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Old 12-08-15, 09:02 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 15th, '15

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August 15th, 2015




US Copyright Litigation Report Reveals File Sharing Cases Now Outnumber All Others

A new report from Lex Machina analyses copyright litigation trends since 2009, highlights the top plaintiffs and defendants, and details the rise of file sharing suits

Lex Machina has released a report highlighting trends and insights from copyright cases filed in US district courts from January 1 2009 to June 30 this year.

The report reveals copyright litigation is a concentrated business. The Central District of California’s 2,496 cases since 2009 give it a 26.2% share, while the Southern District of New York’s 1,061 cases give it an 11.1% share. No other district had more than 1,000 cases filed since 2009.

Top plaintiffs include the music industry, publishing, software and fashion. The top plaintiff is Broadcast Music, which has filed 968 cases since 2009. It is followed by Sony/ATV Song with 528 cases, Warner-Tamerlane Publishing with 401 cases, Songs of Universal with 374 cases, and EMI Blackwood with 327 cases.

Top defendants include retailers, recorded music publishers and book publishers. The top defendant is Ross Stores with 181 cases. It is followed by The TJX Companies with 98 cases, Universal Music with 57 cases, Amazon.com with 55 cases, and Burlington Coat Factory with 54 cases.

The leading law firm for plaintiffs is Doniger/Burroughs. The California fashion, art and entertainment boutique’s 741 cases are more than double the next firm. Its clients include LA Printex Industries, Star Fabrics, United Fabrics International and Unicolors.

In second place is another California firm, The J Andrews Coombs Law Offices, with 305 cases. It represents Disney, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox and DC Comics.

Call & Jensen represented defendants in the most cases, with 142.

Breaking down the stats

The report underlines that fair use is usually decided on summary judgment. Some 72.9% of those who successfully contest ownership or validity do so at summary judgment.

The median time to a temporary restraining order is eight days, to a preliminary injunction is 1.2 months, and to a permanent injunction is 7.5 months. Median time to trial is 2.1 years.

Of the cases since 2009, 2.8% ended in claim defendant win, 22.3% ended in a claimant win, 64.1% in likely settlement, and 10.8% procedural.

This means, of the 14,669 cases terminated since 2009 only 25% have reached a merits decision. Of those, less than half generated a damages award, representing 11.1% of the cases filed. The $495 million of consent judgments represent 40.8% of damages for copyright cases and the $476 million of default judgments represents 39.2%. Juries have awarded $14 million of damages compared with judges awarding $97 million.

The Northern District of California has the highest median award of compensatory damages among district with a high number of cases, at $200,000

The statistics in this blog post so far do not include file sharing cases, defined as copyright cases involving claims of infringement for Bit Torrent/P2P file sharing brought against John Doe(s), anonymous defendants, their IP addresses or internet service providers. An explosion in file sharing cases has occurred since 2011. Last year, the number of file sharing cases outnumbered other copyright cases.

Erotic website owner Malibu Media is the top plaintiff for file sharing litigation, with 4,332 cases. This is more than 15 times higher than the next most litigious plaintiff.

You can download the report by registering online here.
http://www.managingip.com/Blog/34789...ll-others.html





Dallas Buyers Club Will have to Pay Bond for Details on Australian Pirates, Court Rules
Harry Tucker

ILLEGAL downloaders can sleep easier tonight with the Australian Federal Court ruling that the names and addresses of pirates of Dallas Buyers Club will not be shared.

The court ruled this morning that unless Dallas Buyers Club (DBC) LLC pays a $600,000 bond it will not be able to obtain the names and addresses of Australians accused of illegally uploading the movie.

This comes after DBC LLC won the right in April to obtain the details of 4726 pirates that used Australian internet service providers to illegally upload the movie.

Justice Nye Perram came to the decision as a way to prevent DBC LLC from issuing “speculative invoices” to alleged pirates. The bond means that if DBC does go ahead and issue speculative invoices it would lose the entire bond, which is worth more than the damages it would receive from copyright infringers.

“Because DBC has no presence in Australia the court is unable to punish it for contempt if it

fails to honour that undertaking. I will therefore require its undertaking to be secured by the lodging of a bond,” Justice Perram said in his judgment.

“Having had access to what it is that DBC proposes to demand and the potential revenue it might make if it breached its undertaking to the court not to demand such sums, it seems to me that I should set the bond at a level which will ensure that it will not be profitable for it to do so.”

Speculative invoicing involves sending a legal threat to someone saying that unless they pay a sum of money they will have to face court. Often that sum of money is a few thousand dollars, when the actual loss to the rights holders would have been no more than a few hundred dollars.

People usually choose to settle outside of court — whether the sum is fair or not — because it would cost even more than that to take the matter to court.

Justice Perram stated that DBC proposed four different ways it could demand money from copyright infringers.

The permissible demands included infringers paying DBC the cost of a single copy of the film for each copy downloaded, and also covering the costs required to obtain each infringer’s name.

However, Justice Perram said DBC’s other two demands were ridiculous and the reason he put the bond in place.

DBC wanted to pursue the costs for a one-off license fee from each uploader on the basis that each was engaged in the widespread distribution of the film. But Justice Perram claimed that he would be satisfied that, if a case was brought to trial, it would be dismissed “as a case having no reasonable prospects of success”.

He also immediately dismissed DBC’s desire to claim further damages if it was proven that an infringer was a serial pirate.

Justice Perram said the bond was also put in place because DBC had not presented any clear figures on what it would be chasing in damages from infringers.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/on...-1227483227372





The UK’s Proposed 10-Year Max Jail Term for File Sharing Must be Stopped

Op-ed: Fortunately, it's not too late to object to the copyright change—here's how.
Glyn Moody

The UK government is using some dishonest claims to push through an unnecessary and deeply worrying change to copyright law. If the tweak to the law goes ahead, the maximum jail time for online copyright infringement will be the same as offline—10 years—even if you don't gain financially. Fortunately, it's not too late to do something about it: the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) is seeking consultation about the change until the end of this week, and it's easy to write in and object.

The IPO's consultation document is short—just 12 pages long—and the consultation question even shorter: "Should the maximum custodial sentence available for online and offline copyright infringement of equal seriousness be harmonised at 10 years?" Here's the UK government's argument why they should be:

There is no doubt that copyright infringement is serious and there is no strong case for treating online infringement any differently to physical infringement. The links to other criminal behaviour are clear; criminal gangs are making vast sums of money through exploiting the creations of others, causing real harm to those individuals, their industry and the wider economy.

"Criminal gangs," "vast sums of money"—sounds serious, doesn't it? And since there is "no doubt that copyright infringement is serious," you'd expect there to be plenty of evidence to back up that claim. In support of its view, the UK government cites an independent study that it commissioned on the subject. Called "Penalty Fair?," it's a solid piece of work that is well worth downloading and reading. If you do that, you'll notice that there are in fact precisely zero mentions or discussions of "criminal gangs" in the report.

You will, however, find a chapter examining the most serious cases of online copyright infringement in the UK. Almost without exception, these consist of a single person running a server providing access to unauthorised content in some way, often purely via links. There's not a gang to be seen, and precious little money, either. In other words, the UK government presents zero evidence that organised crime is a major concern in online copyright infringement, despite invoking it as the main reason why the penalties for copyright infringement should be made more harsh.

That absence is not really surprising. A 426-page report detailing three years of research on the related subject of media piracy in emerging economies wrote:

"Criminals can’t compete with free. The study finds no systematic links between media piracy and organized crime or terrorism in any of the countries examined. Today, commercial pirates and transnational smugglers face the same dilemma as the legal industry: how to compete with free."

The same logic applies to the UK and other developed economies. The reason that the government is unable to provide any evidence for its claim that "criminal gangs" are involved in online copyright infringement is because they're all looking for better ways of generating illegal loot than low-return online copyright schemes.

Not only is there is no evidence that serious criminals are involved with copyright infringement, but there are plenty of studies to suggest that the non-criminal sharing of copyright material by members of the public actually increases sales. The site La Quadrature du Net has links to dozens of such reports. The rationale for file sharing increasing commercial sales is that these copies are essentially a kind of free marketing carried out by fans. Despite what the copyright industry would have us think, most people understand that creators need to be supported, which means, ultimately, buying products that benefit them. The illegal free copies are often used as "tasters" to check out material before going on to purchase a legal copy.

Unlike the fictional "criminal gang" infringements, this kind of unauthorised sharing certainly does exist on a large scale, but figures cited in the "Penalty Fair?" report suggest it is not particularly harmful: "the UK music industry revenues overall continued to grow year on year during the period under review: to £3.9 billion in 2009, up five per cent on 2008 and ... book sales had also grown or maintained their net value between 2004 and 2009."

While there is no evidence that the harsher punishment for copyright infringement is needed, its introduction would have serious consequences for the digital realm. For example, a longer maximum penalty would have a chilling effect on digital startups in the UK. With a possible 10-year prison sentence hanging over them, entrepreneurs will be more cautious when it comes to innovating in fields having anything to do with copyright—which means practically everything online—or may simply choose to leave the country for more receptive business environments.

