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Old 02-10-19, 06:32 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 5th, ’19

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October 5th, 2019




Canal+ Wins Battle Against Polish Pirates
Alana Foster

• Canal+ original Belfer was illegally distributed by Polish pirating site
• Owner found guilty and sentenced to eight months imprisonment
• Canal+ spokesperson: “He intentionally did not share content through his own hosting infrastructure.”

The owner of Pirate streaming site ysterajto.pl has been imprisoned after the site was found to have illegally distributed Canal+ original TV broadcasts.

The administrator has been sentenced to eight months imprisonment after the Canal+ television piracy team discovered the illegal distribution as part of its regular monitoring activity.

Episodes from season two of its original production Belfer were reportedly made available by ysterajto.pl without proper authorisation.

According to reports, the website administrator was asked to stop illegal activities, which were ignored as well as subsequent requests from the broadcaster.

The Canal+ piracy team obtained further evidence on the illegal operational activities, pointing to the owner of the illegal streaming website. Recordings and additional evidence were offered to authorities to make the arrest.

In a statement, the court concluded that the evidence and the circumstance of the act raised no doubt the website owner acted to the detriment of ITI Neovision SA – the operator of the Canal+ Platform.

A spokesperson from Canal+ piracy division said: “The website owner wanted to use the model in which most of the VOD pirate websites are currently operating, trying to avoid criminal liability. He intentionally did not share content through his own hosting infrastructure, only used video players of external services, embedding them on a website.

“In such a situation, law enforcement agencies were often powerless and accepted translations of the perpetrators, in which they informed you that all content came from external hosting services and were posted by users, which the website owners have no influence on.

“This is the first such an important judgment, which can become a reference point in subsequent such cases.”

Media2.pl reported the Polish piracy service was guilty of committing an offense under article 116 sections one and three of the act of 4 February 1994 on copyright and related rights.

Based on the evidence the website owner was given a sentence of eight-month penalty imprisonment.

In May 2018 another pirate was fined €36,553 and received a prison sentence of 10 months, suspended for three years, for pirating football matches shown by nc+ - the former name of Canal +.
https://www.ibc.org/1627.more





Asian Telcos Try to Tackle Video-Streaming Piracy

Video-streaming has brought many benefits, not least choice and the growing amount of original content, but piracy remains a major problem, which is why a group of telcos and other industry players have joined forces to tackle the issue.

Speaking at the recent All That Matters conference in Singapore, senior executives from three Asian telcos – Singtel, Globe Telecom and Tata Communications – as well as regional streaming service Hooq, set out a series of recommendations.

“We all acknowledge that it is the golden era of TV content, we have such a boom in the amount and quality of content, but that comes with the problem of piracy,” said Anurag Dahiya, head of content and ad sales at Singtel, in comments reported by Campaign Asia.

“After being on the decline for many years, piracy is going up again. It has become the biggest issue for the legitimate content industry,” he added.

The executives pointed to several factors explaining the growth of piracy in the region, including the sheer number of streaming services available that enable consumers to bypass subscription models.

More affordable and better connectivity, as well as the improved sophistication of piracy apps, is also fuelling the trend – as Dahiya noted during the panel session.

“In places like Singapore which has good connectivity, it has become much easier to pirate,” he said. “And viewers no longer have to look for a torrent site, download and then consume – it has been crunched into a box that can be connected to your TV.”

He went on to urge content providers to do more because telcos, as distributors, feel “the heat” of piracy first. “Much of the content industry have not put their shoulder to the wagon on this one,” Dahiya said. “It has to be the first objective everyone has to put on their plans: fight piracy. If we don’t do that then all our other investments are going to waste.”

Although legal enforcement is the most obvious way to deal with piracy, the executives outlined five key areas that would bolster industry-wide efforts.

Jil Bausa-Go, VP of portfolio and partner management at Globe Telecom’s Content Business Group, explained that the Filipino telco is blocking certain internet sites and is working with trade body Asia Video Industry Assocation (AVIA) to “more proactively go after” illicit streaming devices.

Telcos are also striking partnerships with legitimate content partners, while exploring whether “freemium” commercial models, where users get some content for free, would help dissuade them from using pirate sites.

Hooq chief content officer Jennifer Batty raised a fourth area of activity – that of trying to persuade content providers to agree to simultaneous release dates.

“It is incredibly important for us to have content that is exclusive and day-and-date, so we can run a series at the same time as the US or with the original broadcast,” she said.

“That means we can get it to a local audience as quickly as possible and ideally quicker than piracy sites, so we give people an alternative to watch content legally at affordable prices.”

Finally, Mehul Kapadia, global head of marketing at Tata Communications, said that education is key to help consumers understand the impact piracy has on the long-term prospects for the entertainment industry.

“The solution will come from multiple angles, but deep-rooted it has to be education,” he said. “That is the reality: you have to stop pirating if you want the entertainment industry to sustain, because that is what gives billions of us joy.”
https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/...g_piracy/42729





Hundreds of Thousands of People Read Novels on Instagram. They May be the Future

Last year, the New York Public Library released an experiment to put the full text of novels in its Instagram Stories. Today, an estimated 300,000 people are reading books this way.
Katharine Schwab

In August 2018, Instagram followers of the New York Public Library were tapping through their Insta Stories when something unexpected showed up: the full text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, designed for a small screen, with small animations that brought the story to life as you flipped.

The project, known as Insta Novels, is part of the NYPL’s goal to reach beyond its walls and convince more people to read books. In pursuit of this mission, the institution has turned to one of the largest social media platforms in the world, bringing classic literature to Instagram’s 400 million daily active users.

Designed by the design agency Mother New York, Insta Novels is the winner of Fast Company‘s 2019 Innovation by Design Awards in the Apps & Games category. Since launching in August 2018, more than 300,000 people have read the NYPL’s Insta Novels, and the NYPL’s Instagram account has gained 130,000 followers. While gaining more followers was definitely part of the project’s aim, the NYPL is more excited—and surprised—that people actually read the books that it published on Instagram.

