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Old 03-02-16, 08:57 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 6th, '16

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"If Senator Rubio believes that millions of innocent Americans should be subject to intrusive and unconstitutional government surveillance, surely he would have no objections to the government monitoring his own actions and conversations. Maybe after his 2016 strategy documents are accidentally caught up in a government data grab, he'll rethink the use of mass surveillance." – Rep. Jared Polis, D-CO


"There will be dark spots — there always will be. But it’s easy to forget that there is far more data available to governments now than ever before." – Harvard’s Joseph Nye, Former head of the National Intelligence Council


"The fight to stop the TPP before the signature hits the paper is over and civilians lost. The fight isn’t over, but civilians are being forced to take their final stand now." – Drew Wilson






































February 6th, 2016




Torrents Time Lets Anyone Launch Their Own Web Version of Popcorn Time
Emil Protalinski

Popcorn Time, an app for streaming video torrents, just got a new web version: Popcorn Time Online. Unlike other attempts to bring Popcorn Time into the browser, this one is powered by a tool called Torrents Time, which delivers the movies and TV shows via an embedded torrent client. Oh, and the developers have released the code so that anyone can create their own version.

If Popcorn Time is Hollywood’s worst nightmare, Torrents Time is trying to make sure Hollywood can’t wake up.

Before we dig into the details, it’s important to understand the history.

Popcorn Time

Popcorn Time essentially automates the whole torrenting process for movies and TV shows. Many torrents contain pirated content, and so the tool really just makes pirating easier.

Sometimes referred to as the “Netflix for Torrents” or even the “Netflix for Pirates,” Popcorn Time is viewed as a major threat to Netflix, and to Hollywood in general. The project started as an open-source BitTorrent client with an included media player. Popcorn Time gained a lot of fame a few years ago, but was abruptly taken down by its developers on March 14, 2014 due to pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

The project has been forked multiple times by several development teams eager not just to keep the program alive, but to add new features. Popcorntime.io, one of the most popular forks, was shut down by the MPAA on November 3, 2015.

The other popular fork is Popcorn-Time.se. Originally launched under the time4popcorn.eu domain, which has now been suspended, this version has apps for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, and iOS. It also has VPN support, and even works with Chromecast and the Apple TV. Because of the frequent improvements and updates, and because other domains have been suspended, it is seen as the most popular solution.

Popcorn Time Online

But Popcorn Time is still an app. The web-based Popcorn Time Online aims to bring everything directly into the browser.

Aside from adding support for browsers, the creators claim Popcorn Time Online can play “almost every video format.” The existing Popcorn Time versions can’t do this because “many torrents contain unstreamable video formats.”

The quality level of the stream (720p and 1080p are both supported) is indicated on a per-torrent basis. The team expects that the availability of content “will considerably increase from now on.”

New features aside, the real big news is that anyone can now set up a fully functioning version of Popcorn Time Online. Because the code is available on GitHub, anyone can simply download the Popcorn Time Online files, upload them to their web directory, and launch their own version.

The developers see this as “a new era in which, for the first time, any developer could instantly produce a full functioning streaming site enabling all the features Popcorn Time enables as an application, but directly from a browser, with minimal bandwidth requirements.”

Remember when isoHunt let anyone launch their own version of The Pirate Bay? That’s essentially what the Popcorn Time team is hoping to recreate.

Torrents Time

Torrents Time lets users download and play the files inside torrents with one click. There is no need to download and install a separate BitTorrent client, download and open the torrent, nor go in and actually play the download video file.

Torrents Time is what makes Popcorn Time Online not only function, but do so very efficiently. “By using Torrents Time to play video, the Popcorn Time Online users are exposed to a viewing experience which is even better than the excellent experience they have enjoyed until now,” the developers tell VentureBeat. Because the code is available on GitHub, any developer can potentially provide a similar experience to his or her users.

Here are the highlight features:

• In Browser Torrent Client: “Just click on the torrent and start downloading and playing it easily and in no time”
• Built-in VPN: “so you can enjoy complete anonymity while downloading and streaming torrents directly from your browser”
• Watch video torrents instantly, directly from your browser “in the best quality possible, with built-in automatic subtitles in loads of languages to choose from”
• Chromecast, Airplay, and DLNA support, “because we know that as much as it can be nice to watch things directly from your browser, watching them on the big screen is way better”

The “instantly” and “in no time” claims aren’t true, from our experience. You do have to wait quite a bit for the movie or TV show of your choice to start playing. When it does start though, it plays without issue.

Torrents Time, and thus Popcorn Time Online, supports Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox on Windows 7 and up as well as OS X 10.8 and up. The developers tell VentureBeat that Safari support is currently being tested and should arrive in a few weeks. Microsoft Edge is currently not supported but may be in the future.

Built-in VPN support is something that the Popcorn-Time.se team added many months back, so it’s not a big surprise to see Torrents Time integrate it into their solution. While using Popcorn Time Online, you are prompted to turn on a VPN:

You can watch the movie or TV show without one, but as you can see, a VPN is strongly recommended. Torrents Time currently asks you to get an account with Anonymous VPN, which the team believes is “an excellent shield to the users for a good price.” But they are also leaving the door to other VPN providers for integration, and, of course, users can choose to use their own VPN solution on their computer.

Who are the developers?

The developers tell VentureBeat that “Popcorn Time Online and Torrents Time are separate entities, with separate teams.” Both groups wish to remain anonymous, because they don’t want to put developers from the open-source community “at risk.”

While anyone can contribute, the code that is related directly to the content remains separate and unavailable. That means none of the shared code is proprietary, so any developer can use the project or contribute to it “with minimal risk.”

But the real message the teams want to communicate is: “We’re here to stay!” To further that end, they don’t want to reveal their identities for obvious legal reasons.

“Looking at the sad fate of the .io team, we believe that in today’s environment, maintaining anonymity will ensure that we will all be here for as long as we want to be,” the Popcorn Team explained. “By sticking to anonymity, we are not cowards who hide from righteous content monopolies, but content freedom fighters who respect the law but do not trust the law enforcers to play the law fair.”

Whether you agree with that statement or not, Popcorn Time just made a very bold move. Hollywood, the ball is in your court.
http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/02/to...-popcorn-time/





The RIAA Finally Bows to Streaming, Making 17 Artists’ Albums Go Gold and Platinum
Dee Lockett

Call it the Anti effect, or just call it getting hip to the times. The Recording Industry Association of America just announced one of the biggest rule-changes in its history: As of Monday, the RIAA will now count streaming sales as part of its singles and albums certification process, making 17 albums automatically certified gold (500,000) or platinum (1 million) with the news. The rule change means both on-demand video and audio streams will be calculated in the RIAA's certifications, with 1,500 streams counting as the equivalent of ten track sales or one album sale. And now 150 streams will equal one download, rather than the previous 100. In accordance with the new rules, Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly has been recognized as having sold 1 million units, after setting a single-day Spotify record when it was released last March.

Five other albums — Big Sean's Dark Sky Paradise, Coldplay's Ghost Stories, Hozier's Hozier, Shawn Mendes's Handwritten, and Miranda Lambert's aptly named Platinum — have also all gone platinum. The Weeknd's Beauty Behind the Madness and Sam Hunt's Montevallo are now double platinum, while Romeo Santos's Fórmula Vol. 2 is 11 times platinum (as per RIAA's Latin G&P Program) and Michael Jackson's Thriller is now an astounding 32 times platinum.

The rule restructuring comes at a time when some artists are beginning to demand that streaming count toward their overall sales. Last year, Nicki Minaj argued that her latest album, The Pinkprint, would already be at least triple platinum were all her streaming numbers factored in. (She says a March court date has been set to hear her complaint.) Meanwhile, the RIAA has agreed to recognize Rihanna's latest album Anti as platinum based on the 1 million prepaid albums she sold courtesy of Samsung. Billboard (which has recognized album equivalents since 2014), however, says it will not count those sales toward her chart placement — even tweeting, "There are some trends that we just won't touch," seemingly in response to the controversy. So, one small step for streaming; still not as much reward for revamping older models.