As for people not involved in such business activities, the Open Rights Group points out that file sharers have already been threatened with prison sentences, despite the fact they were not seeking any financial gain. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, says that a person who "distributes otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright" is breaking the law. If the owners can show they were affected "prejudicially," you could be found guilty—and with the proposed amendment, "guilty" could mean up to 10 years in jail if the claimed damage were large enough. Once a file is online, it's impossible to stop it being copied around the world, so the nominal "prejudice" could indeed be substantial.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the offline and online worlds are not the same, despite what the UK government claims. You cannot accidentally sell thousands of fake DVDs, and without a clear awareness that you are infringing on someone else's copyright; but you can make thousands of MP3s available online without really thinking about it at all, for example thanks to P2P programs installed on your system. Indeed, that's exactly what Anne Muir did: she was sentenced in 2011 to three years of probation after admitting to distributing what was claimed to be £54,000 worth of copyright files via a P2P application, even though she did not seek any financial reward from doing so. The UK government should not be extending the maximum prison term for such non-commercial file-sharing, but removing it completely.

If you want to help stop this change, or just to give your views on this issue, the Open Rights Group has made it easy by creating an online copyright consultation tool that handles all the mechanics. The consultation closes on 17 August.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy...st-be-stopped/





Tech Giants to Hollywood: Stop Trying to Resurrect SOPA

Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr file a brief with the MPAA in the film studios' lawsuit over MovieTube sites.
Eriq Gardner

With strong echoes of the tensions between the entertainment and tech sectors at the height of war over the Stop Online Piracy Act, a group of leading tech companies is interjecting its opinions in a piracy lawsuit being handled by the Motion Picture Association of America.

Two weeks ago, Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, Universal and Disney sued the anonymous operators of various MovieTube websites. The film companies aimed to do something about illegal streaming sites offering films like Avengers: Age of Ultron ahead of theatrical release.

But was the lawsuit a Trojan horse for grander ambitions? The lawsuit not only aimed to shut down the pirates, but also sought a broad injunction that would order "third-party service providers [to] cease providing services" to those same sites.

Now, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are asking a judge's permission to file an amicus ("friend of the court") brief. It's super rare to have one lodged this early in litigation, but the tech companies believe it is warranted.

"Amici recognize the vital importance of combating infringement on the Internet, and they work with rightsholders, including Plaintiffs themselves, to address those issues on a daily basis," states the brief arguing against an injunction. "But in pursuing the Defendants here, and attempting to resurrect the defeated Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261 (“SOPA”), Plaintiffs disregard established limits on judicial power and the careful balance that Congress has struck between the rights of online service providers and copyright owners. Those protections cannot be swept aside so readily. Plaintiffs do not need, and should not be allowed, to '[c]ut a great road through the law to get after the Devil[.]'"

As pointed out in our last story on this topic, although much of the MPAA's lawsuit over MovieTube is fairly uncontroversial, there is an aspect that deals with injunctive relief directed at third parties. The tech companies are objecting to what they see as the studios' "breathtakingly broad" efforts to ensure the cooperation of web-hosting providers, digital advertising service providers, social media services and others in getting rid of MovieTube sites. "It is no exaggeration to say that such an injunction would bind the entire Internet," argues the amici.

The Stop Online Piracy Act triggered controversy in large part due to measures making it easier to block traffic to blacklisted piracy websites. Lawmakers backed off on passage in the wake of fervent opposition led by the digital vanguard.

Afterward, the entertainment industry began to examine other ways to step up its anti-piracy campaign. Site blocking was part of the discussion — and inroads on this front were made overseas — but inside the U.S., the MPAA's own lawyers were warning how the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65 could make it difficult to get an injunction on "non-parties in a lawsuit without proof that the nonparty was acting in concert with the defendant."

The MPAA believes there's a difference between the kind of site blocking that is happening in the U.K. and the kind of injunctive relief that's at issue here in the MovieTube case.

But the tech companies still believe that the MPAA can't dance around the imposed limitations. "As nonparties to this case, the Neutral Service Providers cannot be bound by an injunction unless they are shown to be working 'in active concert or participation' with Defendants," write the tech companies.

And these tech giants hardly see themselves in "active concert" with the MovieTube sites. They analogize their relationship to these pirates as "a utility company providing electricity to an infringing business, or the postal service carrying copies of infringing materials through the mails."

The brief has other goals. One is to undercut the legal citations that the MPAA is relying upon in its aim of getting a broad injunction. Another goal is to prop up the safe harbors from copyright liability as dictated by the DMCA. Finally, the tech companies also want to make sure that the MPAA doesn't manage to sneak in the All Writs Act as the mechanism by which a judge empowers an injunction.

In their memo supporting injunctive relief, the film studios didn't spend much more than a couple of lines on All Writs Act, which was enacted in 1789 and gave the judicial branch fairly broad powers in advance of preserving jurisdiction. Although the All Writs Act was only briefly mentioned in support of an injunction, it's been under discussion at the MPAA for months, according to documents exposed in the Sony hack.

Now, the tech companies spend several pages addressing the All Writs Act, arguing, "Plaintiffs’ reliance on the All Writs Act is especially problematic because it seeks to duplicate the broad authority that Congress considered, but ultimately abandoned, in the ill-fated 2012 SOPA proposal."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr...-trying-814365





‘Pixels,’ Adam Sandler’s Latest Film, Used By Copyright Troll On Vimeo

Pixels, the new film from Adam Sandler, was a complete flop with critics and at the box office, as the Inquisitr has previously reported. Now, reports are coming in that Pixels has found new life — with anti-piracy firm Entura International, known to have worked with Pixels distributor Columbia Pictures in the past.

According to a report from Kotaku, DMCA takedown notices were served to Vimeo (and actioned by Vimeo) for several completely unrelated videos that happened to include “Pixels” in their titles. In fact, so complete was the carpet-bombing that Entura even served a takedown request for the official Pixels trailer, which was included on the complaint as “Pixels Official Trailer (2015) – Adam Sandler, Peter Dinklage.”

As a post on TorrentFreak indicates, included in the takedown were independent videos from as far back as 2006. The “infringing” video, also titled Pixels, was directed by an independent filmmaker and made entirely with his own material. The Pixels from 2006 has been replaced by Vimeo with a simple takedown notice.

The list, meanwhile, goes on. Also included in the notice were school projects, personal projects, an official video for the Belgium-based electronic music Pixels Festival, and more.

“Life Buoy is my project for my degree at the National University of Arts from Bucharest,” said creator Dragos Bardac on his website. “The film was made in mid 2010 and it is a music video for the song Life buoy by the band The Pixels. I used a mix of stop motion animation techniques in order to tell the story.”

A video titled Pantone Pixels was also caught in the complaint; another personal project, from 2011 by Rob Penny of Austria.

“Originally I was going to make an abstract image from the pixels but then I realised that a load of Pantone swatches are pretty abstract anyway and it would be much more interesting to create something personal.”

“Pantone Pixels [is] a personal project that took me a very long time.”

Another Pixels, an award-winning short film from 2010 by Patrick Jean, has been viewed millions of times. Perhaps worst of all, this Pixels served as an inspiration for the 2015 Pixels. As Deadline reported in 2010, Columbia Pictures and Happy Madison (Adam Sandler’s company) were in talks with Jean to develop the 2015 Pixels, and Happy Madison had bought the rights. Oddly, only the older Pixels has been served with a copyright violation.

Setting an anti-piracy firm on the short film that inspired the feature and gave it the name Pixels seems a poor way to behave. Hopefully, Entura and Columbia Pictures will admit their mistake in this case but given past experience it seems unlikely.
http://www.inquisitr.com/2321617/pix...roll-on-vimeo/





Pornhub Hosting Leaked Fallout 4 Videos After YouTube, File-Sharing Sites Take Them Down

Game footage was supposed to have been shared in secret — but has made its way to the public through an unusual channel
Andrew Griffin

Tens of thousands of people are watching leaked Fallout 4 footage on porn websites, after the videos were taken down from pretty much every other streaming service.

Pornhub has become the one reliable place to see the leaked videos from one of the most anticipated games of recent years. The video was shown during a locked-down session at the Gamescom convention, and has been taken down from almost every other video site — with the exception of Pornhub.

Bethesda, the developer of Fallout 4, shared the new game footage at Gamescom in secret, banning cameras for fear of leaks. But one attendee filmed the show — apparently sitting behind two people and hiding their camera behind them, meaning that the video is not especially high quality — and then leaked it online.

The footage was initially available on YouTube, but despite being uploaded various times all the footage appears to have been taken down. Other file-hosting sites briefly made the videos available but they were either taken down or received so many visitors that they buckled under the strain, Kotaku reports.

So instead, the only available way to watch the film is on Pornhub, where the video has been uploaded under the title “HIDDEN CAMERA SHOWS AUDIENCE TEASED BY BIG BUTT MAN IN TIGHTS LIVE”. It has received 10s of thousands of views.

Pornhub does tend to feature legitimate videos, uploaded by their creators. But it does also seem to have a more relaxed approach to takedown requests.

The site has proven a better way than many alternatives to host the footage, since many other video-sharing sites tend to send a barrage of trackers and ads into users’ browsers. But watching the video on Pornhub does mean doing so next to a series of explicit related videos and ads.

Fallout 4 is set to be released on November 10, 2015.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...-10451063.html





Mongolia is Awash in Media Choices, with Even a Remote Yurt Hooked Up to 60 Channels
Julie Makinen

Deep in a desolate, rocky canyon, about 10 miles from the nearest paved road and even farther from any power line, Altai Davaa and her brother, Tsagaana, eke out a simple life. They sleep in a traditional Mongolian yurt, cook over a wood-fire stove, burn animal dung for fuel and use an outhouse. Every morning, she milks her cows.

But when the sun starts to set behind the ruins of a small Buddhist monastery uphill from their encampment, Tsagaana grabs the power cord from his mini solar panel, plugs in his satellite dish and TV, and starts channel surfing. He gets more than 60 stations, offering everything from "Breaking Bad" to Hollywood blockbusters.

"But mostly, I like Mongolian programs," he says. "They're easier to understand."

