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Old 29-10-21, 07:01 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 30th, ’21

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October 30th, 2021




Blind People Won the Right to Break Ebook DRM. In 3 Years, They'll Have to Do It Again

Advocates will once again be granted a DMCA exception to make accessible versions of texts. They argue that it's far past time to make it permanent.
Damon Beres

It's a cliché of digital life that "information wants to be free." The internet was supposed to make the dream a reality, breaking down barriers and connecting anyone to any bit of data, anywhere. But 32 years after the invention of the World Wide Web, people with print disabilities—the inability to read printed text due to blindness or other impairments—are still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled.

Advocates for the blind are fighting an endless battle to access ebooks that sighted people take for granted, working against copyright law that gives significant protections to corporate powers and publishers who don't cater to their needs. For the past year, they've once again undergone a lengthy petitioning process to earn a critical exemption to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that provides legal cover for people to create accessible versions of ebooks.

Baked into Section 1201 of the DMCA is a triennial process through which the Library of Congress considers exceptions to rules that are intended to protect copyright owners. Since 2002, groups advocating for the blind have put together lengthy documents asking for exemptions that allow copy protections on ebooks to be circumvented for the sake of accessibility. Every three years, they must repeat the process, like Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill.

On Wednesday, the US Copyright Office released a report recommending the Librarian of Congress once again grant the three-year exemption; it will do so in a final rule that takes effect on Thursday. The victory is tainted somewhat by the struggle it represents. Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility—by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example—that it's even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice.

"As the mainstream has embraced ebooks, accessibility has gotten lost," says Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind. "It's an afterthought."

Publishers have no obligation to make electronic versions of their books accessible to the blind through features like text-to-speech (TTS), which reads aloud onscreen text and is available on whichever device you're reading this article. More than a decade ago, publishers fought Amazon for enabling a TTS feature by default on its Kindle 2 ereader, arguing that it violated their copyright on audiobooks. Now, publishers enable or disable TTS on individual books themselves.

Even as TTS has become more common, there's no guarantee that a blind person will be able to enjoy a given novel from Amazon's Kindle storefront, or a textbook or manual. That's why the exemption is so important—and why advocates do the work over and over again to secure it from the Library of Congress. It's a time-consuming and expensive process that many would rather do away with.

"To go every three years is burdensome," says Mark Richert, executive director at the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired. "We are not resourced the way rights owners are. There is a disparity in privilege and capacity. On that sort of equitable note alone, the exemptions should be permanent."

Some advocates have pushed for DMCA reform that would weaken or negate Section 1201's copyright protections, therefore removing the need for a triennial application process. Lawmakers held a number of hearings reevaluating the DMCA last year; they've amounted to more debate about the best path forward, but there have been no material outcomes so far.

In the meantime, the situation morphed into a genuine crisis as the Covid-19 pandemic forced a worldwide exodus to digital space. Eric and Rebecca Bridges, both of whom are blind and work as advocates for people with disabilities, decided to homeschool their 6-year-old son last year after learning their school district wouldn't provide accessible materials.

"The world changed," says Eric, who works as the executive director of the American Council of the Blind. "He’s got two blind parents who can’t really accurately review his progress. How were we going to do this?"

"The apps that our district was using were not accessible to us as blind parents," says Rebecca, a manager at the accessibility software company TPG Interactive. "We felt like he would really lose out … So, we took that leap."

Although their son is sighted, the Bridges needed accessible textbooks and worksheets to instruct him and check his work. They purchased learning materials from three homeschooling companies, but none of them were accessible. Worksheets that appeared totally text-based actually weren't, for example. Instead, the files the Bridges received were just pictures of text.

It's an important distinction. Think of it this way: You can highlight any letter or word in this article, copy and paste it, whatever. But take a screenshot of the same text and suddenly you're left with a static image that you can't interact with. It's the difference between a DOC file and a JPEG. Without specific software, a computer doesn't "see" words in an image.

Rebecca resorted to a program called JAWS, which uses optical character recognition to translate text in an image, to read her son's worksheets. This is where the Section 1201 exemption comes in: To create an accessible version of a copyrighted work sometimes means altering and reproducing that work in a different format using a tool like JAWS. Without the exemption, it would technically be illegal to break copyright protection for this purpose.

So, Rebecca handled the worksheets. But then there were the books. Rebecca asked the homeschooling companies to provide electronic copies of the hard-copy books she purchased for her son, so that she could access the text and instruct him. When she got the files, she had to contend with a fresh slate of problems.

"Not a single one was a completely accessible document, and I received many," Rebecca says. The companies sent locked files she couldn't access and manipulate. Or they sent poorly formatted PDFs that confused her screen-reader software.