There have been many attempts to update books for the digital age: Beyond e-readers like the Kindle and Nook, designers have tried to take advantage of the visual, context-aware nature of the internet to make reading more interactive. A project called Ambient Literature publishes stories that pull in details about your location, the time of day, and the weather for a story you can read only on a smartphone. Others have redesigned the digital reading experience for the browser, making it more pleasant to read a book on your computer.

For NYPL, anything that helps people find stories is a great idea—so why not put them in the library’s Stories?

“Anywhere people want to read is fine by us,” says Richert Schnorr, the director of digital media at the NYPL. “We’re happy to meet people where they are.” Schnorr tapped the NYPL’s librarians to decide which public domain titles to include. Along with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the library’s Instagram page’s highlights section also has Story versions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which slowly became available over the last six months of 2018.

But Instagram is an unlikely platform for reading full novels. As Mother partner and chief creative officer Corinna Falusi puts it: “Instagram is a platform built to share visuals, and we are sharing words.”

So Falusi and her team focused on ensuring that each story was highly legible in terms of text size (not too small, but not so big that each story would take too many screens to complete), background color (a warmer cream to make reading easier on the eyes), and font (the team picked Georgia). They also took advantage of the unique nature of the platform by sprinkling small animations on chapter pages and throughout the books to continually pique the reader’s interest, since they likely expect sleek visuals on Instagram. Finally, they commissioned a different designer to illustrate the equivalent of a book cover that a reader first sees when they open up the Story, taking advantage of Instagram’s focus on visuals to create compelling animations that would convince people to give the story a shot.

To move between pages, the designers realized they could take advantage of Instagram’s interface, where users tap on the right side of the screen to go to the next image or video, to mimic the act of flipping pages. To help guide people, each story has a little animated icon where users are meant to rest their thumb. Then, they can tap every time they want to turn the page. For A Christmas Carol, the icon is a burning candle that slowly burns down as you tap, almost like a digital flip book.

“Every single part of the design was tailored to make the story the most entertaining, to make it the most simple to use, and make it the most natural within the environment of Instagram,” Falusi says.

Ultimately, both Mother and the NYPL hope that this is an ongoing project, whether the library itself publishes more books via Instagram or others take up the mantle and start experimenting themselves. “This is just the beginning of using a platform in a way that hasn’t been used before,” Falusi says.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90392917...y-be-instagram





Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K. Police
Kitty Donaldson and Mark Burton

Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police under a new treaty between the two countries, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The accord, which is set to be signed by next month, will compel social media firms to share information to support investigations into individuals suspected of serious criminal offenses including terrorism and pedophilia, the person said.

Priti Patel, the U.K.’s home secretary, has previously warned that Facebook’s plan to enable users to send end-to-end encrypted messages would benefit criminals, and called on social media firms to develop “back doors” to give intelligence agencies access to their messaging platforms.

The U.K. and the U.S. have agreed not to investigate each other’s citizens as part of the deal, while the U.S. won’t be able to use information obtained from British firms in any cases carrying the death penalty.

Details of the accord were reported earlier by the Times.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/facebook...lice-1.1323301





Firefox: 'No UK Plans' to Make Encrypted Browser Tool its Default

Critics say DoH privacy technology could enable easier spread of child abuse images
Alex Hern

The maker of the Firefox web browser has told the government it has no plans to turn a controversial web privacy tool on by default in the UK, despite launching it in the US later in September.

Mozilla has announced it will make the tool, called DNS-over-HTTPS, or DoH, the default for all users in the US.

The decision has prompted concern in the UK, since the technology breaks many of the centralised filtering and blocking systems in place to prevent easy access to child abuse images, piracy and terrorist material, as well as optional parental controls.

In a letter sent to Nicky Morgan, the culture secretary, seen by the Guardian, Mozilla’s vice-president of global policy, trust and security, Alan Davidson, said the non-profit organisation “has no plans to turn on our DoH feature by default in the United Kingdom and will not do so without further engagement with public and private stakeholders”.

DNS-over-HTTPS is a significant rewrite to one of the basic layers of the internet, the domain name system, which computers use to turn a readable web address, such as theguardian.com, into an IP address that tells the computer which specific server to connect with. Typically, that search is carried out in an unencrypted fashion, which can allow attackers to hijack requests. By adding encryption, DoH adds extra security to the browsing process.

Davidson added in his letter to Morgan: “We do strongly believe that DoH would offer real security benefits to UK citizens. The DNS is one of the oldest parts of the internet’s architecture, and remains largely untouched by efforts to make the web more secure.

“Because current DNS requests are unencrypted, the road that connects your citizens to their online destination is still open and used by bad actors looking to violate user privacy, attack communications, and spy on browsing activity. People’s most personal information, such as their health-related data, can be tracked, collected, leaked and used against people’s best interest. Your citizens deserve to be protected from that threat.”

One side-effect of DoH is that it also bypasses UK web filters, which use the same technique, hijacking DNS lookups, to prevent easy access to websites blocked by internet service providers.

The Internet Watch Foundation, which provides ISPs with a list of websites that host child abuse imagery, for filtering purposes, expressed its concern over the technology for that reason. “We feel that the way in which DNS-over-HTTPS is proposed to be implemented could expose millions of people across the world to the worst imagery of children being sexually abused and could mean that the victims of such abuse could be exposed to countless sets of eyes,” a spokesperson told the tech site the Register.

The trade body for British ISPs even nominated Mozilla as one of its “internet villains of the year” in July over the issue. The ISPA cited as its reason “their proposed approach to introduce DNS-over-HTTPS in such a way as to bypass UK filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet safety standards in the UK”.