Enkhtaivan, who uses one name only, is a 59-year-old herder who lives a yurt near Ugii Nuur lake. He has had a TV for five years, and he gets programming via a solar-powered satellite dish.

On that front, he's hardly starved for choice either. Despite having just 3 million inhabitants scattered over an expanse about four times the size of California, Mongolia has 138 homegrown television stations — 80% of them founded in the last 10 years.

They air everything from wrestling tournaments to news and political talk shows, real estate showcases, home shopping programs, the Miss World Mongolia pageant and even the Mongolian Academy Awards.

"It's just crazy," says Bayarmagnai Puntsag, co-founder of Mongolia's National Press Club.

Since embracing democracy and capitalism in 1990, formerly communist Mongolia has become a dynamic outpost of media choice sandwiched between autocratic Russia and China, where authorities keep a tight rein on the press. Mongolia's smorgasbord of options — the nation also has 111 newspapers, 90 magazines and 72 radio stations — is stunning given that 25 years ago, viewers could see only the state-run Mongolian National Broadcaster and a Russian station.

The country has shot up the World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders, rising from No. 100 in 2012 to No. 54 this year — just five spots behind the United States.

But journalists, station managers and civil society groups say those impressive statistics mask deep problems, particularly in television, the dominant medium. Politicians and businesspeople bankroll and control many of the stations, using them to tout their interests and tar their rivals, but it's hard to know exactly who owns which platform.

The proliferation of channels and the small population mean there's hardly enough advertising money to go around, so many stations have for years pirated content from Hollywood and elsewhere, quickly dubbing the hottest films and TV shows into Mongolian and sending them out in prime time.

Journalists' training is poor and pay is low; many stations accept payments to broadcast stories, or take protection money to keep critical reports off-air.

"If you look at our laws, and our number of outlets, you'd think, oh, we have great media freedom," says Naranjargal Khaskhuu, a former journalist and head of the civil society group Globe International. "But if you look into it, we have lots of problems hiding."

After decades of strict limits on expression, Bayarmagnai says, the scramble to the airwaves was only natural. "Suddenly, we had freedom of speech. That's very appealing to Mongolians; we like to express our thoughts and opinions."

Politicians quickly became involved in the press, and vice versa. The current president, Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, was founder of the country's first independent newspaper, Democracy, and was its first editor in chief. He also was involved in establishing Eagle TV, the first private TV station, in 1994. Prime Minister Chimed Saikhanbileg, meanwhile, is a former television host whose catchphrase, "Don't change the channel!" still rings in the ears of many Mongolians.

Oyundari Tsagaan, who earned her master's degree in journalism at UC Berkeley and is general director of Mongolian National Public Radio and TV, or MNB, says politicians want direct megaphones to reach the masses and are reluctant to give them up even if they don't know how to make the platforms professional or profitable.

"I know one of my political friends who owns a TV station.... He said, 'I don't know how many people watch my TV; I have no idea. But all of my PR advisors told me I have to have some media network. That's why I'm having these stations.'"

Oyundari is no outsider to politics. She began her career as a field reporter for MNB, but in recent years served as secretary-general of the Democratic Party. "Some people say, 'The Democratic Party appointed you to this position.' I say, 'No, I used the Democratic Party to get appointed,'" she said. "It's difficult for professionals to go up in the field without getting involved in politics."

The public broadcaster is headquartered in a hulking socialist-era concrete building on a dusty hill on the western side of Ulan Bator, the capital; it's easily identified by the giant antenna looming over it. Inside, paint peels in the dimly lighted hallways and the shabby stairwells.

Since taking the helm, Oyundari says, she's put her foot down on airing pirated programs and tried to get journalists to stop self-censoring and accepting payoffs. But change is hard: Mongolia's mining-fueled economy has slowed in recent years, and the government has cut funding; the broadcaster has laid off 100 people this year.

Bribery is "a habit for some people," she says. "We can't really control everybody."

At least one channel has taken a more activist approach to the problems. News reporters at Mongol TV, a private station that launched in 2009 and has been outspoken about issues of bribery and piracy, conducted what Chief Executive Nomin Chinbat calls a "social experiment," exposing rivals' less-than-scrupulous journalism with a prank that would have made Ashton Kutcher and his "Punk'd" crew proud.

Posing as businessmen, journalists at the station contacted nine rival media outlets and told them that McDonald's was planning to open its first restaurant in the country near the capital's central Genghis Khan square, serving up "McMutton" burgers and goat's milk shakes.

They offered to pay the outlets a few hundred dollars to run the story. Despite some hints — the fake news release identified a key McDonald's official as Mr. P. Rank, for instance — the rival outlets, including MNB, ran with the "news" without checking facts. On its late evening newscast, Mongol TV aired an expose on the setup.

The incident caused a tempest in media circles.

"People have attacked our other businesses, and … a lot of journalists said we were unethical to expose this. They said: We're in the same industry and we should protect each other," says the British-educated Chinbat, sipping coffee in her penthouse office in Mongol TV's modern headquarters near the square.

But the incident prompted more dialogue about journalistic ethics; in January, Chinbat was selected as chairwoman of the newly established Media Council of Mongolia, a nonprofit professional group that aims to raise the standards of news outlets and vet complaints.

There are other signs of maturation too: Bloomberg has opened an affiliate financial TV network in Ulan Bator sponsored by a local bank, and more stations are paying for the rights to foreign programs or shifting to producing their own local content.

The quality of Mongolian dramas has improved greatly in the last few years, says Ben Moyle, the former CEO of Mongolia's Channel One. But dramas are relatively expensive, so stations including Channel One have looked to reality, news and variety shows to keep costs down.

Channel One now has a popular "bus" program, with local notables being interviewed on city buses; a kids' show featuring a talking pony and celebrities; a Friday night music show sponsored by a local beer company; and a program called "Desert Island" on which guests discuss what songs they would want with them if stranded alone.

Mongol TV has bought popular U.S. shows, including "Prison Break" and "The Good Wife," and for the last two years has even aired the Oscar telecast live. The awards broadcast, says Chinbat, commanded top advertising rates — $10 per second — and netted the channel its highest morning viewership.

But without significant consolidation in the sector — forced by either the market or regulators — graft, piracy and other problems are likely to persist.

"I think the government is content to keep the number of outlets high," says Moyle, who's now a consultant to Channel One. "Politicians are the winners when journalism is poor."
http://www.latimes.com/world/great-r...812-story.html





Twisting Words to Make ‘Sharing’ Apps Seem Selfless
Natasha Singer

I have trouble with the sharing economy. Ditto the peer economy, the people economy and the collaborative economy.

To be clear, I’m not objecting to the services themselves. Ride-hailing apps like Lyft and Uber, odd-jobs marketplaces like TaskRabbit, vacation rental sites like Airbnb, and grocery-shopping apps like Instacart have clearly made travel, lodging, home renovation and dining more efficient for millions of people.

What I find problematic is the terminology itself and how it frames technology-enabled transactions as if they were altruistic or community endeavors.

Let’s begin with “sharing,” a concept that implies something selfless — like giving a part of your liver to a relative who needs a transplant. Now, at least in industry parlance, the word has also come to denote just about any online venture that connects consumers seeking goods and services with people willing to provide them. That would include apps that charge a fee to stay in strangers’ spare bedrooms or use their cars — ventures formerly known as “renting.”

Lyft and Uber, for instance, have both described their services as “ride-sharing” whether the ride involves one or multiple passengers. Lyft also promotes itself as “your friend with a car.” Uber calls its drivers “partners” and “entrepreneurs.” Of Airbnb’s lodging rentals, its site says, “trust is what makes it work.” The names of some service-on-demand apps even carry share-and-share-alike connotations; take Favor, a food delivery start-up where consumers can order “favors” like takeout meals.

Of course, marketing by its very nature involves concocting the most appealing expressions to attract consumers. But start-ups that enable consumers to summon drivers, lunch deliveries or domestic help at the tap of an app have added incentives to portray themselves in feel-good terms.

Government regulators, legislators and courts in the United States have started scrutinizing the app-mediated service sector with the idea of determining whether longstanding consumer protection and labor rules apply to these new delivery models.

One of the central questions is whether people who perform services for on-demand apps should be classified as employees — who are entitled to workers’ benefits and safeguards — or as independent contractors who are on the hook for insurance, expenses and other costs. Judges’ and regulators’ decisions on this issue will depend in large part on whether the workers themselves generally control their own work or “are generally subject to the business’s instructions about when, where and how to work,” according to a federal test for classifying independent contractors.

Against the backdrop of possible regulation, egalitarian-sounding words like “sharing” and “partner” distance start-ups, linguistically at least, from the traditionally regulated industries they seek to displace.

“Framing it as ‘sharing’ or ‘peers’ is a way of trying to keep the focus on the people who provide the services — and off the platforms, which may be very rigid and deterministic as to when, where and how the services are delivered,” says Erin McKean, a lexicographer who is the founder of Wordnik, an online dictionary.

Altruistic words may also lend an aura of incontestability to app-enabled transactions. After all, who wants to challenge services that invoke generous concepts like sharing?

In a forthcoming study on the technology-mediated work experiences of Uber drivers, however, two researchers argue that terms like “sharing” can put a gloss on business practices that may work against the interests of the supposed sharers — that is, the drivers themselves.

Uber and Lyft, for instance, each set the prices passengers pay. But, the study notes, the Uber app is devised to require drivers to accept a ride request before knowing a passenger’s destination and being able to determine if that fare would be financially worthwhile. The study also points out that Uber asks drivers to return passengers’ iPhones and other lost items — a service that earns good will for the company — without automatically compensating drivers for their effort. Some drivers have also noted that the companies encourage them to provide bottled water, mobile phone chargers and other services to passengers at their own expense.

