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Old 16-08-17, 07:30 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 19th, ’17

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August 19th, 2017




Australia's Biggest Telcos Ordered to Block International Pirate Websites by Federal Court
Mazoe Ford and Louise Hall

Australia's biggest telcos have been ordered to block access to 57 international websites that allow users to download pirated TV shows and movies.

The blocked piracy sites:

Yes Movies
Vumoo
Los Movies
Cartoon HD
Putlocker
Watch Series 1 and Watch Series 2
Project - Free TV
ProjectFreeTV
Watch Episodes, Watch Episode Series, Watch TV Series
The Dare TV
Putlocker9.is, Putlocker9.com
Torrent sites: 1337x
Torlock

In a ruling handed down on Friday, the Federal Court found that the websites operated with a "blatant disregard for the rights of copyright owners".

It ordered Telstra, Optus, Vocus and TPG to take "reasonable steps", within 15 days, to stop their customers accessing the websites, which include piratebay.to, watchfree.to, torrentproject.se, Yes Movies, Vumoo and Los Movies.

The decision was welcomed by industry body Creative Content Australia, which has launched a campaign to highlight the devastating financial impact of pirating on the film and television industry.

The organisation's executive director, Lori Flekser, said the ruling vindicated the position of creative industries, which had long argued that pirating prevented creators of original content from being able to fully recoup their financial investment.

"Pirate sites firstly earn a lot of money from other people's content — that's income and revenue that local and global practitioners who have worked incredibly hard on those productions don't get to see," she said.

"Piracy is not a victimless crime: the victims are the creative industries who lose jobs, who lose revenue and who lose potential jobs in the films that simply aren't made because the risks of recouping the revenue are too high."

Ms Flekser said as a result, investors were more reluctant to invest in film and television content, which reduces the amount of content made, and ultimately results in less choice for consumers.

One case was bought by eight film distributors led by Roadshow Films, while a separate case was bought by Foxtel.

Service providers must take reasonable steps: court

The court found carriage service providers must take reasonable steps to disable access to online locations outside Australia that infringe or facilitate the infringement of copyright.

The four CSPs will be required block the domain names associated with pirate streaming sites Yes Movies, Vumoo, Los Movies, Cartoon HD, Putlocker, Watch Series 1, Watch Series 2, Project - Free TV, ProjectFreeTV, Watch Episodes, Watch Episode Series, Watch TV Series, The Dare TV, Putlocker9.is, Putlocker9.com, as well as Torrent sites: 1337x and Torlock.

The court ordered the applicants establish and maintain a website that informed users that the blocked website they were attempting to access has been disabled because it infringed or facilitated the infringement of copyright.

What are the sites being blocked? When will the sites go down? Who's paying for this?

Creative Content Australia said since the first site-blocking orders were made by the Federal Court in December 2016, more than 65 sites and more than 340 domains had been blocked.

Ms Flekser said the campaign, titled The Price of Piracy, and starring veteran Australian actor Bryan Brown, also aimed to raise awareness of the risks to consumers posed by streaming or downloading pirated content.

She said links on infringing sites were the most common way of propagating malware, with one in three sites exposing users to malicious software that can steal personal information such as bank details, credit cards and passwords.

"Pirate sites have become some of the most dangerous places online," she said.

Justice John Nicholas said similar blocking orders had already been made in other countries.

In a statement, Foxtel chief executive Peter Tonagh said the judgment was "another critical step in combating online piracy, which continues to undermine Australia's creative industry".

"The Government's passage of the site blocking legislation, and the court's continued willingness to impose site blocking orders, illustrates the gravity of the threat and the concern we should all have about protecting the hard work of the actors, writers, directors and production teams involved in creating the programming we all love."

The four respondent companies did not participate or seek to be heard in the case. No costs order was made.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-1...locked/8820076





Judge Rules KickassTorrents Founder Properly Charged With Criminal Copyright Conspiracy

Artem Vaulin, awaiting extradition from Poland, can't convince the judge he's being charged with something — secondary copyright infringement — that's not a crime.
Eriq Gardner

For years, there's been ample debate and scholarship on whether or not secondary copyright infringement constitutes a crime. On Friday, a federal judge in Illinois probably made the day of big copyright holders by ruling that the U.S. government has properly indicted Artem Vaulin, the alleged founder of KickassTorrents.

Vaulin is currently in a jail cell in Poland after the 31-year-old was charged last year by U.S. authorities with running one of the world's most popular places to illegally obtain movies, television shows, songs and video games. After being arrested, he retained some of the same attorneys representing Megaupload's Kim Dotcom to fight the case.

Dotcom, who is still in New Zealand in a lengthy battle over whether he can be extradited, never prevailed upon a Virginia judge to rule on the argument that secondary copyright infringement is merely a civil claim. That's because he's been deemed to be a fugitive. The judge wants him to surrender first.

In Illinois, presiding over Vaulin's case, U.S. District Court Judge John Z. Lee could have done the same thing. Indeed, in Friday's decision, he concludes that Vaulin can't move to dismiss under the fugitive disentitlement doctrine.

"As long as Vaulin is in Poland, he is not within the Court’s reach," writes Lee. "And, as far as the Court is aware, he is actively resisting extradition efforts. His attorneys represented at the most recent status hearing that there is a 'real possibility' that he will agree to appear here, but also indicated that he is actively appealing the Polish courts’ decision to extradite him, a process which could take years. Thus, insofar as Vaulin is interested in participating here, he appears willing to do so only from a safe distance."

If that were the end of the decision, it would be notable, but what makes the decision momentous is the fact that the judge decides that he will nevertheless address Vaulin's points about the crime he is charged with.

As a foreigner running a foreign operation, Vaulin's attorneys attacked the sufficiency of the allegations of criminal activity within the United States.

"Vaulin is correct that, as a general matter, the Copyright Act does not apply extraterritorially to reach acts of infringement that occur entirely abroad," writes the judge. "But the core theory underlying the indictment is that Vaulin aided, abetted, and conspired with users of his network to commit criminal copyright infringement in the United States. … When viewed in a light most favorable to the Government, as the Court must do at this preliminary stage, the indictment alleges acts of domestic infringement."

Judge Lee also points out that the indictment accuses him of "mak[ing] available and caus[ing] others to make available without authorization vast amounts of copyrighted content on KAT to millions of individuals in the United States by collecting and uploading torrent files," and that his torrent site used a "network of computer servers from around the world, including computer servers located in Chicago, Illinois."

That's sufficient, he concludes.

Lee next rejects the contention that there can be no criminal liability attached to torrent files because these files are not protected content. The judge says that misunderstands the indictment because what's at issue is the movies and other copyrighted media that users of KickassTorrents are distributing. The judge also places emphasis on how the government is charging Vaulin and others with conspiring to commit acts of infringement.

"Thus, the indictment is fairly construed as alleging an agreement between Vaulin and KAT’s users to download and distribute infringed copyrighted content by using torrent files," states the opinion. "Finally, in addition to alleging a conspiracy to commit copyright infringement based on conduct related to torrent files, the indictment also alleges a conspiracy based on Vaulin and his co-defendants’ distribution of copyrighted content through direct download websites. Thus, the conspiracy alleged in the indictment goes far beyond merely uploading and distributing torrent files, and Vaulin’s motion to dismiss the indictment on this basis is denied."

The judge's opinion doesn't stop there.

Lee takes up the issue of whether secondary liability for copyright infringement can be extended from the civil realm to the criminal one. The judge says that Vaulin is basically missing the big picture.

"[A]s should be clear by now, the indictment does not charge Vaulin with common law secondary liability. … Rather, the indictment relies on the text of the congressionally enacted conspiracy and aiding and abetting statutes. … Thus, the indictment charges Vaulin not with crimes based upon common law theories, but for conduct made unlawful under unambiguous statutes," Lee writes.

Vaulin argued that the old copyright law in 1909 had specific language criminalizing aiding and abetting copyright infringement, and that when the language was removed when the current Copyright Act was enacted in 1976, lawmakers had made a purposeful move against criminal liability for aiding and abetting infringement.

"This argument, however, misses the mark," responds the judge. "When Congress amended the Copyright Act in 1976, 18 U.S.C. § 2 — which, by its terms, applies to every criminal offense — was in force. For this reason, there was no need to include language within the Copyright Act itself that criminalized aiding and abetting criminal infringement. Doing so would have been redundant."

But what about Google?, Vaulin's lawyers ask. Couldn't search engines be exposed to criminal liability because they link to torrent sites, too?

Lee makes two observations.

"First, as the Government noted at oral argument, 'Google doesn’t solicit and reward others for uploading torrent files for copyrighted media,' as Vaulin is charged with doing in this case," he writes. "And, if Google were to engage in such conduct, at least one court has suggested that Google might be civilly liable for contributory infringement under certain circumstances. See Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. For present purposes, though, the Court need not decide whether and when a search engine operator might engage in conduct sufficient to constitute aiding and abetting criminal copyright infringement."

Here's the full opinion.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr...piracy-1026890





Showtime Sues to Stop Pirating of Mayweather-McGregor Fight

The Aug. 26 fight will be shown live on pay-per-view but dozens of websites are already promoting unauthorized streams.

Undefeated boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. and UFC champion Conor McGregor are set to face off later this month in a highly anticipated pay-per-view event — and Showtime Networks is already suing in an attempt to keep pirated streams at bay.

While high-stakes boxing events typically draw substantial viewers, this one has a novel twist. Mayweather is 49-0 and came out of retirement to take on McGregor in his first-ever boxing match after nearly 10 years as a professional mixed martial arts fighter. The Irish MMA star is also a decade younger than the boxer — but will have to play by different rules than he's used to and if he puts a toe out of bounds, he'll be disqualified.

Showtime is suing to stop more than 40 websites from airing an unauthorized stream of the fight. The sites are "all currently formatted as Mayweather v. McGregor blogs populated with articles that are stuffed with keywords related to the fight," writes attorney Dennis Wilson. "Plaintiff alleges that Defendants have engaged in such keyword stuffing as a form of search engine optimization in an effort to attract as much web traffic as possible in the form of Internet users searching for a way to access a live stream of the Fight."

Because of this strategy, the pay cabler argues, several of the potentially infringing sites appear in the top Google search results. The network says it expects the sites to be populated with links to sites offering the live stream right before the fight is broadcast.

Showtime is asking the court for an injunction to stop defendants and any of their partners or licensees from making the fight available for viewing or transferring their websites to another registrant or registrar.

This isn't the first time the network has sued to preemptively stop pirates. In fact, Mayweather's last major fight — his controversial 2015 defeat of Manny Pacquaio that spawned a series of litigation arising from an undeclared shoulder injury — prompted a similar suit. There, Showtime and HBO sued for "anticipated" copyright infringement — and the court granted a temporary injunction. It ordered the sites to be taken offline prior to the start of the fight through the next morning.

Time will tell if Showtime can score back-to-back wins on this front; until then, the complaint is posted below.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr...-fight-1029929





Hackers Release More HBO Episode Shows: Report
Jilian Mincer

Hackers have released more unaired episodes of popular HBO shows but the latest leak did not include anything on the hit series "Game of Thrones," the Associated Press reported on Sunday.

The hackers, who broke into HBO's computer network and have released stolen information for several weeks, provided more unaired episodes, including the popular show "Curb Your Enthusiasm, " which returns in October.

They also leaked episodes of "Insecure," "Ballers" and "The Deuce," according to the Associated Press.

Time Warner Inc's (TWX.N) HBO said Sunday in an emailed statement that it was "not in communication with the hacker, and we're not going to comment every time a new piece of information is released."

"It has been widely reported that there was a cyber incident at HBO," it said. "The hacker may continue to drop bits and pieces of stolen information in an attempt to generate media attention. That’s a game we’re not going to participate in."

HBO acknowledged the hack earlier this summer. It said the thieves had been leaking stolen materials and asking for a multi-million-dollar ransom.

The hack came at a sensitive time for HBO parent Time Warner as it awaits regulatory approval to sell itself to AT&T Inc (T.N) in a $85.4 billion deal announced in October.

Reporting By Jilian Mincer; Editing by Andrew Hay
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-us...-idUKKCN1AU01B





HBO Offered $250,000 to Hackers in Bid to Delay Data Release
Jessica Toonkel

Time Warner Inc's (TWX.N) HBO network last month offered $250,000 to cyber criminals who hacked into its computer system, asking them to extend a deadline for paying a much larger ransom, according to an email reviewed by Reuters.

"You have the advantage of having surprised us," a member of HBO's technology team said in the July 27 email. "In the spirit of professional cooperation, we are asking you to extend your deadline for one week."

The attack came at a sensitive time for HBO: Parent Time Warner is seeking regulatory approval to sell itself to AT&T Inc (T.N) in an $85.4 billion deal announced in October.

The note said that HBO was willing to make the payment "as a show of good faith," but needed time to fund an account for sending payments in bitcoin digital currency or obtain account information from the hackers so it could use a conventional bank wire to transmit the funds.

The hackers did not respond to a request for comment through the email address they used to communicate with HBO. The request prompted an automated response that provided a link to an image of the July 27 note from HBO.

A person familiar with HBO's response to the attack told Reuters that the company sent the email "as a stall tactic" and had never intended to make the $250,000 payment or pay the full $6 million the hackers had demanded to hold off going public with data stolen from HBO.

Nonetheless, the email failed to achieve that goal. A few days after HBO sent the note, the hackers went to the media with details of the breach.

They released an extortion note and some stolen data, including details about an upcoming episode of the network's popular drama "Game of Thrones."

Variety earlier reported details about the $250,000 offer.

Reporting by Jessica Toonkel in New York; Additional reporting by Narottam Medhora in Bengaluru; Editing by Jim Finkle and Dan Grebler
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-us...-idUKKCN1AU01B





Four Arrested for Pirating Game of Thrones Season 7

HBO claims small victory as four are arrested in India for leaking new Game of Thrones episodes online
Vaughn Highfield

Game of Thrones pirates beware. HBO has had its first real victory against pirates of its hit show as four people have been arrested for leaking new episodes ahead of release.

The Indian police have reported that they've arrested four people in conjunction with releasing Game of Thrones season 7, episode 4 ahead of its Monday airing in the country. The arrest occurred after the police received a complaint from a company responsible for storing and processing TV episodes from an app.

"We investigated the case and have arrested four individuals for unauthorised publication of the fourth episode from season seven," deputy commissioner of Police Akbar Pathan told AFP.

The four responsible for pirating the show were employees at said TV show processing company and so leaked episodes by making use of their official database access. All four have been accused of criminal breach of trust and computer-related offences and will be detained until 21 August amid investigation.

Game of Thrones is one of HBO and Sky Atlantic's flagship shows and, last month, the premiere of season 7 became the most pirated show of the year. According to Torrent Freak, more than 130,000 people were actively sharing the episode online via torrents and the first set of video files emerged within minutes of the official broadcast starting.

A quick scour online revealed that the most popular torrent from uploading group “ettv” had more than 345,000 “seeders” (people who are actively sharing the show) and 95,000 “leechers” (people pulling files from seeders and sharing them at the same time) the day after the broadcast. Like every year, it’s expected for this number to grow into the millions.

Piracy of any show is a crime, but the trouble HBO faces is the impossibility of actually catching any of those downloading Game of Thrones illegally. Even if HBO has possession of IP addresses used to download a variety of different Game of Thrones torrents, it doesn't actually know who those people are. To do so it would have to head to the courts to find out – something that's never happened before.

It's also worth remembering that many people who download from torrents also use VPNs, misleading many tracking services to the incorrect IP address.

That didn't stop HBO issuing a stern warning to the pirates. In a statement following the new series premiere, HBO said it had the IP addresses of those uploading, downloading and sharing pirated episodes of Game of Thrones and they will be dealt with imminently.

“We have information leading us to believe that the IP address xx.xxx.xxx.xx was used to download or share Game of Thrones without authorisation,” HBO's DMCA notification reads. “HBO owns the copyright or exclusive rights to Game of Thrones, and the unauthorized download or distribution constitutes copyright infringement. Downloading unauthorised or unknown content is also a security risk for computers, devices, and networks.”

In reality, it's likely that HBO just wants to make casual opportunists think twice before downloading Game of Thrones again. Coming after Game of Thrones fans with court cases wouldn't be good for business or brand image – even if these people aren't paying for it in the first place.

It’s not just torrenting that HBO has to tackle, as illegal streaming sites have also seen a huge boost in viewing figures around Game of Thrones. One such site explained to Torrent Freak that the season premiere was generating around 20,000 views per hour on its site – not a number to be sniffed at.

Despite those high streaming numbers, broadcasters remain focused on taking down torrents first.

Last year HBO tried to crack down on pirates by teaming up with IP Echelon to pull illegal content from the internet. It’s unclear how successful that’s been but, seeing as India had copies of Game of Thrones season 7 episode 1 online before HBO’s official Indian broadcast partner Hostar could air, it suggests there’s a long way to go to stop these files ending up in the wrong hands to start with.

Stemming the tide of piracy also isn’t easy when your servers all go offline once the show goes live on your catch-up service. Foxtel’s services died in Australia as did Hostar’s in India and HBO’s own servers also collapsed in a handful of other countries. Thankfully Sky Atlantic in the UK seemed to be able to manage the influx of viewers without much issue.

If you’re wondering how you can watch Game of Thrones season 7 in the UK without having to break the law to do so, take a look at our handy guide.
http://www.alphr.com/technology/1003...rones-season-7





YouTube has an Illegal TV Streaming Problem

You might be able to find a stream of your favorite show on YouTube.
Brett Williams

Most people turn to Netflix to binge watch full seasons of a single TV show, but there could be a much cheaper way: YouTube.

You might be surprised to learn that you can watch full episodes of popular TV shows on YouTube for free, thanks to a large number of rogue accounts that are hosting illegal live streams of shows.

Do you love King of the Hill? Easy. Just choose which episode you like best. The Simpsons? Plenty to pick from there, too. Or, maybe you're looking for some football? You can watch a livestream replay of the latest game easily, as if the NFL's draconian intellectual property rules mean absolutely nothing.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about these free (and very illegal) TV live streams might even make their way into your suggested video queue, if you watch enough "random shit" and Bobby Hill quote compilations on the site, as Mashable business editor Jason Abbruzzese recently experienced.

He first noticed the surprisingly high number of illegal TV streaming accounts on his YouTube homepage, which has tailored recommended videos based on his viewing habits. Personalized recommendations aren't exactly new — but the number of illegal live streams broadcasting copyrighted material on a loop was a shocker.

When we looked deeper into the livestreams, the number we found was mindblowing. Many of these accounts appear to exist solely to give watchers an endless loop of their favorite shows and only have a few other posts related to the live streamed content.

What's really strange is that there appears to be no obvious incentive for doing this, either. We can basically rule out doing it for ad money because you have to apply to be part of the YouTube Partner Program to earn any ad revenue. Your channel also needs 10,000 views to be eligible to apply, and YouTube has to approve of every account that makes it through, so none of these accounts have a chance to pass.

The audiences watching these channels are actually pretty small compared to other popular channels, too. The largest number of viewers we witnessed was just over a thousand, while many streams had only a few dozen people tuned in at any given time. Clearly, this isn't the type of content that fosters the types of large communities found elsewhere on the site.

We reached out to a few of these account holders directly on the platform, but haven't heard back from anyone as of press time.

The phenomenon seems to be rather ephemeral. Most of the accounts we viewed early in the day were shut down within just a few hours. Some of them survived for up to 20 hours after they were posted — but they were few and far between.

YouTube does its best to make it easy for people to report illegal copyright streams, which could be why the accounts are so often wiped from the site.

First, copyright holders can formally notify YouTube that they believe their materials are being improperly hosted. YouTube then reviews the offending content, and pulls it down if it's found to be infringing the copyright. Users who have multiple complaints against them can be banned from the platform entirely.

Second, there's the nearly decade-old tool called Content ID, which allows the rights holders to manage their content more directly. Copyright holders provide reference files of their content to YouTube, which feed them into the system. The tool can be used for tracking, monetization, or outright blocking content that match the copyrighted materials. There are over 8,000 partners who use this tool, a vast majority who choose to allow materials to stay up.

Video uploaders aren't exactly hung totally out to dry here, either. If a video creator receives a takedown request, they can file a counter notification. Likewise with Content ID claims — YouTube creators can dispute those, too.

We reached out to YouTube to ask about its stance on the livestreams, since the videos are so clearly outside the realm of copyright laws.

"YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders and we’ve invested heavily in copyright and content management tools to give rights holders control of their content on YouTube," a YouTube spokesperson told Mashable in an email. "When copyright holders work with us to provide reference files for their content, we ensure all live broadcasts are scanned for third party content, and we either pause or terminate streams when we find matches to third party content."

We also reached out to 20th Century Fox (the copyright holder for King of the Hill, which we found to be a commonly streamed show), but its reps had no comment on the matter.

It looks like those live streams that caught our eye are just another quirk of the live streaming video platform, which has morphed from an internet oddity for cat videos to a major streaming and music giant over the years. You might not always be able to watch your favorite shows on YouTube — especially if the copyright holder is persistent — but if you find a stream at the right moment, you might find some free binging where you least expect it. Just remember that there's a good chance the person posting the copyrighted material is breaking the law.
http://mashable.com/2017/08/16/youtu.../#VqdoN.Nc15qE





Roku Is Cracking Down on Piracy
Luke Bouma

It looks like Roku has had enough of non-certified Roku Channels allowing piracy on its devices.

Non-certified Roku Channels enable developers to publicly test Roku Channels before they submit them to the Roku Channel Store. Anyone can create a Roku Channel, and if you know the code you can add it to your Roku bypassing the Roku vetting process.

These codes are popular with Adult Channels such as PornHub because Roku does not allow adult content in the Roku Channel Store but does allow them as a private channel. It also seems to be popular with piracy channels.

Now Roku is making moves to block piracy even in non-certified Roku Channels. Recently Roku added the following warning, which anyone who tries to add a non-certified Roku Channel sees:

THIS IS A NON-CERTIFIED CHANNEL. Roku requires all channels to abide by Roku’s terms and conditions, and to distribute only legal content. Roku does not test or review non-certified channels. By continuing, you acknowledge you are accessing a non-certified channel that may include content that is offensive or inappropriate for some audiences. Moreover, if Roku determines that this channel violates copyright, contains illegal content, or otherwise violates Roku’s terms and conditions, then ROKU MAY REMOVE THIS CHANNEL WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE.

Already several Roku piracy channels have shut down and others have announced plans to pull support; however, still others seem to be waiting it out hoping to go unnoticed.

This all comes after Roku got caught up in a lawsuit in Mexico about non-certified Roku Channels that allow piracy. Because of the lawsuit that targeted the creators of the Roku Channels, a Mexican court banned all sales in Mexico. Roku is still fighting the ban of Roku sales in Mexico, but at this time the ban is still in place.

If you are just adding Roku Channels from the Roku Channel Store you have nothing to worry about. This change only effects Roku Channels you do not find inside the Roku Channel store and have to add with a code.
http://cordcuttersnews.com/roku-cracking-piracy/





‘Prominent Public Figure’ Calls Porn Site’s Tactics Extortion
Matt Reynolds

A prominent member of the LBGT community claims an adult entertainment company tried to extort him and other subscribers by falsely accusing them of pirating its content on file-sharing sites, and demanded thousands of dollars to settle the cases out of court.

Plaintiff John Doe says he is “a prominent public figure and leader in the LGBT community” in a federal action filed Tuesday in Los Angeles. He claims Phillip Bleicher, CEO of Chicago-based Flava Works, extorts subscribers by filing boilerplate lawsuits without identifying users by name.

Bleicher is not a party to Doe’s complaint.

“Defendant Flava Works operates pornographic websites for gay men. Capitalizing on the social stigma of its own product, Flava Works has apparently discovered a lucrative side business: extorting money from former subscribers by threatening to expose them as consumers of gay porn,” Doe says in his complaint.

Flava Works specializes in ethnic gay porn, according to the lawsuit.

“Even if the accusation is false, most users reluctantly pay rather than be outed in court documents as a gay porn user – especially if the victim has chosen to keep his sexual orientation private,” Doe says in his complaint.

Doe says Bleicher sent him a demand letter accusing him of pirating the company’s content, and said he could avoid legal action by paying Flava Works $97,000 – “an amount that would increase to $525,000 if not surrendered quickly,” according to the complaint.

“Bleicher was not subtle about the purpose of the payment being to avoid public humiliation, explaining that ‘[i]f you act promptly you will avoid being named as a defendant in a lawsuit,’” the 11-page federal complaint states.

Doe says the matter quickly escalated when Bleicher threatened to detail the allegations in a public news release.

On July 27, the executive sent Doe a $150,000 demand through his attorneys and tied the demand to the plaintiff’s “‘status, his career and his wealth,’” according to the complaint.

“Defendant’s demand for hush money is nothing more than a cynical attempt to extort plaintiff by threatening to expose him as a consumer of gay adult content,” Doe says, adding that Bleicher’s claims are false.

Responding to the complaint on Wednesday, Bleicher said Flava Works had filed a $1.2 million federal lawsuit in Illinois against Doe for copyright infringement.

Bleicher attached the Aug. 15 lawsuit in an email and identified Doe by name. The executive noted Doe had agreed to jurisdiction in Illinois when he agreed to the company’s terms and conditions and said the company had sent him a cease-and-desist letter, as well as a demand to settle out of court.