See below for a list of all newly gold and platinum albums:

Alt-J, An Awesome Wave (Atlantic Records): Gold
Big Sean, Dark Sky Paradise (Def Jam Recordings): Platinum
Brett Eldredge, Bring You Back (Atlantic Nashville): Gold
Coldplay, Ghost Stories (Atlantic/Parlophone): Platinum
Elle King, Love Stuff (RCA): Gold
Fifth Harmony, Reflection (Epic): Gold
Halsey, Badlands (Astralwerks): Gold
Hozier, Hozier (Columbia): Platinum
Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly (Top Dawg Entertainment/Interscope): Platinum
Michael Jackson, Thriller (Epic/Legacy): 32X Multi-Platinum
Miranda Lambert, Platinum (RCA Nashville): Platinum
Romeo Santos, Fórmula Vol. 2 (Sony Latin): 11X Diamante/RIAA Latin G&P Program
Sam Hunt, Montevallo (MCA Nashville): 2X Multi-Platinum
Shawn Mendes, Handwritten (Island Records): Platinum
The Weeknd, Beauty Behind the Madness (XO/Republic Records): 2X Multi-Platinum
Vance Joy, Dream Your Life Away (Atlantic Records): Gold
Wale, Ambition (Atlantic Urban): Gold
http://www.vulture.com/2016/02/riaa-...streaming.html





Why Electric Cars Are Ditching AM Radio
Meghan Neal

Electric cars may be energy efficient Earth-saving futuremobiles, but their rise could also have a strange unintended consequence: killing off the oldest form of radio.

Two popular electric cars, the BMW i3 and Tesla Model X, are ditching terrestrial AM radio because electromagnetic noise from the electric motor interferes with the broadcast reception, causing static, as the blog Music 3.0 recently pointed out.

Electronics have always been a source of AM radio static, and electric motors are no exception. EVs are powered by a rechargeable battery, electric motor, and a frequency converter that controls how much power the car's electrical motors put out by turning voltage on and off thousands of times a second, basically chopping up energy. This process causes electromagnetic interference that gets picked up by the radio.

AM radio has always been more susceptible to static than its partner on the dial. "AM" stands for amplitude modulation, which means the height of the radio waves are varied over time to encode the information, versus “FM,” frequency modulation, which varies their speed. Since amplitude, not frequency, is affected by electrical noise emitted by gadgets like smartphones, TVs, computers, even vacuum cleaners and hairdryers, AM signals are prone to distortion and crackling.

That crackle apparently just doesn’t fly with luxury auto brands. BMW spokesperson Rebecca Kiehne told me, "Electric motors cause interference on AM which is why BMW decided to remove this option. While it could be offered, BMW's performance standards are very high and we don't offer a product that meets less than those high standards."

But while BMW disabled AM radio in the i3 because the company was worried customers would complain about the poor sound quality, some customers have instead taken to complaining about the lack of AM radio. Consumers took to forums to bemoan the omission, a few even saying they wouldn’t buy an i3 without it. One BMW owner commented, “I plan to drag out my portable AM radio and leave it in the car.” Some owners are hacking the car to get AM radio back.

Meanwhile, the new Tesla Model X also dropped terrestrial AM radio from its infotainment dashboard—a change from the Model S. Instead, you can get most AM stations via internet radio if you go menu diving through TuneIn, a service that aggregates internet radio and traditional AM/FM stations and is the standard radio option in Tesla cars.

“AM radio stations are accessible through our internet radio service in Model X. Because AM audio quality can be very poor, we offer internet radio to give our customers considerably better sound quality and reception coverage,” a Tesla spokesperson told me over email. Apparently, finding the stations isn’t always easy though; there’s a Tesla forum devoted to figuring out how to locate AM stations on the Model X.

At this point you may be asking, who cares? Isn’t AM radio a dinosaur technology with one leg in the grave? Does anyone even listen to it? The answer is yes: about 3 million people listen to it every day, and five of the ten most popular radio stations in the US are AM radio. “This narrative that somehow AM radio is dying is silly,” Dennis Wharton, communications executive at the National Association of Broadcasters, told me.

Despite the higher sound quality of the FM band and the ascent of satellite and internet radio, the medium of FDR’s fireside chats and Rush Limbaugh is still cemented in American culture. AM signals can travel further distances, making it popular for talk radio and local programs like weather and traffic reports or emergency response information. It’s also more affordable to get on, so is home to lots of niche stations like foreign language radio, college radio, or religious programs. “It’s a haven for minority radio stations as well—particularly Latino and Hispanic radio has moved a lot to AM radio in recent years,” said Wharton. Not to mention some major sports franchises still broadcast games, sometimes exclusively, on legacy AM stations that have been around forever and have fiercely loyal listeners.

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) is asking BMW to reconsider its decision to drop AM radio, and NAB’s California branch has teamed up with engineers to devise a solutions to the static problem. A group of engineers in Germany are also working on a prototype for minimizing interference by shielding the engine’s cabling and insulating the motor, at a price point that’s affordable for automakers.

Cars and radio have always been inextricably linked: about 90 percent of people listen to traditional radio over the airwaves (more than use the internet), and 40 percent of that listening happens in the car. So it’s worth raising an eyebrow if electric cars are zooming toward the future and leaving a historical technology behind.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why...ching-am-radio





92 Percent of College Students Prefer Reading Print Books to E-Readers
Alice Robb

Readers have been dreading the rise of e-books since before the technology even existed. A 1991 New York Times piece predicting the imminent invention of the personal e-reader spurred angry and impassioned letters to the editor. One reader wrote in to express his worry that the new electronic books wouldn't work in the bath.

Twenty-three years later, half of American adults own an e-reading device. A few years ago, Obama set a goal of getting e-textbooks into every classroom by 2017. Florida lawmakers have passed legislation requiring public schools to convert their textbooks to digital versions.

Despite the embrace of e-books in certain contexts, they remain controversial. Many people just don’t like them: They run out of battery, they hurt your eyes, they don’t work in the bath. After years of growth, sales are stagnating. In 2014, 65 percent of 6 to 17-year-old children said they would always want to read books in print—up from 60 percent two years earlier.

Though it has been over 15 years since Project Gutenberg starting publishing classic literature online and seven since Amazon launched the Kindle, research into how e-books change readers’ experience has been scarce. Defenders of print books usually rely on anecdote or intuition—which can make it easy to dismiss them as Luddites or romantics. And the relative lack of data has sometimes forced them to resort to the hyperbolic—Andrew Piper proclaiming that e-reading isn’t reading at all—or the petty—Peter Conrad complaining that e-readers don’t align margins the way he likes. With her new book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, brings more data to the case for print. Baron and her colleagues surveyed over 300 university students in the U.S., Japan, Germany, and Slovakia, and found a near-universal preference for print, especially for serious reading. (She finds that the format doesn’t matter so much for “light reading.”) When students were given a choice of various media—including hard copy, cell phone, tablet, e-reader, and laptop—92 percent said they could concentrate best in hard copy.

“The group we assumed would gobble this up were teenagers and young adults,” says Baron. “But they talked about things I didn’t think 18 to 26-year-olds cared about anymore.”

Alice Robb: Why are young people—who are accustomed to doing most things on screens—resistant to e-books?

Naomi Baron: There are two big issues. The first was they say they get distracted, pulled away to other things. The second had to do with eye strain and headaches and physical discomfort.

When I asked what they don’t like about reading on a screen—they like to know how far they’ve gone in the book. You can read at the bottom of the screen what percent you’ve finished, but it’s a totally different feel to know you’ve read an inch worth and you have another inch and a half to go. Or students will tell you about their visual memory of where something was on the page; that makes no sense on a screen. One student said, “I keep forgetting who the author is. In a print book all I have to do is flip back and I see it.” There are all kinds of reasons students will give—“I have a sense of accomplishment when I finish a book and I want to see it on the shelf.” They care about the smell of a book. In the Slovakian data, when I asked what do you like most about reading in hard copy, one out of ten talked about the smell of books. There really is a physical, tactile, kinesthetic component to reading.

AR: So students feel like they’re learning more when they actually read books in print, but do we know whether they actually retain more?

NB: Generally speaking, if you give standardized tests on comprehension of passages, the results are about the same on a screen or on hard copy. There are a number of studies that have been done in different countries—in Germany, Austria, Israel, United States, Norway.

But you have to ask: What do you want to measure? Do you want to measure comprehension? That’s a fairly plain, middle-school way of talking about what it means to read. Did you get so involved in that book that you didn’t notice what was going on around you? That you insisted on staying up until three o’clock in the morning? Did you cry?

My research shows people are more likely to re-read if they have a book in hard copy. You might see the title on your shelf and think, “I hadn’t thought about that scene in a long time.” There are certain connections we make that go beyond decoding words.