These practices seem inconsistent with the idea of workers as partners who have a say in the business or autonomous, self-directed entrepreneurs, the authors write.

“I think that the biggest problem with the sharing-economy language is that it co-opts you into your own disempowerment,” says Alex Rosenblat, a researcher at Data & Society, a research center in Manhattan, and a co-author of the study.

(Disclosure: I am starting a part-time fellowship this fall at Data & Society.)

Kristin Carvell, a spokeswoman for Uber, said the app was intended to provide “transport without discrimination” wherever and whenever consumers choose. That is why, she said, drivers learn a passenger’s destination only after accepting a ride request. She added that providing water or phone chargers was an optional customer service for drivers and that drivers could return forgotten items directly to a passenger or to Uber.

The industry rhetoric could be dismissed as mere semantics if the stakes were not so high for investors (a recent financing round valued Uber at about $51 billion), workers and government authorities involved with industry oversight. As with other hot-button issues — do you say “illegal aliens” or “undocumented immigrants”? — word choice here can offer clues to a person’s stance.

In May, for instance, Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, announced that he and a Democratic colleague, Eric Swalwell of California, had formed a bipartisan Sharing Economy Caucus to focus “on these pioneering industries and ensure Congress is taking all of the necessary steps to facilitate, rather than hinder, the next great idea.”

A month later, the Federal Trade Commission held a workshop titled “The ‘Sharing’ Economy.” Marina Lao, who directs the commission’s office of policy planning, told me the quotation marks around “sharing” were meant to indicate that the agency was simply citing a popularly understood term and “not supporting any particular business model.”

And last month, Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, and Senator Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, wrote a letter to the Labor Department about the industry without once invoking “sharing.” The legislators asked labor regulators to examine whether business in “the new on-demand economy” had the potential to misclassify workers as independent contractors and the possible ramifications of such a problem. They also called it the “gig economy.”

News organizations, too, are grappling with what to call these services.

Last year, The Associated Press Stylebook, the ultimate American language manual for many reporters, added an entry for Uber. It described the company, along with Lyft, as “ride-hailing” or “ride-booking” services that allow people to use smartphone apps to book and pay for a car service. The entry cautioned: “Do not use ride-sharing.”

The A.P. manual does not yet have an entry for “sharing economy.”

In a telephone interview, David Minthorn, co-editor of the A.P. Stylebook, told me that “sharing” tends to imply an informal agreement among people, like carpooling. So it seems inaccurate, even euphemistic, he said, to use “sharing” in the context of commercial enterprise.

“We prefer a more forthright description,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/te...-selfless.html





Cord-Cutting Gets Ugly: U.S. Pay-TV Sector Drops 566,000 Customers in Q2
Todd Spangler

Cord-cutting headaches for pay TV have now progressed beyond just a dull, throbbing pain.

Cable, satellite and telco TV companies suffered their worst-ever quarterly subscriber declines for the three months ended June 30, collectively shedding more than half a million accounts — an accelerating erosion that’s put new pressure on operators and media companies exposed in the pay-TV biz.

No. 1 satcaster DirecTV, now part of AT&T, disclosed in a 10-Q filing Friday that it lost a net 133,000 U.S. subscribers in Q2, dramatically worse than its decline of 34,000 in the year-earlier period. Overall, traditional pay-TV distributors lost a whopping 566,000 video subs in the quarter, compared with 321,000 in Q2 2014, according to MoffettNathanson estimates.

Historically, Q2 has always been the softest for cable and satellite TV ops. But what should concern the industry is that the number of pay-TV households is now shrinking at an annual rate of 0.7%, compared with 0.1% a year ago, says analyst Craig Moffett. “That may not seem like a mass exodus,” he wrote in a research note, “but it is a big change in a short period of time.” Moreover, the declines come as U.S. household formation has picked up, Moffett noted, meaning pay-TV penetration rates are falling even faster.

The upswing in cable and satellite TV sub losses in Q2, along with Disney’s lowering guidance on affiliate-fee increases, led to a monumental sell-off in media stocks this past week. Shares of Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox and other congloms exposed to pay TV plummeted, with the sector losing some $60 billion in value in two days, before the stocks mostly stabilized Friday.

“There is clear and convincing evidence that consumers are increasingly cutting the cord or shaving the cord,” BTIG Research analyst Rich Greenfield wrote in a blog post Friday. “In turn, some of the executive commentary makes you wonder how disconnected from reality they are.”

On Friday, Cablevision Systems CEO James Dolan downplayed cord-cutting fears, after the New York-area MSO reported a relatively light loss of 16,000 video subs (versus 28,000 in Q2 2014).

“I don’t think the sky is falling quite yet, and I think that there is not enough programming weight yet in the Internet and in the over-the-top services that are out there to really entice a mainstream video customer,” Dolan said on Cablevision’s earnings call.

Dolan does not expect to see “a landslide of consumers” dropping pay TV in favor of OTT, he added: “My own prediction is that it will be at least five years for 10% of the market to move, and 10 years for 30% of the market to move.”

But Greenfield wonders if pay-TV execs fully appreciate how quickly consumer behavior is shifting, and whether incumbents are prepared to weather the storm. “The consumer must come first, not the business model, or MVPDs and their programming partners will undoubtedly suffer,” he wrote. “MVPDs likely need to accept that they will become ‘dumb pipes’ as consumers spend less time with traditional video (TV) content.”

One thing seems certain: The hemorrhaging in the pay-TV business is going to get worse before it bottoms out.
https://variety.com/2015/digital/new...q2-1201559878/





Mainstream Media Stock Prices Collapsing as People Choose Internet Over TV
Nick Bernabe

The long-term decline in viewership for America’s big TV outlets is finally starting to catch up to their stock prices. Since 2009, media stocks have been some of the best performers in S&P 500, but the last few days have seen $50 billion wiped from these companies.

According to Bloomberg, “Ignited by a plunge in Walt Disney Co., shares tracked by the 15-company S&P 500 Media Index have tumbled 8.2 percent in two days, the biggest slump for the group since 2008…In just five stocks — Disney, Time Warner Inc., Fox, CBS and Comcast Corp. — almost $50 billion of value was erased in two days. Viacom slid 14 percent on Thursday alone, its biggest drop since October 2008.”

Stock analysts say the reason behind the drop is simple on the surface: many of the media companies missed their profit projections, prompting investors to drop their stocks. Disney has lowered its growth projections for its sports brand, ESPN, while Viacom reported lower revenues than expected, which triggered a sell-off.

However, there is a larger trend at play here—one that the mainstream media—which is owned by these very companies facing the stock beat-down—doesn’t want to talk about. People are simply outgrowing the old media paradigm, and instead, are turning to the internet for both their news and entertainment at a break-neck pace. As we reported last month, Netflix will have more viewers than ABC, CBS, NBC, or Fox by 2016.

Viewership of television media is dropping — and it’s left the old media scrambling for answers. According to the Huffington Post,

“Though overall video viewing is up thanks to a plethora of new online services, fewer people are sitting down in front of a television set and a growing number of households — roughly 2.6 million, or 2.8 percent — are becoming ‘broadband only,’ forgoing cable and broadcast signals altogether. In the third quarter of 2014, the average viewer watched 141 hours of TV a month, down 6 hours from the same time last year, and a full 12 minutes less per day.

Digital, on the other hand, has shown strong growth over the past year across all age groups, with viewership up 53 percent among people 18-49, up 62 percent among people 25-54, and up 55 percent among those 55 and older since the third quarter of 2013.”

In the past, TV news outlets relied on a virtual monopoly between the big six companies that own 90% of the media to make their numbers. This left viewers with no choice but to consume media from one of these companies if they watched TV.

But now, as people have multiple sources and choices of news thanks to the internet and independent media, the monopoly is coming under pressure. Aging generations, which will probably never break their TV habits, are now the only reliable audiences for the likes of CNN, Fox News, NBC, CBS, and the rest of the mainstream media. Members of the internet age would rather have choices and read or watch news from sources they both trust and believe in. This is major problem for the old media, as poll after poll has shown eroding trust in the big six. According to Gallup polling numbers, Americans’ confidence in the media’s ability to report “the news fully, accurately, and fairly” reached an all-time low of 40% in 2014.

The reason for the falling ratings and trust in the media is not mentioned in the poll, but one could speculate that younger generations have become disillusioned by endless war mongering, partisanship, racial bias, politician and police worship, reality TV, and celebrity media frenzies that have become the trademarks of TV news. However, one thing is clear: television media will soon suffer the same fate as the near-extinct newspaper industry—barring some unexpected miracle—and that is a positive development for the well being of the political and social conversation in America. America’s new media is becoming more like America as a whole: diverse.
https://www.readability.com/articles/eecqqj9r





Windows 10’s Privacy Policy is the New Normal

Big data and machine learning are going to be used everywhere, even our operating systems.
Peter Bright

Windows 10, in normal usage and typical configurations, will send quite a lot of information to Microsoft. Windows 8, in normal usage and typical configurations, will also send quite a lot of information to Microsoft. On the other side of the fence, OS X, in normal usage and typical configurations, will send some information to Apple. It's hard to imagine a modern day operating system that doesn't do this, at least to some extent.

For example, Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android all sport app stores. Buying from those app stores requires payment information, typically including a name, address, and credit card number. Those stores may have age-based restrictions, so might require a date of birth. Those purchases are, of course, tracked, to both ensure that developers get paid and that popularity lists can be constructed.