Doe “is a member of several illegal gay adult torrent file-sharing websites and he has been uploading and downloading Flava Works’ videos on these sites without Flava Works’ permission,” Bleicher wrote in an email. “We have ample evidence to prove that it’s him (from matching emails, IP, logs and usernames) and he continued to share our copyrighted works.”

Doe’s case makes similar allegations to a case filed several years ago in Los Angeles by a different firm, which Doe cites in his complaint.

A law firm called Prenda targeted thousands of anonymous defendants who downloaded a single copyrighted porn movie from the peer-to-peer file-sharing network BitTorrent. The firm then filed lawsuits in federal courts against Doe defendants to secure quick $4,000 settlements.

In 2013, U.S. District Judge Otis Wright ruled Prenda’s business model meant that “copyright laws originally designed to compensate starving artists allow starving attorneys in this electronic media era to plunder the citizenry.”

Doe seeks a determination that he has not infringed Flava Works’ copyrights, as well as attorneys’ fees.

He is represented by Ben Meiselas of Geragos & Geragos.
https://www.courthousenews.com/promi...ics-extortion/





Google Researchers Made an Algorithm to Delete Watermarks from Photos
Khari Johnson

Researchers at Google have found a vulnerability in the way watermarks are used by stock imagery sites like Adobe Stock that makes it possible to remove the opaque stamp used to protect copyright.

The consistent way in which the watermarks are placed on photos can be exploited using an algorithm trained to recognize and automatically remove them.

“As often done with vulnerabilities discovered in operating systems, applications or protocols, we want to disclose this vulnerability and propose solutions in order to help the photography and stock image communities adapt and better protect its copyrighted content and creations,” research scientists Tali Dekel and Michael Rubenstein wrote in a blog post today. “From our experiments, much of the world’s stock imagery is currently susceptible to this circumvention.”

Changing the position or opacity of a watermark does not impact the algorithm’s ability to remove the watermark from images. Randomization, the researchers say, is required to keep images from being stolen.

In results presented at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference last month, subtle modifications to each watermark can make it harder to remove them. Attempts to get rid of these “warped” watermarks with an algorithm or photo editing software leaves noticeable marks, rendering an image useless.

“While we cannot guarantee that there will not be a way to break such randomized watermarking schemes in the future, we believe (and our experiments show) that randomization will make watermarked collection attacks fundamentally more difficult,” Dekel and Rubenstein wrote.

To see the full report and research, visit the project’s GitHub page.
https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/17/g...s-from-photos/





Cox to Begin Charging $50 Extra to Avoid Usage Caps This Week
Karl Bode

Company insiders tell DSLReports.com that Cox Communications will unveil a new option for customers this week allowing them to avoid usage caps and overage fees for an additional $50 more every month. Earlier this year we were the first to report that Cox Communications had started to ramp up deployment of unnecessary and confusing new usage caps and overage fees. Sources familiar with Cox's plans say the company will make a formal announcement about two changes to the company's usage cap and overage plans starting this week, Wednesday August 15.

As it stands, users in capped markets face a one terabyte cap, after which their only option is paying $10 per each 50 GB of data consumed.

But under Cox's upcoming new plans, users that head over the company's terabyte plan have two options:

• Pay an additional $50 per month on top of what they pay now to avoid usage caps entirely.

• Pay an additional $30 per month for 500 GB of additional data.

A memo being circulated among employees on the changes downplays the impact of these restrictions on consumers, repeatedly trying to argue that confusing and unnecessary usage limits aren't a big deal because the majority of Cox customers won't run afoul of them...today.

"An overwhelming majority of data is consumed by a very small percentage of internet users," a memo to employees documenting the changes reads. "The new choices are great options for the small percentage of heavy users who routinely use 1TB+ per month and prefer a flat monthly rate, rather than purchasing additional data blocks."

"In Cox markets with usage-based billing, the less than two percent of customers who exceed the amount of data included in their plan still have the option of paying $10 for each additional 50 GB of data when they need it," the memo insists.

Of course this downplays the fact that usage caps and overage fees on fixed-line networks are absolutely unnecessary, don't help manage congestion and are little more than price hikes on captive consumers in uncompetitive broadband markets.

And while it's easy to fall into a debate over whether "one terabyte is perfectly reasonable for most people" -- that completely misses the point. Usage caps and overage fees are arbitrary and unnecessary price hikes on consumers, only made possible by the lack of competition. They do not help manage congestion, and flat-rate pricing is perfectly profitable. And if the "very small percentage" of heavy users were really a problem, Cox could shove those users toward business-class tiers -- without having to impose confusing new penalties on all of its subscribers.

No, these usage caps and overage fees are solely about charging you more money for the same product, while simultaneously penalizing and cashing in on customer usage of streaming video alternatives as 4K streaming looms on the horizon. Of course companies like Cox can't admit this, so when they notify customers of these kinds of changes they don't even bother to provide any sensible justification for the changes whatsoever.
https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/...is-Week-140125





T-Mobile Just Took a Huge Step Towards Beating Verizon Once and for All
Chris Mills

This April, T-Mobile spent $8 billion on new low-band spectrum to improve its wireless network. As of right now, that network is online. A “cluster site” in Cheyenne, Wyoming, is the first place in the country to be lit up with T-Mobile’s 600MHz LTE network.

Neville Ray, T-Mobile’s Chief Technology Officer, described the rollout as a “massive milestone” for T-Mobile, and one that should “materially close” T-Mobile’s existing coverage gap with Verizon “by the end of the year.”

To call it a “massive milestone” is really an understatement. Normally, rolling out new spectrum takes years. Verizon, for example, bought 700MHz spectrum from the FCC in a similar auction in 2008, and didn’t turn the network on until 2010. Ray said that “the FCC only granted the licenses in June, so to have the network online by August…is much faster than anyone expected.”

600MHz spectrum is going to be a big deal for T-Mobile as it should finally fix the network’s coverage problems. Cell networks operate across dozens of different “bands,” and broadly speaking, the lower the frequency, the better the coverage. Lower-frequency radio waves travel further and penetrate objects better, which in the real world means superior coverage in rural areas and inside buildings — everywhere that Verizon’s network, thanks to a wealth of low-band spectrum, currently excels.

The site in Wyoming that’s live today is the first of many that should go live by the end of the year. The map above (from a FCC filing) shows where T-Mobile is planning on building out coverage to in 2017, and that includes 600MHz sites in Wyoming, Northwest Oregon, West Texas, Southwest Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, Western North Dakota, Maine, Coastal North Carolina, Central Pennsylvania, Central Virginia and Eastern Washington.

Rolling out 600MHz is particularly challenging because in most cases, there are TV stations using the spectrum right now. Those stations are moving to different frequencies, and T-Mobile is paying out of its own pocket to accelerate the process.

Unfortunately, all that doesn’t mean that T-Mobile’s customers are going to have fantastic service overnight. 600MHz isn’t a frequency that’s been used for LTE anywhere in the world before, so no current devices support it. Ray confirmed that “Samsung and LG will have phones in stores by the end of the year” that support 600MHz, and also said that “as T-Mobile gets more partners and devices, there will be a tidal wave of [600MHz compatible devices] in 2018.” He also stressed that T-Mobile is putting” as much, if not more effort into devices than the network,” but “the network has to come first.”

In other words: it’s an exciting time to be a T-Mobile customer.

600MHz isn’t the only place that T-Mobile is working to improve its network, either. Right now, T-Mobile is deploying thousands of small cell sites across the US, all of which are compatible with License Assisted Access (LAA), a technology that uses Wi-Fi spectrum to achieve crazy-fast speeds. That will help with network congestion in places like airports and shopping malls, where thousands of devices can be trying to download a Snapchat at once.

Ray also mentioned one piece of news to BGR that bodes well for the future: all the 600MHz radios that T-Mobile is deploying right now should be compatible with the 5G standard when it’s finalized next year. T-Mobile has already committed to having a nationwide 5G network by the end of the decade, and this is is going to be a big part of it. When the 5G standards are finalized, T-Mobile shouldn’t have to change anything on the cell towers to convert its 600MHz LTE network to 5G.

The bottom line is simple. Right now — depending on which benchmark you look at — T-Mobile is equal or better than Verizon and AT&T on download speed, but a little behind in coverage. The record-speed 600Mhz deployment will close that coverage gap, and then some. At the same time, T-Mobile is building out much of the infrastructure that will power 5G in the coming years, all while also deploying advanced LTE tech that can deliver gigabit speeds right now. Verizon and AT&T are officially on notice.
http://bgr.com/2017/08/16/t-mobile-c...yment-wyoming/





As Net Neutrality Dies, One Man Wants to Make Verizon Pay for its Sins

Alex Nguyen filed the only formal net neutrality complaint, and he’s still waiting for an answer
Jacob Kastrenakes

Imagine if you took every single gripe you've had with Verizon over the past five years — the time it blocked Nexus 7 tablets for five months; the time it forced you to pay $20 per month for tethering; the time it tried to make you use a mobile wallet app called "ISIS" — and finally put your foot down. For a year, you spend free moments holed up in library stacks, speaking with experts, and researching and writing a sprawling legal complaint about the company's many, many misdeeds. And then you file it all with the FCC, hoping to get some payback.

That's exactly what Alex Nguyen did. And one day very soon, Verizon may have to answer for it.

Nguyen is a recent college graduate living in Santa Clara, California. And for much of 2015, he spent his time digging through years of Verizon's public statements and actions, assembling more than 300 citations into a 112-page document that could well have been his master's thesis. (In fact, he studied computer science.) The document catalogs a dozen questionable actions Verizon has taken since 2012, assembling a body of evidence in an attempt to prove that the carrier has violated a number of open internet protections.

"“Carriers have been doing this forever. Verizon, in particular, has been one of most brazen.""

Finally, when he wrapped up in the middle of last year, Nguyen paid a $225 filing fee and handed his complaint over to the FCC. It would end up being the only formal complaint filed under the net neutrality rules.

The complaint kicked off a back-and-forth process of objections, evidence discovery, and failed mediation to reach a resolution. Along the way, there have been some hilariously petty digressions, which Nguyen, untrained in the law, has handled patiently. At one point, Verizon objected to his definition of “Verizon” and proposed its own definition. Nguyen then objected to Verizon’s objection, saying that Verizon “copied my definition almost verbatim,” which, in fact, it had.

Now one year after Nguyen's initial filing date, all the arguing is over, and the case is the in hands of the commission's Enforcement Bureau to either shoot down, deliver a fine, or demand Verizon make some changes.

"Verizon and I made our cases," Nguyen said. "It looks as though [the FCC's Enforcement Bureau] staff any day now could make a decision."

Nguyen's complaints are comprehensive and wide-ranging. He points to Verizon temporarily blocking the Nexus 7, third-party iPhone 6s, and third-party Nexus 6s. He brings up Verizon charging people more for bringing their own phones to the network. He argues Verizon compelled phone providers to disable FM radios. He also mentions Verizon blocking PayPal, OneDrive, Samsung Pay, and other built-in apps.

"Nguyen appears to have used more than two dozen phones and tablets on Verizon"

Altogether, he alleges, Verizon has violated openness rules in six different ways, ranging from discriminatory pricing, to limiting customer choice, to simply lying about its network.

"Carriers have been doing this forever," Nguyen said. "Verizon, in particular, has been one of most brazen."

As an example, Nguyen points to Verizon's handling of the Apple SIM — a SIM card that's designed to let iPad owners change their phone carrier with the press of a button. Sprint and T-Mobile let the SIM card work as intended. But AT&T and Verizon didn't. Asked why, AT&T plainly said it didn't want to. "It's just simply the way we’ve chosen to do it," a spokesperson told Recode. But Verizon offered a series of explanations that Nguyen doesn't find all that convincing.

"With Verizon it’s always, ‘We’re blocking these features as a fraud prevention tactic,’ or ‘It didn’t pass our certification requirement that we’re not gonna talk about,’ or ‘It didn’t pass these requirements that were never specified,’" he said. "There’s always this pattern of deception with Verizon.”

Though Nguyen isn’t a lawyer — he currently works in law enforcement — he speaks with the care and precision of one, unwilling to say anything that might be used against him in the proceeding. “I think they're gonna make a case based on the record and the facts,” he said at one point, when asked how he feels about a commission intent on dismantling net neutrality being the one to rule on his complaint.

"The FCC missed Nguyen’s complaint when writing up its proposal to kill net neutrality"

But Nguyen is freer when talking about why he went through all of this. He loves gadgets, he says, and wants to be able to use them to their fullest extent. In the complaint, Nguyen appears to have used over two dozen phones and tablets on Verizon’s network over the past several years. In another one of those petty retorts, however, he refused to confirm exactly which phones he used after being asked by Verizon, saying that the company ought to just look through its own records.

“I'm a gadget freak, so I always have lots of stuff, even across multiple carriers besides Verizon,” Nguyen said. Nguyen was originally a Verizon customer through his parents. But eventually he got his own line, despite his problems with the company. “[I’m buying] devices on multiple carriers because I like to tinker.”

Though Nguyen has been arguing with Verizon for over a year at this point, his complaint has gone largely unnoticed. Even officials at the FCC may not have known about it. In April, when the commission released the first draft of its proposal to strike down its latest net neutrality rules, the text said that "since these rules were formally codified in 2010, no formal complaints have been filed under them."

It turns out, there was one, and only one: Nguyen's. And the commission had to correct for that in the finalized proposal it released a month later. The Verge caught the error and pointed it out in an article the next day. Nguyen, who was still voraciously scanning news about open internet proceedings, took notice.

"I've been so busy that, until I read your article, I was unaware that the [FCC's proposal] referenced my complaint," he wrote me in an email the next month. "The error in the draft NPRM released last month raises the question of whether staff forgot to double-check the list of pending formal complaints because they were under pressure to 'focus' on the current chairman's agenda."

In the proposal, the FCC questions whether open internet rules are even needed since only a single complaint has been filed under them. "Does the lack of formal complaints indicate that dedicated, formal enforcement procedures are unwarranted?" the proposal asks.

"Well over 35,000 informal complaints have been filed — but the FCC overlooks them"

But that phrasing wiggles around something important. The FCC also has an informal complaint system, which doesn't require the months of leg work that can go into a filing like Nguyen's. There’s a big difference between the two of them: informal complaints may end with something as simple as an emailed response from the FCC or the ISP, trying to offer help or claiming that nothing’s wrong. Formal complaints, on the other hand, are “similar to court proceedings” and are usually argued by lawyers, according to the FCC. And critically, they end with a ruling from the commission’s Enforcement Bureau.

In addition to requiring far less work, the informal complaint system doesn't require filers to pay a fee, and it's received well over 35,000 complaints so far. In fact, the first informal complaint was filed just a week after the net neutrality rules went into place in June 2015. It was filed by Barry Bahrami, CEO of Commercial Network Services, who said he was being charged unfair rates by Time Warner Cable. But, he says now, it didn't go very well.

"My experience with the whole process was beyond disappointing," Bahrami says. "They really didn't do anything but open a ticket system for us to keep taking stabs at each other."

""I would have been fighting an uphill battle.""

Bahrami says the problem was never resolved. And though he could have elevated his complaint to the formal level, like Nguyen did, he decided against it — in part because of the money and work that'd be needed. "It wouldn't have been the money, for starters," Bahrami said. "I would have been fighting an uphill battle."

Nguyen says his filing, even if it’s the only one, is proof that open internet rules and a complaint process are much needed. "I think the record I've shown in the complaint indicates that yes, [carriers will do bad things]," he said.

Nguyen's filing was started long before the election and the seemingly imminent repeal of net neutrality, but it's come to feel like a last-ditch effort to get something out of the policy before it's gone — to finally see an internet provider answer for its apparent misdeeds. But the longer the commission goes without ruling on Nguyen's complaint, the bigger the risk that net neutrality will be over before it happens.

If that happens, Nguyen has a plan to keep his fight alive. It relies on something called the C Block rules. Verizon is bound to a secondary set of openness rules that it had to accept in order to license a certain slice of wireless spectrum. Because of that, Verizon could still be on the hook for a lot of his complaints, even if the net neutrality order goes down.

"Verizon is bound to openness rules beyond net neutrality"

Those rules state that any carrier using that spectrum "shall not deny, limit, or restrict the ability of their customers to use the devices and applications of their choice." Since the majority of Nguyen's claims involve Verizon blocking access to devices and apps, the FCC should still have to rule on them.

Matt Wood, policy director at the communication advocacy group Free Press, said Nguyen's complaint “looked more careful than one might have expected for an average person” and that Nguyen’s use of both the net neutrality rules and the C Block rules is “certainly wise [given] where we find ourselves right now.”

Verizon has denied all of Nguyen's claims. "Mr. Nugyen (sic) is mistaken,” the company wrote in an email to The Verge. “His complaint misstates the facts and misinterprets the law. Verizon is committed to an open internet and complies with the FCC's transparency and access rules."

The commission is now months past its self-imposed deadline for ruling on Nguyen’s complaint. Nguyen filed a follow-up note in July urging the enforcement bureau to rule soon, but it still remains unclear when a final decision will come down. The FCC declined to comment.
"Net neutrality is months away from being reversed"

It's easy to see why the commission might be dallying on this. The 2015 Open Internet Order is likely to be shot down in the next few months, which would change the facts of this proceeding. And while Verizon may have agreed to these additional openness rules, they're restrictions that current FCC leadership likely isn't a huge fan of. If the commission wants to let Verizon off the hook, waiting ought to make that easier.

Nguyen says he's not that worried about his complaint being delayed for political reasons. But he recognizes that it's become even more important now that the net neutrality rules are almost gone. He still hopes for his case to prove "that these things actually do violate the open internet rules." And if he forces Verizon to make some changes, too, then all the better.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/9/16...lex-nguyen-fcc





Wall Street Merger Mania Is Driving Us Toward One Single, Horrible ISP - Probably Named Comcast
Karl Bode

Many consumers are still reeling from a Charter, Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable merger that left users with slower speeds, worse service, and higher prices. Other broadband consumers are still struggling with a bungled Frontier acquisition of Verizon assets that left users with prolonged outages and even worse customer service than the shitshow they already enjoyed. As we've seen for decades, this kind of mindless consolidation traditionally only benefits the companies involved, particularly in a market where real competition is in short supply.

This growth for growth's sake is one of the major reasons Comcast -- and its horrible customer service (which didn't scale with the company's expansion because that would have cost money) -- exists. And Wall Street's relentless thirst for growth at all costs is a major reason these companies can't simply focus on being the best "dumb pipes" possible, instead focusing their attentions on expanding into markets they have little expertise in (see Verizon's ingenious plan to hoover up failed 90s brands and pander to Millennials). When they can't succeed because they're out of their depth, they try to tilt the playing field (killing net neutrality).

There's oodles of history lessons here, and there's every indication we intend to learn nothing from them. With the ink barely dry on Charter's troubled deal, and the Trump administration signaling that no merger is too big or too absurd, Wall Street analysts have been positively giddy this year pondering megamergers in telecom that had previously been unthinkable on anti-competitive or antitrust grounds. That has included heavy pushes for a Sprint acquisition of T-Mobile or a Verizon bid to buy Comcast -- the massive, obvious anti-competitive impact of both deals be damned.

This week, the merger mania du jour apparently involves a plan that would involve Comcast and French-owned Altice working in concert to buy Charter Communications, whose $180 billion asking price has proven too steep for any one company to contemplate alone (Verizon made a $100 billion offer and was rejected). Citigroup has floated the idea that after acquisition, Comcast could integrate the Time Warner Cable customers they were blocked by regulators from acquiring for anti-competitive reasons, leaving us with one giant cable company to rule us all:

"Charter is pretty much an equal rival in size and scope to Comcast at this point, at least with regards to subscriber numbers. Each company has somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 million customers. For the two to merge outright would leave one dominant cable company in the country, with about half of the entire nation’s subscribers — from coast to coast, and in many of the states in between — under a single umbrella."

Granted there's no guarantee such a deal will happen. Wall Street stock jocks often like to float rumors then profit off of the herk and jerk of stock prices caused by the half-truths they themselves create. But should Comcast be able to swing such a deal, we could be looking at a supernova of anti-competitive dysfunction, the likes of which made Comcast's well documented issues seem charming.

Consider that cable's monopoly was already blossoming thanks to the countless telcos which have effectively stopped trying to compete -- in large part because Wall Street thinks spending money to upgrade your networks is a fool's errand. Then ponder the fact that the current FCC is busy gutting any and all meaningful oversight of these companies, allowing them to inevitably engage in all manner of anti-competitive shenanigans, from arbitrary and punitive usage caps, to net neutrality and privacy violations.

This all may sound like hyperbole, but it's a future that's very much under construction. And the folks giddily contemplating the "looming synergies" of such monumental coagulation are building it with absolutely zero concern for the impact on consumers, startups, small businesses or the health of the internet. Telecom sector executives and the folks paid to cheer their every decision have every intention of taking the already dismal Comcast experience, injecting it with steroids, and setting it loose on a market with no organic competitive or regulatory checks and balances. And by the time most notice the negative repercussions, these same folks will already be hyping the next wave of mindless consolidation.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...-comcast.shtml





FCC Faces Backlash for Saying Americans Might Not Need Fast Home Internet

Everyone should have fast home Internet and mobile access, commenters tell FCC.
Jon Brodkin

American Internet users are telling the Federal Communications Commission that mobile broadband is not a full replacement for fast home Internet service. This week, the FCC kicked off its annual analysis of broadband deployment and signaled that it might determine that smartphone access is a proper substitute for cable or fiber Internet. In doing so, the FCC could conclude that broadband is already being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, and thus the commission could take fewer steps to promote deployment and competition.

There have been over 300 new comments filed since we wrote about this two days ago, almost universally lambasting the FCC's suggestion that Americans might not need fast home Internet service and could make do with mobile broadband only. Mobile is hindered by data caps, limits on tethering, and reliability problems that make it fall short of a wired Internet connection, people told the FCC.

The FCC's own analysis acknowledged that mobile broadband needs to be judged differently. The commission proposed a mobile broadband speed standard of 10Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream, less than half as fast as the FCC's home broadband speed standard of 25Mbps/3Mbps.

Yet FCC Chairman Ajit Pai could conclude that wide swaths of the country have good enough broadband access if they are covered only by wireless carriers offering slower speeds than by cable or fiber ISPs. By contrast, former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler concluded that Americans should have access to both fast home Internet and mobile broadband.

"Y'all are insane," Kevin Lenau of Texas told the FCC this week. "How can you possibly believe 10Mbps is broadband or that mobile is an alternative to broadband? Please wake up to 2017 and increase competition and decrease barriers of entry for rural area broadband."

You can file comments at this link; initial comments are due September 7, and reply comments are due September 22.

A few hundred comments isn't a huge amount for an FCC proceeding. But according to Pai, the raw number of comments is less important than the substance of the comments. Let's take a look at some of the comments that have come in so far.

Data caps and other limits hinder mobile

Daniel Hoon of Pennsylvania: "Wireless Internet connections can in no way replace a wired broadband connection. Wired broadband connections provide an always-on Internet connection with no (or very high) data caps as compared to wireless plans. A wireless plan for my family to use Internet at home would cost thousands of dollars per month versus our current payment of $75.00/month. We already have zero competition at our home (Comcast only) and would like to see more Internet providers, not less."

Jessica Starkey of Pennsylvania: "Americans need both fixed AND mobile broadband! Mobile is very limited in comparison and works differently from fixed broadband internet, and has data caps with expensive fees for going over them (unlike fixed Internet). You can't run a business on purely mobile, nor is it really acceptable for home usage unless all you do is dick around on Facebook all day‚ something that politicians (incorrectly) seem to think is the only thing the general population uses Internet for. It's not an acceptable replacement and BOTH need to be monitored and deployed. Maintain Wheeler's initial determination!"

Jonathan Fair of Virginia: "Mobile Internet is not a sufficient substitute for 'fixed' broadband Internet. The speeds are much more limited, their capacity to handle higher load is highly limited by available spectrum (which is getting rather crowded) and also the number of users hitting a single tower. I do not support a merging of these two to satisfy section 706 [of the Telecommunications Act]. America is far behind other countries when it comes to average Internet speeds and how many people have access to high-speed (25Mbps or higher) Internet."

William Bennett of Arkansas: "My service provider has a 10GB limit, so 10 or 25Mbps it really does not matter. I max out my data after streaming in a few hours. Consider the percentage of people who do not have unlimited data plans in your formula for service speeds."

Kyle Templin of Illinois: "I do not think that 10/1 mobile Internet is enough speed to be considered a substitute for a fixed Internet connection. Mobile is unreliable and the throughput especially for uploading is atrocious. If I was forced to rely on solely mobile Internet for my needs I would not be able to reasonably meet goals and deadlines in my personal life."

Don't forget about rural areas

Justin Hopkins of Missouri: "ISPs were handed money to expand broadband service to rural areas. This was defined at the time. Lowering the bar now only serves to let them off the hook for robbing the taxpayers; and you would be the enablers of that crime. Mobile data service should not, and logically cannot, be considered broadband unless they can consistently provide the current minimum of 25/3Mbps without caps or device (hotspot/tethering) restrictions. Yet, you are proposing to not only ignore the latter, but also neuter the former requirement. I ask that you protect the People, rather than further empowering the corporations that will, and have proven to, take advantage of us."