AR: You argue in the book that e-books make reading a more social, less personal experience.

NB: If you’re annotating on a Kindle, on a Kobo, you see—you know how many people thought that word was really important, or maybe everybody else liked this passage. If we sat and thought about it, what we think the author has to say. … Rather, we’re just trying to present ourselves or fit in.

AR: Why do students buy e-books if they don’t like them?

NB: One argument that students give in favor of electronic media is saving the environment. But this is a hard thing to measure well. If you read 400 books in the life-span of your kindle, was that energy-efficient? Probably. But then there’s the question of energy and recycling. Where is it that these devices get recycled? Who does the recycling? What kind of protective gear do they have? And in terms of all those trees we use for paper—we have creative ways of using woodchips or whatever to make paper.

In the United States, e-books are less expensive. Students will say, “I’d like to have the print version, but the electronic version is so much less expensive.” But if you buy a book used, the publisher and the author are not getting any money but they are getting another reader and they’re not cutting another tree. And the cost is less. And if it goes to a third generation the cost is really less.

My major concern, as a person in higher education, is that we’re not listening. We’re assuming we’re being helpful by lowering price, by making it more convenient, by helping the environment, but we don’t bother asking our students what they think.
https://newrepublic.com/article/1207...-digital-world





New York Times Reports Better-Than-Expected Profit and Revenue
Arathy S Nair

The New York Times Co (NYT.N) reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter profit and revenue on Thursday as it cut costs while continuing its push into digital content.

However, Chief Executive Mark Thompson said stepped-up investment in digital in 2016 - "an investment year" - will put downward pressure on operating profit, with growth resuming as the publisher heads into 2017.

Investments will range from conventional video to expanding virtual reality capabilities, Thompson said.

The Times hopes to end the year with "a million an a quarter digital-only subscribers" compared with about 1.1 million now, Thomson said on a conference call with analysts.

The company, whose shares were up 2 percent at midday, said in October it was aiming to double annual digital revenue to $800 million by 2020, with a focus on smartphone users.

The Times, facing diminishing revenue from print advertising, has been trying to popularize its digital content globally by investing in marketing and taking steps such as allowing subscribers to pay in local currencies.

As part of its drive to push its digital content, the Times distributed more than a million Google Cardboard headsets to home delivery subscribers during the quarter to allow them to view its virtual reality application and films.

The Times said it expected operating costs to rise by a low single-digit percentage in the current quarter as it adds a net 50,000 digital subscribers.

The company's digital advertising revenue increased 10.6 percent to $69.9 million in the fourth quarter, compared with a year earlier, while circulation revenue from digital-only subscription products rose 13.3 pct to $50.4 million.

The Times added 53,000 paid subscribers to its digital-only subscription products in the period. The company did not provide details of print advertising revenue or circulation in the quarter but said its print advertising revenue fell 6.6 percent.

Net income attributable to shareholders from continuing operations rose to $51.7 million, or 31 cents per share, from $34.9 million, or 22 cents per share.

Excluding items, the company earned 37 cents per share, beating the average estimate of 30 cents, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Total revenue was flat at $444.7 million but exceeded the average analyst estimate of $439.6 million.

Operating costs fell 7.7 percent to $352.7 million, the fourth quarter in a row that expenses have fallen.

Up to Wednesday's close of $12.77, the company's shares had fallen about 7 percent in the past 12 months.

(Reporting By Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Ted Kerr)
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ne...-idUSKCN0VD1U4





Sheldon Adelson Tightens Grip on Review-Journal
Ken Doctor

After a brief spell of normalcy seemed to return to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, all bets are now off.

A new publisher has appeared overnight at the paper, a new editor will be installed as soon as Friday, and, sources tell me, stories involving new owner Sheldon Adelson are being reviewed, changed or killed almost daily.

Further, the newsroom is abuzz with word of a list of a half a dozen or so journalists whose work has rubbed Adelson the wrong way over the years, and who may soon be targeted for departure in what one insider describes as a “house-cleaning.”

In addition to such departures, the Review-Journal may see a flurry of resignations sooner than later.

What began as an abstract fear of a powerful new owner’s political hand wanting to steer the paper’s news coverage, after Sheldon Adelson was revealed as the “secret” buyer of the Review-Journal in early December, has become a reality. Says one knowledgeable insider flatly, “Adelson bought the paper because of the content.”

Longtime Gannett executive Craig Moon, announced as publisher on Thursday, has quickly moved to reverse both business decisions and prominent editorial moves recently implemented, some of them with public fanfare, that aimed to protect the integrity of the newsroom’s news report. Frank Vega, a tough-nosed, near-legendary veteran of the industry in his roles as a Gannett and Hearst publisher, is now consulting Moon and Adelson as they re-make the Review-Journal.

Moon refused to comment on the recent changes, as did other principals involved in the story.

Moon’s appointment overturned two apple carts that had been painstakingly set in place over the past several months.

First is the management contract that set up Gatehouse to run the paper for Adelson.

Second are a set of editorial principles established to address potential conflicts of interest owing to Adelson’s ownership of the paper, which had been run prominently on page threeof the paper each day since the sale (POLITICO: “After Adelson, Gatehouse moves to repair damage”).

Meanwhile, in a Las Vegas courtroom, a civil suit involving Adelson threatens to shed new light on the “judge monitoring” issue that has ridden sidecar to the story of Adelson secretly buying the Review-Journal in December. In that matter, Gatehouse reporters were told to “monitor” Las Vegas judges, including one that has been a particular thorn in Sheldon Adelson’s side, as she presided over a civil suit involving him. Any further revelation threatens collateral damage to Gatehouse Media, the company that sold the Review-Journal to Adelson for $140 million almost two months ago. We detail that part of this ongoing saga, in the companion piece, “Can Gatehouse distance itself from the Adelson sale?”

New publisher Moon will name a new editor, a next step in Adelson quickly asserting direct control of the Review-Journal. Though a half dozen or so finalists for the R-J editor position had been recently interviewed by Gatehouse, none of those candidates is likely to get the job; they were unknowingly applying for a job about to be filled separately by the new publisher.

That new editor, likely to be announced Friday or soon after, will succeed interim editor Glenn Cook. Cook, senior editorial writer on the paper’s conservative editorial page, had spearheaded the framing of the newsroom’s new principles.

Moon’s appointment came as a surprise to most in the top management of Gatehouse, which had become Adelson’s business partner – agreeing to manage the paper under a new contract – after it sold the R-J to him in December. Now, that management contract continues in a much-reduced state. “It’s transactional work,” Mike Reed, CEO of Gatehouse/New Media Investment Group, told me Wednesday. “Things like accounting, legal and purchasing.”

In purchasing newsprint and ink, Adelson’s News + Media Capital Group can benefit from the buying power Gatehouse wields as a large newspaper conglomerate.

The terms of the new business partnership between Gatehouse – which had sold the paper to Adelson for more than a $50 million gain, compared to the price it had paid for it nine months previously — and Adelson seemed to be working. Publisher Jason Taylor, while also responsible for the Gatehouse chain’s western 100-plus newspapers, would continue to work for Gatehouse. Gatehouse, in turn, would provide management services, through Taylor, a respected and innovative newspaper executive.

As the new year dawned, it looked like the Adelson-bought newspaper was also getting its house in better journalistic order. After announcing the hiring of 30 journalists (some to restore positions that had been eliminated concurrent with the sale), to fill out a depleted newsroom, the R-J listed nationally at least 13 open jobs, including the long-vacant managing editor job.

Further, it had published a set of principles that clearly demarcated how the paper would cover its new owner, one of Las Vegas’ most news-making citizens, and included those principles daily on page three of the paper. Those changes had been worked through by Taylor, the newsroom leadership, and industry veteran Dave Butler, the editor of Gatehouse’s Providence Journal (“After Adelson: Gatehouse moves to repair Las Vegas damage”).

On his first day on the job, Moon had those principles removed from regular publication. Within five hours, the immediate inherent conflicts of Adelson ownership made themselves highly apparent. The Review-Journal reported that Adelson had met with the ownership of Oakland Raiders football team, hoping to lure them to Las Vegas and into a new “public/private”-funded $1 billion domed stadium.

The new publisher has reviewed each stadium story since, and the stories have seen numerous Moon-directed edits, several sources confirm. Those edits include removing key points of fact on what may turn out to become a $600 million-plus public investment in a football stadium. At least one stadium story was killed, as well, my sources confirm.