Different platforms have different twists on this. The iOS App Store, for example, can show you apps that are popular nearby; it must be recording some location data when purchases are made so it can make this correlation. Windows 10 goes in a different direction. It includes personalized "Picks for you" and can suggest particular apps, based on their similarity to apps that have been previously installed. This currently doesn't seem very intelligent; it will sometimes recommend apps that are already installed.

Continuing evolution

It's probably fair to say that Windows 10 goes further in this kind of thing than previous operating systems. But it does so not as an outlier or some major break from past behaviors, but as a next step in a continuous process of making operating systems more connected, and to make data collection and analysis more extensive.

Some of this is an obvious repercussion of user-facing features. Windows and OS X both offer search (in Windows through Cortana, in OS X through Spotlight) that spans both the local system and online. Naturally, the online portion of that search is sent to the respective company.

Similarly, Siri and Cortana use online systems for their speech recognition. Siri maintains personalized but anonymous speech data on each user to improve speech recognition accuracy.

Cortana similarly personalizes speech models; corrections made to her transcriptions are used to adjust speech models and improve dictation accuracy. Perhaps more contentiously, information about appointments and contacts' names and nicknames is also incorporated into these models so that Cortana can better recognize the people and events that you're talking about.

Windows uses similar personalization systems for both handwriting (using a stylus) and typing. This is used to improve text recognition algorithms so that more handwriting is recognized, and so that autocomplete can make more relevant suggestions. Microsoft regards these personalization features as so important that you can't use Cortana without them. Apple, similarly, makes Siri's personalization an integral part of the service that can't be disabled without disabling Siri entirely.

There are two common reasons for this kind of data collection. The first is that these services simply need to know these things to be useful. Siri needs to know the names of your contacts to be able to set up calls or send messages. Cortana needs to know when and where your appointments are to tell you when you need to leave the home or office to get to them.

But there's a deeper reason: the software powering these capabilities is fundamentally heuristic, using approximation and guesswork to generate its results. Traditionally this wasn't the case; a hardware keyboard with no autocompletion doesn't need any fancy heuristics, it just needs to directly map key presses to characters. But speech recognition, software keyboards of all kinds, and handwriting recognition don't have this precision. The software driving these things has to construct and evaluate a range of different possible interpretations and then pick a most likely option among those interpretations.

Sometimes that software will pick the wrong interpretation; sometimes it won't even generate the right interpretation at all. Analyzing real-world usage data gives companies like Microsoft and Apple (and Apple's speech recognition provider, Nuance) the opportunity to make their heuristics better. This software is all fundamentally data-driven, and as intelligent systems such as Cortana, Siri, and Google Now become more capable and more advanced, they're going to want to slurp up ever more data.

There are further opt-in features that can expose even more data. Cortana, for example, can read your e-mails to find package tracking numbers and flight bookings, which she can then tell you about. This is an opt-in feature, and it means that Cortana will read your e-mails. This e-mail reading appears to occur locally, on each device, but Microsoft will still learn at least some things about your e-mail—for each flight or tracking number Cortana finds, she'll query Microsoft's systems to learn more about them. This should be obvious; your phone doesn't know whether a flight is delayed or just how lost your package has gotten, so naturally online services have to be queried.

The power of the cloud

One of the most important online services in wide use is essentially crowd-sourced: location. Microsoft, Google, Apple, and no doubt others, operate location services. While GPS provides a way for devices to figure out where they are without sending any data, all three companies have built systems that allow for location to be determined without GPS; instead, they use the IDs of Wi-Fi networks that a phone or computer can see.

These databases were often primed using data collected by street view camera cars—itself a contentious practice—but is further extended and updated using data collected and sent by end-users' phones and PCs: each time a device queries the location service by asking it where the nearby Wi-Fi IDs are, the location service might remember those Wi-Fi IDs and their inferred location.

This is very useful, but obviously has privacy implications: the online service providers can track which devices are making which requests, which devices are near which Wi-Fi networks, and feasibly might be able to track how devices move around. The service providers will all claim that the data is anonymized, and that no persistent tracking is performed... but it almost certainly could be.

Indeed, that same "useful but with privacy implications" trade-off is the recurring theme of modern systems. Siri, Cortana, Google Now—they're all useful. But they have privacy implications. Syncing files to OneDrive or Google Drive is useful, but it creates some privacy exposure. Using a Microsoft Account to log in to Windows, sync settings between PCs, and have access to the same apps, or using a Google account to log in to ChromeOS, for the same benefits, are both useful things, but they carry a privacy trade-off.

These trade-offs can bite people. Microsoft, in common with most other American online service providers, will generally comply with court orders demanding data and will cooperate with police investigations. Google, for example, has contacted the FBI when its algorithm detected that a user of its Picasa photo service had uploaded child pornography, and Microsoft performs similar analysis of files on OneDrive. Microsoft received a torrent of bad press when it revealed that it had looked through a Hotmail user's inbox while investigating piracy of Microsoft's own software, though since then the company has promised to hand over such investigations to law enforcement forces rather than conducting them internally.

One of the more contentious aspects of this is that Windows 10, like Windows 8 before it, has the ability to encrypt hard disks and back up the encryption keys to OneDrive (or, for corporate machines that are part of a Windows domain, Active Directory). This capability is not mandatory; while some have claimed that the only way to enable encryption without storing keys in OneDrive is to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro, this is untrue. If you want to put the backup key onto a USB drive instead of storing it online, that's possible.

This is, once again, a trade-off. Drive encryption has some value, especially on laptops, but it also has some risk; lost keys often mean lost data. For average home users, having an online key backup may well be a sensible risk/reward trade-off; the potential loss of privacy if a key is seized or stolen from OneDrive and subsequently used to decrypt their hard disk is likely outweighed by the extra protection that disk encryption provides. The default scheme may make your data less private if you're concerned about government seizure of your assets, but arguably more private if you're concerned about a crackhead stealing your laptop.

Windows 10 lets you opt out of these things if you prefer, but it's a less capable, less useful platform if you do—just as iOS, Android, ChromeOS, and even OS X become less useful if you disable every part of their online cloud service connectivity. This is a trend that isn't going to go away.

One other facet of modern-day computing is perhaps a little less welcome, but equally likely to be a fixture. Like Windows 8 and iOS, Windows 10 includes a persistent, anonymous advertiser ID. This advertising ID, which is enabled by default but can be turned off, is exposed to in-app advertisers to track your activity and in principle show ads that are more relevant to your interest. Turn it off and you'll get untargeted ads. The privacy concerns here are much the same as cookies on the Web; marginally better ads, at the expense of giving advertisers a somewhat better idea of the things that you're interested in.

A surprising change

There is one setting in Windows 10 that's a little more unusual, however. Windows has long had the capability to report basic usage data to Microsoft. This includes, for example, data about any programs or drivers that crash, so that Microsoft can detect any widespread problems. This facility has also included the ability to optionally send more detailed crash reports to the company. These optional reports can potentially include snapshots of the memory being used by processes, and these snapshots can include personal data. So far, so ordinary; OS X and other operating systems have a similar capability, and many applications have equivalent reporting facilities implemented at the app level. The data that these facilities can collect can be invaluable for detecting problems and developing fixes.

On top of this, many Microsoft programs, including Windows itself, have a thing called the Customer Experience Improvement Program. This is, traditionally, an opt-in program. When enabled, Microsoft collects various kinds of usage information. For the operating system, this might include, say, which programs are installed, how often each Control Panel is used, or what the preferred settings for Explorer windows are. For an application, it might include, say, which menu items are used most often, how many documents are opened simultaneously, or whatever else might be appropriate.

Microsoft asserts that the information collected is anonymous (tied to a randomly generated Id rather than any personal identifier), and filtered to remove any personal information it might accidentally correct. It also promises that the information collected from these schemes will only be used for diagnosis and development, never for advertising or sales.

Windows 10, however, shakes this up. Instead of two separate systems—one for error reporting, a second for collecting usage data—both have been rolled into one combined setting. This setting has four positions: off; basic error reporting and simple device capability reporting; enhanced diagnostic tracking that extends the basic information with more detailed error reporting, and usage telemetry; and full data, that adds process memory snapshots to the enhanced data. This means that there's no way to participate in error reporting without also participating in usage tracking, and vice versa.

Further, the "off" option is only available in Windows 10 Enterprise. The common home user versions of Windows, Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro, always collect (and report) at least "Basic" level information and no way to turn off the feature entirely.
The genuine privacy implications of this seem slight, but for those who absolutely do not want to send anything to Microsoft, Windows 10 is certainly a regression. Is Microsoft poring over this data, trying to sniff out the details of Windows users' lives and figure out all their secrets? It's highly unlikely—but the removal of the ability to turn off this reporting is nonetheless strange, and there's no clear reason for it.

Microsoft describes its data collection and usage policies on its privacy page. Some of the descriptions are a little fuzzy, though overall the page gives a clearer idea of what Windows 10 and other services collect, and why.

But the broad pattern is clear. The days of mainstream operating systems that don't integrate cloud services, that don't exploit machine learning and big data, that don't let developers know which features are used and what problems occur, are behind us, and they're not coming back. This may cost us some amount of privacy, but we'll tend to get something in return: software that can do more things and that works better. For many of us the benefits of these design decisions will be worth it. Those who think they aren't will continue to have to hunt through options to turn these features off... if they can.
http://arstechnica.com/information-t...he-new-normal/





Open-Source App to Disable Windows 10 Tracking Features
Ali Raza

Windows 10, Microsoft’s latest upgrade to its flagship operating system comes bundled with telemetry and tracking services enabled by default. A new open-source application is now available to stop all telemetry and tracking services used by Windows 10.