Michael Smith of Virginia: "Unless mobile ISPs are going to change their own policies (or the FCC change them) to remove data cap limits and tethering restrictions, and all of the other rules that mobile ISPs demanded to differentiate themselves from wired ISPs, rural areas cannot be considered 'covered by broadband.' I used to live in an area like this and the data cap limitations themselves prevent safe access by not allowing large downloads of operating system updates. Please do not change guidelines for ISPs prior to a real-life demonstration that proves they could provide the same access as a wired provider."

Tom Gourlay of New Jersey: "As someone that lives in a rural area, I feel my cellphone is not adequate for our needs, and having DSL is too slow for keeping up with our Internet connection. I know we need both and feel companies have been terrible in providing broadband to rural areas even ones in a state as NJ. No one wants to put it where we live. Don't count wireless as broadband and make companies build out their broadband to those of us that need and want it."

We need fast home Internet for work

Aaron Letts of Michigan: "In the world we live in the Internet is used not only for frivolities like entertainment and non-essential communication, but also education and employment, two aspects that are the very center point of many Americans' lives. Online classes, both at the college and K-12 levels are becoming more and more prevalent, and the number of workers who are telecommuting to jobs on the other side of the country increases every day. For these applications as well as the less 'important' ones, mobile broadband alone does not cut it."

Margaret Garberick of Minnesota: "Lots of us work remotely. Slower Internet will not help. You can't look at a server on your phone—companies don't allow it so we need better coverage. And it could cost jobs if this is cut, defeating the purpose of creating more jobs as your administration keeps promising.

Luke of North Carolina: "The idea that mobile Internet can replace ground broadband is laughable. The idea that perhaps Americans don't need high-speed Internet is laughable. 10 meg down and 1 meg up is not going to cut it for anything of real use to citizens. Any person who works at home is going to need at least 10 meg down and 3-4 meg up just for themselves, not taking into consideration that the average family has 5-10 devices connected and a few of those are probably watching HD video at the same time.

Anthony de Araujo of Pennsylvania: "Mobile 'broadband' is NOT even close to sufficient for a regular American household. With streaming services popping up left and right, and with telecommuters like myself, 25Mbps is ludicrous... Picture this, my household: husband and wife, 6 'kids' ranging in age from 24-32; two spouses of said kids; ALL streaming one thing or another; all while I'm trying to work."

The FCC is helping corporations, not citizens

Alan Mandel of Massachusetts: "Ah, regulatory capture in action! Clearly every technologically astute employee of the FCC is fully aware that mobile broadband is no substitute for fast fixed-line broadband. Mobile broadband usually offers lower bandwidth, along with higher latency that decreases responsiveness. It's also less reliable, less consistent, costs more for most users, is more likely to have data caps, [and] is much, much more hostile to privacy. With climate change, you can deny it all you want, but that only serves to amplify the inevitable warming. Similarly, you can do the ISPs' bidding and deem mobile broadband an adequate substitute for fixed-line, but that will simply increase the number of Americans suffering with inadequate and expensive Internet service, and amplify our lack of competitiveness with nations that develop their communications policy for the primary benefit of citizens, and not the bottom line of mammoth corporations."

Samantha Kingston of Colorado: "This is a blatant attempt to give the telecommunications industry a free pass on deploying broadband to all Americans, including Americans in rural areas. Access to information is considered a right in an era where an Internet connection is necessary to conduct everyday business and personal tasks. In an increasingly paperless and digital world, everyone needs broadband access. This is a particularly disgusting and classist move by a government who claims to scorn the so-called elites and officials who supposedly understand the need of 'everyday Americans.' If you want to show you actually understand the needs of rural people, you will not do this."

Mobile isn’t good enough for entertainment

Matthew Montgomery of Texas: "I work in the gaming industry and making the wireless network count as a broadband network is downright laughable. Wireless networks can not give any user a consistent ping rate and the speeds jump all over the place. Not only that but most games now are about a 50GB download which is WAY past anyone's data caps. Unless the carriers can guarantee a 1TB data cap like what they do for their broadband cable version and be able to deliver a constant ping rate then this would stifle the video gaming sector."

No name given, from Colorado: "Millions of households in the US stream HD movies, play online games, and browse social media. Mobile Internet is definitely not the solution. You are severely out of touch if you think so and should resign from the FCC if you don't understand how the masses communicate to begin with."

Lynnette Gill of Colorado: "Mobile service does not make up for or replace fixed service. I have a low data plan on my phone because I use my wireless at home. It would be cost prohibitive to have a big enough data plan on my phone to do all the things I do on my Internet at home. You can't play MMORPGs on a phone, you can't stream movie services on your phone."

Kevin Tilton of New Jersey: "Mobile broadband is not a suitable replacement for fixed access services to the Internet. Both of these serve different needs in the life of the average American. Mobile broadband allows one to continuously stay in contact with family friends and others, but has issues accessing the wealth of content such as online-based education and entertainment; whether that be due to issues with formatting of content or the speed of the connection itself."

Lower standard for mobile isn't technology-neutral

Will Noble of Massachusetts: "You've asked whether your inquiry would best follow the statutory instruction to evaluate the deployment of advanced telecommunications capability 'without regard to any transmission media or technology.' However, you've decided to distinguish between fixed and mobile broadband by setting different standards: 25Mbps/3Mbps for fixed and 10Mbps/1Mbps for mobile. This shows me that you are not seeking to deploy advanced telecommunications capability 'without regard to any transmission media or technology.' If you were to set the standard for advanced capability independently of the medium, by upgrading the standard of mobile broadband to 25Mbps/3Mbps, I would be satisfied. If you were to do so by downgrading the standard of fixed broadband to 10Mbps/1Mbps, I would be quite disappointed (and so would the vast majority of Americans), but at least you would be adhering to your statutory instruction."
https://arstechnica.com/information-...ns-tell-fcc/2/





AT&T’s Attempt to Stall Google Fiber Construction Thrown Out by Judge

AT&T sued Louisville over pole attachment rule, but judge says rule is valid.
Jon Brodkin

AT&T has lost a court case in which it tried to stall construction by Google Fiber in Louisville, Kentucky.

AT&T sued the local government in Louisville and Jefferson County in February 2016 to stop a One Touch Make Ready Ordinance designed to give Google Fiber and other new ISPs quicker access to utility poles. But yesterday, US District Court Judge David Hale dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, saying AT&T's claims that the ordinance is invalid are false.

"We are currently reviewing the decision and our next steps," AT&T said when contacted by Ars today.

One Touch Make Ready rules let ISPs make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles themselves instead of having to wait for other providers like AT&T to send work crews to move their own wires. Without One Touch Make Ready rules, the pole attachment process can cause delays of months before new ISPs can install service to homes.

Google Fiber has continued construction in Louisville despite the lawsuit and staff cuts that affected deployments in other cities.

AT&T’s claims picked apart by judge

AT&T claimed that Louisville has no jurisdiction under federal or state law to regulate pole attachments, an argument that the district court judge picked apart. AT&T argued that the rule referred to in-court documents as Ordinance No. 21 "impermissibly regulates the terms and conditions of pole attachments," but in doing so AT&T "narrowly characterize[d] Ordinance No. 21 as one that regulates pole attachments," the judge wrote. In reality, "the ordinance actually prescribes the 'method or manner of encumbering or placing burdens on' public rights-of-way," Hale wrote.

Kentucky's state Public Service Commission has exclusive jurisdiction over regulation of rates and services of utilities, but cities are allowed to "regulate local utilities in every area except as to rates and service," the judge wrote.

"Louisville Metro has an important interest in managing its public rights-of-way to maximize efficiency and enhance public safety," Hale wrote. "And Kentucky law preserves the right of cities to regulate public rights-of-way. Because Ordinance No. 21 regulates public rights-of-way, it is within Louisville Metro’s constitutional authority to enact the ordinance, and [Kentucky law] cannot limit that authority."

AT&T's claim that federal law invalidates Louisville's ordinance failed to convince the judge as well. The Federal Communications Commission helped Louisville on this front with a court filing in October 2016; the FCC said that states are allowed to opt out of the federal rules governing access to utility poles and that Kentucky is one of 20 states that has opted out of the federal regime and imposed its own rules.

The judge agreed with the FCC and Louisville, writing that "While Ordinance No. 21 imposes requirements that are different from the FCC’s regulations, AT&T’s federal preemption argument fails as a matter of law because the FCC regulations at issue do not apply in Kentucky."

Most of the poles used by AT&T in Louisville are owned by AT&T or Louisville Gas & Electric.

AT&T also claimed that Louisville Metro did not follow its own requirements when enacting the ordinance. This was an attempt to invalidate the ordinance on a technicality related to how the metro government amended its municipal code.

"The Metro Council uses the 'strike-through and underscoring method' of amending the municipal Code, which identifies both the language to be repealed and the new language to be added," Hale wrote. "This is the longstanding practice of the Metro Council when enacting ordinances that amend the Code. AT&T has failed to show how this method is inconsistent with the requirements."

Charter lawsuit still pending

Charter also sued Louisville over the One Touch Make Ready ordinance. That lawsuit is still pending and appears to be heading to trial. Besides objecting to One Touch Make Ready, Charter also alleged that Louisville has given preferential treatment to both AT&T and Google Fiber.

While AT&T operates under a historic state-issued telecommunications franchise, it was not required to obtain a separate franchise from Louisville Metro Council, Charter says. Louisville regulates Charter as a "Cable Communications System," but Charter says that Louisville is placing less burdensome regulations on Google Fiber by treating it as a 'Communications Service' provider instead.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-construction/





MIT Researchers Use Machine Learning to Kill Video Buffering
Abhimanyu Ghoshal

Don’t you just hate it when the YouTube clip you’re trying to watch pauses midway to buffer, or drastically lowers the resolution to a pixelated mess? A group of MIT researchers believe they’ve figured out a solution to those annoyances plaguing millions of people a day.

Using machine learning, the Pensieve system figures out the optimal algorithm to use for delivering video at the best possible resolution while avoiding buffering breaks, no matter what connection you’re on.

That’s kind of what YouTube and Netflix already strive to do, but the researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) say that the systems currently have to make a trade-off between the quality of the video versus how often it has to rebuffer in order to prepare the next segment of the clip for viewing.

By using an AI to learn what algorithm works best in various conditions – including, for example, instances when you’re heading into a tunnel where connectivity is sketchy, and when you’re in a crowded area with thousands of other network users – Pensieve is said to cut rebuffering by up to 30 percent.

The team says it’s tested its system with just a month’s worth of video content; exposing it to more data, like Netflix’s entire catalog, could help boost its performance even further. The technology could also prove useful in applications like streaming high-resolution VR content.

The researchers will present their paper at the upcoming SIGCOMM Conference in Los Angeles, and also plan to open-source the project subsequently. You can learn more about how it works on this page.
https://thenextweb.com/artificial-in...deo-buffering/





How a Conservative TV Giant Is Ridding Itself of Regulation
Cecilia Kang, Eric Lipton and Sydney Ember

The day before President Trump’s inauguration, the top executive of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation’s largest owner of television stations, invited an important guest to the headquarters of the company’s Washington-area ABC affiliate.

The trip was, in the parlance of the business world, a deal closer.

The invitation from David D. Smith, the chairman of Sinclair, went to Ajit V. Pai, a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission who was about to be named the broadcast industry’s chief regulator. Mr. Smith wanted Mr. Pai to ease up on efforts under President Barack Obama to crack down on media consolidation, which were threatening Sinclair’s ambitions to grow even bigger.

Mr. Smith did not have to wait long.

Within days of their meeting, Mr. Pai was named chairman of the F.C.C. And during his first 10 days on the job, he relaxed a restriction on television stations’ sharing of advertising revenue and other resources — the exact topic that Mr. Pai discussed with Mr. Smith and one of his business partners, according to records examined by The New York Times.

“These are invaluable and effective tools, which were taken away by the commission,” according to a summary of their meeting filed with the F.C.C.

It was only the beginning. Since becoming chairman in January, Mr. Pai has undertaken a deregulatory blitz, enacting or proposing a wish list of fundamental policy changes advocated by Mr. Smith and his company. Hundreds of pages of emails and other documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal a rush of regulatory actions has been carefully aligned with Sinclair’s business objectives.

The moves, which include easing a cap on how many stations a broadcaster can own, have opened up lucrative opportunities for Mr. Smith, among them a $3.9 billion bid to buy Tribune Media, another large owner of stations.

Mr. Pai’s deregulatory drive has also helped win him a following as a champion of pro-business, conservative causes — even leading some Republicans to approach him since he was first named to the F.C.C. in 2012 about running for elected office.

Sinclair’s Expanding Range

The Sinclair Broadcast Group owns or operates 173 television stations across the country, almost three times the number it had in 2010. If a proposed merger with Tribune Media is approved, Sinclair would add 42 stations in spots across the United States, making its reach even broader.

Television stations owned or operated by the Sinclair Broadcast Group

NUMBER OF

STATIONS

175

Currently:

NUMBER OF STATIONS

173 stations

5

150

1

Stations fully owned and

operated by Sinclair

125

Operated under a shared

services agreement

100

Operated under a local

marketing agreement

50 percent owned

by Sinclair

75

After potential merger with Tribune Media:

215 stations

NEW OR EXPANDED

MARKETS

50

25

0

’96

’00

’04

’08

’12

’16
Sources: Company websites; S.E.C. filings; Free Press

By The New York Times

An examination of the F.C.C. records shows that the Smith-Pai alliance does not follow the familiar script of a lobbyist with deep pockets influencing policy. Instead, it is a case of a powerful regulator and an industry giant sharing a political ideology, and suddenly, with the election of Mr. Trump, having free rein to pursue it — with both Mr. Smith, 66, and Mr. Pai, 44, reaping rewards.

Neither Mr. Pai nor Mr. Smith would comment for this article.

Associates say both men believe that local television stations, which fall under the commission’s rules because they broadcast over federally owned airwaves, are at a disadvantage when competing against cable companies and online streaming services like Comcast and Netflix.

Tina Pelkey, spokeswoman for Mr. Pai, said the new chairman had not taken steps to help Sinclair specifically; his concerns relate to the broadcast industry generally.

“It has nothing to do with any one company,” Ms. Pelkey said.

Other broadcast companies, as well as the National Association of Broadcasters, have pushed for some of the same changes that have benefited Sinclair.

Loosened regulatory requirements, Sinclair executives said, will help even the playing field and benefit millions of Americans who rely on broadcast stations for news and entertainment by allowing the companies to invest in new equipment and technology.

“Thankfully we’ve got Chairman Pai, who’s launched an action to look at antiquated rules,” Christopher S. Ripley, who became Sinclair’s chief executive in mid-January, said in a recent speech, adding that the rules had “artificially tipped the playing field away from TV broadcast.”

But critics say the rollback undermines the heart of the F.C.C. mission to protect diversity, competition and local control in broadcast media. It also gives an increasingly prominent conservative voice in broadcast television — Sinclair has become known for its right-leaning commentary — an unparalleled national platform, as television remains the preferred source for most Americans of news, according to Pew.

A merger with Tribune would transform Sinclair into a media juggernaut, with reach into seven out of 10 homes through more than 200 stations in cities as diverse as Eureka, Calif., and Huntsville, Ala. The company would have a significant presence in important markets in several electoral swing states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina, and would gain entry into the biggest urban markets: New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The result would illustrate the real-world stakes of the Trump administration’s pursuit of dismantling regulations across government. The rollback at the F.C.C., a microcosm of the broader effort, pleases business interests and many Republicans who complain that regulators are heavy-handed and hostile in their approach. It raises alarms among free-speech advocates and many Democrats who say consumers suffer without aggressive oversight.

“I worry that our democracy is at stake because democracy depends on a diversity of voices and competition of news outlets,” said Representative Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

If Sinclair’s past is any guide, the changes for viewers could be profound.

The company has a history of cutting staffs and shaving costs by requiring stations to share news coverage, in that way reducing unique local content. And it has required stations to air conservative-leaning segments, including law-and-order features from its “Terrorism Alert Desk,” as well as punditry from Republicans like Boris Epshteyn, a former surrogate to Mr. Trump, who was still seen visiting the White House after joining Sinclair.

In the political battleground state of Wisconsin, a merger would give Sinclair six stations in the biggest markets — Milwaukee, Green Bay and Madison — causing some journalists to fear a statewide, coordinated corporate news strategy that would tilt right.

“We’ve moved from a high-quality independent news ownership structure to one where a few companies have outsized influence,” said Lewis A. Friedland, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Mr. Friedland previously worked as a news manager at WITI, the current Fox affiliate in Milwaukee. It is owned by Tribune and would become part of the Sinclair empire if the merger is approved, as expected.

Sinclair rejects suggestions that its stations push right-leaning views, and says the company’s mission is to be objective in its news coverage.

“We are proud to offer a range of perspectives, both conservative and liberal — to our consumers — on our Sinclair broadcast stations each day,” Scott Livingston, Sinclair’s vice president for news, wrote in a July memo to staff members. “It is unfortunate that so many of our competitors do not provide the same marketplace of ideas.”

Though Sinclair is not a household name like the conservative cable TV channel Fox News, it has been a powerful operator in Washington, with a decades-long history of courting Republicans and Democrats even as regulators accused it of flouting broadcast rules.

Sinclair was founded in 1971 by Mr. Smith’s father, Julian Sinclair Smith, an electrical engineer with a deep curiosity about new broadcasting technology. At the time, the company consisted of a radio station and a single UHF station in Baltimore, but it wasn’t long before it embarked on an ambitious growth strategy.

With more stations, Sinclair could command more lucrative advertising, and later, higher fees from cable and satellite companies that retransmitted its broadcasts.

Sinclair helped pioneer a range of creative growth techniques that the company insisted were both legal and good for television viewers.

Most notable was its use of so-called joint sales agreements, which allowed it to work around ownership rules that prevented any one company from owning multiple top-rated channels in a single market.

The practice started in 1991 in Pittsburgh as a game of ownership hot potato, when Sinclair sold its station there to an employee, Edwin Edwards, and retained ownership of a second station. The two stations then shared resources and programming, but on paper they remained under separate ownership. David Smith’s mother, Carolyn Smith, later helped fund Mr. Edwards’s company and took a stake in it.

Consumer advocates long complained about the maneuver, and by President Obama’s second term, regulators at the F.C.C., then led by Democrats, were taking a hard look at it.

That is when, records show, Mr. Pai first met with Sinclair’s top lawyers.

Mr. Pai was a fresh Republican face on the commission. He had an impressive background: degrees from Harvard and the University of Chicago Law School, and stints at the Department of Justice, at the general counsel’s office of the F.C.C. and at the Senate Judiciary Committee, as an aide to Sam Brownback, then a Republican senator from Kansas and now the state’s governor.

The child of immigrants from India, he liked to tell the story of how his parents arrived in the United States with nothing but $10 and a transistor radio.

Perhaps most appealing to Sinclair and other TV station owners, Mr. Pai exhibited blanket empathy for the broadcasting industry, both television and radio.

“I’ve been listening carefully to what you have to say,” Mr. Pai told broadcast executives in late 2012. “Unfortunately, it seems there’s a widespread perception that today’s F.C.C. is largely indifferent to the fate of your business.”

An enthusiastic purveyor of free-market philosophy, Mr. Pai quickly became a dependable opponent to regulations created by the F.C.C.’s Democratic majority. He promised to take a “weed whacker” to regulations if he ever became chairman.

“The commission,” he told the broadcast executives, “can do a better job of focusing on what’s important to broadcasters.”

An Alliance Is Forged

Just seven months into Mr. Pai’s tenure, in December 2012, he welcomed a group of visitors to his office: Barry M. Faber, Sinclair’s general counsel, and two of the company’s Washington-based corporate lawyers.

“Television stations have utilized J.S.A.s for at least 10 years,” Mr. Faber told Mr. Pai according to records of the meeting filed with the F.C.C., referring to the joint sales agreements that Sinclair utilized in Pittsburgh and elsewhere.

Mr. Faber added that “to his knowledge, not a single example of harm to program diversity or competition for viewers resulting from J.S.A.s has been documented.”

The Sinclair executives made the same pitch to the other commissioners, but it was Mr. Pai, the records show, who aggressively picked up the company’s cause in opposing the commission’s crackdown on the disputed agreements.

In two follow-up visits with Mr. Pai’s chief of staff, Matthew Berry, in January and February 2014, Sinclair sent Rebecca Hanson, a lobbyist for the company who had just left a job at the F.C.C.

Federal law prohibits top officials from lobbying former colleagues immediately after leaving government, but Ms. Hanson was not senior enough at the F.C.C. to be subject to the restriction. Agency records show that she met with Mr. Berry, and shared with him data that showed the benefits to consumers of joint sales agreements.

Mr. Pai inserted the information, almost word for word, in his formal legal argument when voting against the F.C.C. measure, in addition to citing experiences at other companies, like Entravision, an owner of Spanish-language television stations. He then echoed arguments made by broadcasters like Sinclair that opposed the move in a series of speeches, remarks before Congress and in social media, where he is a prolific user of Twitter.

Ms. Hanson said the meetings were entirely appropriate, and they were disclosed as required under F.C.C. rules. “Sinclair has followed the rule-making process like everyone else,” Ms. Hanson said in an interview.

Mr. Pai also made appearances on conservative media, extending Sinclair’s arguments beyond telecommunications circles to the broader Republican audience. The advocacy did not go unnoticed. Mr. Pai has been eyed for years by Republican leaders in Kansas and asked at least three times to consider a run for public office, according to two former government colleagues familiar with Kansas Republican politics.

Harold Feld, a senior vice president at the left-leaning consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, said Mr. Pai had translated his visibility “into enormous influence and a much brighter future” in Republican circles.

“He discovered in the same way Trump discovered that sounding off on things — taking extreme positions, using social media, being the ‘rock star’ — has benefits,” he said.

Still, Mr. Pai’s advocacy did not improve Sinclair’s plight during the Obama years, when rulings repeatedly went against the company. “The F.C.C. continues to bury its head in the sand,” Sinclair’s lawyers wrote to the agency in frustration.

Sinclair also faced two investigations into rule violations.

In July 2016, the F.C.C. announced a $9.5 million fine against Sinclair for violating “good faith obligations” when negotiating fees from cable and satellite companies that retransmit its broadcasts.

A second investigation, which is continuing, deals with commercials aired on Sinclair stations by the Huntsman Cancer Institute, based in Salt Lake City. The commercials were broadcast as news stories on some stations without viewers’ being alerted to the fact that they were paid content.

Emails reviewed by The Times show that Ms. Hanson, the Sinclair lobbyist, reached out to her former F.C.C. colleagues about the Huntsman investigation.

“How can they not tell us what they have against us? Will this ever end? Why won’t they tell us? Can you get them to tell us?” Ms. Hanson wrote on July 26, 2016, to her former boss, William Lake, the head of the F.C.C. media bureau.

“Being on the outside of the F.C.C. is so … weird,” she wrote.

At that point, tensions between the F.C.C. and Sinclair were at a high point.

Mr. Smith, the Sinclair chairman, had shown his own frustration around the same time with the F.C.C.’s investigation of the Huntsman segments. He lashed out during a session in Baltimore with more than 100 news directors and executives.

In an expletive-filled rant, Mr. Smith suggested that Sinclair stations that ran the segments would have to pay for their mistake. He also ordered news directors to write him emails admitting they had erred and outlining what they would do to prevent it from happening again.

“Exciting times, to say the least!” said the email to Mr. Pai’s assistant days after Mr. Trump’s victory in November. It was from Ms. Hanson, the Sinclair lobbyist. “I am sure the commissioner will be in increasing demand in the coming weeks.”

Mr. Pai was widely seen as the top contender to take over as F.C.C. chairman under a Republican administration, and Ms. Hanson had already invited him to speak at a gathering on Nov. 16 of general managers from Sinclair stations at the Four Seasons Hotel in Baltimore.

Now that Mr. Trump had been elected, she was adding another request: “Would he have time to meet with our C.E.O., David Smith, for a few minutes after his session?”

The answer was yes, and Mr. Pai and Mr. Smith, then Sinclair’s chief executive and chairman, met in private at the end of the event.

It is unclear whether the two men had previously met. If not, Mr. Pai would soon learn that Mr. Smith was hardly a conventional television mogul.

Unpolished, gruff and intensely private, he does not belong to the slick world of media elites, where his contemporaries, like Leslie Moonves at CBS and Rupert Murdoch at 21st Century Fox, are staples of the society pages.

His inventory of business investments includes a small chain of pizza restaurants and a farm where he grows 15 varieties of tomatoes.

A frank and adversarial titan of local news, Mr. Smith has on occasion himself become news. In 1996 he and a prostitute were arrested by the Baltimore police in his company Mercedes during a sting operation. And in 2015, a jury awarded a farmer $1.8 million after the farmer sued Mr. Smith for having 95 acres of his cornfield mowed down. The farmer leased the field from Mr. Smith in Monkton, Md., near Sinclair headquarters in Hunt Valley. Mr. Smith prevailed on an appeal.