The Conflicts

It is near impossible to overestimate the depth of the conflict involved in the Adelson ownership. As a major player in the gaming industry in Las Vegas, Macau and Singapore, top donor to Republican Party candidates and now the booster of a “public-private” funded football stadium, Adelson-related stories have appeared in the R-J for years. For years, the paper has “lawyered” each Adelson-related story, given the magnate’s history of litigiousness. Now that review is being done in house, with very different results.

As Craig Moon removed the published principles, he noted that such detail in disclosure is unusual in American newspapering. He’s right.

As I’ve written, it’s not unusual for publishers to maintain a policy by which they must see any mention of their paper or its ownership before publication. In standard practice, that’s intended as a heads-up for the business side, and not an invitation to make story changes that make the ownership or management look better.

Further, the whole Adelson-buying-of-the-R-J affair, though, is anything but business-as-usual.

In this case, with journalistic practice already squarely in question – and the question of journalistic malpractice raised — the vanished principles speak to a much-lowered firewall between the new political owner and a newsroom trying to do its job fairly.

For the Review-Journal, then, the act of removing the principles is both symbolic of Adelson’s assertion of control and one with wider, immediate implications. Adelson’s own involvement in reviewing the R-J content has become a constant.

The Year Ahead

For former R-J publisher Jason Taylor, it’s an opportunity to step out of the madness. By Adelson’s wish, Taylor had assumed an odd man-in-the middle role that turned out to be unworkable. He’ll remain in Las Vegas, responsible for Gatehouse’s Western states titles and its events strategies, industry-leading notions I highlighted a couple of years ago.

Gatehouse itself, given the highly questioned “judge monitoring,” is at work trying to calm the concerns of its editors and publishers over the public black eye to the credibility of its journalism.

In Las Vegas, readers must be unsure of the kind of Review-Journal — the state’s biggest news source — they’ll get in print and digital. Will the Review-Journal become a pariah paper, less trusted to report the news without censorship? Its new publisher and editor must maneuver a path between an owner who expects his new property to be a mouthpiece and a newsroom newly self-empowered to tell its readers what it actually knows. That may be a narrow path, or there may be none at all.

Then, there’s the question of Sheldon Adelson’s wider ambitions. Might his News + Media Capital Group have greater aims than the ownership of the Review-Journal? Insiders say he does.

If influencing Nevada politics, policy and legislation is one key goal of Adelson, then the next likely target of acquisition for him would be the Gannett-owned Reno Gazette-Journal. The state’s second-largest daily – after the Review-Journal – is situated in Nevada’s legislative capital. Might Gannett sell it – if offered more than double its value, as Gatehouse did with the R-J?

Meanwhile, much remains in flux daily at the Review-Journal, as journalists await the next editor and the next sense of what they can publish – and what they can’t.

In the newsroom, there are the whispers and exchanged Adelson-related web links making the rounds, the latest about Argentinian newspaper reports accusing Adelson’s Hayom, his Tel Aviv-based popular daily, of being involved in the Alberto Nisman scandal. (That twisty tale begins with a 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center, which killed 85 people. It then continues into the investigation into the attack’s perpetrators, leading to charges of cover-up against just-departed Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Just Sunday, new President Mauricio Macri pledged to reopen the government’s wider investigation.)

So from Buenos Aires to Macau to Las Vegas, the involvement of Sheldon Adelson in the news lives on, almost non-stop. Almost every new day, a new Adelson tale rolls out, publicly — or otherwise.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/articl...review-journal





Google Fiber May be Looking to Add Phone Services
Brian Fung

Google Fiber is sending out invitations to an experimental telephone service for some of its high-speed Internet subscribers, according to two people who have received the invitation.

The service, known as Google Fiber Phone, closely resembles another Google product, Google Voice. That application lets users link all of their various telephones, including landline and mobile devices, to a single phone number. Fiber Phone comes with Google Voice features, such as voicemail transcriptions and automatic call screening based on the time of day.

The invite has been rolling out for at least the past month to members of the Google Fiber Trusted Tester program. The Trusted Tester program involves Fiber subscribers who have opted in to try new and potential changes to their service.

Officially, Google Fiber does not offer traditional phone service. But if the company rolls out Fiber Phone more widely, Google would become a true triple-play provider, offering customers a mix of broadband, television and telephony — just like its rivals in the cable industry.

From there, it wouldn't be much of a leap for Google to begin offering its broadband subscribers bundled access to Project Fi, Google's recently launched cellular service that hops between Sprint, T-Mobile and WiFi. As many cable companies mull an entry into the competitive wireless market, it appears Google may already be positioning itself to get ahead of them.

You can see a copy of the invitation being sent out to customers here (PDF). A Google spokesperson didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...phone-service/





Comcast Uses Broadband Monopoly to Temporarily Buck Cord Cutting
Karl Bode

Comcast's latest quarterly earnings report indicates that Comcast managed to buck the overall cord cutting trend and actually add 89,000 basic video subscribers during the fourth quarter. Like Time Warner Cable, Comcast appears to be benefiting from a return of customers that had previously fled to satellite and telcoTV providers, thanks predominately to the lure of faster speeds and bundle promotions.

Comcast still saw a net loss of 36,000 basic video subscribers for the full year, but the company's short term ability to leech some customers back from telcoTV and satellite with bundle promotions will surely fuel industry denial that cord cutting isn't a trend worth worrying over longer term. Unfortunately for cord cutting deniers, it's not that simple.

For one thing, many of these users are just returning from satellite TV and telco TV. Verizon not coincidentally saw its worst TV subscriber quarter since 2006 with just a 20,000 subscriber net gain. AT&T and DirecTV combined meanwhile saw a net loss of 24,000 subscribers during the fourth quarter. In other words a lot of this is just lateral movement back to cable operators by customers lured by updated cable boxes and faster broadband speeds.

Despite a quarter marred by continued consumer annoyance at Comcast's poor customer service and business practices (ranging from usage caps to net neutrality violations), Comcast's broadband growth remains strong -- thanks in large part to telco broadband providers unwilling to upgrade their broadband networks to next-generation speeds.

For example, as AT&T and Verizon turn the lion's share of their attention toward wireless, the companies are all but forcing millions of unwanted DSL customers off of their lines via a combination of apathy and price hikes. That's leaving companies like Comcast with an incredible broadband monopoly position in countless markets, easily luring new customers with broadband speeds traditional telcos refuse to provide.

As a result, Comcast added 460,000 broadband customers on the quarter -- the best subscriber addition tally for broadband in nine years. The company also managed to add 139,000 voice subscribers at a time when many cable voice users are trimming lines to reduce overall monthly costs. The "new" (more likely returning) TV customers are riding along on bundles where television is heavily, but temporarily, discounted.

That doesn't mean those customers will stick around. Nor does it mean (contrary to what the industry will soon begin crowing over the next week) that cord cutting was overhyped or non-existent. What it does mean is that Comcast enjoys a monopoly in many broadband markets and is using that power to shove these users toward bundles. In many markets, TV and broadband bundled can be $20 less on promotion than just broadband alone.

Many of those customers may find themselves cutting the TV component once the full rates kick in. That's where Comcast clearly hopes its usage caps and its decision to exempt its own stream service from said caps will help keep these users captive.

As such, Comcast's fourth quarter TV subscriber number doesn't mean users are necessarily seeing a renewed interest in traditional television or that cord cutting doesn't exist, it just means Comcast's reaping the benefits of its monopoly broadband position, and that bundled broadband users are signing up for TV because it's cheaper than broadband alone.
https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/...Cutting-136217





Senators Blast Comcast, Other Cable Firms for “Unfair Billing Practices”

FCC urged to look into erroneous rental charges and other billing problems.
Jon Brodkin

Six Democratic US senators today criticized Comcast and other TV and broadband providers for charging erroneous fees, such as cable modem rental fees billed to customers who bought their own modems. The senators have written a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler asking the commission to "stop unfair billing practices."

Last year, more than 30 percent of complaints to the FCC about Internet service and 38 percent of complaints about TV service were about billing, wrote Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

The senators described Comcast, the nation's largest cable and broadband company, as a repeat offender. "We are troubled upon hearing complaints of consumers being charged the modem rental fee after they have returned the rented equipment to Comcast or being charged the rental fee having never rented a modem in the first place," the senators wrote. "Not only are the majority of customers using automatic payment systems and may not personally authorize every erroneous charge, many consumers report having to call and remedy this problem throughout several billing cycles. In fact, customer help boards found online at Comcast’s Help and Support Forum contain complaints about this exact problem."

