time is on our side. If we can rally enough voices of opposition, we can delay or defeat this vote, sending a powerful message to Congress. Every day can make a huge difference in this fight because Section 702, originally enacted as part of the FISA Amendments Act—the legal authority the NSA relies on to engage in this mass surveillance—expires in 12 days.

The vote on this is likely to happen today, so there’s no time to make phone calls or send emails. We are asking people to use social media to contact their representatives. We’ve set up a tool to help you tweet at your member of Congress. We also encourage you to find other social media accounts for your representatives (such as an official Facebook account) and post a comment there.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/1...expansion-bill





Security Firm Keeper Sues News Reporter Over Vulnerability Story

The vulnerability was fixed, but Keeper now demands that the allegedly defamatory article is pulled offline.
Zack Whittaker

Keeper, a password manager software maker, has filed a lawsuit against a news reporter and its publication after a story was posted reporting a vulnerability disclosure.

Dan Goodin, security editor at Ars Technica, was named defendant in a suit filed Tuesday by Chicago-based Keeper Security, which accused Goodin of "false and misleading statements" about the company's password manager.

Goodin's story, posted December 15, cited Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy, who said in a vulnerability disclosure report he posted a day earlier that a security flaw in Keeper allowed "any website to steal any password" through the password manager's browser extension.

Goodin was one of the first to cover news of the vulnerability disclosure. He wrote that the password manager was bundled in some versions of Windows 10. When Ormandy tested the bundled password manager, he found a password stealing bug that was nearly identical to one he previously discovered in 2016.

Ormandy also posted a proof-of-concept exploit for the new vulnerability.

The bug has since been fixed, according to Ormandy's follow-up note, which triggered the release of the report. Goodin's story was amended twice, which was noted in the story's footer.

Keeper confirmed the bug was fixed in its own blog post, which said "no customers were adversely affected by this potential vulnerability."

Keeper said in its lawsuit that Goodin and his employer, tech site Ars Technica, also named as defendant, "made false and misleading statements about the Keeper software application suggesting that it had a 16-month old bug that allowed sites to steal user passwords."

The security firm asserts claims for defamation, and calls for a jury trial. The suit also calls for the retraction and removal of the article, and to award damages to Keeper. The full complaint can be found here.

Keeper chief executive Darren Guccione reiterated the company's claims in an email sent to ZDNet, adding that it "vigorously defends its technology, brand, team members and customers."

Ken Fisher, editor-in-chief for Ars Technica, did not immediately return a request for comment by email. Ormandy referred comment to Google, which declined to comment. We also reached out to Microsoft for comment but didn't hear back. (If that changes, we will update.)

Several security experts and researchers on Twitter decried the lawsuit.

"This is bullying and Goodin is [definitely] def in the top 1 percent [of] knowledgeable journalists," said Matthieu Suiche, founder of Comae Technologies, a Dubai-based security firm, in a tweet.

"If Keeper Security thinks this will make their software more secure, this will only irreversibly damage their reputation as a security company," he added.

Kim Zetter, an independent security reporter, said in a tweet that the suit was "ridiculous."

"What a bad precedent this is for a security firm to set and what a dishonorable way to treat a journalist who has covered security for years and takes great pains to get things right," she added.

It remains unclear how successful the suit will be. Illinois, where the case is filed, is said to have "good" laws to protect against so-called strategic lawsuits against public participation, largely seen as ways to protect free speech.

Keeper threatened to sue security firm Fox-IT for finding a security flaw in one of its products.

The case is 1:17-cv-09117 in the northern district of Illinois.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/securit...ability-story/





Apple's iPhone Throttling Will Reinvigorate the Push for Right to Repair Laws

More states are considering right to repair legislation that will make it easier to fix your electronics.
Jason Koebler

The news that Apple throttles iPhones that have old batteries will reinvigorate the right to repair debate as the movement enters a crucial year.

Third party repair shops say they’ve already seen an uptick in customers asking for battery replacements to speed up their slow phones, and right to repair activists who are pushing for state legislation that will make third party and self repair more accessible say Apple’s secrecy about this behavior will give them a powerful rallying message.

“If Apple were serious about battery life, they’d market battery replacements,” Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of Repair.org, told me in an email. “Apple clearly has a big financial benefit when people decide their phones are too slow and head to the Apple Store for a new phone.”

Repair.org is a right to repair advocacy group that is made up largely of small, third party repair shops, which is spearheading the effort to get states to consider legislation that will make it easier to repair electronic devices.