Even ebooks that are formatted correctly for TTS can have other issues. Math and science are the worst. Textbooks may be formatted for 100 percent accurate text-to-speech, only to falter when it comes to formulas, equations, charts, and tables. Those are typically rendered as images in an ebook, which would require publishers to take an additional step to record "alt text" for each individual figure—audio that would describe the image once encountered by a screen reader.

This rarely happens. A screen reader instead stumbles over these static images, sometimes reciting filename gibberish, leaving a blind reader with no possible way to discern meaning. That's assuming, again, that an accessible version of the textbook exists to begin with. If one does exist, it may only be available on certain platforms.

“As the mainstream has embraced ebooks, accessibility has gotten lost.”

Mark Riccobono, National Federation of the Blind

The inconsistencies can be maddening. Take Calculus: Early Transcendentals, a popular textbook from the publisher Cengage Learning. The "eTextbook" available on Amazon is actually just a straightforward scan of the book, with absolutely no text to speech functionality. Bookshare, an accessible online library, offers a version of the book, but even that copy is not fully accessible, because it doesn't contain alt text descriptions of those static images.

Brad Turner, VP and GM of global education and literacy at Benetech, the nonprofit behind Bookshare, says that while his company will sometimes inject accessible features into ebooks without the cooperation of a publisher, they won't write their own descriptions for images.

"Our agreement with publishers is, give us your content, and we promise not to change it at all. We’re only going to make it accessible," Turner says. "For many of the images, graphics, charts, graphs, formulas, equations, we’re not qualified like the author or the publisher."

Emily Featherston, director of corporate communications at Cengage, says the company is committed to providing accessible versions of its ebooks, and that it has "accessibility guidelines and an in-house team of digital accessibility and learning design specialists" to support its product and tech teams. Readers who purchase and access text through Cengage's own platform will have access to TTS and alt text, but those features aren't guaranteed from the third parties people may be more accustomed to buying from.

"While this work helps demonstrate our commitment to providing accessible solutions, we also recognize that accessibility is a journey, not a destination, and there is always room to improve," Featherston says.

That journey has been very long. Technological interventions have been available for years—some people use tools like the Kindle Converter or Codex to cleave through digital rights management, transforming proprietary ebooks into accessible formats—but the core problem is actually very simple. Publishers could provide fully accessible, digital versions of their books. They don't have to, and often they don't.

So advocates in the United States are stuck filing for an exemption to a 23-year-old law, signed a year before the founding of Napster and well ahead of the smartphone era, when a top copyright concern was kids ripping music from CDs. The recommendation this month to extend the copyright exemption for accessible ebooks is good news, but the entire process will repeat in three years.

By then, a permanent fix may be closer. In 2019, the European Accessibility Act became law in the EU. It will be enforced in June 2025, requiring all ebooks published in the EU after that point to be fully accessible. Some hope it could set a precedent here.

"We passed a seatbelt law. We passed an unleaded gas law. Why can’t we pass an accessible book law?" Turner says.

Meanwhile, the Bridges are looking to the future—with some trepidation.

"Math is going to be nasty," Rebecca says. "There’s no doubt in my mind."
https://www.wired.com/story/ebooks-d...sibility-dmca/





Tokyo Olympics, Broadband Spark Rise in Q3 Profit for Comcast
Brian Steinberg

Comcast saw its third-quarter profit soar due to its massive broadcast of the Tokyo Olympics across NBCUniversal as well as an uptick in broadband customers hunkered down at home during the coronavirus pandemic, even as the company’s traditional cable business showed new signs of erosion.

The Philadelphia owner of the Comcast cable empire and the NBCUniversal entertainment conglomerate said profit in the third quarter came to $4.04 billion, or 86 cents per share, compared with $2.02 billion, or 44 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Revenue spiked 18.7% to $30.3 billion in the quarter, compared with $25.5 billion in the year-earlier quarter.

Revenue at the company’s overall cable operations increased 7.4% to $16.1 billion. Comcast said it added 300,000 new broadband subscribers and 18,000 business customers during the quarter, even as it lost 408,000 traditional video consumers and 158,000 voice customers.

The company declined to offer a total number of subscribers for Peacock, the video-streaming service launched by NBCUniversal that has been a pivotal part of the company’s strategy amid consumers’ growing interest in watching their video favorites at times of their own choosing.