Comcast increased its monthly modem rental fee from $8 to $10 (in late 2014) "and makes an estimated $275 to $300 million a quarter from these fees," the letter said.

The problem is made worse by lack of competition, the senators wrote.

When contacted by Ars today, a Comcast spokesperson noted that "modems are available to consumers at retail, and rental isn’t required for broadband service."

The senators didn't make any specific call for an investigation but asked Wheeler several questions. The senators want to know if the FCC regulates erroneous equipment fees charged to consumers, whether the FCC has records or a database of erroneous equipment charges, how many consumers have complained to the FCC about incorrect equipment fees, and what action the FCC has taken in those cases.

Wheeler's office told Ars that "we’ve received the letter and are reviewing it." In most cases, it takes Wheeler at least a few weeks to respond to letters from lawmakers.

The FCC could take action against broadband providers using common-carrier regulation. Because of the FCC's reclassification of Internet providers as common carriers, the commission can intervene when customers complain about "unjust" or "unreasonable" prices and billing practices.

Wheeler has also proposed new rules to make the set-top box market more competitive, which might help customers avoid or reduce cable box rental fees.

UPDATE: Comcast offered an additional statement this afternoon, saying, “Comcast operates in a highly competitive environment across all of our lines of business. Acknowledging some of our issues with customer service, we have undertaken a substantial, multi-year effort to reinvent the customer experience, including improving billing systems, reliability, and all of our interactions with our customers. We are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in this effort and are working hard to improve and we won’t stop until we have made the changes necessary. We take every FCC complaint seriously, and respond to each one on an individualized basis. We are also using the information from complaints in our ongoing efforts to improve the overall customer experience.”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ing-practices/





Verizon’s Mobile Video Won’t Count Against Data Caps—But Netflix Does

Verizon Wireless tests limit of net neutrality rules by zero-rating own data.
Jon Brodkin

Verizon Wireless is testing the limits of the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules after announcing that it will exempt its own video service from mobile data caps—while counting data from competitors such as YouTube and Netflix against customers' caps.

The only way for companies to deliver data to Verizon customers without counting against their data caps is to pay the carrier, something no major rival video service has chosen to do. While data cap exemptions are not specifically outlawed by the FCC's net neutrality rules, the FCC is examining these arrangements to determine whether they should be stopped under the commission's so-called "general conduct standard." The FCC is already looking into data cap exemptions—also known as zero-rating—implemented by Comcast, AT&T, and T-Mobile USA.

Verizon last month announced its new "FreeBee Data 360" program in which content providers can pay to send zero-rated data to customers. Verizon has also been pushing its new "Go90" streaming video service, and yesterday it added a perk to Go90's mobile app: free data.

"If you’re a Verizon Wireless post-paid customer, stream Go90 videos over LTE without using up your data," the app update for iPhone and Android said.

Go90 streams live sports and other shows. The app is free with ads, and it has some content that's exclusive to Verizon Wireless subscribers.

A Verizon spokesperson told Ars that "the FCC was made aware of this announcement" but didn't elaborate on discussions with the commission. We've also contacted the FCC but haven't heard back.

Verizon's implementation of zero-rating may raise more serious concerns than the zero-rating implemented by T-Mobile, which is exempting many third-party video services from caps without charging providers for the exemptions. (T-Mobile is also throttling video, making the comparison a little more complicated.)

Verizon gets its money

By making Go90 exempt from data caps while enforcing limits on Netflix, YouTube, and other video, Verizon can push customers toward its own service at the expense of rivals. If those rivals in the video market want the same benefits afforded to Go90, then Verizon would still benefit by taking money in exchange for data cap exemptions.

While the FreeBee website indicates that companies paying for data cap exemptions can sponsor only up to 30 seconds of mobile video streaming, Verizon told us that video providers can pay for as much as they want.

"Under FreeBee 360 there is no limit," Verizon told Ars. "In other words, if a video provider came to Verizon and said they wanted to run a television series and sponsor it, under Free Bee 360 they could make arrangements to do so and the viewers would see data free."

Verizon argues that it isn't giving Go90 any special treatment. "The same ability to sponsor data is available to any other content provider with the same pricing," Verizon told Ars. "There is no double dipping here, Verizon isn’t getting paid twice—consumers are paying for all data usage today. When consumers used sponsored services, the sponsor will pay for that usage instead of the consumer."

Netflix unlikely to play ball

While Netflix is a fan of T-Mobile's zero-rating, the video company doesn't seem likely to pay Verizon for data cap exemptions. Netflix does pay Verizon for network interconnection that improves video quality on home broadband connections, but it only did so under protest after months of performance problems.

Netflix declined comment when contacted by Ars today. We're also waiting to hear back from YouTube, which previously objected to T-Mobile's video program.

Besides video, FreeBee lets companies pay to sponsor up to 30 minutes of audio streaming for Verizon customers or app downloads and usage of a website or app.

Verizon explained its thinking a bit further to Re/code, claiming that Go90 made the decision on its own. Remember, Go90 is owned by Verizon, and Verizon Wireless is a wholly owned subsidiary of Verizon.

“Go90 has decided to take advantage of Verizon’s FreeBee Data 360 service, which allows them to pay for customer’s data usage associated with watching videos on the Go90 app,” a Verizon representative said according to Re/code. “FreeBee Data 360 is an open, non-exclusive service available to other content providers on a non-discriminatory basis. Any interested content provider can use FreeBee Data 360 to expand their audiences by giving consumers the opportunity to enjoy their content without incurring data charges.”

The Verizon-owned AOL is also sponsoring data through the FreeBee program.

FCC still thinking about zero-rating

The FCC recently demanded meetings with T-Mobile, AT&T, and Comcast about their zero-rating implementations.

Each carrier has implemented zero-rating a bit differently. Comcast zero-rates its own Stream TV service, which provides online video to Internet-only customers, but the company says it's beyond the reach of net neutrality rules because Stream TV is an IP cable service instead of one delivered over the public Internet.

AT&T's Sponsored Data program charges third parties, such as advertisers, for the right to deliver data without counting against consumers' mobile data caps.

AT&T's zero-rating might start to look a bit more like Verizon's. Re/code pointed out that AT&T is preparing a mobile video service of its own that may involve sponsored data.

Despite no explicit ban on zero-rating, the FCC's net neutrality rules has a general conduct standard in which the FCC judges on a case-by-case basis whether a practice "unreasonably interferes" with the ability of consumers to reach content or the ability of content providers to reach consumers. The FCC hasn't yet said whether it will put a stop to any specific zero-rating practices.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2016...-netflix-will/





Singtel Pushes 10Gbps Service to Singapore Homes

At speeds of up to 10Gbps, the fibre broadband service will be the fastest currently available to households in Singapore and priced at S$189 a month.
Eileen Yu

Singtel has announced a new fibre broadband service that will push speeds of up to 10Gbps to residential homes in Singapore.

The service offering follows a pilot trial last year involving selected customers and is delivered off the telco's Next Generation Gigabit Passive Optical Network (10GPON). Latest news on Asia

Singtel's Singapore managing director of home consumer, Goh Seow Eng, said: "We recognise that residential customers are using greater bandwidth and requiring faster speeds for their online activities." At 10Gbps, the offering currently tops the cohort of connection speeds available to households in Singapore, Goh said.

Following Singtel's launch, local competitor StarHub sent across a response that pointed to its focus on "meeting customers' real needs".

Its head of entertainment and SmartLife Lim Shu Fen noted, for instance, that the majority of its home broadband customers preferred to connect to the internet via Wi-Fi. So StarHub offered its integrated fibre and cable dual-broadband service plans aimed at improving wireless coverage and service reliability.

"Nevertheless, we will continue to monitor industry developments and customer preferences to ensure our broadband plans remain competitive and relevant," Lim said.

Another local player M1 had unveiled a 10Gbps service for enterprises in May 2014 as well as its own GPON service for businesses in August last year, offering connection speeds of 2Gbps to 10Gbps. It told local news agency CNA that its 10Gbps GPON service for Singapore households was ready "will be launched soon".

According to Singtel, a 10Gbps connection would enable a two-hour HD movie to be downloaded within 90 seconds, or a two-hour 4K-quality movie to be downloaded in six minutes.