Within the space of a week since its launch, Windows 10 has been a rousing success. With positive reviews written setting the pace for the operating system pre-launch and enormous demand, Windows 10 was downloaded a staggering 14 million times within the first 24 hours of its launch. Microsoft’s decision to offer Windows 10 as a free upgrade for users of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 within the first year of its launch has been welcomed by hundreds of millions of Windows users worldwide.

However, the launch of the latest version of Microsoft’s massively popular operating system isn’t without controversy. It was to be expected. Months ahead of the launch, industry rumors were rife that Windows 10 is constantly collecting users’ data, sharing Wi-Fi passwords to contacts (albeit with encryption) and collects data & usage patterns exhibited by the Windows user.

After launch, the biggest criticism of all was the constricted setup process which did not offer many choices in granular options. It was also clear that user data would be sent back to Microsoft, by default. While many tracking features can be disabled manually for better user privacy, novice users will prefer a new open-source application that claims to preserve one’s privacy and disable tracking features with a single click.

“In my opinion, there is some unnecessary fear surrounding Windows 10, but beneath all of that I do believe lots of fear is justified,” said Syed Qazi, the app’s developer.

A quick open-sourced fix

Reddit user Qazi aka 10se1ucgo has developed an application titled ‘Disable Windows 10 Tracking’ – which he claims disables the multiple tracking services in Windows 10. He also adds that the registry is tweaked in order to further block other processes from trying to track a user’s activities.

“The program is meant for inexperienced users who don’t want to have to fiddle with the registry and don’t want to take the chance of messing up something. And no, most of it can’t be disabled in the built-in menus, there are still some ‘hidden’ ones,” he noted.

The application makes certain changes including:

• Disabling Telemetry services.
• Disabling tracking services.
• Disabling logging that is enabled by certain trackers after clearing it.
• Blocking tracking servers by editing the host file.

Qazi plans on adding many more features to the application with the aim to disable all tracking features within the operating system. It’s a small start, but the application has already seen a dozen changes in its development cycle within the last two days alone and there are a lot of takers for the application.

The entire code is available for inspection on GitHub. Microsoft hasn’t commented on the application yet.

As a disclaimer, it goes without saying that users are reminded to use any external applications or programs at their own risk.
http://blog.lifars.com/2015/08/05/ap...king-features/





The Digital Media Industry Needs to React to Ad Blockers … or Else
Michael Rosenwald

Disrupting the media industry is easy. Not long ago, I moused over to AdBlockPlus.org, clicked on a green button that said “Install for Safari,” and less than 10 seconds later, ads had vanished. All of them. Goodbye iPad ad that unfurled down my screen. Goodbye blinking mattress ads. Goodbye car ad following me from site to site. This immediately became Web surfing nirvana: Pages loaded faster, my browser stopped randomly crashing, my whole computer ran better. The Adblocker Plus plugin even told me how many ads I’ve dodged in the last couple of months: more than 35,000 and counting.

This is an exciting and chaotic time in digital news. Innovators like BuzzFeed and Vox are rising, old stalwarts like The New York Times and The Washington Post are finding massive new audiences online, and global online ad revenue continues to rise, reaching nearly $180 billion last year. But analysts say the rise of ad blocking threatens the entire industry—the free sites that rely exclusively on ads, as well as the paywalled outlets that rely on ads to compensate for the vast majority of internet users who refuse to pay for news.

A phenomenon that began several years ago in online gaming circles—you don’t want to get between gamers and their zombies—has swept into the mainstream. A new report from Adobe and one of several startups helping publishers fight ad blocking shows that 198 million people globally are now blocking ads, up 41 percent from 2014. In the US, ad blocking grew 48 percent from last year, to 45 million users. A recent Reuters Institute Digital News survey put the numbers even higher, saying that almost half of all US internet users block ads.

Taken alone, my 35,000-plus blocked ads probably aren’t doing much damage to the news industry; maybe a campaign reporter will be forced to stay in a Marriott Courtyard instead of the W. (Sorry.) But taken together, ad blockers are hitting publishers in their digital guts. Adobe says that $21.8 billion in global ad revenue will be blocked this year.

Users are inadvertently putting their favorite websites out of business.

“For publishers, ad blockers are the elephant in the room,” media analyst Frederic Filloux wrote a few months ago. “Everybody sees them, no one talks about it.” I asked numerous publishers and ad platforms how much ad blocking they were seeing and what they were doing about it. Most didn’t reply. A Google spokeswoman did tell me this: “We believe that ads help fund free services and content on the web. For our part, we’re continuing to invest in ad experiences that are relevant and useful for users, ensuring that users have choice over their ad experiences online, and helping publishers continue to fund their content.”

The problem is that surveys show many internet users, particularly younger ones, have already decided they hate online ads. As one woman said in the Reuters report, “Online ads are obtrusive, obnoxious, annoying.” And few feel an obligation to help publishers out. Some 80 percent of internet users polled by Adobe said they weren’t willing to pay even a small fee to make ads disappear. So: Readers hate online ads, most users are unwilling to subscribe online (only 11 percent do, according to the Reuters study), and few would pay to make ads go away. No wonder the publishers didn’t get back to me.

Publishers have been banking on the growth of mobile, where the ad blocking plugins either don’t work or are cumbersome to install. Back in March, a Wells Fargo analyst wrote in a report on ad blocking that “the mobile migration should thwart some of the growth” of ad blockers. But three months later, at its annual developer conference, Apple revealed that its new operating system scheduled for release this fall will allow ad blocking on Safari. Given Apple’s mobile dominance, the implications are potentially terrifying. Wired’s headline: “Apple’s support of ad blocking may upend how the web works.”


There are five or six ad blockers on the market, but the biggest player—with more than 60 million active users—is Adblock Plus, part of a German company called Eyeo. It doesn’t take a technological wizard to figure out how its product, and other ad blockers, work. Without an ad blocker installed, when a user clicks on a website, the site quickly connects to ad servers which display ads in various spots on the page. Ad blockers put a wall between the website and server, stopping ads in their tracks. Eyeo has been sued in German courts by publishers who argued Adblock Plus users shouldn’t be able to block ads on their sites. The publishers lost.

In many ways, Adblock Plus has become the internet’s advertising sheriff. That’s because its software, by default, allows some ads through its firewall—ads it deems “acceptable,” meeting a series of strict criteria it came up with in conversation with internet users around the world. The criteria essentially eliminate most of the ads on the market today, rolling back ad technology to the 1990s: text only, no animations, no popovers, no placement in the flow of text. In the two months since I’ve installed the software, I don’t recall seeing any ads that meet the criteria.

Websites must apply to get “whitelisted,” and an Adblock Plus employee then works with the site to make sure that the selected ads comply with the criteria. Ben Williams, a spokesman for Eyeo, told me that 700 publishers and bloggers have been whitelisted. The whitelist is how the company makes money. Eyeo charges large for-profit publishers a cut of ad revenues to be on the list, a scheme some critics have called extortion. Williams declined to say who is paying or how much, but the Financial Times recently reported that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon were among those paying Eyeo for their acceptable ads to appear to Adblock Plus users.

Adblock Plus has released a browser for mobile Android devices that blocks ads, and it’s planning to release a similar product for Apple devices. But Adblock Plus might not be the biggest threat for publishers on mobile. Shine, an Israeli company, isn’t targeting users fed up with annoying ads. It’s going after mobile operators like Verizon and AT&T, whose networks are stressed by data-heavy ads that constantly ping towers for location. Shine has developed technology that allows mobile operators to block ads before they even hit smartphones—in browsers and in standalone apps. Imagine this: A mobile operator lowers a user’s bill if she agrees to block ads, freeing up network resources.

Roi Carthy, the company’s chief marketing officer, told me the software is in pilot testing with mobile carriers, but he declined to say which ones. The idea would undoubtedly face regulatory scrutiny in the US if mobile operators attempt to use it. Net neutrality advocates have already expressed concern. But Carthy says the company is prepared to fight. “The desire to figure out how to bring ad blocking to mobile consumers is a worldwide phenomenon,” Carthy told me. Ad blocking, he said, “is an inalienable right.”

Sean Blanchfield certainly doesn’t share Carthy’s views. He worries that ad blocking will decimate the free Web.

A longtime online gaming engineer—he worked on Call of Duty and Guitar Hero—Blanchfield noticed something odd happening a few years ago: There was a 30 percent discrepancy between his games’ pageviews and ad views. He investigated and found that 1 in 3 of the ads were being blocked, a mortifying revenue hit. Ad blocking was still largely unique to gaming then, but Blanchfield correctly sensed it would spread. “Users are inadvertently putting their favorite websites out of business,” he told me.

Blanchfield started a company called PageFair, one of several startups trying to give publishers the upper hand again. PageFair has been helping publishers measure how many users are blocking ads and how much it’s costing them, as well as displaying acceptable ads under Eyeo’s requirements. But PageFair has bigger plans: It has developed new technology that allows publishers to display acceptable ads and to add basic banner ads with images, circumventing the blocking software.

The strategy lets PageFair play both sides of the debate. It understands the ad blocking community finds many online ads annoying, but it ultimately sides with publishers in their need to show ads, particularly ones that generate a lot of revenue. “Your house, your rules, your ads,” Blanchfield said. Major US publishers will soon launch Pagefair’s software, he said, but he declined to identify which ones.

There are other ideas for solutions.