A month later, the body withdrew the nomination and cancelled the “award” entirely, saying it “clearly sent the wrong message”.

Google has also announced plans to test DoH in its Chrome web browser, starting in October. The company will not turn on DoH for every user, but says it will default to DoH for those relatively technical users who have already chosen to switch their DNS provider to companies such as Google, Cloudflare and OpenDNS.

A Government spokesperson said: “Child sexual exploitation is an abhorrent crime that this Government is committed to tackling.

“While we look to support security and privacy online, it is vital that all sectors of the digital industry consider child safety when developing their systems and services. We are working with industry on solutions to any potential problems as part of our ongoing work to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...ol-its-default





Netflix, You Have a Problem: ‘The Irishman’ Is Too Good
Owen Gleiberman

When the executives at Netflix saw the response to “The Irishman” on Friday, the opening night of the New York Film Festival, they must have been popping champagne corks. The audience was hugely enthusiastic about the film, and the critical response was through the roof, with many hailing Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour swan-song-of-the-Mob drama as a masterpiece. (I wasn’t in the M-word camp, but I called the film a “coldly enthralling knockout” — close enough.) The buzz about “The Irishman” instantly launched it into the awards race, with some declaring it to be the front-runner. And while awards chatter this early on is notoriously unreliable, it seems safe to say that “The Irishman” has now all but guaranteed Netflix a central place at the awards table, in the same way that “Roma” did last year. (The company, in fact, has already launched one key awards player during the fall festivals: Noah Baumbach’s masterful “Marriage Story.”)

So on what planet is there a downside to all that?

Actually, there is a potential downside, one that’s all too real. It’s not about awards. It’s about branding — which, after all, is a major part of what awards are about.

Most movie studios, having spent $160 million to make a film like “The Irishman” (but then, no movie studio has ever spent $160 million to make a film like “The Irishman”), would be breathing a sigh of relief over the fact that it now looks like their gargantuan investment will pay off. But Netflix, as we know, follows the laws of a totally different economic ecosystem; that’s why the company could afford to spend so much on “The Irishman” in the first place. You know the cliché everyone always trots out about the budget of this or that indie film — that it “would be the catering budget” on such-and-such a blockbuster? For Netflix, $160 million is a catering budget. For most studios, it’s a potential bank-breaker, and when Disney or Paramount spends that much money on a film (not counting marketing costs), they intend, and expect, to make it back.

The Netflix plan turns that cost/benefit equation on its head. The company doesn’t expect, or need, to profit from “The Irishman” by wooing an audience into a movie theater to purchase tickets that add up to something larger than what the movie costs. In truth, the fact that “The Irishman” will play in as many movie theaters as it does, for about a month, starting on Nov. 1, is — for Netflix — less a stab toward profit than a kind of concession. It’s Netflix saying, “Okay, we’ll play this movie the old-fashioned way, even though it’s not our business plan.” Their business plan is to get people around the globe to subscribe to Netflix. In that sense, “The Irishman” is an incredibly expensive billboard, a way of upping subscriptions by announcing to the world: This is the streaming club you want to belong to.

Yet “The Irishman,” like “Roma” before it, is also a billboard directed at filmmakers. It’s saying to them: This is the streaming service you want to make your movie at. And that’s where the high cinematic achievement of “The Irishman,” now that the film has been unveiled, could create a nasty bit of friction.

Many of those who saw the movie on Friday and hailed its quality (in reviews, tweets, etc.) made the point that “The Irishman” deserves to be seen on the big screen. Though I’m not alone in thinking the film has a mini-series aspect to it, I wouldn’t dispute that point, and I can’t imagine anyone else would either. “The Irishman” was made, by one of the key film virtuosos of the last half century, as a work of cinema to be shared in the secular temple that the movie theater still is. (Yes, even with all those trailers, with the $10 Cokes and the idiots on their cell phones.) I think a great many people will want to experience it that way. Scorsese has made a movie powerful enough to have achieved that buzzy, elusive, you-just-gotta-see-it factor. Meaning: You gotta see it in a theater.

So let’s pretend, for a moment, that the picture was being released by Warner Bros., the company that 29 years ago financed and distributed “GoodFellas.” What kind of life would “The Irishman” enjoy in theaters under those circumstances? Now that we’ve seen it, we can speculate about that in a more informed way than we might have a week ago. Based on its quality, its ecstatic reviews, its veritable summit meeting of acting legends (Al Pacino, amazingly, had never worked with Scorsese before, and he gives the film’s most memorable performance), I don’t think it’s farfetched to say that “The Irishman,” in theaters, would have the potential to be the rare dramatic feature that makes $100 million in the U.S. alone. If so, that would be a triumph for its studio.

But it would be more than that. The amount of money a movie makes isn’t just a measure of profit. It’s a measure of the audience’s collective passion. It’s connected to how much a film drives the conversation, to how much it enters the bloodstream of our culture.

I would argue that this year, there’s going to be a powerful gap — in fact, you could call it a chasm — between the way “The Irishman” would have played at theaters had it been released by a conventional studio and the way that it will play in theaters in the glorified, seam-busting version of a limited release under Netflix.

We saw that kind of gap last year with “Roma.” Yet it wasn’t nearly as dramatic as this year’s will be, since the box-office expectations for “Roma,” a foreign-language art film, were far lower. I believe that given a full-scale release in theaters, “Roma” could have grossed $20 to $30 million. But the fact that it made so much less didn’t matter all that much. The buzz factor, in that case, came from the singular, over-the-top, once-every-20-years-if-you’re-lucky quality of the reviews, with the movie crowning more 10 Best lists than you could count and sweeping every critic group’s year-end awards, as critic after critic (though not this one) stood up and declared “Roma” to be a work of art for the ages.