Meanwhile, revenue for NBCUniversal increased 57.9% to $10. billion, including $1.8 billion of revenue from the Tokyo Olympics, the company said. Advertising revenue increased 73%, largely due to the Tokyo Olympics, higher pricing, and additional Peacock sales. Distribution revenue increased 36.2%

Studio revenue increased 27%, driven by movie releases including "F9"and "The Boss Baby: Family Business." Revenue from movies was crimped severely by coronavirus in the year-earlier period. Revenue at the company's theme parks rose to $1.4 billion as the facilities saw business improve from the year-earlier quarter, when they had to close or open to only a limited number of customers.

Revenue for Sky increased 4.1% to $5.0 billion, Comcast said.
https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/com...nd-1235099442/





Here's the FBI's Internal Guide for Getting Data from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon

The newly obtained document shows in granular detail the sort of data that the country's carriers keep, and for how long.
Joseph Cox

A newly obtained document written by the FBI lays out in unusually granular detail how it and other law enforcement agencies can obtain location information of phones from telecommunication companies.

Much of the information reiterates what we already knew about law enforcement access to telecommunications data—how officials can request location data from a telecom with a warrant or use court orders to obtain other information on a phone user, for example. But the document does provide insights on what exactly each carrier collects, a more recent run-down of how long each telecom retains certain types of data for, and images of the tool the FBI makes available to law enforcement agencies across the country to analyze cell phone tower data.

Ryan Shapiro, executive director of nonprofit organization Property of the People, shared the document with Motherboard after obtaining it through a public record act request. Property of the People focuses on obtaining and publishing government records.

The document, a 139 page slide presentation dated 2019, is written by the FBI’s Cellular Analysis Survey Team (CAST).

CAST supports the FBI as well as state, local, and tribal law enforcement investigations through the analysis of call data and tower information, the presentation adds. That can include obtaining the data from telecommunications companies in the first place; analyzing tower dumps that can show which phones were in an approximate location at a given time; providing expert witness testimony; and performing drive tests to verify the actual coverage of a cell tower.

“When necessary, CAST will utilize industry standard survey gear drive test equipment to determine the true geographical coverage breadth of a cell site sector,” the presentation reads. The presentation highlights the legal process required to obtain information from a telecommunications company, such as a court order or search warrant.

The LinkedIn profile of one CAST member Motherboard found says they have a “special emphasis in historical cell site analysis which is typically used for locating phones (and the individuals attached to those phones) for cases such as kidnappings, homicides, missing persons, and robberies.”

CAST provides its own cell phone data visualization tool to law enforcement officials around the country called CASTViz for free.

“CASTViz has the ability to quickly plot call detail records and tower data for lead generation and investigative purposes,” the presentation reads. The document includes images of and instructions for the CASTViz software itself.

Nate Wessler, deputy project director of the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said in a phone call that “I’ve never seen a visualization of it” after viewing the document. He added that the document raises questions around what sort of assumptions are built into this tool, and what errors this software might make. (The presentation adds that maps and analysis created by CASTViz should not be taken to court without being validated for accuracy, and that testimony should only be through a qualified expert).

The document also explains how data requests from Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) such as Boost Mobile are handled, explains how to obtain location data from what the FBI describes as “burner phones,” and how to obtain information from OnStar, General Motors’ in-vehicle system. The document also provides the cost of some of this data for law enforcement to request.

The presentation provides more recent figures on how long telecoms retain data for. AT&T holds onto data such as call records, cell site, and tower dumps for 7 years. T-Mobile holds similar information for 2 years, and Verizon holds it for 1 year.

“There is no conceivable business reason they need that much,” Wessler said, referring to AT&T’s longer retention periods than other telecoms.

The slide also shows that AT&T retains “cloud storage internet/web browsing” data for 1 year. When asked what this detail entails exactly, such as websites visited by customers on the AT&T network, AT&T spokesperson Margaret Boles said in an email that “Like all companies, we are required by law to comply with mandatory legal demands, such as warrants based on probable cause. Our responses comply with the law.” The document also mentions that law enforcement can request records related to wearable devices from AT&T.

Another section that provides an overview of the different engineering and location datasets held by telecoms and potentially available to law enforcement agencies tells officials to use some AT&T data “cautiously.”

“AT&T does not validate results,” the presentation reads. AT&T did not respond to a request for comment on this point.

“It’s good that there’s a disclaimer. At the same time, concerning that they’re advising law enforcement officers—state and local police—that they can ask for this stuff,” Wessler said on the AT&T data.

That section also mentioned that Verizon has a “new” location tool that law enforcement agencies can use.

Rich Young, a Verizon spokesperson, told Motherboard in an email that “This is a tool that our security team uses in response to lawful warrants and emergency requests. For example, this tool would be used in response to cases involving armed fugitives or missing children. As a common industry practice, the tool uses network-based cell site location information. All other major providers use a similar approach.”

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vq...mobile-verizon

















Until next week,

- js.



















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