Priced at S$189 (US$132.6) a month on a two-year contract, the telco said its new 10Gbps Fibre Home Bundle service includes a 10G optical network router, wireless dual-band AC router, service installation, and 4G mobile broadband (data cap at 500MB). Also included for a limited time are a pair of Wi-Fi Mesh devices, offered through Singtel's partnership with AirTies and touted to eliminate dead or poor Wi-Fi spots within the customer's home.

With the new 10Gbps service, subscribers will be able to distribute the wired connection between an additional four 1Gbps ports.

The service will be available later this month, though, customers can register their interest in signing up via Singtel's website before February 15.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/singtel...ngapore-homes/





Fujitsu Achieves Record 56Gbps Wireless Transmission
Steve McCaskill

Fujitsu and Tokyo Institute of Technology create tech that could boost capacity of mobile networks in years to come

Fujitsu and the Tokyo Institute of Technology claim to have achieved world record transmission speeds of 56Gbps and hope to commercialise the technology for use in mobile base stations by 2020, boosting the capacity of cellular networks in areas suffering from poor connectivity due to high data demands.

The speed, achieved in indoor tests across a distance of 10cm, were made possible using millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies located between 30-300GHz, which are capable of carrying large amounts of data and have few other competing wireless applications.

The partners say this spectrum has been difficult to harness because of the requirement to design Complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuits that can modulate and demodulate mobile broadband signals in and out of the frequencies without data loss.

Researchers were able to solve this difficulty by creating CMOS circuits that split data signals into two and transmitting them over different frequency ranges before combining them once again. Essentially this method, increases capacity without impacting the quality of the signal. This signal is transported across the circuit board using a specially designed interface to the antenna, reducing data loss.

It is claimed that by pairing the technology developed with a high-output amplifier, the same effect can be achieved outdoors.

Mobile capacity can be boosted using small cells and additional base stations connected to the wider network using fibre. However Fujitsu says in some areas, such as urban locations and places surrounding by mountains and rivers, the laying of additional cable might not be possible. By boosting the wireless capacity of the base station itself, this need might be removed.

MmWave is seen by many within the mobile industry as a way of boosting speeds and capacity, and one standard being proposed by the third generation

Read more at http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/netw...mission-185156





Microsoft Plumbs Ocean’s Depths to Test Underwater Data Center
John Markoff

Taking a page from Jules Verne, researchers at Microsoft believe the future of data centers may be under the sea.

Microsoft has tested a prototype of a self-contained data center that can operate hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, eliminating one of the technology industry’s most expensive problems: the air-conditioning bill.

Today’s data centers, which power everything from streaming video to social networking and email, contain thousands of computer servers generating lots of heat. When there is too much heat, the servers crash.

Putting the gear under cold ocean water could fix the problem. It may also answer the exponentially growing energy demands of the computing world because Microsoft is considering pairing the system either with a turbine or a tidal energy system to generate electricity.

The effort, code-named Project Natick, might lead to strands of giant steel tubes linked by fiber optic cables placed on the seafloor. Another possibility would suspend containers shaped like jelly beans beneath the surface to capture the ocean current with turbines that generate electricity.

“When I first heard about this I thought, ‘Water ... electricity, why would you do that?’ ” said Ben Cutler, a Microsoft computer designer who is one of the engineers who worked on the Project Natick system. “But as you think more about it, it actually makes a lot of sense.”

Such a radical idea could run into stumbling blocks, including environmental concerns and unforeseen technical issues. But the Microsoft researchers believe that by mass producing the capsules, they could shorten the deployment time of new data centers from the two years it now takes on land to just 90 days, offering a huge cost advantage.

The underwater server containers could also help make web services work faster. Much of the world’s population now lives in urban centers close to oceans but far away from data centers usually built in out-of-the-way places with lots of room. The ability to place computing power near users lowers the delay, or latency, people experience, which is a big issue for web users.

“For years, the main cloud providers have been seeking sites around the world not only for green energy but which also take advantage of the environment,” said Larry Smarr, a physicist and scientific computing specialist who is director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at the University of California, San Diego.

Driven by technologies as varied as digital entertainment and the rapid arrival of the so-called Internet of Things, the demand for centralized computing has been growing exponentially. Microsoft manages more than 100 data centers around the globe and is adding more at a rapid clip. The company has spent more than $15 billion on a global data center system that now provides more than 200 online services.

In 2014, engineers in a branch of Microsoft Research known as New Experiences and Technologies, or NExT, began thinking about a novel approach to sharply speed up the process of adding new power to so-called cloud computing systems.

“When you pull out your smartphone you think you’re using this miraculous little computer, but actually you’re using more than 100 computers out in this thing called the cloud,” said Peter Lee, corporate vice president for Microsoft Research and the NExT organization. “And then you multiply that by billions of people, and that’s just a huge amount of computing work.”

The company recently completed a 105-day trial of a steel capsule — eight feet in diameter — that was placed 30 feet underwater in the Pacific Ocean off the Central California coast near San Luis Obispo. Controlled from offices here on the Microsoft campus, the trial proved more successful than expected.

The researchers had worried about hardware failures and leaks. The underwater system was outfitted with 100 different sensors to measure pressure, humidity, motion and other conditions to better understand what it is like to operate in an environment where it is impossible to send a repairman in the middle of the night.

The system held up. That led the engineers to extend the time of the experiment and to even run commercial data-processing projects from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service.

The research group has started designing an underwater system that will be three times as large. It will be built in collaboration with a yet-to-be-chosen developer of an ocean-based alternative-energy system. The Microsoft engineers said they expected a new trial to begin next year, possibly near Florida or in Northern Europe, where there are extensive ocean energy projects underway.

The first prototype, affectionately named Leona Philpot — a character in Microsoft’s Halo video game series — has been returned, partly covered with barnacles, to the company’s corporate campus here.

It is a large white steel tube, covered with heat exchangers, with its ends sealed by metal plates and large bolts. Inside is a single data center computing rack that was bathed in pressurized nitrogen to efficiently remove heat from computing chips while the system was tested on the ocean floor.

The idea for the underwater system came from a research paper written in 2014 by several Microsoft data center employees, including one with experience on a Navy submarine.

Norman A. Whitaker, the managing director for special projects at Microsoft Research and the former deputy director at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, said the underwater server concept was an example of what scientists at Darpa called “refactoring,” or completely rethinking the way something has traditionally been accomplished.

Even if putting a big computing tube underwater seems far-fetched, the project could lead to other innovations, he said. For example, the new undersea capsules are designed to be left in place without maintenance for as long as five years. That means the servers inside it have to be hardy enough to last that long without needing repairs.

That would be a stretch for most servers, but they will have to improve in order to operate in the underwater capsule — something the Microsoft engineers say they are working on.

They’re also rethinking the physical alignment of data centers. Right now, servers are put in racks so they can be maintained by humans. But when they do not need maintenance, many parts that are just there to aid human interaction can be removed, Mr. Whitaker said.

“The idea with refactoring is that it tickles a whole bunch of things at the same time,” he said.

In the first experiment, the Microsoft researchers said they studied the impact their computing containers might have on fragile underwater environments. They used acoustic sensors to determine if the spinning drives and fans inside the steel container could be heard in the surrounding water. What they found is that the clicking of the shrimp that swam next to the system drowned out any noise created by the container.

One aspect of the project that has the most obvious potential is the harvest of electricity from the movement of seawater. This could mean that no new energy is added to the ocean and, as a result, there is no overall heating, the researchers asserted. In their early experiment the Microsoft engineers said they had measured an “extremely” small amount of local heating of the capsule.

“We measured no heating of the marine environment beyond a few inches from the vessel,” Dr. Lee said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/te...ta-center.html





Here’s Why Microsoft Wants Everyone to Get Windows 10 by July — and What Happens if they Don’t
Max Slater-Robins

Microsoft is giving away Windows to any existing customers for free until July 26, 2016.

This is a dramatic shift from how previous versions of Windows have worked. Beyond this, it has also had a big effect on how Microsoft’s finances work.

Giving away the operating system for free seems like it makes no sense. Traditionally, Microsoft has made money by selling Windows (or, as an extension, Office) to consumers and businesses. Now, it just sells Windows to businesses and gives it away to consumers.

The reasoning behind this is simple, and has been articulated by Microsoft many times: Windows on one billion devices.