Mr. Smith and Mr. Pai met for a second time in January, just before Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Mr. Smith was joined by Armstrong Williams, a business partner and Sinclair conservative talk show host, and Mr. Ripley, Sinclair’s newly named chief executive, who later expressed confidence that the F.C.C. under Mr. Pai would enact sweeping regulatory changes.

“We do expect this new F.C.C. to tackle the ownership rules,” Mr. Ripley said on an earnings call with investors in February. “We’re very optimistic about this new F.C.C. and the leadership of Ajit Pai.”

Mr. Smith had already made clear his expectations. “If Donald Trump is as deregulatory as he suggests he is,” Mr. Smith said at a media industry conference just after the election, according to TheStreet.com, “we’re going to be the first industry in line to say, ‘We are the most over-regulated industry that exists in the United States.’”

Neither Sinclair nor the White House would say if Mr. Smith had recommended Mr. Pai for the chairmanship. Either way, Mr. Pai did not disappoint.

In one of his first actions as chairman, he struck down an effort to rein in the use of joint sales agreements, the issue he had discussed with Mr. Smith in January.

Mr. Pai also froze a program for broadband subsidies for low-income families and began a rollback of net neutrality rules that ensured internet traffic was equally available to all consumers, acting on regulatory issues that will reshape other multibillion-dollar businesses under his watch.

Mr. Pai then introduced his most stunning action to date, easing the cap on ownership for broadcast television stations. The order allowed Sinclair to count just half of its UHF stations against the national limit.

Almost immediately, Sinclair took advantage of the relaxed regulation, announcing the purchase of Bonten Media, an owner of television stations, and Tribune.

The proposed merger with Tribune raised broad opposition from consumer groups, former regulators, satellite and cable firms and even conservative media. More generally, the relaxed ownership limits on UHF stations also unsettled some TV and media companies.

“It doesn’t make any sense. It is a sham,” said Jim Goodmon, president of Capitol Broadcasting Company, a small television and radio company in Raleigh, N.C. “It becomes a game of scale and the big guys will have everything.”

But days after the action on the ownership cap, Mr. Pai gave a keynote speech to the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, where he promised to rethink all media ownership restrictions.

“One of the most powerful forces in government is inertia,” Mr. Pai told the group in April. “Rules that get on the books seem to stay there forever,” he added. “I’m trying to change that.”

Sinclair’s viewers heard about Mr. Pai’s performance. Mr. Williams, the conservative commentator, showered Mr. Pai with praise on his show, which is broadcast on Sinclair TV stations nationwide.

“When you ask people who are familiar with you, one of the common themes is that this guy really has courage, he’s really tough, he knows who he is, he understand and respects the law and he has no political agenda,” Mr. Williams said to Mr. Pai during a televised interview, adding, “Where do you find that kind of self-awareness, that kind of courage that propels you?”

Sinclair’s increasingly tight relationship with the F.C.C., and the likelihood that the commission will allow it to grow and spread its conservative agenda further, has made critics, including some longtime television journalists, uneasy.

Jill Geisler, a former general manager at WITI, the Tribune station in Milwaukee, said she was watching with intense interest.

“Will Sinclair be a responsible broadcaster of the news,” she asked, “or a creator of the largest programmer of propaganda?”

Cecilia Kang reported from Washington and Milwaukee, Eric Lipton from Washington, and Sydney Ember from New York. Doris Burke contributed research.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/u...egulation.html





House Dems Press FCC for Answers on Sinclair
Harper Neidig

House Democrats are demanding answers from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about its “favorable treatment” of Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has been cashing in on a series of agency moves that are easing restrictions on its control of local television stations.

In a 12-page letter sent to Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on Monday, Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. (N.J.), Mike Doyle (Pa.) and Diana DeGette (Colo.) seized on multiple media reports detailing how the agency has been delivering on Sinclair’s deregulatory wish list.

“We hope this letter will serve as an opportunity to respond to reports suggesting you have failed to exercise adequate independence as FCC Chairman and that may have resulted in the agency giving unusual and possibly preferential treatment to Sinclair," the three Democrats wrote.

Pallone, Doyle and DeGette are the ranking Democrats on the House Commerce Committee, the technology and communications subcommittee, and the oversight and investigations subcommittee, respectively.

They asked Pai to come forward with more information about his office’s contacts with the White House and Sinclair on proceedings related to the broadcaster.

A spokeswoman for Pai was not immediately available to comment.

Since President Trump tapped Pai as chairman in January, the FCC has passed several proposals that have helped clear the way for Sinclair to buy up more local television stations.

Most notably, the commission voted in April to reinstate a rule that gives it greater room to acquire certain stations without running afoul of media ownership limits.

Critics say that rule, known as the ultra high frequency (UHF) discount, directly paved the way for Sinclair’s proposed $3.9 billion deal to purchase Tribune Media, which is awaiting FCC approval.

Democrats have blasted the deal, arguing that it gives too much power to a single ideological broadcaster and risks suppressing competing independent media outlets.

"The United States has maintained for decades a policy that restricts the number of viewers a single broadcast entity can reach nationwide so that the American public has access to a diversity of local voices over the air,” Monday’s letter reads. “As the largest owner of television broadcast stations in the country, Sinclair had expanded to the limits of these FCC ownership rules.

“Since taking office, however, you have implemented a series of actions that ease these restrictions and allow Sinclair to expand its reach quickly. You have simultaneously proposed to allow the industry to adopt a new broadcast technology that will likely benefit Sinclair more than any other company."
http://thehill.com/policy/technology...rs-on-sinclair





Samsung TV PLUS Is Now Offering 4K / HDR Content In Europe
Juan Carlos Ropel

Samsung Electronics has announced that its premium Smart TV content service, TV Plus, is now available for users of Samsung Smart TVs in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom (users from North America and Southeast Asia already have this service available since 2015).

Owners of eligible Samsung Smart TVs with 4K / HDR capabilities in the above-mentioned European countries now have direct access to premium 4K UHD HDR content offered by Samsung, in partnership with Rakuten TV, and can find their favorite shows using the TV Plus straightforward interface. All of Samsung’s 2017 4K TVs such as the flagship Q9F or the mid-range MU-Series models would thus be able to access the new content service with 4K high dynamic range enabled.

Samsung TV Plus offers a wide selection of over 8,900 movies and TV shows broken down into three categories: New Releases, Family and UHD. Popular UHD movies like Passengers, Moneyball, and Hotel Transylvania are available via TV Plus, which can be accessed through the main menu and can be browsed by simply connecting an eligible Samsung Smart TV or Samsung 4K HDR smart TV to the Internet through a LAN-line or Wi-Fi network.

Heeman Lee, Vice President of the Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics, stated the following:

“Our goal at Samsung is to create innovative and valuable technology that makes our consumers’ lives easier and more enjoyable when it comes to watching their favorite content. With the European expansion of TV PLUS, we are thrilled to provide additional consumers access to new movies in UHD and HDR quality.”

The expansion comes at what could be considered a strategically well timed moment in the European market, given that 4K TV sales in the huge continental market are steadily growing year by year and are expected to rise to over 17 million 4K TV units shipped by the end of 2017. Meanwhile, TV Plus content has become a success in Southeast Asia since its launch, where 70% of Smart TV users in Korea are watching TV PLUS channels, and 41% of Smart TV users in Vietnam are using TV PLUS.

Unlike other streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime or HBO Go, Samsung TV Plus is only available for owners of Samsung Smart TVs at the moment.
http://4k.com/news/samsung-tv-plus-i...-europe-20853/





Netflix Co-Founder’s Crazy Plan: Pay $10 a Month, Go to the Movies All You Want

MoviePass wants to subsidize your film habit, letting you go to the theater once a day for about the price of a single ticket.
Isabel Gottlieb

As movie theaters struggle with tepid sales, Mitch Lowe has an extreme proposal for how to get more people into seats: Let them come to all the showings they want for about the price of a single ticket each month.

Lowe, an early Netflix Inc. executive who now runs a startup called MoviePass, plans to drop the price of the company’s movie ticket subscriptions on Tuesday to $9.95. The fee will let customers get in to one showing every day at any theater in the U.S. that accepts debit cards. MoviePass will pay theaters the full price of each ticket used by subscribers, excluding 3D or Imax screens.

MoviePass could lose a lot of money subsidizing people’s movie habits. So the company also raised cash on Tuesday by selling a majority stake to Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc., a small, publicly traded data firm in New York. The companies declined to comment on terms of the financing but said MoviePass intends to hold an initial public offering by March. Helios and Metheson shares rose 5.7 percent to $2.95 at the close Tuesday in New York.

Ted Farnsworth, chief executive officer at Helios and Matheson, said the goal is to amass a large base of customers and collect data on viewing behaviors. That information could then be used to eventually target advertisements or other marketing materials to subscribers. “It’s no different than Facebook or Google,” Farnsworth said. “The more we understand our fans, the more we can target them.”

Theater operators should certainly welcome any effort to increase sales. The top four cinema operators, led by AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., lost $1.3 billion in market value early this month after a disappointing summer. The number of tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada last year declined slightly, while box office revenue rose just 2 percent thanks to pricier tickets, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, a trade group. The cost of a ticket has almost doubled in the last two decades, according to the website Box Office Mojo. The average price is about $8.89 this year, though it can be much higher in some cities.

Shares of theater companies fell Tuesday on concerns that MoviePass’s pricing would hurt studios or exhibitors. AMC’s stock declined 2.6 percent to $13.25 at the close.

Investors may be misinterpreting the MoviePass business model, Eric Wold, an analyst at B Riley & Co. wrote in a note to clients. If MoviePass can drive more people to theaters that would benefit the exhibitors, although the overall impact is “more negligible than anything,” Wold wrote.

MoviePass was founded in 2011, originally with a business model similar to a gym membership. The company hoped to turn profit from subscribers who paid $30 or more per month but didn’t use the service often enough to justify the cost. Lowe, a fixture of the home video business who helped get Netflix off the ground and served as president of rental-kiosk operator Redbox, was named CEO last year. The privately held company declined to disclose subscriber numbers or financial information. Lowe said the data-based business model is still “years in the future.”

With the new strategy, MoviePass hopes to resolve what Lowe sees as the biggest factor to blame for the theater industry’s decline. He said the high price of tickets, not competition from Netflix or Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video service, is a big part of what’s keeping people away. “People really do want to go more often,” Lowe said. “They just don’t like the transaction.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...s-all-you-want





AMC Looking to Block MoviePass Service after Price Slashing
Jason Aycock

The AMC theater chain -- whose parent (NYSE:AMC) dropped 2.8% in the stock market today after third-party service MoviePass dropped the cost of its unlimited movie pass to $9.95/month -- is examining legal options to block the subscription service.

MoviePass lowered the price to $9.95 from $50 for a month's worth of movies. Theaters don't miss out on revenues, as MoviePass says it pays full price for the tickets, but AMC says they're "not welcome here" and the service isn't in the best interest of "moviegoers, movie theatres and movie studios."

"While AMC is not opposed to subscription programs generally, the one envisioned by MoviePass is not one AMC can embrace," the company says in a release. "We are actively working now to determine whether it may be feasible to opt out and not participate in this shaky and unsustainable program."

AMC is the country's biggest theater chain.

Others in the sector today: Regal Entertainment (RGC -1.2%), Cinemark Holdings (CNK -0.7%), Marcus (MCS -1.2%), Reading International (RDI +0.4%), IMAX (IMAX -1.3%).
https://seekingalpha.com/news/328969...price-slashing





In the Land of Internet Subcultures, Try Not to Look Like a Tourist
John Herrman

A loose agglomeration of right-wing pundits and personalities on YouTube have, in the last few years, accumulated substantial and devoted audiences. Their politics are severe; they are culture warriors with a new set of weapons. They make their arguments for people who might not be reached by other media — and do so in a novel, medium-specific way. Those audiences get to know their hosts, and each other, developing who develop into fandoms while simultaneously experiencing ideological formation. This is the simple case for the relevance of the YouTube Right, which I wrote about for The New York Times Magazine earlier this month. After it was published, controversy erupted over a Google employee’s memo criticizing his company’s attitudes toward diversity; when the employee was fired, he granted his first interview to Stefan Molyneux, a central figure in the movement (and the piece).

Covering any large subculture — particularly one with an explicit ideological component — is a surefire way to garner a passionate response. So is attempting to place it in a taxonomy, or to identify a precedent for what it does — in this case, conservative talk radio, whose power has been perilously underestimated for three decades. I received messages objecting to the article’s political descriptions, which wasn’t a surprise: Many such YouTubers self-identify with more granularity, as classical liberals or libertarians, as “identitarians,” or as mere contrarians. There were people urging me not to give extreme politics a platform as others claimed these ideas were anything but.

But reactions to the piece crystallized something else about the state of the media — all media — today. The most useful way to understand the disparity in responses inspired by the piece isn’t to understand audiences as living on different parts of an ideological spectrum, or on a continuum of tech-savviness. Rather, I learned to understand where they were coming from in a much more literal sense. Media consumers’ internet of 2017 is divided up among enormous, distinct and powerful platforms — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. And their experience of the broader media universe is informed by the contexts in which they spend the most time, or to which they feel allegiance.

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Those immersed in this subculture were, of course, skeptical and defensive, critical of what felt to them like a glancing take on their hometown, dismissing it as condescending or antagonistic. Other active YouTube users begged me to understand that the YouTube Right is not representative of their platform, and reasonably suggested that I had overstated their importance. A few more responded: “Who?”

Readers from Twitter, where the YouTube Right maintains a visible secondary presence, were more receptive to the story’s premises. To politically engaged Twitter users, the YouTube Right represents a powerful but remote, somewhat mysterious force. The story’s subjects were more familiar to a typical Reddit user than to, for example, the average Facebook user. They’re well-known objects of mockery on Tumblr, and something like mainstream figures on a site like 4chan.

One user’s home platform is another’s foreign land. A point made by a subculture at home on Facebook might look funny to another on Twitter, which can read as evidence of a conspiracy to yet another on YouTube, which might be seen as offensive on Tumblr, which could be a joke on Reddit. One’s sense of these things — whether a meme is funny, whether an argument is persuasive, whether a statement amounts to a threat — is informed not just by what the subculture stands for, but by which platform you use to make sense of the vast internet around you.

And attention from a reporter — perceived as resident of none of the above — is suspect by default. Indeed, in my years covering online communities and platforms, I’ve noticed a consistent, almost instinctive complaint about journalists is that they don’t engage on the subject’s home turf: If you really understood us, you’d have joined us; if you really wanted to connect, you’d have made a video. Communities such as the YouTube Right are adept at supercharging this complaint into a potent resentment politics: The “mainstream” or “elite” media, they argue, isn’t just out of touch ideologically or culturally, it is technologically and sociologically incompatible with the participatory, identity-centric — begrudgingly, social — media of the future. “They treated us as a curiosity for years. Now it’s their turn,” or something like that.

This is strategic, yes. But not entirely mistaken. Media companies have been largely superseded by social media platforms as internet users’ home bases, as the mechanisms for sorting information. If a majority of a publication’s audience is arriving from outside platforms, the old tendency to cover what happens on those platforms as inherently marginal is not just obsolete; it’s hazardous.

When I report on the internet, it can be tempting to think of the communities I visit as fundamentally distinct from those that a reporter might travel to document in person. But I can’t. It is necessary to understand the internet’s most popular venues as real habitats, populations and places, rather than as apart from reality. They are reality — or maybe more accurately, realities, from which every internet user now has the ability to pick whichever one feels most true. Or just most like home.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/i...ubculture.html





After Electric Cars, What More Will it Take for Batteries to Change the Face of Energy?

No need for subsidies. Higher volumes and better chemistry are causing costs to plummet

ABOUT three-quarters of the way along one of the snaking production lines in Nissan’s Sunderland plant, a worker bolts fuel tanks into the chassis of countless Qashqais—the “urban crossover” SUVs which are the bulk of the factory’s output. But every so often something else passes along the line: an electric vehicle called a Leaf. The fuel-tank bolter changes his rhythm to add a set of lithium-ion battery packs to the floor of the Leaf. His movements are so well choreographed with the swishing robotic arms around him that he makes the shift from the internal combustion engine to the battery-charged electric vehicle look almost seamless.

Until recently, it was a transition that many found unthinkable. The internal combustion engine has been the main way of powering vehicles on land and at sea for most of the past century. That is quite the head start. Though Leafs are the world’s biggest-selling electric vehicle, the Sunderland plant, Britain’s biggest car factory, only made 17,500 of them last year. It made 310,000 Qashqais. And the Qashqais, unlike the Leafs, were profitable. Nissan has so far lost money on every Leaf it has made.

There were 750,000 electric vehicles sold worldwide last year, less than 1% of the new-car market. In 2011 Carlos Ghosn, boss of the Renault-Nissan alliance, suggested that his two companies alone would be selling twice that number by 2016, one of many boosterish predictions that have proved well wide of the mark. But if the timing of their take-off has proved uncertain, the belief that electric vehicles are going to be a big business very soon is ever more widely held. Mass-market vehicles with driving ranges close to that offered by a full tank of petrol, such as Tesla’s Model 3 and GM’s Chevrolet Bolt, have recently hit the market; a revamped Leaf will be unveiled in September. The ability to make such cars on the same production lines as fossil-fuel burners, as in Sunderland, means that they can spread more easily through the industry as production ramps up.

All we need to live today

Many forecasters reckon that the lifetime costs of owning and driving an electric car will be comparable to those for a fuel burner within a few years, leading sales of the electric cars to soar in the 2020s and to claim the majority sometime during the 2030s. China, which accounted for roughly half the electric vehicles sold last year, wants to see 2m electric and plug-in hybrid cars on its roads by 2020, and 7m within a decade. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), a consultancy, notes that forecasts from oil companies have a lot more electric vehicles in them than they did a few years ago; OPEC now expects 266m such vehicles to be on the street by 2040 (see chart 1). Britain and France have both said that, by that time, new cars completely reliant on internal combustion engines will be illegal.

That this is even conceivable is a tribute to the remarkable expansion of the lithium-ion battery business—and to the belief that it is set to get much bigger. The first such batteries went on sale just 26 years ago, in Sony’s CCD-TR1 camcorder. The product was a hit: the batteries even more so, spreading to computers, phones, cordless power tools, e-cigarettes and beyond. The more gadgets the world has become hooked on, the more lithium-ion batteries it has needed. Last year consumer products accounted for the production of lithium-ion batteries with a total storage capacity of about 45 gigawatt-hours (GWh). To put that in context, if all those batteries were charged up they could provide Britain, which uses on average about 34GW of electricity, with about an hour and 20 minutes of juice.

In the same year production of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles reached just over half that capacity: 25GWh. But Sam Jaffe of Cairn ERA, a battery consultancy, expects demand for vehicle batteries to overtake that from consumer electronics as early as next year, marking a pivotal moment for the industry. Huge expansion is under way. The top five manufacturers—Japan’s Panasonic, South Korea’s LG Chem and Samsung SDI, and China’s BYD and CATL—are ramping up capital expenditure with a view to almost tripling capacity by 2020 (see chart 2). The vast $5bn gigafactory Tesla is building with Panasonic in Nevada is thought to already be producing about 4GWh a year. Tesla says it will produce 35GWh in 2018. Just four years ago, that would have been enough for all applications across the whole world.

The gigafactory is not just for cars. Hearing of electricity blackouts in South Australia, Elon Musk, Tesla’s founder, tweeted to the state’s premier in March that by the end of the year Tesla could provide enough battery storage to make sure that the grid never fell over again. At the gigafactory they are now hard at work cramming 129 megawatt-hours (MWh) of capacity into a facility designed to keep their boss’s word. When installed on the other side of the Pacific, it will be the biggest such grid-based system in the world; but many more are on the way. Industrial-scale lithium-ion battery packs—essentially lots of the battery packs used in cars wired together, their chemistry and electronics tweaked to support quicker charging and discharging—are increasingly popular with grid operators looking for ways to smooth out the effects of intermittent power supplies such as solar and wind. Smaller battery packs are being bought by consumers who want independence from the grid—or, indeed, to store the electricity they produce for themselves so that it can be sold into the grid at the most lucrative time of day or night. Batteries are becoming an integral part of the low-emissions future.

The chance to change

The fundamental operating principles of the lithium-ion battery are easily understood. When the battery is charging an electric potential pulls lithium ions into the recesses of a graphite-based electrode; when it is in use these ions migrate back through a liquid electrolyte to a much more complex electrode made of compounds containing lithium and other metals—the cathode. The fundamental operating principles of the battery business, on the other hand, are considerably more opaque, thanks to an almost paranoid taste for secrecy among suppliers and the baffling economics of the Asian conglomerates that lead the market.

All the big producers are adding capacity in part because it drives down unit costs, as the past few years have shown (see chart 3). Lithium-ion cells (the basic components of batteries) cost over $1,000 a kilowatt-hour (kWh) in 2010; last year they were in the $130-200 range. GM says it is paying $145 per kWh to LG Chem for the cells that make up the 60kWh battery for the Bolt (the pack, thanks to labour, materials and electronics, costs more than the sum of its cells). Tesla says that cells for the Model 3 are cheaper. Lower costs are not the only improvements; large amounts of R&D investment have led to better power density (more storage per kilogram) and better durability (more discharge-then-recharge cycles). The Bolt comes with a battery warranty of eight years.

But getting prices down this way has not just produced cheaper, better batteries. It has also resulted in significant overcapacity. Cairn ERA estimates that last year the manufacturing capacity for lithium-ion batteries exceeded demand by about a third. Both it and BNEF say that the battery manufacturers are either losing money or making only wafer-thin profits on every electric-vehicle battery they produce. Despite the seeming glut, though, they all have plans to expand, in part to drive prices even lower. Mr Jaffe explains their thinking as that of the “traditional Asian conglomerate model”: sacrificing margins for market share. This may be a sound strategy given the ever-greater hopes for electric vehicles in the near future. But at the moment it is also one that looks rather unnerving. Although Mr Jaffe believes that increased demand for both electric vehicles and stationary storage will justify the rush to expand, he accepts that, for now, “It feels like a gold rush—but there’s no gold.”

There are, though, other valuable metals in the picture. Making more batteries means acquiring more lithium, as well as various other metals, including cobalt, for the cathodes. These make up about 60% of the cost of a cell. Being assured of a constant supply of them is as much a strategic consideration for battery-makers as mastering electrochemistry. Since 2015 lithium prices have quadrupled, says Simon Moores of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a consultancy. Cobalt’s price has more than doubled over the same period; prices of chemicals containing nickel, also used in cathodes, are rising too.

New supplies of lithium should not be too hard to find; there are thought to be at least 210m tonnes of the stuff, says Mr Moores, compared with current annual production of 180,000 tonnes. New fields are being opened up. In July SQM of Chile, the world’s biggest lithium producer, said it would invest $110m in a lithium joint venture in Western Australia. Cobalt is more tricky. Not only are supplies scarcer, but a lot comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. This raises both ethical problems (production can rely on child labour) and business ones (no one wants to depend on warlords for a vital resource). LG Chem has said it is trying to reduce the cobalt component of its battery cells, while continuing to improve their performance. Further down the road, recycling the metals from old batteries could make the industry much more sustainable.

One of the reasons manufacturers are confidently piling on capacity despite costlier raw materials is that, at the moment, little else can compete with their wares. Other battery technologies that sound as if, in principle, they might have advantages are often touted—but none of them enjoys the decades of development that have turned lithium-ion devices from an intriguing idea into a dominant technology. This work has generated a huge amount of knowledge about the fine details of manufacturability, the choice of electrolytes and the ever more sophisticated nanotechnology of the metallic cathodes.

Kenan Sahin, who heads CAMX Power, an American company that supplies materials for cathodes, says the lithium-ion battery’s cost and weight, its ability to charge and discharge repeatedly, its durability and its safety have all been achieved through an endless process of fine-tuning, rather than eureka moments. He likens battery chemistry to drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry. “It’s really difficult. Whatever you have needs to work at large scale and the side-effects have to be acceptable,” he says. This is all hard for a would-be usurper to emulate. For the foreseeable future, ever-improving lithium-ion technology—perhaps with new solid electrolytes—will make the running, benefiting from yet more refinements the more applications it supports.

Until now, the mainstay has been a cylindrical cell called the 18650, which looks like a rifle shell. It is 65 millimetres long, 18mm in diameter and has an energy density of perhaps 250 watt-hours per kilogram. (The energy density of petrol, for comparison, is about 50 times greater; but the cell can store that much energy hundreds or thousands of times.) Tesla and Panasonic have now developed the 2170, a bit longer and wider; Mr Musk says it will be the most energy-dense battery on the market. The company says that the cost of driving a Model 3, released in late July to rave reviews, will be half that of any of its previous vehicles. At the car’s launch Mr Musk seemed a bit overawed at the prospect of producing 500,000 such vehicles next year: “Welcome to production hell,” he told the assembled workers.

On August 7th Tesla announced plans to sell bonds worth $1.5bn to support its expansion, giving a badly needed breather to the equity market, where it usually raises cash (and where its value has risen by two-thirds over the past year). The company has said that it has 455,000 pre-orders for the Model 3, which, if taken up, would generate enough cashflow by year-end to start shoring up the company’s finances. If it all goes to plan, Mr Musk hopes to see the gigafactory become the largest building in the world, cranking out 100GWh a year—and to be joined by further gigafactories elsewhere; the next would probably be in China.