Ben Barokas, a former senior executive at Google, recently launched Sourcepoint, bringing together a team of online ad technologists to develop a product that has both carrot and stick qualities. As the product rolls out in the coming months, Sourcepoint will offer software that lets publishers show ad blockers a message: “One of the consequences of using ad blocking software is that it significantly damages the value exchange between consumers and creators of digital content.” The message then urges users to click a link to disable ad blocking on that site.

Publishers can also enable a more stick-like approach, telling ad blockers that in order to continue they must restore banner ads, view a video ad, identify and views ads that are useful for them, or just pay up.

“We wanted to provide publishers with technology that allows them to provide users with choice,” Barokas told me.

Publishers must make money. The reader must not be overly annoyed.

“Otherwise, little by little, content will go away,” Barokas said. “We are not in a sustainable media ecosystem today.”
http://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/...a_industry.php





The Ethics of Modern Web Ad-Blocking
Marc Arment

More than fifteen years ago, in response to decreasing ad rates and banner blindness, web advertisers and publishers adopted pop-up ads.

People hated pop-up ads. We tolerated in-page banners as an acceptable cost of browsing free websites, but pop-ups were over the line: they were too annoying and intrusive. Many website publishers claimed helplessness in serving them — the ads came from somewhere else that they had little control over, they said. They really needed the money from pop-ups to stay afloat, they said.

The future didn’t work out well for pop-ups. Pop-up-blocking software boomed, and within a few years, every modern web browser blocked almost all pop-ups by default.

A line had been crossed, and people fought back.

People often argue that running ad-blocking software is violating an implied contract between the reader and the publisher: the publisher offers the page content to the reader for free, in exchange for the reader seeing the publisher’s ads. And that’s a nice, simple theory, but it’s a blurry line in reality.

By that implied-contract theory, readers should not only permit their browsers to load the ads, but they should actually read each one, giving themselves a chance to develop an interest for the advertised product or service and maybe even click on it and make a purchase. That’s also a nice theory, but of course, it’s ridiculous to expect anyone to actually do that. Publishers are lucky if people even read the content with any real attention today, let alone the ads around it.

Ads have always been a hopeful gamble, not required consumption. Before the web, people changed channels or got up during TV commercials, or skipped right over ads in newspapers and magazines. Pragmatic advertisers and publishers know that their job is to try to show you an ad and hope you see and care about it. They know that the vast majority of people won’t, and the ads are priced accordingly. The burden is on the advertisers and publishers to create ads that you’ll care about and present them in a way that you’ll tolerate.

Web ads are dramatically different from prior ad media, though — rather than just being printed on paper or inserted into a broadcast, web ads are software. They run arbitrary code on your computer, which can (and usually does) collect and send data about you and your behavior back to the advertisers and publishers. And there’s so much consolidation amongst ad networks and analytics providers that they can easily track your behavior across multiple sites, building a creepily accurate and deep profile of your personal information and private business.

All of that tracking and data collection is done without your knowledge, and — critically — without your consent. Because of how the web and web browsers work, the involuntary data collection starts if you simply follow a link. There’s no opportunity for disclosure, negotiation, or reconsideration. By following any link, you unwittingly opt into whatever the target site, and any number of embedded scripts from other sites and tracking networks, wants to collect, track, analyze, and sell about you.

That’s why the implied-contract theory is invalid: people aren’t agreeing to write a blank check and give up reasonable expectations of privacy by clicking a link. They can’t even know what the cost of visiting a page will be until they’ve already visited it and paid the price.

And it’s all getting so much worse, so quickly.

I’ve never been tempted to run ad-blocking software before — I make most of my living from ads, as do many of my friends and colleagues, and I’ve always wanted to support the free media I consume. But in the last few years, possibly due to the dominance of low-quality ad networks and the increased share of mobile browsing (which is far less lucrative for ads, and more sensitive to ad intrusiveness, than PC browsing), web ad quality and tolerability have plummeted, and annoyance, abuse, misdirection, and tracking have skyrocketed.

Publishers don’t have an easy job trying to stay in business today, but that simply doesn’t justify the rampant abuse, privacy invasion, sleaziness, and creepiness that many of them are forcing upon their readers, regardless of whether the publishers feel they had much choice in the matter.

Modern web ads and trackers are far over the line for many people today, and they’ve finally crossed the line for me, too. Just as when pop-ups crossed the line fifteen years ago, technical countermeasures are warranted.

Web publishers and advertisers cannot be trusted with the amount of access that today’s browsers give them by default, and people are not obligated to permit their web browsers to load all resources or execute all code that they’re given.

I recently started using Ghostery on my computers, and a simple homemade iOS content blocker that I may release for iOS 9’s launch. The web performance improvements with these are staggering, and the reports of quite how much Ghostery is blocking on most pages is shocking and disgusting.

Web publishers had things pretty nice for a while. Monetization was usually as simple as dropping a <script> tag from an ad service into your template. Want to add stats and analytics? Just drop in another <script> tag from another service. The bizdev people made a deal to integrate another analytics service for another few pennies? Go ahead, drop in yet another <script> tag.

Those days are over. It won’t be easy for many to move on, and not everyone will make it.

This won’t be a clean, easy transition. Blocking pop-ups was much more incisive: it was easy for legitimate publishers to avoid one narrowly-useful Javascript function to open new windows. But it’s completely reasonable for today’s web readers to be so fed up that they disable all ads, or even all Javascript. Web developers and standards bodies couldn’t be more out of touch with this issue, racing ahead to give browsers and Javascript even more capabilities without adequately addressing the fundamental problems that will drive many people to disable huge chunks of their browser’s functionality.

But publishers, advertisers, and browser vendors are all partly responsible for the situation we’re all in. Nobody could blame the users of yesteryear for killing pop-up ad rates, and nobody should blame the users of 2015 for blocking abusive, intrusive, misleading, and privacy-stealing ads and trackers, even if it’s inconvenient for publishers and web developers.

Fortunately, better monetization methods exist. It has never been easier to collect small direct payments online, cutting out the advertising middlemen and selling directly to your true customers. For publishers who want to remain ad-supported, ethically and tastefully presented native advertising, such as sponsored posts in feeds and our community’s podcast ads, has proven to be more effective, more profitable, and less user-hostile by far compared to awful network <script> embeds.

In a few years, after the dust has settled, we’re all going to look back at today’s web’s excesses and abuses as an almost unbelievable embarrassment. Hopefully, the worst is behind us. And it’s time to stop demonizing people who use tools to bring that sanity to their web browsers today.
http://www.marco.org/2015/08/11/ad-blocking-ethics





Teenagers Keep and Make Friends Online, Pew Says
Dino Grandoni

Researchers say they have discovered something that teenagers already know: Young people use the Internet to maintain friendships made at school or work, but also to forge entirely new ones with peers they meet while browsing social networks like Instagram or playing a game like Call of Duty.

In a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of American teenagers age 13 to 17 say they have made a friend online. Nearly three in 10 of the teenagers surveyed said they had a network of more than five friends they had made through the Internet. The vast majority, 77 percent, of these relationships don’t culminate in an actual meeting, the Pew researchers said.

For at least some parents, the survey’s could come as a revelation.

“We found the Internet is really a critical part of how teens make and sustain friendship,” said Amanda Lenhart, associate director of research at Pew. “It helps us unpack some adult assumptions — that they’re wasting time with these devices.”

But for teenagers, like Isabel Song, 18, of Colorado Springs, making friends online is just a part of growing up.

“A lot of the times people look at online friendships skeptically,” Ms. Song said in an interview. “But I feel if we do it safely and do it right, they can mean the world to people.”

When applying to universities during the last school year, Ms. Song relied on a group of friends she had made on Twitter for application tips and emotional support. Many in the group, she said, had gone through the college admissions process a year or two before. Only once she began touring colleges did she finally meet some of these friends in person.

Teenage girls rely more than boys on social networks like Instagram and Facebook, famous for turning “friend” into a verb, to find like-minded peers online. There, they often congregate to discuss shared interests.

Boys, in turn, are more likely than girls to make friendships through video games. One third of teenage boys said they had made a friend through Internet-connected video games, Pew found.

“Communication in games really grew over the past 10 to 15 years,” said David Cole, founder of DFC Intelligence, a company that researches digital media. “It was games like World of Warcraft and Xbox Live, with products like Halo, that really drove it for teens.”

But over all, boys are more likely than girls to seek out peers online, in part because some sites on the Internet, like Reddit, are often not welcoming to women, the researchers said.

“In some of these more open spaces,” said Ms. Lenhart, the Pew researcher, “sometimes the conversation isn’t always hospitable to women and girls.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/0...line-pew-says/





‘Grabber’ Nabbed in Big Sting
Solly Maphumulo

Two men believed that they had found a buyer for a machine nicknamed The Grabber, but their “clients” were undercover intelligence operatives.

At 10am on Friday, the duo were lured to Irene Mall outside Pretoria in a police and intelligence sting that resulted in their arrest for illegally being in possession of the cellphone-tapping, -tracking and -locator machine worth over R25 million.

The machine, specially installed in a German-made multi-purpose vehicle, was impounded.

The Star knows the identity of the two arrested men - a top businessman in the gold industry and a bank employee -but can only identify them once they have appeared in court. They were due in court on Monday.

Hawks spokesman Hangwani Mulaudzi confirmed the arrests and said more were imminent.

The Grabber, manufactured in Israel, can be used to intercept highly confidential national security information and sell it or exchange it with political enemies.

Police sources told The Star that evidence showed The Grabber, which could bug at least 10 000 lines at a time, had been used to advance certain parties in commercial transactions.

In one case, The Grabber had allegedly been used to bug and track members of the bid adjudication committee of the Airports Company of South Africa, which decides on contracts worth hundreds of millions.