If the film had become a $30 million crossover art-film smash, would that have helped it at the Oscars? Let’s say this much: It wouldn’t have hurt. Yet speculating on that kind of alternative scenario is a fool’s game; we can never know. In the case of “The Irishman,” however, the chasm between what the movie could have been — in theaters — and what it will be speaks to something fundamental that reaches beyond the awards race. It speaks to what cinema is. I predict that when it plays in, say, 500 theaters for a handful of weeks, that release is going to feel constricted, choked off, and frustrating in a way that the release of “Roma” didn’t quite. Of course, what Netflix would say is: On Nov. 27, just 26 days after it premieres, viewers all over the world will get to see “The Irishman” in the comfort of their own homes. Netflix would ask: What’s bad about that? Netflix would say: Welcome to the future.

But is it? For months now, Scorsese has been doing his bit for Netflix by declaring, in one interview after another, that no other studio would make “The Irishman.” That makes Netflix sound like the savior of cinema. “We make the movies that no one else will!”

Yet there’s an anomalous element to the budget of “The Irishman.” The reason that no conventional studio would have made the film isn’t that no studio would back Martin Scorsese bringing his grand vision to the big screen. It’s that the bold new technology required for the de-aging process is, right now, insanely expensive. “The Irishman” doesn’t look like a movie that should have cost $160 million. And in the coming years, it won’t be. Netflix ponied up a king’s ransom to make their billboard, their subscriber bait and film-director recruitment poster. On some level they’re broadcasting the message: If we can get Martin Scorsese, then who can’t we get?

But that’s where the unalloyed filmmaking excitement of “The Irishman” could prove to be a fly in the ointment. Netflix has, in fact, made such a good movie that a vast audience of people — a world of people — are going to want to see it in movie theaters. And if the film’s relatively limited theatrical release starts to feel like a compromise with that desire, it could give a great many people pause: members of the Academy, and filmmakers who are promised the moon if they make their next movie with Netflix. Sure, they’ll get to make the film they want, and that isn’t nothing. But the release of “The Irishman” is destined to shine a light on the underlying metaphysical question: Is home viewing really the moon? The 20th century is officially behind us, but it may not be going out of style nearly as quickly as the executives at Netflix would like it to.
https://variety.com/2019/film/column...se-1203353105/





Massive Study Proves Once And For All That No, Net Neutrality Did Not Hurt Broadband Investment
Karl Bode

The biggest study (pdf) ever of its kind has found that net neutrality rules had absolutely no impact on broadband investment whatsoever. The study took an incredibly detailed look at CAPEX data for more than 8,577 different companies (270+ of which were telecom providers) and concluded:

"The results of the paper are clear and should be both unsurprising and uncontroversial. The key finding is there were no impacts on telecommunication industry investment from the net neutrality policy changes. Neither the 2010 or 2015 US net neutrality rule changes had any causal impact on telecommunications investment."

Since the very beginning of the net neutrality debate, ISPs have repeatedly proclaimed that net neutrality rules (read: stopgap rules crafted in the absence of competition to stop giant monopolies from abusing their power) utterly demolished broadband sector investment. It was a primary talking point during the battle over the 2010 rules, and was foundational in the Ajit Pai FCC's arguments justifying their hugely unpopular and fraud prone repeal.

Time after time after time, big ISPs and the politicians paid to love them insisted that the rules had crushed sector investment, and repealing them would result in a massive spike in broadband investment. It was a line repeated again last year by Pai during an FCC oversight hearing (for those interested he wasn't under oath, which applies only to Judiciary hearings):

"Under the heavy-handed regulations adopted by the prior Commission in 2015, network investment declined for two straight years, the first time that had happened outside of a recession in the broadband era...we now have a regulatory framework in place that is encouraging the private sector to make the investments necessary to bring better, faster, and cheaper broadband to more Americans.

It didn't matter that several studies had shown this wasn't true. It didn't matter that journalists who had reviewed public earnings data found no evidence whatsoever to support the claim. It didn't even matter that CEOs for numerous ISPs were clearly on record telling investors the claim wasn't true. It was repeated over and over and over again by the telecom sector and loyal politicians like Pai in the hopes that repetition would somehow forge an alternative reality where what net neutrality opponents felt in their guts would become the indisputable truth.

Throughout the repeal, the Pai FCC repeatedly cited data from telecom lobbying firm US Telecom as gospel, at one point even directing reporters with questions directly to US Telecom lobbyists (that's bad, in case you're wondering). Last year, the group pushed a "study" proclaiming broadband investment had exploded in the wake of the repeal, somehow failing to even notice their study had a fatal flaw:

"Last year, telecom lobbying group US Telecom released a study it claimed showed that broadband investment had spiked dramatically in 2017 thanks to “positive consumer and innovation policies” and a “pro-growth regulatory approach” at the FCC.

The problem? The FCC’s net neutrality rules weren’t formally repealed until June of 2018.

The entire mess speaks plainly to how lobbyists and the lawmakers who love them use repetition, friendly media outlets, and massaged industry-sponsored lobbyist and economist analysis to construct alternate realities that support anti-consumer, anti-innovation policies (like say, letting lumbering, anti-competitive telecom giants do whatever the hell they'd like). As we've noted a few times, it's important to understand that the "net neutrality repeal" didn't just kill net neutrality rules, it all but obliterated the FCC's ability to hold ISPs accountable for much of anything, which was the entire point.