All this presupposes that electric vehicles really are poised for take-off. There is no doubt that they are getting better and cheaper. But there are other constraints on their use, most notably charging. In Britain 43% of car owners do not have access to off-street parking and thus would not be able to charge cars at home. Nor are domestic supplies always up to the strains of, say, an 11kW charger; using the kettle or immersion heater during the six hours it would take to charge up a 90kWh battery could blow the fuses. The answer will be fast-charging stations, possibly like petrol stations; some car companies are beginning to build them as a way to assuage the “range anxiety” that turns some drivers off electric vehicles. Whether such facilities can expand fast enough to allow the industry’s expansive ambitions to be fulfilled remains an open question.

This uncertainty about the speed at which electric-vehicle usage will grow is one of the things that makes stationary storage an attractive alternative market for the battery-makers. Installations such as the one recently built in a nondescript lot on the outskirts of San Diego, California, by San Diego Gas & Electric (SDGE) have none of the glamour of glistening new models hitting showrooms. It is a 384,000-cell car battery impersonating a trailer park: the dullest Transformer ever. But its ordinariness is part of its beauty, says Caroline Winn, chief operating officer of SDGE; the utility uses it to offer power at times of peak demand. Modular construction meant the 120MWh facility—just a touch smaller than the one Tesla has promised South Australia—was ready to go only eight months after the start of the project. It runs so quietly it is hardly audible. Building a gas turbine to do the same job would have been cheaper but would have taken years, in the unlikely event that local residents had given it the go-ahead in the first place. The battery facility “is a lot prettier than a gas turbine,” Ms Winn says.

The final source of energy

For Tesla and other big battery-makers grid-storage projects are the most attractive part of the electricity market; they offer contracts that use up otherwise surplus capacity in satisfyingly large job lots. But there is also demand for batteries to go “behind the meter”. Tesla serves this market with its Powerwall domestic battery pack, designed to complement the solar panels and solar tiles it offers. Nissan, too, is looking at behind-the-meter applications. It is working with Eaton, an American power-management company, to put “second-life”, or partially used, Leaf batteries into packs that can provide businesses and factories with back-up power, thus replacing polluting diesel generators. The first big customer is the Amsterdam Arena, home to AFC Ajax, a football club.

Such systems do not necessarily compete on price; but governments are providing various incentives for them. In May the New York State regulator gave Con Edison, a utility, the right to allow business customers to install batteries in Brooklyn and Queens to export electricity to the grid. New York, with a rickety grid that dates back over a century to the days of George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla, is struggling to integrate more renewable energy into its supplies, and storage offers it a new way to manage peak power demand. Jason Doling, a state energy official, says the programme should be ideal for high-rise blocks; powering lifts from the battery in mornings and evenings when electricity prices are highest would be a boon.

The New York fire department remains concerned that lithium-ion batteries in buildings pose a fire hazard, however. When they are being installed, it keeps its engines on standby. As the externally combusting fiasco of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 smartphones reminded the world last year, lithium-ion batteries can, if badly or over-ambitiously designed, short circuit in incendiary ways. In general, however, new materials and ceramic coatings for electrodes have made the batteries for cars very safe.

Setting aside concerns about combustion, companies that install batteries for behind-the-meter storage, and indeed for grid storage, say they are hampered by outdated regulation and by insurance problems. This limits the funding available to them, according to Anil Srivastava, who runs Leclanché, a Swiss battery-producer. They also need to find ways to make stationary storage pay. Sometimes, as in San Diego, it is pretty much the only solution to the demands of a regulator: the California Public Utilities Commission was worried about blackouts in Los Angeles in the wake of a leak at the Aliso Canyon gas-storage facility in 2015. When price is more of an object, the batteries need to find more than one service to provide, a procedure known as “revenue stacking”. For example, a system might be designed to offer power to the grid for short-term frequency regulation as well as providing a way of dealing with peak demand.

It sounds complicated. But finding more than one way to sell the same thing is second nature in the battery business, as it fine-tunes its wares for every market and every scale. And though today’s exuberance may look a little scary, in the long run that ability looks likely to see the industry do very nicely indeed.
https://www.economist.com/news/brief...-plummet-after





Zinc-Air Batteries: Three-Stage Method Could Revolutionise Rechargeability

University of Sydney charges ahead on zinc-air batteries

University of Sydney researchers have found a solution for one of the biggest stumbling blocks preventing zinc-air batteries from overtaking conventional lithium-ion batteries as the power source of choice in electronic devices.

Zinc-air batteries are batteries powered by zinc metal and oxygen from the air. Due to the global abundance of zinc metal, these batteries are much cheaper to produce than lithium-ion batteries, and they can also store more energy (theoretically five times more than that of lithium-ion batteries), are much safer and are more environmentally friendly.

While zinc-air batteries are currently used as an energy source in hearing aids and some film cameras and railway signal devices, their widespread use has been hindered by the fact that, up until now, recharging them has proved difficult. This is due to the lack of electrocatalysts that successfully reduce and generate oxygen during the discharging and charging of a battery.

Published in Advanced Materials today, a paper authored by chemical engineering researchers from the University of Sydney and Nanyang Technological University outlines a new three-stage method to overcome this problem.

According to lead author Professor Yuan Chen, from the University of Sydney's Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies, the new method can be used to create bifunctional oxygen electrocatalysts for building rechargeable zinc-air batteries from scratch.

"Up until now, rechargeable zinc-air batteries have been made with expensive precious metal catalysts, such as platinum and iridium oxide. In contrast, our method produces a family of new high-performance and low-cost catalysts," he said.

These new catalysts are produced through the simultaneous control of the: 1) composition, 2) size and 3) crystallinity of metal oxides of earth-abundant elements such as iron, cobalt and nickel. They can then be applied to build rechargeable zinc-air batteries.

Paper co-author Dr Li Wei, also from the University's Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies, said trials of zinc-air batteries developed with the new catalysts had demonstrated excellent rechargeability - including less than a 10 percent battery efficacy drop over 60 discharging/charging cycles of 120 hours.

"We are solving fundamental technological challenges to realise more sustainable metal-air batteries for our society," Professor Chen added.
https://techxplore.com/news/2017-08-...lutionise.html





Health Benefits of Wind and Solar Offset all Subsidies

Estimated economic benefits of renewables in the US is $87 billion.
Cathleen O'Grady

Wind and solar energy are obviously essential in reducing carbon emissions, but they also have a remarkable side effect: saving lives. As they edge out fossil fuels, renewables are reducing not just carbon emissions, but also other air pollutants. And the result is an improvement in air quality, with a corresponding drop in premature deaths.

A paper in Nature Energy this week dives into the weeds by trying to estimate the economic benefits of wind and solar power across the whole of the US. Berkeley environmental engineer Dev Millstein and his colleagues estimate that between 3,000 and 12,700 premature deaths have been averted because of air quality benefits over the last decade or so, creating a total economic benefit between $30 billion and $113 billion. The benefits from wind work out to be more than 7¢ per kilowatt-hour, which is more than unsubsidized wind energy generally costs.

Death is in the air

Poor air quality is a tricky beast in public health, since it’s not obvious when someone dies as a result of air pollution. The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution leads to around 7 million premature deaths globally each year—people dying earlier than they otherwise would have from heightened incidence of cancer, heart disease, and respiratory disease.

In the US, air pollution is responsible for an estimated 200,000 premature deaths a year. Road transport (53,000 deaths) and electricity generation (52,000 deaths) are the two sectors contributing the lion's share of the problem. For perspective, the CDC reports that heart disease and cancer, the two biggest killers in the US, each claim around 600,000 lives each in a typical year. The third biggest killer, respiratory disease, is at 155,000.

Air pollution is contributing heavily to those totals, so renewable energy would undoubtedly reduce its contribution. And, since premature deaths cost money on a societal level, renewables would be providing some economic benefits as well.

There are a lot of moving parts involved in trying to figure out the economic benefits of renewables. Impact studies have been done before, but they’ve been limited to certain regions or short time periods. This study ambitiously tries to estimate the benefits from emissions that were avoided because of the increase in wind and solar energy from 2007 through 2015, and to do so for the whole of the US. Millstein and colleagues looked at carbon emissions, as well as sulphur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter, all of which contribute to poor air quality.

There are other factors that also need to be considered. A rise in renewables isn’t the only thing that has been changing in the energy sector: fuel costs and regulation have also played a role. How much of the benefit can be attributed to wind and solar power, and how much to other changes? The researchers used models that track the benefits attributable to renewable power as a proportion of the total reduction in emissions.

Regional differences also introduce complexity. For instance, “most wind power has been deployed in the centre of the country,” the researchers write, while "solar power is heavily concentrated in California.” Some areas of the country have more coal plants, and others have natural gas, which is lower in emissions than coal. To top it all off, emissions regulations aren’t consistent across the entire country.

This means that air pollution benefits were widely variable across different regions. For example, a huge uptick in wind power in a region previously dependent on coal would substantially change the air quality in that region, but a solar power plant far away from any fossil fuel production wouldn’t change the air quality all that much. Climate benefits, on the other hand, are not regionally specific—any climate benefits in the US are good news for the whole world.

Millstein and his colleagues used a range of different models to get an idea of the full scope of estimates that could be reached by using different sets of assumptions. That means that the true benefit probably falls somewhere in the estimated range.
Lives and money saved

The climate benefits of solar and wind power were hefty, but the majority of the benefit came from air quality improvements. The climate benefit estimates ranged from $5 billion to $106 billion, with an additional $30 billion to $113 billion in air quality and public health benefits. And that’s just the estimated economic benefits of the averted 3,000 to 12,000 premature deaths—it doesn't count things like sub-lethal medical issues and lost productivity, much less the personal benefits to individual lives.

The middle ranges of these estimates suggest that wind and solar are pulling their weight cost-wise, despite subsidies: “total central-value wind and solar air-quality and climate benefits are comparable to estimates of total federal and state financial support,” the authors write. The estimates also tie in with other models that have looked at benefits in specific regions, which is a good reliability check.

As emissions continue to fall, the relative improvement brought about by renewable energy will also start to decline. The best way to maximize investment might be to take into account those regional differences, the researchers write: “wind and solar deployments to those regions of the country that offer the greatest benefits (at the least cost) would offer additional gain.”
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017...es-since-2007/





Intel Launches New 'Ruler' Form Factor for Petabyte SSDs

Firm is coming aggressively after the data storage market
Chris Merriman

INTEL HAS UNVEILED a brand new form factor for solid state disc drives (SSDs).

Intel Optane's new "ruler" format will allow up to a petabyte of storage on a single 1U server rack.

Although new formats are emerging all the time, this one seems particularly timely, coming as it does at a time when we have far exceeded the need for an SSD to take up even a standard 2.5-inch space, most of which is air.

By using 3D-NAND, the ruler crams in even more data and will provide more stability with less chance of catastrophic failure with data loss.

The company has promised that the Ruler will have more bandwidth, IOPS and lower latency than SAS.

Bill Leszinske, vice president of Intel's Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG), swooned: "We are in the midst of an era of major data centre transformation, driven by Intel. These new ruler form factor SSDs and dual port SSDs are the latest in a long line of innovations we've brought to market to make storing and accessing data easier and faster, while delivering more value to customers.

Related: Intel details its Core X-Series processors ahead of September launch

"Data drives everything we do - from financial decisions to virtual reality gaming, and from autonomous driving to machine learning - and Intel storage innovations like these ensure incredibly quick, reliable access to that data."

There's no set date for the "ruler" to arrive, but the newest drives will be arriving in standard formats (SATA, SAS and M2) in the third quarter of 2017.

As part of the announcement, Intel also announced a range of "hard drive replacement" SSDs - the S4500 and S4600 0 which are said to have the highest density 32-layer 3D NAND on the market, and are specifically aimed at data centres that want to move to solid state simply and if necessary, in stages.
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer...r-petabyte-ssd





E-Commerce Will Change Forever

Next month e-commerce will change forever thanks to Amazon. September 12 marks 20 years since Amazon filed for their 1-Click patent. This means that the patent will expire and the technology behind it will be free to be used by any e-commerce site. Starting next month more and more sites will be offering a one click checkout experience. Most major sites have already started development with plans to launch soon after the patent expires.

History behind the patent

Amazon applied for the 1-Click patent in September of 1997, the actual patent was granted in 1999. The whole idea behind the patent is when you store a user’s credit card and address you only need a single click to order a product. For the last 20 years Amazon has kept a tight hold on this technology, they have only licensed it to one company Apple. No one knows what Apple paid to license the technology, but the value of the patent has been assessed at 2.4 billion dollars by sources. Over the last 20 years Amazon has defended the validity of the patent in several cases, even having to revise the patent at one point. But, now the wait is almost over and this technology is about to make it into the open market.

Not a one page checkout

The one click checkout is not to be confused with a one page checkout. With a one page checkout all of the account, checkout, and payment information is on one page. With a one click checkout a user is sent straight from the product (or category) page to the order confirmation page. No clicking through any steps or accepting any charges, one click from a product page and an order is placed. The user will land directly on the order confirmation page. Order placed, once click and done.

Merchants listen up

If you are a merchant, this can be a huge opportunity for you. With the holiday season right around the corner who does not want to offer their customers a quicker, easier way to checkout? You can reduce the friction of going through a whole checkout process down to just one button press from a product page. Look at the image below, pressing the buy now button will take a user directly to an order confirmation page and charge their payment method.

Not all credit card processors have the technology to support a one click checkout system. Some that we know that have the technology are:

Stripe
Authorize.net
First Data
Paypal Pro
Skybank

These are the ones we have worked with in the past that we know use a card vault. Others likely support it too, so if you know another processor that uses a card vault let us know. The card vault is the key to the frictionless payment. Customers store their card to use it later, that is one of the keys to the one click checkout process.

How serious is this?

It is serious enough that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has started writing a draft proposal for one click buying methods. They have recruited some of the top companies in the industry like Google, Apple, and Facebook to help come up with a set of specifications. Google has already implemented some of the standards in its Chrome and Chrome Mobile browsers, with more likely to come in the future. They have proposed ways of storing cards and address data in the browser and letting the browser communicate directly with your payment gateway to send the card or bank information. Sounds pretty useful doesn’t it?

What are we doing?

We realize that is technology is important to our merchants. This is something that will change e-commerce in a major way over the next year. We have already started on a framework to extend the thirty bees 1.0.x branch to allow for single click buying. We are developing a module that will allow payment modules to hook into it, so that developers can extend their payment modules to work with a single click buying. We are going to develop several of these modules in house, such as the Stripe module and a couple of other modules. We are also going to release a couple tutorials on how to hook into the single click checkout module, so that developers will be able to easily update their modules to support the new system.
https://thirtybees.com/blog/e-commer...hange-forever/





Former Harvard Money Manager Is Launching a Digital-Currency Hedge Fund
Michael McDonald and Justina Lee

• Lewis Fellas focused on Asian equities at Harvard endowment
• Bletchley Park Asset Management seeks to raise $200 million

Lewis Fellas, a former portfolio manager at Harvard University’s $35.7 billion endowment, is planning a hedge fund that invests in digital currencies such as bitcoin.

Fellas, who left Harvard Management Co. in Boston last year, is launching Bletchley Park Asset Management on Sept. 1, according to a person familiar with the matter. The fund, which is registered in the Cayman Islands, seeks to raise $200 million, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.

Fellas is Bletchley Park’s chief investment officer, and Ronnie Potel, a former executive at Morgan Stanley, is managing partner, according to the person and LinkedIn profiles for both men. The fund has been testing arbitrage strategies in the markets for these new currencies, according to the person. HFMWeek reported the fund’s launch on Thursday.

Digital currencies can be used to make transactions electronically and have proliferated with the success of bitcoin, which became the first decentralized cryptocurrency in 2009. Bitcoin, the largest digital tender, this week soared past $4,000 for the first time on growing optimism that faster transaction times will hasten its spread.

Money managers have invested in blockchain -- the technology used for verifying and recording transactions -- and set up funds to speculate in the markets for the currencies.

Lewis was a portfolio manager focusing on Asian equity markets during his tenure at Harvard Management until he departed in June 2016. Prior to joining Harvard in 2014, he was a portfolio manager in Hong Kong at Segantii Capital Management. He also worked as a trader at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

A number of former Harvard portfolio managers have launched hedge funds in recent months as the endowment has downsized and reorganized. Harvard has backed at least two of the funds, TPRV Capital, a relative value hedge fund, and Cambridge Square Capital, which focuses on fixed income markets.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...sia-hedge-fund





Wisconsin Lawmakers Vote to Pay Foxconn $3 Billion to Get New Factory

State taxpayers could end up paying Foxconn $500,000 per job, or more.
Joe Mullin

The Wisconsin Assembly voted 59-30 on Thursday to approve a bill to give incentives worth $3 billion to Taiwan-based Foxconn so that the company would open its first US plant in the state.

Foxconn, best known for supplying parts of Apple's iPhones, will open the $10 billion liquid-crystal display plant in 2020, according to Reuters. The bill still has to be approved by a joint finance committee and the state Senate.

Both houses of Wisconsin's legislature are controlled by Republicans, and the deal is supported by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a Republican who negotiated the deal.

The vote was largely, but not entirely, along party lines. Three Democrats joined 56 Republicans in supporting the deal. Two Republicans and 28 Democrats voted against it.

Opponents said the deal wasn't a good use of taxpayer funds. The $3 billion incentives package includes about $2.85 billion in cash payments from taxpayers and tax breaks valued at about $150 million. The state is also waiving certain environmental rules.

Supporters, including Walker, say that the deal will be transformational for Wisconsin, pushing its economy toward high-tech manufacturing. Foxconn will spend $10 billion to build the plant. The facility has been planned to employ 3,000 workers, and supporters say that number could grow to 13,000 workers in the future.

The deal was announced last month at a White House event, although it was contingent on Wisconsin approving the massive incentives bill. President Donald Trump praised the deal, saying it was a win for anyone who "believes in the label 'Made in the USA.'"
The LCD display panels will be produced under the Sharp brand, which Foxconn purchased last year.

Democratic opponents of the deal have pointed out that paying $3 billion to get 3,000 jobs means the state subsidy amounts to around $1 million per job.

That's $66,600 per employee for each of the next 15 years, according to an analysis by Prof. Michael Hicks, an economics professor at Ball State University who opposes the deal. Foxconn will pay the workers an average of just over $53,000 per year. (Those numbers are based on the initial count of 3,000 workers.)

"Voters might wish to ask just why each Wisconsin household is stuck with a nearly $1,200 bill to subsidize a company that is half as productive as Wal-Mart, and one-tenth as productive as Harley-Davidson," writes Hicks in an op-ed for MarketWatch. "It is an over-the-top bad deal for Wisconsin."

However, the full $3 billion in incentives only becomes available if Foxconn ends up creating 13,000 jobs. But there's no ironclad guarantee in the deal that Foxconn even meets its 3,000 job promise, so the opponents' "$1 million per job" argument could be true if the factory only ends up employing 1,500 people or fewer.

Even if the plant never expands beyond 3,000 jobs, though, Foxconn will get $1.35 billion for building the plant. Assuming even the beginning stages of the deal come together, Wisconsin will be paying $500,000 worth of incentives per job.

Either way you slice it, the Wisconsin proposal will be the largest-ever subsidy provided by a state to a foreign company, according to Politifact.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...t-new-factory/





I Bought a Book About the Internet From 1994 and None of the Links Worked

Early books and periodicals about the internet were the atlases of the digital world in the mid-90s—and like atlases, they frequently pandered to the largest possible audience.
Ernie Smith

For crate-diggers of all stripes, the internet is awesome for one reason: The crate never ends.

There's always something new to find online, because people keep creating new things to throw into that crate. But that crate has a hole at the bottom. Stuff is falling out just as quickly, and pieces of history that would stick around in meatspace disappear in an instant online. So as a result, there aren't a lot of websites from 1995 that made it through to the present day. Gopher sites? Odds are low. Text files? Perhaps.

The endless pace of linkrot has left books about the internet in a curious limbo—they're dead trees about the dead-tree killer, after all. To their credit, books about the internet carry a bit of permanence about them, but they also go out of date quickly, which isn't helpful. But for my purposes, that's a virtue.

A whole lot of internet guidebooks sold, reflecting a broader trend in technology books. To give you an idea: During its initial printing run, International Data Group printed just 7,500 copies of DOS for Dummies.

Despite low expectations, the book quickly became a massive success, setting the stage for a cottage industry of books that break down technical topics in simple terms, mostly in the computer space.

By 1993, the series had sold 1.3 million copies on its own. Now there are 1,950 individual books in the series, covering a whole lot of things that have nothing to do with computing, and the books have sold upwards of 300 million titles.

The internet benefited from this phenomenon, too, with scores of how-to books showing up during this time. This was not an era for insidery content—a publication like Motherboard, for example, might not have been as focused on internet culture in 1993, because not enough people even knew what the internet was. (Some publications, like the magazine Internet Underground, certainly tried, however.)

Of course, with these books being very much of their era, that means that the odds are pretty low that any of the resources are even going to still be online. But that certainly doesn't mean I can't try to find some links in this thing that actually work in 2017.

" Internet Underground was this celebration of this relatively lawless, boundless network of ideas we call the Internet. It assumed two things about its audience: 1) You were a fan [and] 2) you knew how to use it. Otherwise the magazine would haven't have made much sense to you."

— Rob Bernstein, the editor of Internet Underground magazine, discussing the nature of the magazine with The Kernel. The magazine, published by the same corporate parent as Electronic Gaming Monthly, was less a guide to the internet and more a dive into its culture—a rarity of its era, one that felt written for people in the know than those on the outside. Probably its best comparison point was Wired, but it felt a bit rougher around the edges, in a good way. But while it had some touches of mainstream culture in its pages—the first issue, notably, featured an interview with early internet webmaster Rodney Dangerfield (really)—it was a rare example of an insidery internet publication in the 90s. Most of the time, the consumer-oriented internet-related periodicals had a tone closer to the Dummies series.

Internet Underground was eventually retired and folded into Yahoo! Internet Life, which was pretty much the opposite of Internet Underground in every way. An online archive of the magazine still lingers, but a full print issue only found its way onto the Internet Archive relatively recently. (I recommend you read it, especially if you like the "grunge typography" stylings of graphic designer David Carson. It's a trip.)

What I learned from buying a 23-year-old book on free online resources

Recently, I bought a book—quaint, I know—and I'm probably the only person to have purchased this book or anything like it in more than 20 years.

It's a reference book, the kind that you can still pick up at Barnes and Noble today. But it's best described as what you'd get if you combined a phone book, a Matthew Lesko free money guide, and the internet.

The book, titled Free $tuff From the Internet (Coriolis Group Books, 1994), promises to help you find free content online. And, crucially, it focuses less on the web, which was still quite young, than on many of the alternative protocols of the era. The book is a bit tongue-in-cheek, to be fair, but some of the language and descriptions, surrounded by clip-art or screenshots of internet resources, are a little much.

"A revolution in communication is raging around the world, and it's called the Internet," author Patrick Vincent explains in the book's preface. "And whether you realize it or not, you are now on your way to being the latest foot soldier in this latter-day Information Crusade. Welcome to the Internet."

Conceptually, this book speaks to the early internet's inherent sense of wonder. But, curiously, it was less focused on its value as a real-time communication tool, and more focused on what you could download onto your computer without paying any money. Your modem and phone line, the book implies by its sheer existence, are the only things separating you from more free stuff!

The book—which, much like a Matthew Lesko tome, leans heavily on publicly funded resources like universities or NASA—has a warning in it that because of its printed nature, odds are very strong that individual links were in danger of going out of date. And, as it turns out…this is not a misleading statement.

Case in point: This book links to FTP sites, telnet servers, and Gopher destinations, and I've tried many of them in an effort to figure out whether something, anything in this book works in the present day.

These FTP servers were often based at universities which have a vested interest in keeping information online for a long-term period—think the University of North Carolina, or Kansas State University. But despite this, I could not get most of these servers to load—they were long ago murdered by the World Wide Web. About half an hour of attempts to load any content whatsoever from these servers led to a whole lot of crying and wasted commands on my terminal screen.

Eventually, though, I hit (a little) paydirt. The first positive match I got for a working server, on page 137 out of a 460-page book, was for gatekeeper.dec.com, an FTP server created by Digital Equipment Corporation and now owned by Hewlett-Packard. But sadly, the resource that I was told I would find there, a recipe for escargot and chanterelle pizza, was no longer there—in fact, the whole recipe folder had been removed. I was only able to find said recipe by typing in a phrase in the book and searching for it in Google. My second positive server match led me to ftp.luth.se, where I was promised a download of Doom. (No dice, but fortunately, it's not a hard program to find.)

Eventually, the book took me to page 147, where I found a link to a FTP server at MIT (rtfm.mit.edu) that had a text file from a Usenet server—a list of MUD servers, to be exact—to find something in this 22-year-old book that was still on the internet in its original form.

It's too bad, really. All the references to Hewlett-Packard printer utilities, the file folders with images from the Civil War, the online coloring book downloads? They're generally not available to even look at in an archived form. Users never thought to save these things for later—because nobody believed they would have to.

That is not a great track record, and honestly, it makes me worry about the state of the internet years or decades from now. Will the links still work?

That's the big lesson I take from this book: It's the digital equivalent of walking into a city with a map printed in 1940 and trying to see if things still line up. And honestly, very little—if anything—does.