The men are believed to have used the information to influence and blackmail people who were involved in the tender.

Sources revealed that the arrest of the men followed concern that the equipment would be used to help the syndicate win billions in government tenders and compromise national security.

An intelligence operative who wished to remain anonymous warned: “This is a serious security threat. Only certain people are authorised to use this machine. No ordinary citizen is supposed to be in possession of this device.”

The acquisition of the machine – first-generation Mobile GSM tracking and locating equipment – is highly regulated, internationally and in South Africa.

In South Africa, it belongs to a category of special equipment – used in the interest of national security – and can only be bought with special presidential authority.

The Star understands that the equipment was bought using a fraudulently acquired letter of authority from the South African government and was paid for by money from a private trust owned by a local businessman, but managed by an attorney based in the Free State.

Information at The Star’s disposal indicates that the machine was first installed in a specially bought BMW X5 and was removed and installed into a Mercedes Benz Viano because it was bigger.

In court, the men are expected to face a raft of charges which relate to crimes against the state.

They also are expected to face charges of illegally bringing the machine into the country in violation of the Rica Act.

Crimes committed in violation of this law carry a minimum sentence of 10 years and a fine of R2 million.
http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-cour...ting-1.1894536





Samsung Floats 'Space Internet' Plan to Save Mobile
Ry Crozier

Samsung Electronics has proposed a ‘space internet’ network consisting of 4600 micro-satellites that could act as backhaul for terrestrial cellular networks and bring low-cost internet to “everyone in the world”.

The proposal is contained in an academic research paper by Farooq Khan - president of Samsung R&D America – and marks the latest entrant in the internet democratisation race.

Other notable entrants in this space are Google, which has separate proposals for satellite and balloon-based internet - SpaceX, OneWeb and Internet.org, which also counts Samsung as a member.

Samsung’s own proposal is driven in part by fears that current initiatives to solve burgeoning mobile data traffic growth – such as the trend to deploy dense, small-cell networks – won’t be able to meet the demand in a cost-effective way.

“By year 2028, both cellular and wi-fi will be carrying data traffic in excess of one zetabyte/ month,” Khan said.(pdf)

“Our goal here is to design a space internet with similar capacity. This space internet can then provide backhaul for cellular and wi-fi as well as direct communication with the satellite connecting the world’s population currently without internet access.

“With the satellite-based backhaul, cellular and wi-fi deployments become practical in remote regions of the earth where there is no wired Internet infrastructure.”

Khan’s plan is to send about 4600 micro-satellites into low earth orbit – in a range between 160km and 2000km in altitude.

The sheer number of satellites is required to ensure continuity of service.

“An entire constellation of satellites would be necessary to maintain constant coverage where a new satellite shows up at the location of a previous satellite which has moved out of sight [of a ground station],” Khan said.

Each satellite needs to be capable of data rates of at least 1 Terabit/s “or higher”.

“Space internet satellites providing Tb/s data rates would require tens of GHz of spectrum which would require use of spectrum across wide frequency range,” Khan said.

“To achieve ultra-fast Tb/s data rates, our system would need to operate at bandwidths of 32 GHz or higher.”

Khan produced modelling that purported to show the response times for traffic “to go halfway around earth” would be similar for space internet and fibre optic links.

If Samsung’s vision could be turned into a reality, Khan said it could offer “200GB/month for five billion users Worldwide with signal latencies comparable to those offered by ground based systems.”
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/407826...ve-mobile.aspx





Want Fiber Internet? That’ll be $383,500, ISP Tells Farm Owner

Good news, though: Small ISP promises to do the same work for just $42,000.
Jon Brodkin

Internet service providers often charge thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars to extend their networks to people outside their service areas.

But it turns out construction costs passed on to customers can be much, much higher. When the operator of a family farm in Nebraska requested fiber service from the local DSL Internet and phone service company, he found out that he’d have to pay an incredible $383,500 to subsidize the ISP’s construction.

That’s the price estimate Windstream Communications provided to the Norman R. Schneider Family Trust Farm in Ceresco, Nebraska, after CTO Nelson Schneider contacted the company about getting fiber service to replace his DSL.

"I accidentally bought a house without cable," writes man who works at home.

Fortunately, it looks like Schneider will get fiber service for a fraction of that price from a second network provider called Northeast Nebraska Telephone Company (NNTC). Even though the Schneider farm is completely outside NNTC’s service area, even for copper, NNTC told him it would build the fiber line for a more reasonable $41,915.88.

While nearly $42,000 is still a lot, Schneider noted that “it is a one-time investment that will enhance my quality of life and property value significantly.”

What isn’t clear is why Windstream would charge nine times as much as NNTC. Ars contacted Windstream, which confirmed the $383,500 price, saying “the total quoted was for 36 months of dedicated Internet service.”

We also asked Windstream how it calculated the estimate but did not receive an answer.

Windstream has about 1.1 million Internet subscribers and just announced that it's getting $175 million a year for the next seven years from the federal government to bring 10Mbps Internet to 400,000 rural locations in 17 states. That money is from the Connect America Fund, which is paid for by surcharges on Americans' phone bills.

This isn't the first time Windstream has received money to improve Internet service in areas like Schneider's, but it hasn't helped him yet. "I called them out on it once. They said they'd 'already spent all of it,'" he said.

Windstream told Schneider that he would have to pay to run fiber about 4.5 miles from its facilities to his property, “but it's actually 3.5 miles from town, which is the same distance it is to Northeast Nebraska's nearest fiber node,” he said. (NNTC told Schneider in an e-mail that he was "about 3 miles from our nearest fiber connection.")

Strangely, Schneider said there is what appears to be a Windstream fiber line about a quarter-mile from his property. A map of Windstream’s fiber network seems to confirm its location.

“They refuse to connect me to that,” he said. “They tell me that it's some sort of reserved, private Windstream-only line.”

Windstream did not respond to questions from Ars about this apparently unavailable fiber line.

Excruciatingly slow DSL makes Internet use tedious

The farm, built by Schneider's parents in 1979 (the year he was born), is about 22 miles from the state capital of Lincoln. While the property has a Ceresco area code and zip code, it’s technically outside the city limits. But the farm is in Windstream’s copper service area, and Schneider pays the company $80 a month for phone service and extremely slow DSL Internet, he told Ars.

Schneider’s Windstream service is supposed to provide 1.5Mbps download speeds and 310kbps upstream. For about two years, the service consistently provided what was promised, he said. But recently, speeds dropped to about 512kbps down and 256kbps up, and Windstream hasn’t been able to get it back to where it used to be, he said.

“They are continually telling me there's nothing wrong with it,” he said.

With speeds of just half a megabit, “it makes everything just tedious,” Schneider said. “Any site that has graphics is tedious. It makes it difficult to check the grain prices online because everything loads so slowly. None of that is just pure text, it’s all scripted, it's not fast at all. I don’t think anybody really appreciates how much the Web has changed since 512kbps was considered fast.”

Downloading operating system and software updates is especially difficult, he noted.

Schneider’s family used a fixed wireless service for a couple of years, but the speeds were about the same as Windstream, and the provider “complained constantly that I was using too much bandwidth,” he said.

Schneider has considered satellite Internet, “but the latency and severely low data caps aren't good value for the cost, and I refuse to ever pay the outrageous per-gigabyte overages most such outfits charge,” he said.

Schneider’s current Windstream service is residential, but Windstream’s website advertises business-class Internet service in Ceresco with speeds up to 40Mbps and prices starting at $39.99 a month. The farm is a business, so Schneider tried to get that business-class service, but he had trouble just getting Windstream to listen.

Schneider filed a complaint against Windstream on the Federal Communications Commission's website, he said, and “by going through that channel I was actually able to get Windstream to contact me to talk about replacing DSL with something better.” Schneider isn't the first Internet customer to find that providers are more willing to compromise when you complain to the government, but going through Windstream was still a dead end.

At one point, a Windstream salesperson told Schneider that it would cost $20,000 to get a fiber line. That turned out to be “overly optimistic,” in Schneider’s words. Ultimately, Windstream wouldn’t budge on the $383,500 cost.

The company also did not promise Schneider any particular speed. “They have been extremely reticent to tell me what kind of maximum speeds they'd offer,” he said. “The highest quote I've gotten from them is 10/10 [10Mbps both downstream and upstream] on speed.”

Fed up, Schneider contacted NNTC in June. He had learned about NNTC running fiber to farms in its service area, which wasn’t that far from his own. After exchanging a few e-mails with company representatives, an NNTC executive visited Schneider because “he wanted to drive the proposed fiber route and stopped by to discuss it while he was in the area.”

Northeast agreed to let Schneider pay for the construction in three annual payments of about $14,000 each, and it will provide 50Mbps download speeds and 15Mbps uploads for $100 a month, he said. (UPDATE: After this article published, Schneider learned that the package will instead be $140 a month for 25Mbps both downstream and upstream. The $41,915.88 construction cost remains the same.) Northeast also agreed to a $6,000 credit for any other customer “that signs up using the line I'm paying to install.” The necessary paperwork is being finished up this month.

“They said they'd have to order the fiber cables, but should be able to get me set up by the end of September of this year,” he said.

Schneider was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to deal with NNTC after his experience with Windstream. While nearly $42,000 for Internet service is still much more than most people would have to pay, Schneider is happy to make the investment.

“I look at it like buying a nice new car, only instead of taking me places on the paved highway, it will finally allow me to drive the Information Superhighway at the speed limit,” he said. “Right now I feel like an Amish horse-drawn carriage when doing anything online."
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...ls-farm-owner/

















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