Apple throttles phone performance as batteries age in order to prevent the phone from suddenly shutting off. This makes sense, but Apple has not messaged this to its consumers—it’s given only two opaque statements that conveniently avoid stating the facts: old batteries will negatively affect phone performance. And Apple has never said that simply replacing the battery will fix this throttling.

On the contrary, Apple has lobbied against state-level legislation that would require it to sell repair parts to consumers and third parties and release service manuals for its devices. It has also warned consumers against using third party repair in software updates. Meanwhile, Apple Stores will only replace iPhone batteries if they fail a specific diagnostic test, the specifics of which are not made public. Third-party replacement repair usually costs about $40, compared to the $79 that Apple charges.

“If you don’t fail the diagnostic test, they won’t do it,” Michael Oberdick, owner of two electronics repair shops called iOutlet in Ohio, told me on a phone call. “If I drive into an automotive repair shop and ask them to change the battery, they’ll do it for me even if their diagnostics say it’s good.”

Apple has not clearly messaged to consumers that phones with old batteries are getting throttled, which means there are many people out there who think their perfectly good phone has gone bad.

“Apple is consistently doing things like this without the consent of their customers,” Oberdick said. “It’s always a move that makes the consumer who is not informed or technologically savvy replace their phone.”

Oberdick says that around new iOS updates—which usually follow the release of a new iPhone—his shop sees a “massive increase in battery replacements. Our battery replacements will triple.”

He says that he’ll use this news to let his consumers know why their phone is slowing down.

Gordon-Byrne, meanwhile, says that this information can be used to talk to the masses about the importance of being able to repair your own things. This year, 12 states introduced right to repair legislation, but none of them passed, due to tech company lobbying (including by Apple) or crowded legislative calendars. Most states introduce new legislation in the first few weeks of the year, and Gordon-Byrne says lawmakers in many new states have reached out to her about their intention to write a right to repair bill.

“Legislative sessions are kicking up right after the new year, and nothing stirs the masses better than Apple being a bully,” Gordon-Byrne said. “More states have got bills being drafted for filing. It’s going to be a good New Year.”
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...ight-to-repair





Tesla Big Battery Outsmarts Lumbering Coal Units after Loy Yang Trips
Giles Parkinson

The Tesla big battery is having a big impact on Australia’s electricity market, far beyond the South Australia grid where it was expected to time shift a small amount of wind energy and provide network services and emergency back-up in case of a major problem.

Last Thursday, one of the biggest coal units in Australia, Loy Yang A 3, tripped without warning at 1.59am, with the sudden loss of 560MW and causing a slump in frequency on the network.

What happened next has stunned electricity industry insiders and given food for thought over the near to medium term future of the grid, such was the rapid response of the Tesla big battery to an event that happened nearly 1,000km away.

Even before the Loy Yang A unit had finished tripping, the 100MW/129MWh had responded, injecting 7.3MW into the network to help arrest a slump in frequency that had fallen below 49.80Hertz.

Data from AEMO (and gathered above by Dylan McConnell from the Climate and Energy College) shows that the Tesla big battery responded four seconds ahead of the generator contracted at that time to provide FCAS (frequency control and ancillary services), the Gladstone coal generator in Queensland.

But in reality, the response from the Tesla big battery was even quicker than that – in milliseconds – but too fast for the AEMO data to record.

Importantly, by the time that the contracted Gladstone coal unit had gotten out of bed and put its socks on so it can inject more into the grid – it is paid to respond in six seconds – the fall in frequency had already been arrested and was being reversed.

Gladstone injected more than Tesla did back into the grid, and took the frequency back up to its normal levels of 50Hz, but by then Tesla had already put its gun back in its holster and had wandered into the bar for a glass of milk.

So why did the Tesla big battery respond when not contracted?

One reason is because it can, and so it did.

The other reason is less clear, but more intriguing. It is contracted to provide such grid services by the South Australia government.

The details of that contract are not released, but it wouldn’t surprise if that contract allowed, or even encouraged, such intervention – just to rub in the message about a cleaner, faster, smarter grid to the technology dinosaurs in the eastern states.

Marvellous stuff.

This is just the latest in a series of interventions since the Tesla big battery was officially opened in early December.

It has provided, at the request of AEMO, 70MW of back-up to help meet a critical peak in the day before its opening, entered into the FCAS market, as we highlight here, and discharged at full capacity.

Over the weekend was again illustrating its rapid fire charging and discharging. (See graph above). The rapid re-bidding is likely to change the market forever, particularly when the 5-minute settlement rule finally comes into effect in 2021.

It should be an interesting 2018.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big...g-trips-70003/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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