It's like we built a new city on top of an old one.

Five interesting facts about the internet you probably weren't aware of that this book on free internet stuff helpfully points out

1. It was possible to get on a text-based version of the internet for free in many areas, using only a modem and a phone line. An entire section of Free $tuff From the Internet offers up a lengthy list of free-nets, grassroots phone systems that essentially allowed for free access to text-based online resources. These networks, often tied to universities or municipalities, couldn't compete with the internet of today, but are a great reminder that this place wasn't always so corporate.
2. The graphical internet wasn't necessarily natural at first. Near the tail end of Free $tuff, Vincent spends a lot of time discussing the implications of the then-new NCSA Mosaic (which, unlike nearly everything else in this book, still has links that work!) The chapter, titled "The Tightwad's Guide to Mosaic," gets surprisingly technical, given the largely non-technical nature of the book, with much attention focused on the need of acquiring a SLIP or PPP account, setting up a TCP/IP stack, and editing INI files to make sure that everything in Mosaic works. These days, this stuff just works, but back then, it was an ordeal to get everything working the first time.
3. The Rolling Stones may have been the first major band on the internet. In 1994, the band not only launched a website to promote its album Voodoo Lounge, it actually streamed a concert on the platform in November of that year, using an online provider named MBone for some reason. You can actually watch a video of the concert here.
4. It was possible to buy stuff online before Amazon. While Amazon popularized the model of purchasing things, the online outpost CD Connection (which is still online today, albeit not in the telnet-based form highlighted in this book) made it possible to actually purchase CDs online as early as 1990. (Speaking of Amazon, one of their eventual acquisitions is name-dropped in this, not that you'd know it simply by looking. On page 275, Cardiff University's Movie Database Browser gets a shout-out. A few years after the book came out, it became IMDb—as well as the property of Amazon.)
5. Newsletters were probably bigger, proportionally, than they are now. This book rarely mentions the concept of spam, if at all, despite it being an important part of internet culture. But one thing it did highlight repeatedly were mailing lists (sometimes in newsletter form, sometimes in listserv form) for things like issues of Dilbert (A pre-Master Wizard Scott Adams actually ran the list!), or getting access to things like grant proposals, or access to local communities. It's clear that email was a much more fundamental piece of the internet pie in the 90s, especially compared to the modern day, where it's still heavily used, but only one of many things fighting for your attention.

"The biggest problem is that there's still a lot of dorks in computing," Dan Gookin, the author of the original DOS for Dummies, told the Orlando Sentinel in 1993. "They're the kind of people who were in chess club in high school—real bright but wound up in their self-centered little technical world, and they can't communicate with other people."

Now, Gookin has always been this salty—in a Dummies retrospective for Slate last year, he implied that the series' publisher at the time, IDG, "would have wrapped that title around newsprint and it still would have sold."

But something tells me that his point to the Sentinel in the 90s, while sort of mean and dismissive of a whole segment of the population, is grounded in a degree of reality. The internet was not a welcoming place for strangers, of which huge chunks of the global population very much were. In early 1994, after Mosaic but before Netscape, while Adam Curry still owned MTV.com, New York Times writer Peter H. Lewis suggested that the internet seemed exciting, but that it was unwelcoming to newbies, who needed a guide to get around.

"First-time visitors may discover that finding the way around is an ordeal, especially if they do not speak the language," he wrote.

Computer and internet reference books of the 90s were the guide that filled the void. They represented a kind of midpoint between sheer hucksterism and infotainment. Going back to Free $tuff From the Internet, I should point out that the structure of the book was this weird setup where every single resource got a full paragraph description, no matter how large or small it was. A link to a directory of Beatles photos on a random FTP server would get just as much text as a blurb about resources explaining the then-new North American Free Trade Agreement. Despite the fact that one probably needed more detail, it didn't really get it.

This book, essentially, is the equivalent of one guy's bookmark list in the days before Netscape popularized bookmarks on the internet.
Internet Underground: The coolest internet magazine on planet Earth. Image: Internet Archive

I don't think Patrick Vincent was trying to pad out the book by doing this. I do think that he was aiming for an audience that needed online training wheels, in comparison to Internet Underground magazine, which aimed for one that didn't.

I loved Internet Underground magazine. I used to have every issue. That it was replaced by, essentially, the magazine version of Free $tuff From the Internet, is both depressing and fitting.

The fact of the matter is, the public needed a map in the early days of the internet. It took a while before people understood memes.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...e-links-worked





U.S. Judge Says LinkedIn Cannot Block Startup from Public Profile Data
Salvador Rodriguez

A U.S. federal judge on Monday ruled that Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) LinkedIn unit cannot prevent a startup from accessing public profile data, in a test of how much control a social media site can wield over information its users have deemed to be public.

U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction request brought by hiQ Labs, and ordered LinkedIn to remove within 24 hours any technology preventing hiQ from accessing public profiles.

The case is considered to have implications beyond LinkedIn and hiQ Labs and could dictate just how much control companies have over publicly available data that is hosted on their services.

"To the extent LinkedIn has already put in place technology to prevent hiQ from accessing these public profiles, it is ordered to remove any such barriers," Chen's order reads.

HiQ Labs uses the LinkedIn data to build algorithms capable of predicting employee behaviors, such as when they might quit.

LinkedIn plans to challenge the decision, company spokeswoman Nicole Leverich said.

“We’re disappointed in the court’s ruling,” Leverich said. “This case is not over. We will continue to fight to protect our members’ ability to control the information they make available on LinkedIn.”

HiQ Labs called the decision an important victory for companies that rely on publicly available data for their businesses.

"HiQ believes that public data must remain public, and innovation on the internet should not be stifled by legal bullying or the anti-competitive hoarding of public data by a small group of powerful companies," the company said in a statement Monday evening.

That sentiment was echoed by Falon Fatemi, chief executive of Node, a San Francisco startup that uses publicly available data and artificial intelligence to help companies identify potential customers.

"If LinkedIn is going to allow profiles to be indexed by search engines to benefit their platform then why shouldn't the rest of the internet benefit from that as well?" she said.

The dispute between the two tech companies has been going on since May, when LinkedIn issued a letter to hiQ Labs instructing the startup to stop scraping data from its service.

HiQ Labs responded by filing a lawsuit against LinkedIn in June, alleging that the Microsoft-owned social network was in violation of antitrust laws.

Reporting by Salvador Rodriguez and Dan Levine; Editing by Tom Brown and Lisa Shumaker
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-m...KCN1AU2BV?il=0





LinkedIn Data-Scraping Case Highlights Calls for SCOTUS Review of Computer Fraud Law
Andrew Chung; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Dan Grebler

Is it time for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide how the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - a law enacted before ordinary people could even access computer networks – applies in the Internet age?

This fall, the justices will consider requests to review that overarching question in two very different cases from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Power Ventures v. Facebook and Nosal v. United States. And if the justices need proof of the urgency of the issue, they got it Monday in a decision from U.S. District Judge Edward Chen of San Francisco.

Judge Chen granted a preliminary injunction to the data analytics startup hiQ, which relies on access to the public profiles of LinkedIn members to create products it sells to employers like eBay and GoDaddy. LinkedIn had sent hiQ a cease and desist letter in May, cutting off the data miner’s access and threatening action under the CFAA if hiQ tried to circumvent the block. HiQ sued in June.

To ruthlessly simplify the two sides’ arguments: LinkedIn claimed it has a right to protect the privacy of its users by blocking users that violate its terms of service, just as a public library might cut off borrowing privileges for someone who used a fake ID or refused to return a book. HiQ countered that it never trespassed but only accessed LinkedIn data available to the entire world, like any onlooker in a public square. Both sides brought in legal poohbahs - former U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli of Munger Tolles & Olson for LinkedIn; Harvard prof Laurence Tribe and Farella Braun & Martel for hiQ - for a preliminary injunction hearing last month.

Judge Chen agreed in Monday’s opinion that it makes sense to draw an analogy between the CFAA and physical trespass laws. The CFAA was enacted to deter computer hackers, who are literally computer trespassers. The tough part of interpreting the statute, however, is determining when a user actually is trespassing. Relying heavily on the reasoning of George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr in a 2016 paper, Norms of Computer Trespass, Judge Chen concluded that the key consideration is whether the computer owner has imposed a virtual lock on its doors, in the form of passwords or other software restricting public access.

Under Judge Chen’s analysis, a user could be considered unauthorized, in the statutory language of the CFAA, if it tampered with those virtual locks or stole a key to open them. But if the computer owner has left its doors open, Judge Chen said, users are authorized to pass through them.

“The court intuitively understands that where an individual does not have permission to enter, he would be trespassing if he did so,” the judge explained. “Even if the door is open to the public for business, the shop owner may impose limits to the manner and scope of access (e.g., by restricting access to a storage or employees-only area). But if a business displayed a sign in its storefront window visible to all on a public street and sidewalk, it could not ban an individual from looking at the sign and subject such person to trespass for violating such a ban. LinkedIn, here, essentially seeks to prohibit hiQ from viewing a sign publicly visible to all.”

Judge Chen has spent a lot of time thinking about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – he presided over the 2013 CFAA prosecution of David Nosal, who was accused of supervising colleagues who used friends’ login credentials to access the computer systems of their former employer, the executive recruiter Korn Ferry. His conclusion in the LinkedIn case is notable for its deep understanding of the law.

But it’s even more notable that the judge is worried about whether businesses like LinkedIn can take advantage of the CFAA for their own purposes, “a result that Congress could not have intended when it enacted the CFAA over three decades ago,” the judge wrote. Under LinkedIn’s formulation of the CFAA, he said, website owners could cut off access based on users’ race or gender. Political campaigns could block rival campaigns or unsympathetic news organizations. Companies could hobble competitors that sought to use public information about their products or pricing.

In short, Judge Chen wrote, “a broad reading of the CFAA could stifle the dynamic evolution and incremental development of state and local laws addressing the delicate balance between open access to information and privacy – all in the name of a federal statute enacted in 1984 before the advent of the World Wide Web.” (The CFAA was enacted in 1986, as an amendment to a 1984 computer fraud law that was part of an omnibus anti-crime bill.)

Judge Chen’s fear of CFAA abuse brings me to the Power Ventures and Nosal petitions for Supreme Court review. In both of those cases, the 9th Circuit found users to have violated the computer fraud statute. Nosal, as I mentioned, was convicted for unauthorized access to the website of his former employer. Power Ventures, a social media site, was found to be in breach of the CFAA when it used its members’ login credentials to access Facebook after Facebook sent Power Ventures a cease-and-desist letter.

Power Ventures, represented at the Supreme Court by Hughes Hubbard & Reed, contends it was authorized because its members supplied their Facebook credentials. Facebook, represented by Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, argued that there’s no need for the justices to hop into a case with idiosyncratic facts when the federal circuits aren’t split. Briefing in that case is complete. Nosal, who is represented by Hogan Lovells, presents a similar question of whether defendants can be criminally liable under the CFAA when they have obtained permission (and login credentials) from an account holder authorized to access a computer but have not received authorization from the computer owner. The Justice Department’s response to Nosal’s petition for Supreme Court review is due on Sept. 5.

Amicus briefs in the two cases, from the Cato Institute in Power Ventures and from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Nosal, rang the same alarm bells as Judge Chen did in Monday’s hiQ case. Congress never intended the CFAA to be an all-purpose Internet policing law, the two groups said in their amicus briefs. The law was passed to criminalize computer hacking in the days of mainframes, before public computer networks really existed. Yet the 9th Circuit’s definition of an unauthorized user has exposed all kinds of people to criminal liability for using borrowed passwords, even with the assent of the password holder.

Cato and the EFF both argued that other appellate courts, notably the 2nd and 4th Circuits, have adopted a more circumscribed view of who is an unauthorized user under the CFAA. They both said in their amicus briefs that it’s up to the Supreme Court to look at the big-picture question of which users can be targeted under an old law adapted for unanticipated purposes.

“The court is going to have to deal with this issue sooner or later,” said Cato’s Devin Watkins, principal author of the libertarian group’s amicus brief backing Power Ventures’ petition for Supreme Court review. “The justices are going to have to decide what the underlying principles of the CFAA are.” (Cato, like Judge Chen, based its analysis on trespass law. It analogized Power Ventures to a guest invited to an apartment renter’s home. Facebook may own the building, but as long as the apartment renter has allowed Power Ventures into the complex, Power Ventures is not trespassing.)

Unless Congress resolves to rewrite the computer fraud law – which it has so far shown absolutely no inclination to do - the Supreme Court will be the last word on weaponizing the CFAA in the frightening ways Judge Chen hypothesized in the LinkedIn case. It’s a tough issue that’s not going away.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-o...-idUSKCN1AV29N





Trump Can Block People on Twitter if he Wants, Administration Says

As president, Trump can use Twitter however he sees fit, Justice Department says.
David Kravets

The administration of President Donald Trump is scoffing at a federal lawsuit by Twitter users who claim that their constitutional rights are being violated because the president has blocked them from his @realDonaldTrump Twitter handle.

"It would send the First Amendment deep into uncharted waters to hold that a president's choices about whom to follow, and whom to block, on Twitter—a privately run website that, as a central feature of its social-media platform, enables all users to block particular individuals from viewing posts—violate the Constitution." That's part of what Michael Baer, a Justice Department attorney, wrote to the New York federal judge overseeing the lawsuit Friday.

In addition, the Justice Department said the courts are powerless to tell Trump how he can manage his private Twitter handle, which has 35.8 million followers.

"To the extent that the President's management of his Twitter account constitutes state action, it is unquestionably action that lies within his discretion as Chief Executive; it is therefore outside the scope of judicial enforcement," Baer wrote.

Baer added that an order telling Trump how to manage his Twitter feed "would raise profound separation-of-powers concerns by intruding directly into the president's chosen means of communicating to millions of Americans."

The lawsuit, filed last month, claims Trump's Twitter feed is a public forum and an official voice of the president. Excluding people from reading or replying to his tweets—especially because they tweeted critical comments—amounts to a First Amendment breach, according to the lawsuit. The suit demands that Trump unblock people he has blocked on Twitter, and it seeks a preliminary injunction to stop him from blocking people.

Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy says he doesn't think blocked Twitter users are having their First Amendment rights breached. That said, he believes "the matter is not open and shut."

Many of these types of lawsuits targeting politicians are cropping up across the nation. There's some legal precedent on the topic, too. Last month, a federal judge in Virginia ruled that a local politician had violated the First Amendment rights of a constituent because the politician briefly banned the constituent from the politician's personal Facebook account, where she discussed public business.

"The suppression of critical commentary regarding elected officials is the quintessential form of viewpoint discrimination against which the First Amendment guards," US District Judge James Cacheris wrote in a suit brought by a constituent against Phyllis Randall, the chairwoman of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors in Virginia. Randall's Facebook page, the judge ruled, "operates as a forum for speech under the First Amendment to the US Constitution."

In the Trump case, the Justice Department notes that people blocked by the president can still view his tweets if they log out of Twitter. The department also says that those suing Trump "remain free to use Twitter (or any social media platform) to criticize the president."

No hearing date has been set.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...stration-says/





Justice Demands 1.3M IP Addresses Related to Trump Resistance Site
Morgan Chalfant

The Department of Justice has requested information on visitors to a website used to organize protests against President Trump, the Los Angeles-based Dreamhost said in a blog post published on Monday.

Dreamhost, a web hosting provider, said that it has been working with the Department of Justice for several months on the request, which believes goes too far under the Constitution.

DreamHost claimed that the complying with the request from the Justice Department would amount to handing over roughly 1.3 million visitor IP addresses to the government, in addition to contact information, email content and photos of thousands of visitors to the website, which was involved in organizing protests against Trump on Inauguration Day.

“That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment,” DreamHost wrote in the blog post on Monday. “That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind.”

When contacted, the Justice Department directed The Hill to the U.S. attorney's office in D.C.

The company is currently challenging the request. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Friday in Washington.

“In essence, the Search Warrant not only aims to identify the political dissidents of the current administration, but attempts to identify and understand what content each of these dissidents viewed on the website,” the company’s general counsel, Chris Ghazarian, said in a legal argument opposing the request.

The web provider published a purported search warrant issued by the Superior Court of the District of Columbia that asks for records and information related to the website and its owner, along with information that could be used to identify subscribers of the website.

This includes “names, addresses, telephone numbers and other identifiers, e-mail addresses, business information, the length of service (including start date), means and source of payment for services (including any credit card or bank account number), and information about any domain name registration.”

The warrant, dated July 12, says that authorities will seize any information constituting violations of D.C. code governing riots that involve individuals connected to the protests on Inauguration Day.

More than 200 people were indicted on felony rioting charges in connection with the protests in Washington on Jan. 20.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecur...-trump-website





Tech Companies Urge Supreme Court to Boost Cellphone Privacy
Andrew Chung

More than a dozen high technology companies and the biggest wireless operator in the United States, Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N), have called on the U.S. Supreme Court to make it harder for government officials to access individuals' sensitive cellphone data.

The companies filed a 44-page brief with the court on Monday night in a high-profile dispute over whether police should have to get a warrant before obtaining data that could reveal a cellphone user's whereabouts.

Signed by some of Silicon Valley's biggest names, including Apple (AAPL.O), Facebook (FB.O), Twitter (TWTR.N), Snap (SNAP.N) and Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google, the brief said that as individuals' data is increasingly collected through digital devices, greater privacy protections are needed under the law.

"That users rely on technology companies to process their data for limited purposes does not mean that they expect their intimate data to be monitored by the government without a warrant," the brief said.

The justices agreed last June to hear an appeal by Timothy Carpenter, who was convicted in 2013 in a series of armed robberies of Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in Ohio and Michigan. Federal prosecutors helped place him near several of the robberies using "cell site location information" obtained from his wireless carrier.

Carpenter claims that without a warrant from a court, such data amounts to an unreasonable search and seizure under the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment. But last year a federal appeals court upheld his convictions, finding that no warrant was required.

Carpenter's case will be argued before the court some time after its new term begins in October.

The case comes amid growing scrutiny of the surveillance practices of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies and concern among lawmakers across the political spectrum about civil liberties and police evading warrant requirements.

Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who is representing Carpenter, said the companies' brief represented a "robust defense of their customers' privacy rights in the digital age."

Verizon's participation in the brief was important, he added, given that it receives, like other wireless carriers, thousands of requests for cellphone location records every year from law enforcement. The requests are routinely granted.

The U.S. Department of Justice, which is defending current law enforcement procedures in the case, declined to comment on Tuesday.

Civil liberties lawyers have said police need "probable cause," and therefore a warrant, to avoid constitutionally unreasonable searches.

In their brief, the companies said the Supreme Court should clarify that when it comes to digital data that can reveal personal information, people should not lose protections against government intrusion "simply by choosing to use those technologies."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKCN1AV1B3





Discord Bans Servers that Promote Nazi Ideology

After Charlottesville, ‘Love. Not hate’
Casey Newton

Discord, a fast-growing free chat service popular among gamers, said today that it had shut down “a number of accounts” following violence instigated by white supremacists over the weekend. The service, which lets users chat with voice and text, was being used by proponents of Nazi ideology both before and after the attacks in Charlottesville, Virginia. “We will continue to take action against Nazi ideology, and all forms of hate,” the company said in a tweet.

Discord declined to state how many servers had been affected, but said it included a mix of old accounts and accounts that were created over the weekend. Among the affected servers was one used by AltRight.com, a white nationalist news site. The site’s homepage includes a prominent link to a Discord chat which is now broken.

Love. Not hate. pic.twitter.com/5xFpvHTuI2
— Discord (@discordapp) August 14, 2017

The company said it does not read private messages exchanged on its servers. Members of those groups reported messages in the chats for violating Discord’s terms of service, the company said, and it took action. “When hatred like this violates our community standards we act swiftly to take servers down and ban individual users,” the company said in a statement. “The public server linked to AltRight.com that violated those terms was shut down along with several other public groups and accounts fostering bad actors on Discord. We will continue to be aggressive to ensure that Discord exists for the community we set out to support — gamers.”

Discord has been criticized in the past for being slow to act against noxious accounts. Earlier this year, Gizmodo found the service was being used by groups that existed primarily to promote abuse and dox people.

Discord’s announcement came the same day that neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer was banned first by GoDaddy and later by Google, where it had attempted to register.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/14/1...acist-altright





Neo-Nazi Site Moves to Dark Web after GoDaddy and Google Bans
Adi Robertson

Prominent neo-Nazi news site the Daily Stormer has apparently moved to the dark web after being denied domain registration from Google and GoDaddy. The site’s status page tweeted a link to the new site, which can only be accessed through the anonymizing service Tor. (Neo-Nazi troll Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, who is banned from Twitter, also posted the link on Gab.ai.) As Motherboard noted this morning, this means that it no longer has to rely on a major domain registrar, protecting it from a rare online crackdown on white supremacism.

The Stormer’s original registrar, GoDaddy, banned the site yesterday, after it posted an article celebrating the alleged murder of protester Heather Heyer during this weekend’s white supremacist rally. After a plausibly fabricated takeover by hacking collective Anonymous, it then moved briefly to Google Domains, before being kicked off both Domains and YouTube for unspecified terms-of-service violations.

Google and GoDaddy are two of several tech companies that appear to be taking a harder line on the white nationalist alt-right movement after Heyer’s death. Facebook has removed links to the Daily Stormer article, chat app Discord has banned it and other alt-right channels, and Airbnb’s CEO said that the alt-right and white supremacy had “no place in this world,” or on Airbnb. However, white supremacism isn’t new to the dark web — researchers at online investigation site Hunchly noted that the Stormer’s new address also percolated through an existing alt-right site.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/15/1...ddy-google-ban





Teaching A.I. Systems to Behave Themselves
Cade Metz

At OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab founded by Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, machines are teaching themselves to behave like humans. But sometimes, this goes wrong.

Sitting inside OpenAI’s San Francisco offices on a recent afternoon, the researcher Dario Amodei showed off an autonomous system that taught itself to play Coast Runners, an old boat-racing video game. The winner is the boat with the most points that also crosses the finish line.

The result was surprising: The boat was far too interested in the little green widgets that popped up on the screen. Catching these widgets meant scoring points. Rather than trying to finish the race, the boat went point-crazy. It drove in endless circles, colliding with other vessels, skidding into stone walls and repeatedly catching fire.

Mr. Amodei’s burning boat demonstrated the risks of the A.I. techniques that are rapidly remaking the tech world. Researchers are building machines that can learn tasks largely on their own. This is how Google’s DeepMind lab created a system that could beat the world’s best player at the ancient game of Go. But as these machines train themselves through hours of data analysis, they may also find their way to unexpected, unwanted and perhaps even harmful behavior.

That’s a concern as these techniques move into online services, security devices and robotics. Now, a small community of A.I. researchers, including Mr. Amodei, is beginning to explore mathematical techniques that aim to keep the worst from happening.

At OpenAI, Mr. Amodei and his colleague Paul Christiano are developing algorithms that can not only learn tasks through hours of trial and error, but also receive regular guidance from human teachers along the way.

With a few clicks here and there, the researchers now have a way of showing the autonomous system that it needs to win points in Coast Runners while also moving toward the finish line. They believe that these kinds of algorithms — a blend of human and machine instruction — can help keep automated systems safe.

For years, Mr. Musk, along with other pundits, philosophers and technologists, have warned that machines could spin outside our control and somehow learn malicious behavior their designers didn’t anticipate. At times, these warnings have seemed overblown, given that today’s autonomous car systems can even get tripped up by the most basic tasks, like recognizing a bike lane or a red light.

But researchers like Mr. Amodei are trying to get ahead of the risks. In some ways, what these scientists are doing is a bit like a parent teaching a child right from wrong.

Many specialists in the A.I. field believe a technique called reinforcement learning — a way for machines to learn specific tasks through extreme trial and error — could be a primary path to artificial intelligence. Researchers specify a particular reward the machine should strive for, and as it navigates a task at random, the machine keeps close track of what brings the reward and what doesn’t. When OpenAI trained its bot to play Coast Runners, the reward was more points.

This video game training has real-world implications.

If a machine can learn to navigate a racing game like Grand Theft Auto, researchers believe, it can learn to drive a real car. If it can learn to use a web browser and other common software apps, it can learn to understand natural language and maybe even carry on a conversation. At places like Google and the University of California, Berkeley, robots have already used the technique to learn simple tasks like picking things up or opening a door.

All this is why Mr. Amodei and Mr. Christiano are working to build reinforcement learning algorithms that accept human guidance along the way. This can ensure systems don’t stray from the task at hand.

Together with others at the London-based DeepMind, a lab owned by Google, the two OpenAI researchers recently published some of their research in this area. Spanning two of the world’s top A.I. labs — and two that hadn’t really worked together in the past — these algorithms are considered a notable step forward in A.I. safety research.

“This validates a lot of the previous thinking,” said Dylan Hadfield-Menell, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “These types of algorithms hold a lot of promise over the next five to 10 years.”

The field is small, but it is growing. As OpenAI and DeepMind build teams dedicated to A.I. safety, so too is Google’s stateside lab, Google Brain. Meanwhile, researchers at universities like the U.C. Berkeley and Stanford University are working on similar problems, often in collaboration with the big corporate labs.