Getting Windows 10 onto one billion devices — roughly the same number as Apple has on iOS — is tough. Windows is a computer operating system, not a phone operating system. This was great when PCs ruled, but that is no longer true.

However, the PC market is still massive — around 270 million units per year — and Microsoft has a good chance of getting Windows 10 onto one billion devices. But to do it, the company had to make a compromise and give it away for free.

Drastic times call for drastic measures

To make that decision — which was likely the idea of CEO Satya Nadella — possible, Microsoft has had to invent new lines of revenue.

Office 365, for example, works better when a lot of people use it because it’s subscription-based. Instead of getting a one-time fee — usually around $100 (£70) per copy — Microsoft now gets $5.99 (£5.99) every month which, in a little over a year, generates more money than the old model.

This change means that Microsoft has had to look for different ways to monetise Windows. The Windows Store is one example of this and, according to Microsoft, it’s becoming a hit (annoyed developers aside).

Microsoft needs the most amount of people to use the Windows Store to make it viable. Apple’s App Store, which is worth tens of billions of dollars a year, is valuable because one billion people have access to it.

Apple recently announced its holiday quarter results and made a big deal out of its “Services” division which, in essence, was the App Store. According to Apple, its services business is worth $31 billion (£22 billion) per year.

Microsoft wants to get some of that $31 billion — or, more accurately, create its own — and giving away Windows is a key part of that mission because the more people you have using your operating system, the more money you can make from it.

But why did Microsoft want to change its business model?

The PC market, despite shipping 270 million units, is on the decline as people buy smartphones.

Microsoft’s smartphone business is in trouble having shipped just 110 million units in its entire lifetime compared to around 4.5 billion iOS and Android shipments.

Essentially, Microsoft has had little choice but to give away Windows for free, to anyone, to increase usage in a world that is increasingly hostile to PCs.

Microsoft has also been distributing its apps on other platforms and now has over 300 million Office downloads on iOS and Android. The company originally made the apps exclusive to Office 365 customers but has since opened it up to anyone.

A big kick in revenue from cloud service — around $6.3 billion (£4.4 billion) in the last quarter — also helped the company navigate this change.

So what happens if the plan goes wrong?

Microsoft is running a big risk giving away Windows for free and, come July, could choose to do any number of things.

The company says it currently has over 200 million Windows users but that number needs to increase fivefold — and that isn’t likely to happen in the next four or five months.

ZDNet speculates that Microsoft could do one of three things:

1. Go back to the original model of charging users a license to get Windows.
2. Extend the period of time Windows 10 is free for.
3. Change out the free offer for a different offer.

Any of these three options is viable and the only way to find out what the company will do is wait until July 26, but the most likely guess at this time is that Microsoft chooses option two, bites the bullet, and offers another six months of free Windows 10 to on-board as many users as possible.

However, the free offer will have to end eventually and Microsoft could be a very different company by that time.

According to Microsoft’s holiday quarter report, the Windows Store is growing, the third-party apps are a hit, cloud revenues are up, and the Surface line is looking bright — but will these be enough to bring Microsoft into a new age?

We’ll have to wait until July 26, 2016 to find out.
https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/wh...150000279.html





Apple – Losing Out On Talent and in Need of a Killer New Device

Despite its huge value, Silicon Valley developers are turned off by ‘secretive, controlling’ culture and its engineering is no longer seen as cutting edge
Nellie Bowles

When developer James Knight was on the job market recently, he considered applying to several of the big tech companies and immediately crossed Apple off his list.

“Apple’s culture is one that’s so negative, so strict, so harsh,” said Knight, a talented 27-year-old coder who left a job at Google for more lucrative freelance work. “At Apple, you’re gonna be working 60-80 hours a week and some VP will come yell at you at any moment? That’s a very hostile work environment.”

Now his company focuses on building apps for the iPhone: “Other than the fact that we have to work with them because we’re delivering apps to their app store, I don’t really want anything to do with them,” Knight said.

The Silicon Valley computing giant is stumbling. With news of massive but slowing sales, its stock price fell 6.5% after its results on 27 January, to $93.42 from a springtime high of $133. Apple’s market value is now $522.63bn, down from a high of $774.69bn in February 2015.

More curious is how the company has been relatively undervalued: Apple stock’s market value relative to its earnings is about 10, while Facebook’s is about 109 –indicating investors have significantly more confidence in the social giant’s future. Long unassailable, there is now a chink in Apple’s armor.

Tellingly, Apple is no longer seen as the best place for engineers to work, according to several Silicon Valley talent recruiters. It’s a trend that has been happening slowly for years – and now, in this latest tech boom, has become more acute.

Bay area technologists once talked about the company with somewhat fearful reverence lest they ever damage their chances of scoring a lucrative job in Cupertino, but now they are starting to vent about what’s seen as a secretive, controlling culture. The company’s not attracting the top young talent, who opt for Facebook or Alphabet (Google’s new parent company), or better yet Uber and Airbnb, say recruiters. And, since the wage collusion lawsuit has been settled (a case in which Apple, Google, Adobe and others worked together to depress engineer wages by not poaching talent), talent is more likely to move around.

One startup executive, who has poached engineers from blue chip companies, compared the big three consumer tech companies to the Ivy League universities; he cast Facebook as Harvard, Google as Yale and Apple as Dartmouth (apologies to Dartmouth). Or as Elon Musk recently put the hiring situation a little more harshly: Apple is the “Tesla graveyard”.

“If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple,” Musk recently told a German newspaper.

The biggest issue for programmers seems to be a high-stress culture and cult of secrecy, which contrasts sharply with office trends toward gentler management and more playful workdays; Google’s seven-person “conference” bikes come to mind. Apple notoriously doesn’t serve free food, which was unusual in 2012 and, in 2016 Silicon Valley, shocking for highly prized and pampered engineers accustomed to perks. Employees don’t get free phones. And Apple’s enormous new Cupertino campus, a neo-futuristic glass circle, has been nicknamed the Death Star.

“A pain point for a lot of people with Apple is they can’t talk about what they’re working on, which hinders your social status in a way,” said Troy Sultan, the founder of tech recruiting startup IDK Labs. “You want to put on your LinkedIn that you’re working on the latest iPhone, but you absolutely can’t. It’s interesting Apple can retain top talent at all. I don’t know how. They keep you sort of locked up.”

For entry-level engineers, Sultan said it can seem like a confusing and rigid culture: “I want to have trust in Apple’s leadership, but it’s weird at least from the bottom of the food chain.”

Young ambitious programmers and designers have been put off by this: “Apple culture’s a little weird. A lot of secrecy, a lot of control. It just seems kind of like the empire down there,” said Matthew Wood, a designer at the development agency Arsenal. “Thinking about jobs, Apple never really comes up.”

Apple is working on a self-driving car and on artificial intelligence, along with secretive development of many other products, but its failure to produce a new killer product is turning off developers.

“The best engineers want to work on the bleeding edge of technology,” said Michael Solomon, the co-founder of 10x, an engineering talent management firm. “Apple’s last release [the Apple Watch] was not a giant hit. And everyone’s already got an iPhone. There’s just diminishing returns making it another degree of a crisper screen or a higher megapixel camera. It’s just a replacement game.”

Engineers look for “big problems” that will push them and for a culture that puts them at the center, Solomon said. He also noted that the best engineers like to work in “flow state” and keep creative hours, which Apple, with its long commute from San Francisco to Cupertino, doesn’t always allow.

“Apple’s not an engineering culture,” Solomon said. “Tim Cook’s done an amazing job running the company, but [Steve Jobs] was the guy everyone wanted to follow into battle.”

Lest this argument go too far, though: Apple pays its software engineers well and is the largest corporation in the world, so it is presumably more stable than a venture-backed private company such as Uber or Airbnb, whose pay is in cash and stock option packages – the latter of which may evaporate.

Its struggles are more systematic than simply getting the best software engineers, which its enormous $216bn in cash can certainly help with. The iPhone is the bulk of Apple’s business, and at a certain point everyone who wants an iPhone has one. Efforts to break into other markets with its watch seem shaky. Its “moonshot” plans like self-driving cars seem to be challenged: they recently lost the head of their secretive autonomous car unit. And Amazon, which has a notoriously brutal workplace culture, has seen its stock soar this year.

But Apple’s reputation among young programmers is telling. In an industry built on the notion of “disruption”, attracting exceptional talent and keeping them nimble is key. Apple doesn’t need to just make a better iPhone – it needs to make something new. That’s a much harder task.