And while the industry may have scored a victory on the front end, the choices made could still come home to roost. Three different major FCC policy efforts have been shot down by the courts in as many months for failing to provide hard evidence actually supporting the decision. Given 23 state AGs have sued the FCC claiming the net neutrality repeal was similarly flawed, plenty of folks are curious if the FCC's net neutrality repeal will soon share a similar fate.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...vestment.shtml





Net Neutrality Rules Could Return at State Level Under Mixed U.S. Court Decision
David Shepardson

Net neutrality laws could return at the state level after a U.S. court ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration cannot block states from passing their own net neutrality laws, but largely upheld the 2017 repeal of landmark rules barring internet service providers from blocking or throttling traffic, or offering paid fast lanes.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the Federal Communications Commission erred when it declared that states cannot pass their own net neutrality laws and ordered the agency to review some key aspects of its 2017 repeal of rules set by the Obama administration. But it left open the possibility the FCC could seek to block state efforts on a case-by-case basis.

The court also found that the FCC acted properly when it overturned a 2015 decision that had classified broadband internet as a utility-style service that handed the FCC sweeping authority to regulate it and instead classified it as less regulated information service.

But the court also found the agency "failed to examine the implications of its decisions for public safety" and must also review how its decision will impact a government subsidy program for low-income users.

The decision means the more than 10-year-old debate over net neutrality will continue to drag on for months or more likely years.

The 2017 FCC decision handed internet providers sweeping powers to recast how Americans use the internet, as long as they disclose changes. The new rules took effect in June 2018, reversing rules adopted under former President Barack Obama in 2015 which barred internet service providers from blocking or throttling traffic, or offering paid fast lanes, also known as paid prioritization.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said the decision affirmed the FCC's "decision to repeal 1930s utility-style regulation of the internet. A free and open internet is what we have today. A free and open internet is what we’ll continue to have going forward."

Pai added that the FCC would address "the narrow issues that the court identified."

John Bergmayer, legal director at Public Knowledge, said the decision "leaves states with a clear path forward to enact state net neutrality laws to protect internet users and provide certainty for participants in the digital economy. States should move expeditiously to protect consumers where the FCC has refused to do so."

A senior FCC official told reporters on a conference call that the decision is "not a green light" for states to pass any internet rules they want and said the FCC has not decided whether to appeal portions of the decision.

Championed by large tech companies and consumer groups, net neutrality was formally adopted by the FCC in 2015. Major telecommunications companies argued it limited their ability to offer new services to content providers, and under the Trump administration, the FCC overturned the policy.

California adopted sweeping state net neutrality protections in October 2018 but agreed not to enforce the measure pending the court challenge.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said the decision "blocks the FCC's effort to preempt state net neutrality laws through regulation."

The court threw out the part of the order that barred all states from setting net neutrality rules.

"The commission lacked the legal authority to categorically abolish all 50 states statutorily conferred authority to regulate intrastate communications," the court said.

The FCC could still make "provision-specific arguments" to seek to block individual aspects of state net neutrality rules.

Judge Stephen Williams wrote in his dissenting opinion that "On my colleagues’ view, state policy trumps federal; or, more precisely, the most draconian state policy trumps all else."

The Internet Innovation Alliance, a group representing companies including AT&T Inc, said the decision "allowing rules that differ among all 50 states could spell disaster for advancement of the internet."

The Trump administration rules were a win for internet providers like AT&T, Comcast Corp and Verizon Communications Inc but opposed by companies such as Facebook Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Additional reporting by Bryan Pietsch; Editing by Paul Simao and Lisa Shumaker)
https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1WG462





Court Ruling Paves Way For State Net Neutrality Rules
Kenneth Corbin

A federal court on Tuesday upheld the Federal Communications Commission's move to strike down Obama-era net neutrality regulations, but notably ruled that states are free to pursue their own rules governing internet traffic.

The ruling gave both supporters and opponents of strong internet regulations something to cheer. Critics of the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order welcomed the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's affirmation of the agency's argument that it had exceeded its statutory authority under the previous administration in its regulation of broadband service.

Meantime, while advocates of the prior net neutrality rules had been hoping the court would reject the FCC's decision to repeal the regulation, they see in the ruling hope for a new push at the state level to bar internet service providers from blocking or slowing content or charging extra for speedy delivery on their networks.

"The commission's choice to give up oversight of broadband means that states now have the clear authority to step in to protect consumers and promote competition where the FCC is unwilling to do so," said John Bergmayer, legal director at Public Knowledge, a digital rights group that joined in the litigation opposing the FCC's net neutrality repeal.

"The court's decision leaves states with a clear path forward to enact state net neutrality laws to protect internet users and provide certainty for participants in the digital economy," Bergmayer said in a statement. "States should move expeditiously to protect consumers where the FCC has refused to do so."

The court's ruling will also turn attention back to the U.S. Congress, where lawmakers have been debating proposals for a federal law enshrining net neutrality principles for more than a decade. Net neutrality advocates and many tech companies have thrown their support behind the Save the Internet Act, which would effectively restore the original 2015 order that prohibited ISPs from blocking, throttling or charging extra for content delivery. That measure passed the House in April, but Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell declared the bill "dead on arrival" in the upper chamber.

The FCC's treatment of net neutrality has varied as majority control of the agency has shifted from Republicans to Democrats and back again. And with all major actions threatened by a court challenge or reversal by a subsequent administration, there is broad agreement that a permanent solution must come from Congress, where consensus remains elusive.

So the court's ruling sets up the prospect for renewed energy in statehouses to enact net neutrality rules, which could in turn invite a spate of new legal challenges and an emerging patchwork of internet regulations.

California seems likely to emerge as patient zero in the showdown over state laws, having opted to delay its own net neutrality rule pending the outcome of the federal case.

"This decade-long fight has always been mostly about political theatre, and now, that melodrama will shift to litigation over state net neutrality laws," said Berin Szóka, president of TechFreedom, a tech policy group that joined in the litigation to defend the FCC's repeal of its net neutrality rules. "Today's decision does not mean such laws will be upheld — merely that they will have to be litigated state-by-state."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenneth.../#4376cd047049





E.U.’s Top Court Rules Against Facebook in Global Takedown Case
Adam Satariano

Europe’s top court said on Thursday that an individual country can order Facebook to take down posts, photographs and videos and restrict global access to that material, in a ruling that has implications for how countries can expand content bans beyond their borders.