In some cases, researchers are working to ensure that systems don’t make mistakes on their own, as the Coast Runners boat did. They’re also working to ensure that hackers and other bad actors can’t exploit hidden holes in these systems. Researchers like Google’s Ian Goodfellow, for example, are exploring ways that hackers could fool A.I. systems into seeing things that aren’t there.

Modern computer vision is based on what are called deep neural networks, which are pattern-recognition systems that can learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. By analyzing thousands of dog photos, a neural network can learn to recognize a dog. This is how Facebook identifies faces in snapshots, and it’s how Google instantly searches for images inside its Photos app.

But Mr. Goodfellow and others have shown that hackers can alter images so that a neural network will believe they include things that aren’t really there. Just by changing a few pixels in the photo of elephant, for example, they could fool the neural network into thinking it depicts a car.

The daily Bits newsletter will keep you updated on the latest from Silicon Valley and the technology industry, plus exclusive analysis from our reporters and editors.

That becomes problematic when neural networks are used in security cameras. Simply by making a few marks on your face, the researchers said, you could fool a camera into believing you’re someone else.

“If you train an object-recognition system on a million images labeled by humans, you can still create new images where a human and the machine disagree 100 percent of the time,” Mr. Goodfellow said. “We need to understand that phenomenon.”

Another big worry is that A.I. systems will learn to prevent humans from turning them off. If the machine is designed to chase a reward, the thinking goes, it may find that it can chase that reward only if it stays on. This oft-described threat is much further off, but researchers are already working to address it.

Mr. Hadfield-Menell and others at U.C. Berkeley recently published a paper that takes a mathematical approach to the problem. A machine will seek to preserve its off switch, they showed, if it is specifically designed to be uncertain about its reward function. This gives it an incentive to accept or even seek out human oversight.

Much of this work is still theoretical. But given the rapid progress of A.I. techniques and their growing importance across so many industries, researchers believe that starting early is the best policy.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty around exactly how rapid progress in A.I. is going to be,” said Shane Legg, who oversees the A.I. safety work at DeepMind. “The responsible approach is to try to understand different ways in which these technologies can be misused, different ways they can fail and different ways of dealing with these issues.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/t...-training.html





After Trump Hedges His Condemnation of Hate, C.E.O.s Organize a Mass Defection
David Gelles, Landon Thomas Jr., Andrew Ross Sorkin and Kate Kelly

On Tuesday, Indra Nooyi, the chief executive of PepsiCo, joined a call with other prominent corporate chieftains who — like her — had agreed to advise President Trump.

A rebellion was brewing.

Along with other business leaders, Ms. Nooyi had watched with bafflement over the weekend as Mr. Trump blamed “many sides” for an outburst of white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va.

Ms. Nooyi spoke with Mary T. Barra, the head of General Motors, Virginia M. Rometty, the chief of IBM, and Rich Lesser, the chief executive of Boston Consulting Group, who were similarly outraged with the president’s response. All of them wondered whether it was time to step down from the Strategic and Policy Forum, an elite group formed late last year to advise the president on economic issues.

As these calls were occurring, the president’s other main business advisory group, the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative, had begun to disintegrate. Early Monday, the chief executive of Merck stepped down from that group, followed by the chiefs of Intel and Under Armour, and representatives from a labor group and a nonprofit business alliance.

Some chief executives were still on the fence on Tuesday, torn between remaining on the prestigious presidential policy advisory panel and making a statement by stepping down.

But after the president delivered a series of stunning remarks in the gilded lobby of Trump Tower on Tuesday afternoon, when he again equated far-right hate groups with the groups protesting them, many chief executives had enough.

On Wednesday morning, a dozen of the country’s most influential C.E.O.s joined a conference call, and, after some debate, a consensus emerged: The policy forum would be disbanded, delivering a blow to a president who came into office boasting of his close ties with business leaders.

With the collapse of the councils, the president has all but lost his most natural constituency — the corporate leaders who stood to benefit from his agenda of lower taxes and lighter regulation.

Before they could make a statement announcing their decision, however, Mr. Trump spoke. He had caught wind of their planned defection and wanted to have the last word. Taking to Twitter, he wrote: “Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!”

This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen people at the companies represented on the council or advising them.

Mr. Trump rose to fame as a businessman. A real estate developer and reality television star, he cultivated an image as the consummate boss, dishing out investment advice and popularizing the phrase “You’re fired!” on the television show “The Apprentice.”

As president, he filled the White House with executives from Wall Street, and installed business and business-friendly leaders in many important government roles. And he convened several business advisory groups stacked with the nation’s top chief executives.

But seven months into his presidency, Mr. Trump is faced with an uncomfortable situation: Fewer and fewer business leaders are willing to be associated with a president who continues to advance opinions and policies that are deeply unpopular.

“There is continuing pressure on C.E.O.s from customers, employees, shareholders and board members to take a position against what’s going on and separate themselves from president Trump’s councils,” said Bill George, the former chief executive of the medical device maker Medtronic and a board member of Goldman Sachs. “These executives cannot live with customers thinking they are in cahoots with someone who supports white supremacists or neo-Nazis.”

For the executives, leaving these groups is no small matter. Presidential advisory groups are largely ceremonial but highly prestigious posts for business leaders, giving them an opportunity to weigh in on policy and try to shape a president’s legislative agenda. But after a few much-publicized events for the groups, momentum was lost, and when the week began, no further meetings were planned.

“They had a few meetings with a bunch of fanfare, but it was more symbolic than anything else,” said Anat R. Admati, a professor of finance and economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Still, executives’ involvement with the groups — or their decision to withdraw — had become a barometer of their support for the president. The recent mass defections have exposed a fundamental divide between Mr. Trump and mainstream business leaders.

“In American history, we’ve never had business leaders decline national service when requested by the president,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. “They’ve now turned their backs on him.”

By Tuesday evening, a consensus had emerged among many of the chief executives on the policy forum. Having stood with the president in recent months even as he advanced positions they vehemently opposed, including tough immigration policies and withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate accord, many executives felt his apparent tolerance for white nationalist violence was a bridge too far.

Ms. Nooyi was drawing heavy criticism on social media for her involvement in the panel. Others, including Mr. Lesser, the chief executive of Boston Consulting Group, and Mark Weinberger, the head of the accounting firm Ernst & Young, also signaled they would not remain. By 10 p.m., it was clear that many participants were prepared to resign.

As the group disintegrated, Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of the Blackstone Group, was kept in the loop. Mr. Schwarzman was one of Mr. Trump’s closest business confidants and the chairman of the policy forum, but he was also outraged by the president’s remarks.

On Tuesday evening, he called Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a White House adviser, to inform him that the policy forum was falling apart. At the same time, Mr. Schwarzman began drafting a statement about disbanding the group. A White House spokesman declined to comment.

Efforts to schedule a conference call for the chief executives on Tuesday night were unsuccessful, so a call was set for 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday.

On Wednesday morning, Laurence D. Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, called Ms. Nooyi, Ms. Rometty, Ms. Barra and Douglas McMillon, the chief executive of Walmart.

Mr. Fink decided to step down after seeing the president’s remarks on Tuesday, and now encouraged other executives to join him. Mr. McMillon, who earlier in the week made public a stinging critique of the president, but had not stepped down from the advisory group, had changed his stance after Mr. Trump’s news conference on Tuesday, deciding to step down.

As the call began, more than a dozen of the nation’s top business leaders dialed in from around the country — Mr. Fink was in Aspen, Colo., while Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan, was home in New York.

Leading the discussion, Mr. Schwarzman, gave each participant time to speak.

Two in the group — Jim McNerney, the former chief executive of Boeing and Jack Welch, the former leader of General Electric — proposed issuing a statement condemning the president, but keeping the group together.

Mr. McNerney and Mr. Welch did not respond to requests for comment.

But most others, including Mr. Fink of BlackRock and Ms. Nooyi of Pepsi, leaned toward disbanding.

Mr. Dimon was also furious and wanted off the council, but felt conflicted because of his role as chairman of the Business Roundtable, an industry group.

Ms. Rometty of IBM, who had faced criticism from employees for her role in the group, advocated that the executives “condemn and disband.” That phrase soon drew broad backing.

During the 40-minute phone call, Mr. Schwarzman did not press for continued allegiance to the president. He said that although he had had high hopes for the forum, something had to change in light of the president’s reaction to the violence in Charlottesville. The question, he added, was how to reach a consensus.

As the policy forum was holding its call, other members of the manufacturing council, including Denise Morrison of Campbell Soup and Inge Thulin of 3M, announced they would step down.

By the time the call was over, the group had agreed to disband. After the decision was final, Mr. Schwarzman called the White House to let Mr. Trump know. He was asked to include language that the president had agreed to disband it.

Shortly thereafter, the president claimed on Twitter that he was disbanding the advisory groups.

Companies swiftly disputed that notion. Johnson & Johnson said its chief executive, Alex Gorsky, was leaving the panel before the president’s tweet.

After the announcement of the disbanding, many of the chief executives who had initially lent support to Mr. Trump, publicly separated themselves from him, one by one, in stark language.

“There is no room for equivocation here: the evil on display by these perpetrators of hate should be condemned and has no place in a country that draws strength from our diversity and humanity,” Mr. Dimon of JPMorgan wrote.

“In the past week, we have seen and heard of public events and statements that run counter to our values as a country and a company,” Ms. Rometty of IBM said.

And Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman of General Electric, said, “The president’s statements yesterday were deeply troubling.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/b...ncil-ceos.html





'Firestorm' Over Trump's Latest Tirade Prompted Top CEOs to Disband Advisory Council

• President Trump's latest tirade left a White Hosue panel of business leaders little choice but to disband, one member tells CNBC.
• "There was such a firestorm," the member said.
• In the face of corporate defections, Trump announced plans Wednesday to dissolve the group and the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative council.

Patti Domm, Jacob Pramuk

A White House advisory panel of top CEOs disbanded Wednesday after the backlash from President Donald Trump's latest tirade left the panel little choice, according to one member.

"There was such a firestorm," the member told CNBC. "You don't know what 's coming next, what he's going to say or do next."

In the face of corporate defections and the member's disclosure, Trump announced plans to dissolve the group and the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative council.

The strategic forum, led by Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman and made up of top business leaders, is separate from Trump's manufacturing council, which had seen seven defections this week.

The president and CEO of 3M, Inge Thulin, announced his resignation from the manufacturing council on Wednesday afternoon.

"I believe the initiative is no longer an effective vehicle for 3M to advance" its goals — to achieve a United States that is "stronger, healthier and more prosperous for all people," he said.

Seven of the White House councils' 37 members resigned this week, led by Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier's exitexit on Monday from the manufacturing council. Frazier left after Trump's waffling responses to the deadly right-wing violence in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend.

"As C.E.O. of Merck and as a matter of personal conscience, I feel a responsibility to take a stand against extremism," Frazier said.

Trump has attacked those who left the councils, tweeting at Frazier almost immediately after the Merck chief resigned and later tweeting, "For every CEO that drops out of the Manufacturing Council, I have many to take their place. Grandstanders should not have gone on. JOBS!"

Following Wednesday's decision by the advisory council to disband and condemn Trump's statements, the president said he would end both the Strategic and Policy Forum and the manufacturing council.

The business backlash to Trump follows his lukewarm response to violence at a white nationalist rally over the weekend, where one woman died and 19 people were injured after a car rammed into counterprotesters. On Tuesday, Trump appeared to equate torch-bearing white nationalists with the protesters who demonstrated against them.

"The thinking was it was important to do as a group," said the member of the advisory council. As a panel, not as individuals because it would have more significant impact. It makes a central point that it's not going to go forward. It's done."

The business leaders chose to dissolve the council in order to "condemn" the president's comments about the Charlottesville violence, the member said. The member described Trump's defiant press conference on Tuesday as a "tripwire."

They had heard from employees and customers about the advisory council.

"There really was nothing to debate," the member said.

The Strategic and Policy Forum, led by Schwarzman, featured:

• Paul Atkins, CEO, Patomak Global Partners
• Mary Barra, chairwoman and CEO, General Motors
• Toby Cosgrove, CEO, Cleveland Clinic
• Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase
• Larry Fink, chairman and CEO, BlackRock
• Rich Lesser, president and CEO, Boston Consulting Group
• Doug McMillon, president and CEO, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
• Jim McNerney, former chairman, president and CEO, Boeing
• Indra Nooyi, chairwoman and CEO of PepsiCo
• Adebayo "Bayo" Ogunlesi, chairman and managing partner, Global Infrastructure Partners
• Ginni Rometty, chairwoman, president, and CEO, IBM
• Kevin Warsh, Shepard family distinguished visiting fellow in economics, Hoover Institute, former member of the Federal Reserve's board of governors.
• Mark Weinberger, global chairman and CEO, EY
• Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO, General Electric
• Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize winner, vice chairman of IHS Markit

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/16/a-se...isbanding.html





Entire Membership of Trump's Arts Council Quits Over Charlottesville Remarks

All 17 members of a White House advisory panel on the arts and humanities resigned en masse Friday in response to President Trump's divisive comments on the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va. (August 18, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)
Associated Press

Another presidential advisory committee is breaking up.

Actor Kal Penn, artist Chuck Close and the entire membership of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities have announced their resignation. A letter dated Friday, and signed by 16 of 17 committee members, cited the "false equivalence" of President Donald Trump's comments about last weekend's "Unite the Right" gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump has blamed "many sides" for the demonstrations that left an anti-racism activist dead.

The White House said Trump had already decided against renewing the advisory committee for budgetary reasons.

"Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions," the letter reads. "Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too."

The only member whose name did not appear was Broadway director George C. Wolfe. Representatives for Wolfe at Creative Arts Agency said Friday that he was also resigning and that his name would be added to the letter, which seemed to contain a hidden political message beyond the ones stated openly. The first initials of the letter's six main paragraphs spell out "r-e-s-i-s-t."

"Earlier this month it was decided that President Trump will not renew the executive order for the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH), which expires later this year," the White House said in a statement attributed to an unnamed spokesperson. "While the committee has done good work in the past, in its current form it simply is not a responsible way to spend American tax dollars."

The statement said the committee "merely redirects funding" from federal cultural agencies that report directly to the president, Congress and taxpayers.
Protesting Trump, Evanston violinist, 93, among those who quit presidential arts committee

"These cultural agencies do tremendous work and they will continue to engage in these important projects," the statement said.

Earlier this week, two business advisory councils were disbanded as members left in protest.

Friday's exodus heightened the arts world's contentious relationship with Trump. The president struggled to find entertainers, many of whom backed Hillary Clinton in 2016, to perform at his inaugural gala, and Kennedy Center honorees for lifetime achievement have already said they will not attend the White House reception in December.

As president, Trump has also recommended defunding the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities.

The arts and humanities committee was established in 1982 under President Ronald Reagan and, with the first lady serving as honorary chair, works with both government and private agencies in promoting the arts through such programs as Turnaround Arts and Save America's Treasures. Others signing the resignation letter included Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri; and Vicki Kennedy, widow of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. All were appointed by President Barack Obama.

Associated Press writer Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.
http://www.courant.com/nation-world/...818-story.html





Where Is the Line? Deadly Protest Forces Media to Decide
Jim Rutenberg

It took the death of a young woman at the hands of one of the neo-Nazis she was protesting to force the ever-expanding media universe to face a question it has been evading for years: Where’s the line?

Google, Twitter and the web hosting company GoDaddy appeared to find it this week when they shut down The Daily Stormer, an American Nazi “publication,” after it mocked the peace activist Heather Heyer, who was killed Saturday at a white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville, Va. But The Daily Stormer had been comfortably operating in the established online matrix since it was founded in 2013.

The Daily Caller, the conservative online publication that has the Fox News host Tucker Carlson as a founder, appeared to identify the line, too. This week it took down a truly vile video it produced in January celebrating motorists who had plowed into “liberal protesters,” advising its readers to “study the technique.” (The Daily Caller said on Thursday that the video was a young videographer’s “clumsy attempt at creating some levity” at a tense time, but added that any suggestion that the video had a role in causing “Nazis to be stupid, violent maniacs is patently absurd.”)

The Fox News website Fox Nation, which apparently liked the video enough to repost it, also took it down this week, calling it “inappropriate” and expressing regret.

There were the online platforms like Facebook, Reddit and, as my colleague Kevin Roose reported this week, Discord, which shut themselves off from the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who had been using the sites to spread their hateful message and to organize.

And then there was The Associated Press, which made the thoughtful editorial judgment to avoid using the term “alt-right,” a neat bit of branding created to “disguise racist aims,” the A.P. said. Other news organizations should do the same.

It may come as a relief that people in high places in the media and technology world decided it was no longer tenable to give extra oxygen — digital and financial — to those who worship the champions of slavery or march under the Nazi flag, glorifying one of the most morally reprehensible regimes in history.

But it is truly remarkable that it only happened now, after the nation had to witness a white supremacist rally gone wrong, a latter-day Munich Beer Hall Putsch in miniature.

And it was a resounding answer to what should be an easy hypothetical question, easier than the “baby Hitler” conundrum: Would you facilitate the publication of Hitler’s newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, and provide him the means to organize his movement? It started as a joke, after all.

You can view the Stormers and their ilk as fringy “losers,” as the White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon described them this week. But the internet can rocket the fringe to the front and the center in an instant. The Stormers certainly saw the rally as their step out of the web’s shadows, one made possible by the following they had built online.

As a Daily Stormer “feature writer” says on the appropriately praised “Vice News Tonight” documentary on the rally, “As you can see we are stepping off the Internet in a big way.” Putting a finer point on it, he tells the Vice correspondent Elle Reeve, “People realize they are not atomized individuals. They are part of a larger whole because we have been spreading our memes. We have been organizing on the Internet, so now they’re coming out.”

That came to an end this week when GoDaddy said it would no longer host The Daily Stormer because its article mocking Ms. Heyer “could incite violence, which violates our terms of service.” The Daily Stormer hit the same problem when it moved its domain to Google, where the “terms of service” also prohibit content that could incite violence. And then Google booted The Stormer from YouTube.

A cascade of others followed: Visa, MasterCard and Discover said they were reassessing or ending their financial service agreements with extremist sites; GoFundMe shut down campaigns supporting the man accused of killing Ms. Heyer, James Fields; OKCupid banned the white supremacist Chris Cantwell for life; the streaming music service – and New York Times partner — Spotify told Billboard on Wednesday that it was removing a collection of bands that the Southern Poverty Law Center had identified as “hate bands.”

Then again, that list had been out for three years.

As we’ve seen time and time again in recent months, it often takes an extreme moment to push the platforms to address extreme content.

Part of the problem is logistical: There is so much material flooding the platforms that the most dangerous items can slip through.

But moves to stanch certain kinds of content also clash with the spirit of the First Amendment and, more to the point, the free-speech ethos that is so ingrained in the web.

That ethos has been the game-changer, and often for the good.

Unlike the last big communications revolutions — brought about with radio and then television — this one came with no barrier to entry in terms of expensive equipment like towers and studios. There have been no governmental limits like broadcasting standards and licensing requirements.

That has democratized information, giving rise to new political and social movements as well as to a phalanx of innovative media ventures that have diminished the traditional gatekeeper role of the mainstream media. It gave anyone with an internet connection an opportunity to have his or her voice heard widely via Facebook or Twitter, Reddit or Medium.

But as the downsides of informational democratization become more evident — the opening it has provided for nefarious state actors, terrorists and hate mongers — those who have some control over the web’s content stream have had a hard time figuring out where to build some much-needed dams.

Google, in keeping with Silicon Valley’s aversion to the news media, would not provide anyone to speak on the record about its policies but pointed to new moves aimed at starving hateful or violent sites of advertising revenue and to detect and remove terrorist videos.

The Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday vowed to do more to take down any message that “promotes or celebrates hate crimes or acts of terrorism” and said his staff was watching closely for “threats of physical harm.”

The trouble has come in finding the line between what some may find offensive and what is objectively dangerous speech.

YouTube shut down The Daily Stormer. But I had no trouble finding a recording of Thursday’s edition of “David Duke Radio” on YouTube, or, for that matter, the latest audio from “Stormfront Radio,” which is connected to an older supremacist site.

Twitter has sought to ban or suspend accounts of brazen online troublemakers like the former Breitbart star Milo Yiannopoulos, yet it struggled to keep up with the frenzied attempts from the left and right to use the site to identify opposing demonstrators and make their lives miserable. In at least a couple of cases those attempts resulted in harassment campaigns against people who were nowhere near the rally.

Then again, the efforts to police content can go too far. Mixed in with complaints from right-wing provocateurs who have already been shut down are serious conservative fears that the moves will result in censorship for right-leaning political thought.

The challenge for all sides was laid bare last fall when Facebook removed a post of Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo of children, including a naked girl, fleeing a napalm attack.

The conversation needs to continue. It can’t only be had at the height of a crisis, and it can’t only be relegated to social media.

But at this point, if we can’t set a line at neo-Nazis and white nationalists inciting hatred and violence, can we set any line at all?

Jaclyn Peiser contributed research.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/b...est-media.html





Under Trump, Business Leaders have Become the Country's Moral Compass, Tech Investor Says

• Technology companies such as Amazon have had their business models targeted directly by President Donald Trump.
• A slew of high-profile CEOs, including IBM's Ginni Rometty, relinquished their roles on Trump's advisory councils.
• The role of private companies, as well as organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is likely to keep intensifying, a tech investor says.

Anita Balakrishnan

The tech industry will continue to feel more pressure to assert its values and address the size and scope of its influence, after a week of events that pitted CEOs against President Donald Trump, one technology investor told CNBC on Friday.

"Business leaders are being asked to step forward and try and set policy for our country. It's kind of an awkward situation overall," Jeff Richards, managing partner at GGV Capital, told CNBC's "Squawk Alley" on Friday.

Technology companies such as Amazon have seen their business models targeted directly by Trump. "Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt — many jobs being lost!," Trump tweeted this week.

The tensions between tech companies and Trump were cranked up after a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, organized by white nationalists. Some critics said that Trump's remarks did not come down harshly enough on the organizers, and a slew of high-profile CEOs, including IBM's Ginni Rometty, relinquished their roles on Trump's advisory councils.

Many technology CEOs did not have formal roles in the White House panels, but some CEOs, such as Apple's Tim Cook, spoke out anyway. Still, compared with some other industries, the response was slow. Amazon, for instance, did not comment to CNBC earlier this week.

It's an unprecedented situation for many business leaders, according to Richards, whose firm invests in technology companies such as Alibaba, Pandora and Airbnb. But the role of private companies, as well as organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is likely to keep intensifying, Richards said.

"We've never really seen this before. We've never seen the moral compass of our country placed in the hands of private business leaders," Richards said. "And I think one of the reasons you're seeing that is because many of us would argue that our president is tending to go back and forth on various things."
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/18/tim-...mp-tweets.html





James Murdoch, Rebuking Trump, Pledges $1 Million to Anti-Defamation League
Maggie Haberman

James Murdoch, the chief executive of 21st Century Fox and the son of a frequent ally of President Trump’s, condemned the president’s performance after the violence in Charlottesville, Va., and pledged to donate $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League.

In an email on Thursday, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times and confirmed as authentic by a spokesman for Mr. Murdoch’s company, the Fox scion gave an extraordinarily candid statement against the white supremacist sentiment that swept through Virginia last weekend. It was also the most outspoken that a member of the Murdoch family has been in response to the week’s events.

Mr. Murdoch’s father, Rupert Murdoch, is a conservative media mogul who has become an informal adviser to Mr. Trump, recently dining with the president in the White House residence. The younger Mr. Murdoch has been less outspoken about his political views, making the email even more surprising.

With a subject line reading, “Subject: Personal note from James Murdoch re: ADL,” Mr. Murdoch addressed the note to “friends.”

“I’m writing to you in a personal capacity, as a concerned citizen and a father. It has not been my habit to widely offer running commentary on current affairs, nor to presume to weigh in on the events of a given day save those that might be of particular or specific concern to 21CF and my colleagues,” he wrote. “But what we watched this last week in Charlottesville and the reaction to it by the President of the United States concern all of us as Americans and free people.”

He added: “These events remind us all why vigilance against hate and bigotry is an eternal obligation — a necessary discipline for the preservation of our way of life and our ideals. The presence of hate in our society was appallingly laid bare as we watched swastikas brandished on the streets of Charlottesville and acts of brutal terrorism and violence perpetrated by a racist mob. I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists. Democrats, Republicans, and others must all agree on this, and it compromises nothing for them to do so.”

Mr. Murdoch said that he and his wife, Kathryn, plan to donate $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League, urging others to follow suit.

“We hardly ever talk about our charitable giving, but in this case I wanted to tell you and encourage you to be generous too. Many of you are supporters of the Anti-Defamation League already — now is a great time to give more,” he wrote.

The Anti-Defamation League has been outspoken against Mr. Trump since early in his campaign, including tracking an uptick in white supremacists supporting him as he declined repeatedly to forcefully denounce them or disavow their support.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/u...on-league.html





Read Apple CEO Tim Cook's Email To Employees About Charlottesville

Cook said he disagrees with the president's "moral equivalence" between white supremacists and anti-racist protestors and pledges $2 million in donations to fight hate.
Charlie Warzel

On Wednesday evening Apple CEO Tim Cook sent an email to all global employees condemning racism and bigotry as well as President Trump's response to the tragedy in Charlottesville, according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News.