The European Court of Justice’s decision came after a former Austrian politician sought to have Facebook remove disparaging comments about her that had been posted on an individual’s personal page, as well as “equivalent” messages posted by others. The politician, Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, a former leader of Austria’s Green Party, argued that Facebook needed to delete the material in the country and limit worldwide access.

The decision is a blow to big internet platforms like Facebook, placing more responsibility on them to patrol their sites for content ruled illegal.

The case has been closely watched because of its potential ripple effects for regulating internet content. The enforcement of defamation, libel and privacy laws varies from country to country, with language and behavior that is allowed in one nation prohibited in another. The court’s decision highlights the difficulty of creating uniform standards to govern an inherently borderless web and then enforcing them.

Facebook and other critics had warned, before the decision, that letting a single nation force an internet platform to delete material elsewhere would limit free speech. Implementing such a global ban would likely require the use of automated content filters, which civil society groups and others have cautioned could lead to the takedown of legitimate material because filters cannot detect nuances used in satire and some political commentary.

Opponents had also argued that allowing the removal of an original post and then expanding that ban to posts considered “equivalent” added some potential for unintended consequences.

Supporters counter that defamation laws haven’t been enforced appropriately in the internet age and are needed to force platforms like Facebook to do more to combat internet trolls, hate speech and other personal attacks that spread on the web.

Facebook sharply criticized the ruling. “This judgment raises critical questions around freedom of expression and the role that internet companies should play in monitoring, interpreting and removing speech that might be illegal in any particular country,” the company said in a statement.

“It undermines the longstanding principle that one country does not have the right to impose its laws on speech on another country. It also opens the door to obligations being imposed on internet companies to proactively monitor content and then interpret if it is ‘equivalent’ to content that has been found to be illegal.”

Ms. Glawischnig-Piesczek did not respond to requests for comment.

The decision highlights a widening gap between the United States and Europe on regulating the technology industry. Europe has imposed tougher policies on privacy, antitrust, copyright and content moderation, while the United States has traditionally had a more hands-off approach.

Yet as Europe has enacted tougher policies, courts are being asked to clarify their reach, including if Facebook, Google and other platforms must apply the rules beyond the borders of the 28-nation European Union.

Last week, the European Court of Justice limited the reach of the privacy law known as the “right to be forgotten,” which allows European citizens to demand Google remove links to sensitive personal data from search results. The court said Google could not be ordered to remove links to websites globally, except in certain circumstances when weighed against the rights to free expression and the public’s right to information

On Thursday, the Luxembourg-based court turned its attention to the reach of European defamation laws. It ruled that a national court of a European Union country could order Facebook to remove posts considered defamatory in regions beyond its jurisdiction.

The decision should not be expected to lead to a flood of orders against Facebook to take down content globally, said David Erdos, deputy director of the Center for Intellectual Property and Information Law at Cambridge University. The opinion was narrowly crafted, he said, and urged national courts to weigh any bans carefully against international laws.

“Courts will be feeling their way for years to come,” he said.

The difference between today’s decision and last week’s ruling limiting the reach of the right to be forgotten is that an Austrian court had specifically found, within its decision, that the offensive comments toward Ms. Glawischnig-Piesczek were illegal.

The court on Thursday said that while Facebook wasn’t liable for the disparaging comments posted about Ms. Glawischnig-Piesczek, it had an obligation to take down the posts after a court ruled them defamatory. Facebook, the court said, “did not act expeditiously to remove or to disable access to that information.”

“The key thing about this case is what preventive measures can be imposed on Facebook,” said Martin Husovec, an assistant law professor at Tilburg University’s Institute for Law, Technology and Society in the Netherlands.

The court’s decision cannot be appealed.

Ben Wagner, director of the Privacy and Sustainable Computing Lab at Vienna University, said the case raises broad concerns about restricting political speech. Although the court wasn’t ruling on whether the comments made against Ms. Glawischnig-Piesczek were defamatory, Mr. Wagner said the decision undermined freedom of speech given that she is a public figure.

“We’re talking about a politician who is being insulted in a political context, that’s very different than a normal citizen.” he said. “There needs to be a greater scope for freedom of opinion and expression.”

Facebook has long said it is an impartial platform and argued that it should not be held legally responsible for material posted by its more than 2 billion users. Yet with increased scrutiny from policymakers around the world, the social network has taken steps to limit hate speech and extremism on its site. Last month, it appointed an 11-member oversight board to review content decisions.

The European Court of Justice decision was rooted in events from 2016, when a Facebook user in Austria posted a link to a news article about immigration that included comments calling Ms. Glawischnig-Piesczek a “lousy traitor of the people,” a “corrupt oaf” and member of a “fascist party.”

Facebook initially refused demands to remove the material. In many countries the comments would be considered acceptable, if vulgar, political speech.

Ms. Glawischnig-Piesczek successfully sued Facebook in Austrian courts, which concluded the comments were intended to damage her reputation. She also demanded that Facebook remove posts that were similar in tone to the original insults.

The Austrian Supreme Court referred the case to the European Court of Justice.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/t...efamation.html





Apple Approves Controversial Hong Kong App After Rejection
Mark Gurman

• App shows policie activity, helps users avoid dangerous areas
• Developer said Apple ‘finally made the right decision’

Apple Inc.’s App Store reversed a recent decision to reject a Hong Kong app that shows police activity in the midst of increasingly violent pro-democracy protests in the city.

The app, known as HKmap.live, is a mobile version of a website that helps users avoid potentially dangerous areas, according to the developer, who uses the alias Kuma to remain anonymous. It was rejected from Apple’s App Store because it “facilitates, enables, and encourages an activity that is not legal,” Apple told the developer, according to a copy of the rejection notice seen by Bloomberg News. “Specifically, the app allowed users to evade law enforcement,” Apple wrote.

On Friday, Apple reversed the decision and the app has been approved for sale in Hong Kong. “Apple finally made the right decision,” the developer said.

The developer said the app is built to “show events happening” in Hong Kong, but what users choose to do with that information is their choice. “We don’t encourage any advice on the map in general. Our ultimate goal is safety for everyone.”

On Twitter, the developer had argued that the rejection was unfair because other apps, such as Google’s Waze, help drivers avoid traffic cameras and police. Apple is assuming that HKmap.live users are lawbreakers “and therefore evading law enforcement, which is clearly not the same,” the developer wrote on Twitter. By contrast, the app was approved for download on Android phones via a “quick process,” the developer added.

The app was submitted to the App Store on Sept. 21. It was initially rejected on Sept. 26 for another reason related to rules on payment options and what additional functions apps can tap, the developer said. After addressing that issue, the app was re-submitted and rejected again on Oct. 2 for helping users evade law enforcement. The app was submitted for review again later that day, according to the developer.

Apple has to walk a fine line in China. The company sells millions of iPhones in the country and indirectly supports millions of jobs there. But it must also follow local laws that have become increasingly tough when it comes to digital information. In 2017, the company set up a data center in China to abide by laws that require global companies to store information within the country. Apple also pulled some VPN apps from its App Store in China, limiting users’ ability to bypass a local web firewall and access overseas sites.

“We would obviously rather not remove the apps, but like we do in other countries, we follow the law wherever we do business,” Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said at the time. “We strongly believe participating in markets and bringing benefits to customers is in the best interest of the folks there and in other countries as well.”

Apple couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on the approval.

Reviewing app decisions several times is a common practice. According to Apple’s website, the company rejects 40% of the 100,000 apps considered each week. It has what is known as an App Review Board to evaluate rejections.

As part of its latest review of HKmap.live, Apple likely researched if the software violated local laws. Apple typically examines such laws before making approval or rejection decisions on third-party apps.

The developer had hoped Apple would change its mind. The person had to buy an iPhone and a Mac computer to build the app for the company’s platform. “At least let me publish my app,” the developer said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...er-controversy





Looking Back at the Snowden Revelations
Matthew Green

Edward Snowden recently released his memoirs. In some parts of the Internet, this has rekindled an ancient debate: namely, was it all worth it? Did Snowden’s leaks make us better off, or did Snowden just embarass us and set back U.S. security by decades? Most of the arguments are so familiar that they’re boring at this point. But no matter how many times I read them, I still feel that there’s something important missing.

It’s no coincidence that this is a cryptography blog, which means that I’m not concerned with the same things as the general public. That is, I’m not terribly interested in debating the value of whistleblower laws (for some of that, see this excellent Twitter thread by Jake Williams). Instead, when it comes to Snowden’s leaks, I think the question we should be asking ourselves is very different. Namely:

What did the Snowden leaks tell us about modern surveillance capabilities? And what did we learn about our ability to defend against them?

And while the leaks themselves have receded into the past a bit — and the world has continued to get more complicated — the technical concerns that Snowden alerted us to are only getting more salient.

Life before June 2013

It’s difficult to believe that the Snowden revelations began over six years ago. It’s also easy to forget how much things have changed in the intervening years.

Six years ago, vast portions of our communication were done in plaintext. It’s hard to believe how bad things were, but back in 2013, Google was one of the only major tech companies who had deployed HTTPS in its services by default, and even there they had some major exceptions. Web clients were even worse. These graphs (source and source) don’t cover the whole time period, but they give some of the flavor:

Outside of HTTPS, the story was even worse. In 2013 the vast majority of text messages were sent via unencrypted SMS/MMS or poorly-encrypted IM services, which were a privacy nightmare. Future developments like the inclusion of default end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp were years away. Probably the sole (and surprising) exception to was Apple, which had been ahead of the curve in deploying end-to-end encryption. This was largely counterbalanced by the tire fire that was Android back in those days.

But even these raw facts don’t tell the full story.

What’s harder to present in a chart is how different attitudes were towards surveillance back before Snowden. The idea that governments would conduct large-scale interception of our communications traffic was a point of view that relatively few “normal people” spent time thinking about — it was mostly confined to security mailing lists and X-Files scripts. Sure, everyone understood that government surveillance was a thing, in the abstract. But actually talking about this was bound to make you look a little silly, even in paranoid circles.

That these concerns have been granted respectability is one of the most important things Snowden did for us.

So what did Snowden’s leaks really tell us?

The brilliant thing about the Snowden leaks was that he didn’t tell us much of anything. He showed us. Most of the revelations came in the form of a Powerpoint slide deck, the misery of which somehow made it all more real. And despite all the revelation fatigue, the things he showed us were remarkable. I’m going to hit a few of the highlights from my perspective. Many are cryptography-related, just because that’s what this blog is about. Others tell a more basic story about how vulnerable our networks are.
“Collect it all”

Prior to Snowden, even surveillance-skeptics would probably concede that, yes, the NSA collects data on specific targets. But even the most paranoid observers were shocked by the sheer scale of what the NSA was actually doing out there.

The Snowden revelations detailed several programs that were so astonishing in the breadth and scale of the data being collected, the only real limits on them were caused by technical limitations in the NSA’s hardware. Most of us are familiar with the famous examples, like nationwide phone metadata collection. But it’s the bizarre, obscure leaks that really drive this home. For example:

“Optic Nerve”. From 2008-2010 the NSA and GCHQ collected millions of still images from every Yahoo! Messenger webchat stream, and used them to build a massive database for facial recognition. The collection of data had no particular rhyme or reason — i.e., it didn’t target specific users who might be a national security threat. It was just… everything. Don’t believe me? Here’s how we know how indiscriminate this was: the program didn’t even necessarily target faces. It got… other things:

MYSTIC/SOMALGET. In addition to collecting massive quantities of Internet metadata, the NSA recorded the full audio every cellular call made in the Bahamas. (Note: this is not simply calls to the Bahamas, which might be sort of a thing. They abused a law enforcement access feature in order to record all the mobile calls made within the country.) Needless to say, the Bahamian government was not party to this secret.