"Hate is a cancer," Cook wrote to employees, noting that Apple must be "unequivocal" about fighting and denouncing bigotry in all forms.

Cook called for unity among Apple employees regardless of political views and affirmed the company's commitment to inclusion. Most notably, Cook came out strongly against Trump's press conference remarks on Tuesday afternoon.

"I disagree with the president and others who believe that there is a moral equivalence between white supremacists and Nazis, and those who oppose them by standing up for human rights. Equating the two runs counter to our ideals as Americans," he wrote.

According to Cook's memo, Apple will be making two separate $1 million donations to both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The company will also match employee donations to these and other groups two-for-one until September 30th. Cook also said that Apple would soon offer its users a way to contribute to the Southern Poverty Law Center through iTunes.

Here is the email in its entirety:

Quote:
Team,

Like so many of you, equality is at the core of my beliefs and values. The events of the past several days have been deeply troubling for me, and I’ve heard from many people at Apple who are saddened, outraged or confused.

What occurred in Charlottesville has no place in our country. Hate is a cancer, and left unchecked it destroys everything in its path. Its scars last generations. History has taught us this time and time again, both in the United States and countries around the world.

We must not witness or permit such hate and bigotry in our country, and we must be unequivocal about it. This is not about the left or the right, conservative or liberal. It is about human decency and morality. I disagree with the president and others who believe that there is a moral equivalence between white supremacists and Nazis, and those who oppose them by standing up for human rights. Equating the two runs counter to our ideals as Americans.

Regardless of your political views, we must all stand together on this one point — that we are all equal. As a company, through our actions, our products and our voice, we will always work to ensure that everyone is treated equally and with respect.

I believe Apple has led by example, and we’re going to keep doing that. We have always welcomed people from every walk of life to our stores around the world and showed them that Apple is inclusive of everyone. We empower people to share their views and express themselves through our products.

In the wake of the tragic and repulsive events in Charlottesville, we are stepping up to help organizations who work to rid our country of hate. Apple will be making contributions of $1 million each to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. We will also match two-for-one our employees’ donations to these and several other human rights groups, between now and September 30.

In the coming days, iTunes will offer users an easy way to join us in directly supporting the work of the SPLC.

Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.” So, we will continue to speak up. These have been dark days, but I remain as optimistic as ever that the future is bright. Apple can and will play an important role in bringing about positive change.

Best,

Tim
https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarz...zdy#.ys97wWQZb





Google is Paying Apple Billions Per Year to Remain on the iPhone, Bernstein Says

• Google will pay Apple about $3 billion this year to remain the default search engine on iOS devices, Bernstein says.
• The licensing payments make up a large bulk of Apple's services revenue.
• There are pros and cons to the payments.

Todd Haselton

Google is paying Apple billions of dollars to remain the default search engine on iPhones and iPads, Bernstein said in a note to investors on Monday.

The firm believes that Google will pay Apple about $3 billion this year, up from $1 billion just three years ago, and that Google's licensing fees make up a large bulk of Apple's services business.

Apple has been touting its services business as a quickly growing segment of the company, noting that it expects that branch alone will soon be as large as a Fortune 500 company.

"Court documents indicate that Google paid Apple $1B in 2014, and we estimate that total Google payments to Apple in FY 17 may approach $3B," Bernstein analyst A.M. Sacconaghi Jr. said. "Given that Google payments are nearly all profit for Apple, Google alone may account for 5% of Apple's total operating profits this year, and may account for 25% of total company OP growth over the last two years."

Bernstein sees pros and cons in the payments.

Sacconaghi said that Google might decide to back away from paying Apple any licensing fees if it feels confident enough that its search engine is so popular Apple won't include any other option by default.

On the other hand, Sacconaghi said that Apple's iOS devices contribute about 50 percent to Google's mobile search revenue, which means Google might be too afraid to walk away from its licensing deal with Apple. In this case, it's a win-win for Apple and Google.

Bernstein has an outperform rating on Apple with a price target of $175.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/14/goog...bernstein.html





An iOS 11 Feature Could Let You Quickly Disable TouchID and Keep Cops Out
Sarah Buhr

TouchID has always been a legal grey area when it came to cops and border patrol asking you to fork over your phone. But, with the new update in iOS 11, that no longer seems to be a problem.

The new feature is being referred to in some circles as a “cop button” because it allows the iPhone owner to set up a provision in the update allowing you to choose whether to keep TouchID on or not. This allows travelers and people who tend to get harassed by police more often — or just anyone concerned with privacy and security — to set their phone up using a long, complex password, thus locking out cops and anyone who doesn’t know the passphrase.

Currently, police can force you to use your fingerprint to unlock the phone, but they can’t force you to use your password — something that has been proven by law to be protected.

As Twitter user @alt_kia pointed out, to unlock the phone you press the power button rapidly five times and it will open a second screen, while also forcing anyone with the phone to use the longer passphrase to unlock it.

iOS 11 is a game-changer for Touch ID. Press power button rapidly 5 times and it opens the 2nd screen, but it also forces passphrase entry! pic.twitter.com/uvWbM04lyk

— Kia‏☆ (@alt_kia) August 17, 2017

This process is especially useful in an emergency situation where you need to unlock the phone and call 911. As noted in Engadget, the option to call for help will pop up after you push the power button five times.

Of course, the process isn’t easy for those wishing to use it for privacy reasons, and you might get fatigued constantly unlocking it this way. However, it’s a good way to keep what’s on your phone to yourself.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/17/an...keep-cops-out/





Hacker Decrypts Apple's Secure Enclave Processor (SEP) Firmware
iClarified

The security coprocessor was introduced alongside the iPhone 5s and Touch ID. It performs secure services for the rest of the SOC and prevents the main processor from getting direct access to sensitive data. It runs its own operating system (SEPOS) which includes a kernel, drivers, services, and applications.

The Secure Enclave is responsible for processing fingerprint data from the Touch ID sensor, determining if there is a match against registered fingerprints, and then enabling access or purchases on behalf of the user. Communication between the processor and the Touch ID sensor takes place over a serial peripheral interface bus. The processor forwards the data to the Secure Enclave but can’t read it. It’s encrypted and authenticated with a session key that is negotiated using the device’s shared key that is provisioned for the Touch ID sensor and the Secure Enclave. The session key exchange uses AES key wrapping with both sides providing a random key that establishes the session key and uses AES-CCM transport encryption

Today, xerub announced the decryption key 'is fully grown'. You can use img4lib to decrypt the firmware and xerub's SEP firmware split tool to process.

Decryption of the SEP Firmware will make it easier for hackers and security researchers to comb through the SEP for vulnerabilities.

You can find the decryption key at the link below. Please follow iClarified on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or RSS for updates.
http://www.iclarified.com/62025/hack...r-sep-firmware





Unpatchable Flaw Affects Most of Today's Modern Cars
Catalin Cimpanu

A flaw buried deep in the hearts of all modern cars allows an attacker with local or even remote access to a vehicle to shut down various components, including safety systems such as airbags, brakes, parking sensors, and others.

The vulnerability affects the CAN (Controller Area Network) protocol that's deployed in modern cars and used to manage communications between a vehicle's internal components.

It will take a new generation of cars to patch the flaw

The flaw was discovered by a collaborative effort of Politecnico di Milano, Linklayer Labs, and Trend Micro's Forward-looking Threat Research (FTR) team.

Researchers say this flaw is not a vulnerability in the classic meaning of the word. This is because the flaw is more of a CAN standard design choice that makes it unpatchable.

Patching the issue means changing how the CAN standard works at its lowest levels. Researchers say car manufacturers can only mitigate the vulnerability via specific network countermeasures, but cannot eliminate it entirely.

"To eliminate the risk entirely, an updated CAN standard should be proposed, adopted, and implemented," researchers say. "Realistically, it would take an entire generation of vehicles for such a vulnerability to be resolved, not just a recall or an OTA (on-the-air) upgrade."
Flaw leads to shutdown of various car components

Researchers say that almost any modern car in circulation today is likely affected. Bosch developed the CAN protocol in 1983, and it became an ISO standard in 1993. Nearly all modern cars use it to interconnect components.

The vulnerability researchers describe is a denial of service attack. The issue can be exploited with local access by default, but if any of the car's components contains a remotely-exploitable flaw, then the CAN vulnerability can also be exploited from a remote location.

Below is an explanation of how the vulnerability works:

CAN messages, including errors, are called “frames.” Our attack focuses on how CAN handles errors. Errors arise when a device reads values that do not correspond to the original expected value on a frame. When a device detects such an event, it writes an error message onto the CAN bus in order to “recall” the errant frame and notify the other devices to entirely ignore the recalled frame. This mishap is very common and is usually due to natural causes, a transient malfunction, or simply by too many systems and modules trying to send frames through the CAN at the same time.

If a device sends out too many errors, then—as CAN standards dictate—it goes into a so-called Bus Off state, where it is cut off from the CAN and prevented from reading and/or writing any data onto the CAN. This feature is helpful in isolating clearly malfunctioning devices and stops them from triggering the other modules/systems on the CAN.

This is the exact feature that our attack abuses. Our attack triggers this particular feature by inducing enough errors such that a targeted device or system on the CAN is made to go into the Bus Off state, and thus rendered inert/inoperable. This, in turn, can drastically affect the car’s performance to the point that it becomes dangerous and even fatal, especially when essential systems like the airbag system or the antilock braking system are deactivated.

Special device needed to carry out local attacks

The research team says that all it takes is a specially-crafted device that attackers have to connect to the car's CAN bus through local open ports. The device reuses frames already circulating in the CAN rather than injecting new ones, generating errors and causing a denial-of-service in various car components.

Car attack rig

The Department of Homeland Security's ICS-CERT has issued an alert regarding this flaw, albeit there is little to be done on the side of car makers.

"The only current recommendation for protecting against this exploit is to limit access to input ports (specifically OBD-II) on automobiles," said ICS-CERT experts in an alert released last month.

In the long term, researchers recommend that standardization bodies, decision makers, and car manufacturers get together to revise and improve existing standards or issue new ones in tune with our times.

The research was presented last month at the DIMVA conference in Bonn, Germany. The technical paper detailing the flaw in depth is available here and here. A YouTube video recorded by Trend Micro researcher Federico Maggi is available below.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...s-modern-cars/





How Security Pros Look at Encryption Backdoors

The majority of IT security professionals believe encryption backdoors are ineffective and potentially dangerous, with 91 percent saying cybercriminals could take advantage of government-mandated encryption backdoors.

72 percent of the respondents do not believe encryption backdoors would make their nations safer from terrorists, according to a Venafi survey of 296 IT security pros, conducted at Black Hat USA 2017.

“Giving the government backdoors to encryption destroys our security and makes communications more vulnerable,” said Kevin Bocek, chief security strategist for Venafi. “It’s not surprising that so many security professionals are concerned about backdoors; the tech industry has been fighting against them ever since global governments first called for unrestricted access. We need to spend more time protecting and supporting the security of our machines, not creating purposeful holes that are lucrative to cybercriminals.”

Additional findings

• Only 19 percent believe the technology industry is doing enough to protect the public from the dangers of encryption backdoors.
• 81 percent feel governments should not be able to force technology companies to give them access to encrypted user data.
• 86 percent believe consumers don’t understand issues around encryption backdoors.

Encryption backdoors create vulnerabilities that can be exploited by a wide range of malicious actors, including hostile or abusive government agencies. Billions of people worldwide rely on encryption to protect critical infrastructure – including global financial systems, electrical grids and transportation systems – from cybercriminals who steal data for financial gain or espionage.
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2017...ion-backdoors/





How A Pop Song Could “Watch” You Through Your TV

Your phone, TV, or connected device could become a sonar spy, as white hat hackers at the University of Washington give new meaning to bad music.
Steven Melendez

Forget your classic listening device: Researchers at the University of Washington have demonstrated that phones, smart TVs, Amazon Echo-like assistants, and other devices equipped with speakers and microphones could be used by hackers as clandestine sonar “bugs” capable of tracking your location in a room.

Their system, called CovertBand, emits high-pitched sonar signals hidden within popular songs—their examples include songs by Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, and 2Pac—then records them with the machine’s microphone to detect people’s activities. Jumping, walking, and “supine pelvic tilts” all produce distinguishable patterns, they say in a paper. (Of course, someone who hacked the microphone on a smart TV or computer could likely listen to its users, as well.)

Lately we’ve been hearing a lot about these sound-based hacks. Researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of South Carolina demonstrated in March they could induce false readings in a phone’s accelerometer by playing certain sounds, potentially disrupting apps that relied on the tool, according to a report in The New York Times.

Another study, from last month’s Black Hat conference, showed devices with balancing gyroscopes like drones and hoverboards could be similarly disrupted, Ars Technica reports. And last year, researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University demonstrated how malware could turn headphones attached to a computer into a microphone able to pick up sounds from 20 feet away.

Sonic spying and sabotage are nothing new. Leon Theremin, the music instrument designer, also built a sonic bug that was hidden inside a wooden Great Seal of the United States in the U.S. ambassador’s home in Moscow after World War II. (It had been given to him as a gift by a group of Russian schoolchildren) The device had no power supply or active electronics, but when Soviet spies beamed radio waves of the right frequency at it, they could pick up the sounds of nearby conversations. The NSA, according to a leaked weapons catalog, has a similar radio-based tool for remotely hacking into air-gapped computers, a magical-seeming exploit that has inspired at least one engineer to brew his own.

Sound can be also be weaponized in more directly harmful ways. “We Are the Champions” and “Babylon” were among the songs blasted at high volume during some Iraq War interrogations. Despite the New York Police Department’s arguments otherwise, a judge ruled in June that a lawsuit related to officers’ use of a long range acoustic device at a Black Lives Matter protest can proceed, because sound can cause physical harm. And earlier this month, the Associated Press reported that five U.S. diplomats in Cuba had suffered severe hearing loss—the result, a State Dept. investigation said, of a covert sonic weapon.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40455626...h-your-devices





Scottish Parliament Says 'Brute-Force' Cyber-Attack Ongoing, has Not Breached Defences

Scotland's devolved parliament is suffering an ongoing brute-force cyber attack but the attack has not breached the assembly's IT defences, it said on Wednesday.

"At this point there is no evidence to suggest that the attack has breached our defences and our IT systems continue to be fully operational," the Scottish parliament said in a statement.

"Users should be aware, however, that this attack remains ongoing. It is not uncommon for brute force attacks to be sustained over a period of days so it is essential that IT account users are vigilant and report any suspicious issues," it added.

Hackers using a "brute-force" attack repeatedly try to gain access to systems by trying different passwords.

Hackers are becoming more and more adept at developing or finding malware to wipe data on computers, making them inoperable and causing data breaches. Britain's last major cyber attack was the "WannaCry" ransomware attack, which infected hundreds of thousands of computers in May and caused disruptions in more than 150 countries.

Reporting by Elisabeth O'Leary; Editing by Alistair Smout
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-ch...-idUKKCN1AX0KX





In Ukraine, a Malware Expert Who Could Blow the Whistle on Russian Hacking
Andrew E. Kramer and Andrew Higgins

The hacker, known only by his online alias “Profexer,” kept a low profile. He wrote computer code alone in an apartment and quietly sold his handiwork on the anonymous portion of the internet known as the Dark Web. Last winter, he suddenly went dark entirely.

Profexer’s posts, already accessible only to a small band of fellow hackers and cybercriminals looking for software tips, blinked out in January — just days after American intelligence agencies publicly identified a program he had written as one tool used in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

But while Profexer’s online persona vanished, a flesh-and-blood person has emerged: a fearful man who the Ukrainian police said turned himself in early this year, and has now become a witness for the F.B.I.

“I don’t know what will happen,” he wrote in one of his last messages posted on a restricted-access website before going to the police. “It won’t be pleasant. But I’m still alive.”

It is the first known instance of a living witness emerging from the arid mass of technical detail that has so far shaped the investigation into the D.N.C. hack and the heated debate it has stirred. The Ukrainian police declined to divulge the man’s name or other details, other than that he is living in Ukraine and has not been arrested.

There is no evidence that Profexer worked, at least knowingly, for Russia’s intelligence services, but his malware apparently did.

That a hacking operation that Washington is convinced was orchestrated by Moscow would obtain malware from a source in Ukraine — perhaps the Kremlin’s most bitter enemy — sheds considerable light on the Russian security services’ modus operandi in what Western intelligence agencies say is their clandestine cyberwar against the United States and Europe.

It does not suggest a compact team of government employees who write all their own code and carry out attacks during office hours in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but rather a far looser enterprise that draws on talent and hacking tools wherever they can be found.

Also emerging from Ukraine is a sharper picture of what the United States believes is a Russian government hacking group known as Advanced Persistent Threat 28 or Fancy Bear. It is this group, which American intelligence agencies believe is operated by Russian military intelligence, that has been blamed, along with a second Russian outfit known as Cozy Bear, for the D.N.C. intrusion.

Rather than training, arming and deploying hackers to carry out a specific mission like just another military unit, Fancy Bear and its twin Cozy Bear have operated more as centers for organization and financing; much of the hard work like coding is outsourced to private and often crime-tainted vendors.

Russia’s Testing Ground

In more than a decade of tracking suspected Russian-directed cyberattacks against a host of targets in the West and in former Soviet territories — NATO, electrical grids, research groups, journalists critical of Russia and political parties, to name a few — security services around the world have identified only a handful of people who are directly involved in either carrying out such attacks or providing the cyberweapons that were used.

This absence of reliable witnesses has left ample room for President Trump and others to raise doubts about whether Russia really was involved in the D.N.C. hack.

“There is not now and never has been a single piece of technical evidence produced that connects the malware used in the D.N.C. attack to the G.R.U., F.S.B. or any agency of the Russian government,” said Jeffrey Carr, the author of a book on cyberwarfare. The G.R.U. is Russia’s military intelligence agency, and the F.S.B. its federal security service.

United States intelligence agencies, however, have been unequivocal in pointing a finger at Russia.

Seeking a path out of this fog, cybersecurity researchers and Western law enforcement officers have turned to Ukraine, a country that Russia has used for years as a laboratory for a range of politicized operations that later cropped up elsewhere, including electoral hacking in the United States.

In several instances, certain types of computer intrusions, like the use of malware to knock out crucial infrastructure or to pilfer email messages later released to tilt public opinion, occurred in Ukraine first. Only later were the same techniques used in Western Europe and the United States.

So, not surprisingly, those studying cyberwar in Ukraine are now turning up clues in the investigation of the D.N.C. hack, including the discovery of a rare witness.

Security experts were initially left scratching their heads when the Department of Homeland Security on Dec. 29 released technical evidence of Russian hacking that seemed to point not to Russia, but rather to Ukraine.

In this initial report, the department released only one sample of malware said to be an indicator of Russian state-sponsored hacking, though outside experts said a variety of malicious programs were used in Russian electoral hacking.

The sample pointed to a malware program, called the P.A.S. web shell, a hacking tool advertised on Russian-language Dark Web forums and used by cybercriminals throughout the former Soviet Union. The author, Profexer, is a well-regarded technical expert among hackers, spoken about with awe and respect in Kiev.

He had made it available to download, free, from a website that asked only for donations, ranging from $3 to $250. The real money was made by selling customized versions and by guiding his hacker clients in its effective use. It remains unclear how extensively he interacted with the Russian hacking team.

After the Department of Homeland Security identified his creation, he quickly shut down his website and posted on a closed forum for hackers, called Exploit, that “I’m not interested in excessive attention to me personally.”

Soon, a hint of panic appeared, and he posted a note saying that, six days on, he was still alive.

Another hacker, with the nickname Zloi Santa, or Bad Santa, suggested the Americans would certainly find him, and place him under arrest, perhaps during a layover at an airport.

“It could be, or it could not be, it depends only on politics,” Profexer responded. “If U.S. law enforcement wants to take me down, they will not wait for me in some country’s airport. Relations between our countries are so tight I would be arrested in my kitchen, at the first request.”

In fact, Serhiy Demediuk, chief of the Ukrainian Cyber Police, said in an interview that Profexer went to the authorities himself. As the cooperation began, Profexer went dark on hacker forums. He last posted online on Jan. 9. Mr. Demediuk said he had made the witness available to the F.B.I., which has posted a full-time cybersecurity expert in Kiev as one of four bureau agents stationed at the United States Embassy there. The F.B.I. declined to comment.

Profexer was not arrested because his activities fell in a legal gray zone, as an author but not a user of malware, the Ukrainian police say. But he did know the users, at least by their online handles. “He told us he didn’t create it to be used in the way it was,” Mr. Demediuk said.

A member of Ukraine’s Parliament with close ties to the security services, Anton Gerashchenko, said that the interaction was online or by phone and that the Ukrainian programmer had been paid to write customized malware without knowing its purpose, only later learning it was used in the D.N.C. hack.

Mr. Gerashchenko described the author only in broad strokes, to protect his safety, as a young man from a provincial Ukrainian city. He confirmed that the author turned himself in to the police and was cooperating as a witness in the D.N.C. investigation. “He was a freelancer and now he is a valuable witness,” Mr. Gerashchenko said.

A Bear’s Lair

While it is not known what Profexer has told Ukrainian investigators and the F.B.I. about Russia’s hacking efforts, evidence emanating from Ukraine has again provided some of the clearest pictures yet about Fancy Bear, or Advanced Persistent Threat 28, which is run by the G.R.U.

Fancy Bear has been identified mostly by what it does, not by who does it. One of its recurring features has been the theft of emails and its close collaboration with the Russian state news media.

Tracking the bear to its lair, however, has so far proved impossible, not least because many experts believe that no such single place exists.

Even for a sophisticated tech company like Microsoft, singling out individuals in the digital miasma has proved just about impossible. To curtail the damage to clients’ operating systems, the company filed a complaint against Fancy Bear last year with the United States District Court for eastern Virginia but found itself boxing with shadows.

As Microsoft lawyers reported to the court, “because defendants used fake contact information, anonymous Bitcoin and prepaid credit cards and false identities, and sophisticated technical means to conceal their identities, when setting up and using the relevant internet domains, defendants’ true identities remain unknown.”

Nevertheless, Ukrainian officials, though wary of upsetting the Trump administration, have been quietly cooperating with American investigators to try to figure out who stands behind all the disguises.

Included in this sharing of information were copies of the server hard drives of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission, which were targeted during a presidential election in May 2014. That the F.B.I. had obtained evidence of this earlier, Russian-linked electoral hack has not been previously reported.

Traces of the same malicious code, this time a program called Sofacy, were seen in the 2014 attack in Ukraine and later in the D.N.C. intrusion in the United States.

Intriguingly, in the cyberattack during the Ukrainian election, what appears to have been a bungle by Channel 1, a Russian state television station, inadvertently implicated the government authorities in Moscow.

Hackers had loaded onto a Ukrainian election commission server a graphic mimicking the page for displaying results. This phony page showed a shocker of an outcome: an election win for a fiercely anti-Russian, ultraright candidate, Dmytro Yarosh. Mr. Yarosh in reality received less than 1 percent of the vote.

The false result would have played into a Russian propaganda narrative that Ukraine today is ruled by hard-right, even fascist, figures.

The fake image was programmed to display when polls closed, at 8 p.m., but a Ukrainian cybersecurity company, InfoSafe, discovered it just minutes earlier and unplugged the server.

State television in Russia nevertheless reported that Mr. Yarosh had won and broadcast the fake graphic, citing the election commission’s website, even though the image had never appeared there. The hacker had clearly provided Channel 1 with the same image in advance, but the reporters had failed to check that the hack actually worked.

“For me, this is an obvious link between the hackers and Russian officials,” said Victor Zhora, director of InfoSafe, the cybersecurity company that first found the fake graphic.

A Ukrainian government researcher who studied the hack, Nikolai Koval, published his findings in a 2015 book, “Cyberwar in Perspective,” and identified the Sofacy malware on the server.

The mirror of the hard drive went to the F.B.I., which had this forensic sample when the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike identified the same malware two years later, on the D.N.C. servers.

“It was the first strike,” Mr. Zhora said of the earlier hack of Ukraine’s electoral computers. Ukraine’s Cyber Police have also provided the F.B.I. with copies of server hard drives showing the possible origins of some phishing emails targeting the Democratic Party during the election.

In 2016, two years after the election hack in Ukraine, hackers using some of the same techniques plundered the email system of the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, which had accused Russian athletes of systematic drug use.

That raid, too, seems to have been closely coordinated with Russian state television, which began airing well-prepared reports about WADA’s hacked emails just minutes after they were made public. The emails appeared on a website that announced that WADA had been hacked by a group calling itself the “Fancy Bears’ Hack Team.”

It was the first time Fancy Bear had broken cover.

Fancy Bear remains extraordinarily elusive, however. To throw investigators off its scent, the group has undergone various makeovers, restocking its arsenal of malware and sometimes hiding under different guises. One of its alter egos, cyberexperts believe, is Cyber Berkut, an outfit supposedly set up in Ukraine by supporters of the country’s pro-Russian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014.

After lying dormant for many months, Cyber Berkut jumped back into action this summer just as multiple investigations in Washington into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow shifted into high gear. Cyber Berkut released stolen emails that it and Russian state news media said had exposed the real story: Hillary Clinton had colluded with Ukraine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/w...g-witness.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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