MUSCULAR. In case anyone thought the NSA avoided attacks on American providers, a series of leaks in 2014 documented that the NSA had tapped the internal leased lines used to connect Google and Yahoo datacenters. This gave the agencies access to vast and likely indiscriminate access to torrents of data on U.S. and European users, information was likely above and beyond the data that these companies already shared with the U.S. under existing programs like PRISM. This leak is probably most famous for this slide:

Yahoo!, post-Snowden. And in case you believe that this all ended after Snowden’s leaks, we’ve learned even more disturbing things since. For example, in 2015, Yahoo got caught installing what has been described as a “rootkit” that scanned every single email in its database for specific selectors, at the request of the U.S. government. This was so egregious that the company didn’t even tell it’s CISO, who left the next week. In fact, we know a lot more about Yahoo’s collaboration during this time period, thanks to Snowden.

These examples are not necessarily the worst things we learned from the Snowden leaks. I chose them only to illustrate how completely indiscriminate the agency’s surveillance really was. And not because the NSA was especially evil, but just because it was easy to do. If you had any illusions that this data was being carefully filtered to exclude capturing data belonging to U.S. citizens, or U.S. companies, the Snowden leaks should have set you straight.

SIGINT Enabling

The Snowden leaks also helped shatter a second illusion: the idea that the NSA was on the side of the angels when it comes to making the Internet more secure. I’ve written about this plenty on this blog (with sometimes exciting results), but maybe this needs to be said again.

One of the most important lessons we learned from the Snowden leaks was that the NSA very much prioritizes its surveillance mission, to the point where it is willing to actively insert vulnerabilities into encryption products and standards used on U.S. networks. And this kind of thing wasn’t just an occasional crime of opportunity — the agency spent $250 million per year on a program called the SIGINT Enabling Project. Its goal was, basically, to bypass our commercial encryption at any cost.

This kind of sabotage is, needless to say, something that not even the most paranoid security researchers would have predicted from our own intelligence agencies. Agencies that, ostensibly have a mission to protect U.S. networks.

The Snowden reporting not only revealed the existence of these overall programs, but they uncovered a lot of unpleasant specifics, leading to a great deal of follow-up investigation.

For example, the Snowden leaks contained specific allegations of a vulnerability in a NIST standard called Dual EC. The possibility of such a vulnerability had previously been noted by U.S. security researchers Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson a few years earlier. But despite making a reasonable case for re-designing this algorithm, those researchers (and others) were basically brushed off by the “serious” people at NIST.

The Snowden documents changed all that. The leaks were a devastating embarassment to the U.S. cryptographic establishment, and led to some actual changes. Not only does it appear that the NSA deliberately backdoored Dual EC, it seems that they did so (and used NIST) in order to deploy the backdoor into U.S. security products. Later investigations would show that Dual EC was present in software by RSA Security (allegedly because of a secret contract with the NSA) and in firewalls made by Juniper Networks.

(Just to make everything a bit more horrifying, Juniper’s Dual EC backdoor would later be hijacked and turned against the United States by unknown hackers — illustrating exactly how reckless this all was.)

And finally, there are the mysteries. Snowden slides indicate that the NSA has been decrypting SSL/TLS and IPsec connections at vast scale. Even beyond the SIGINT Enabling-type sabotage, this raises huge questions about what the hell is actually going on here. There are theories. These may or may not be correct, but at least now people are thinking about them. At very least, it’s clear that something is very, very wrong.

Have things improved?

This is the $250 million question.

Some of the top-level indicators are surprisingly healthy. HTTPS adoption has taken off like a rocket, driven in part by Google’s willingness to use it as a signal for search rankings — and the rise of free Certificate Authorities like LetsEncrypt. It’s possible that these things would have happened eventually without Snowden, but it’s less likely.

End-to-end encrypted messaging has also taken off, largely due to adoption by WhatsApp and a host of relatively new apps. It’s reached the point where law enforcement agencies have begun to freak out, as the slide below illustrates.

Does Snowden deserve credit for this? Maybe not directly, but it’s almost certain that concerns over the surveillance he revealed did play a role. (It’s worth noting that this adoption is not evenly distributed across the globe.)

It’s also worth pointing out that at least in the open source community the quality of our encryption software has improved enormously, largely due to the fact that major companies made well-funded efforts to harden their systems, in part as a result of serious flaws like Heartbleed — and in part as a response to the company’s own concerns about surveillance.

It might very well be that the NSA has lost a significant portion of its capability since Snowden.

The future isn’t American

I’ve said this before, as have many others: even if you support the NSA’s mission, and believe that the U.S. is doing everything right, it doesn’t matter. Unfortunately, the future of surveillance has very little to do with what happens in Ft. Meade, Maryland. In fact, the world that Snowden brought to our attention isn’t necessarily a world that Americans have much say in.

As an example: today the U.S. government is in the midst of forcing a standoff with China over the global deployment of Huawei’s 5G wireless networks around the world. This is a complicated issue, and financial interest probably plays a big role. But global security also matters here. This conflict is perhaps the clearest acknowledgement we’re likely to see that our own government knows how much control of communications networks really matters, and our inability to secure communications on these networks could really hurt us. This means that we, here in the West, had better get our stuff together — or else we should be prepared to get a taste of our own medicine.

If nothing else, we owe Snowden for helping us to understand how high the stakes might be.
https://blog.cryptographyengineering...n-revelations/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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