Knight says he and many of his friends value lifestyle over salary. “I’m the kind of person who likes to show up to work sometimes at 11, or maybe work from home one day. And Apple’s not the place you can do that,” Knight said. “Apple can move away from that culture but culture takes time. A lot of time. And stock prices drop hourly.”

Apple did not immediately return a request for comment.
http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...ley-developers





Parents are Dumb and Kids Don’t Know Anything About Computers Anymore
James Seibel

This is a rant. I love rants. The well formed rant is an art form that is under appreciated. It uses absurdity and exaggeration to get its point across, and often times humor, to make a valid point that is ripe for dissection and debate. Even if it’s full of glaring contradictions, it is the kernel of truth that makes it so effective.

Plus, once a rant starts getting lots of commentary, you can sift through the discussion and get a range of opinions that really give breadth to the issue. I particularly like people who write hundreds of words refuting the rant point by point, who seemingly lack any sense of humor or perspective.

Sorry for the digression. This article is my rant.

When I was 2 years old in 1990, my parents purchased a PC from a long-defunct local computer repair shop. It came with DOS. I didn’t give a shit about it at first, but once I realized it could play games, I was enamored.

But installing a game was difficult! My father could barely figure it out, and usually had someone come over to do it. Everything was a series of floppy disks and strange commands, and usually some error popped up and you had to try again.

Eventually Windows 3.1 was released and purchased, and our computer wasn’t purely a command line anymore.

To use this beast, you had to understand files, folders, memory, hard disk, fancy commands, and so on. Then you could play your games.

Later, when we got a 56K modem and learned about Direct Connect and Usenet, we had to learn all about file sharing and piracy. You had to use weird file formats, strange tools, and cross your fingers and pray you didn’t brick your whole OS with viruses. And if you did, it was an all-weekend quest of searching online for how to fix it. And search engines were terrible! And the internet was super slow! It was fun!

Nowadays, parents think their kids are computer experts because they can install shit on an iPad. Clicking “Install” and watching a bar go across the screen passes for expertise in the average household.

A couple years ago there was a widely reported story of kids “hacking” their school issued iPads to get around parental controls. The media ate that shit up — “Kids today! They are computer hacker genius babies running circles around their parents and administrators!”

In reality, all they did was go 3 menus deep and remove a config profile. This was not “hacking”. In fact, Apple patched this problem soon after by creating an option to make device management profiles un-removable. Problem solved!

I write code for a living. I formally began this training in college, but I was screwing around with BASIC on Ti83’s since 5th grade. From age 2 I was steeped in all things computers. So are all of my coworkers who are my age. I don’t have 7 years of experience — I have almost 30.

We are collectively raising a generation of kids who have no idea WTF is going on anymore. All of the mysteries are impossible to dive into within the walled gardens of mobile devices and tablets. The fact that even Android devices don’t have an official way to be jailbroken is totally absurd and counter productive. Windows lost any semblance of a command line, and while Apple has a great terminal, most families can’t afford Apple devices, and even if they can, it’s insanity to give a 2 year old access to a $2,000 laptop.

Sure, some of you computer experts out there are training your kids to code and giving them Raspberry Pi’s and so on and so forth. But the vast majority are not, and I would guess that in poor families it’s a rarity. The technology that most kids actually use is making them DUMBER.

My generation had an enormous advantage in that computers were difficult to use. Then we all banded together and made them too easy to use, and now the next generation is at a disadvantage. The 2 year old today who becomes a software engineer will be 20 years behind where I was when he or she is 22.

So next time an acquaintance talks about what a computer genius their kids are, sigh really loud and roll your eyes and tell them what dum dums they are :)
https://medium.com/@seibelj/parents-...52c#.1xq0ol9kk





DHS Official Thinks People Should Have To Give Up Their Anonymity To Use The Internet
Tim Cushiung

Apparently, the only way to stop terrorists from hating us for our freedom is to strip away those offensive freedoms.

Erik Barnett, the DHS's attache to the European Union, pitched some freedom-stripping ideas to a presumably more receptive audience via an article for a French policy magazine. Leveraging both the recent Paris attacks and the omnipresent law enforcement excuse for any bad idea -- child porn -- Barnett suggested victory in the War on Terror can be achieved by stripping internet users of their anonymity. You know, all of them, not just the terrorists.

After a short anecdote about a successful child porn prosecution in Europe. Barnett gets straight to the point. Here's Kieren McCarthy of The Register.

Before we have an opportunity to celebrate, however, Barnett jumps straight to terrorism. "How much of the potential jihadists' data should intelligence agencies or law enforcement be able to examine to protect citizenry from terrorist attack?", he poses. The answer, of course, is everything.

Then the pitch: "As the use of technology by human beings grows and we look at ethical and philosophical questions surrounding ownership of data and privacy interests, we must start to ask how much of the user's data is fair game for law enforcement to protect children from sexual abuse?"


In short, if you value internet-related freedoms, you're basically supporting terrorism and child porn. No person -- especially no legislator -- would want to be seen as valuing personal freedoms over the good of the nation's infrastructure/children. And, because terrible ideas must be buttressed by terrible analogies, Barnett theorizes that the internet is basically a car.

"When a person drives a car on a highway, he or she agrees to display a license plate. The license plate's identifiers are ignored most of the time by law enforcement [unless] the car is involved in a legal infraction or otherwise becomes a matter of public interest. Similarly, should not every individual be required to display a 'license plate' on the digital super-highway?"

To use the Fourth Amendment for a moment, a lowered expectation of privacy is in play when operating a vehicle on public roads. However, the Fourth Amendment affords a great deal of privacy to the interior of people's homes. Because the government (in most cases) does not provide internet access, it has no basis to demand ongoing access to citizens' internet activities. It may acquire this information (along with subscriber info) using search warrants and subpoenas during the course of investigations, but it cannot demand (or at least shouldn't) -- for national security reasons or otherwise -- that every internet user be immediately identifiable.

Discussions of requiring a license for internet usage have been raised previously but rarely go anywhere. To do so is to start heading down the path to totalitarianism. Unfortunately, being in a constant state of war against an ambiguous foe often results in legislators and government officials declaring their interest in seeing this path not only surveyed, but the first layer of asphalt applied.

Barnett is one of this number, and he wants a strawman to serve as construction foreman.

"Social media is used to generate support for terrorist groups ... How appropriate is the law enforcement engagement of the social media companies to reveal digital fingerprints of these extremist groups? Who determines the level of 'extremism' of a group? Few would disagree that law enforcement and intelligence services should have the ability..."

Actually, lots of people would disagree, starting with many citizens and running all the way up to their service providers. On top of that, the nation's courts would find the institution of a law that strips the anonymity of internet users to be unconstitutional, so that's another hurdle Barnett and like-minded officials would not be able to clear, no matter their stated justification.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...internet.shtml





New Technologies Give Government Ample Means to Track Suspects, Study Finds
David E. Sanger

For more than two years the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies have warned that encrypted communications are creating a “going dark” crisis that will keep them from tracking terrorists and kidnappers.

Now, a study in which current and former intelligence officials participated concludes that the warning is wildly overblown, and that a raft of new technologies — like television sets with microphones and web-connected cars — are creating ample opportunities for the government to track suspects, many of them worrying.

“ ‘Going dark’ does not aptly describe the long-term landscape for government surveillance,” concludes the study, to be published Monday by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

The study argues that the phrase ignores the flood of new technologies “being packed with sensors and wireless connectivity” that are expected to become the subject of court orders and subpoenas, and are already the target of the National Security Agency as it places “implants” into networks around the world to monitor communications abroad.

The products, ranging from “toasters to bedsheets, light bulbs, cameras, toothbrushes, door locks, cars, watches and other wearables,” will give the government increasing opportunities to track suspects and in many cases reconstruct communications and meetings.

The study, titled, “Don’t Panic: Making Progress on the ‘Going Dark’ Debate,” is among the sharpest counterpoints yet to the contentions of James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, and other Justice Department officials, mostly by arguing that they have defined the issue too narrowly.

Over the past year, they have repeatedly told Congress that the move by Apple to automatically encrypt data on its iPhone, and similar steps by Google and Microsoft, are choking off critical abilities to track suspects, even with a court order.

President Obama, however, concluded last fall that any effort to legislate a government “back door” into encrypted communications would probably create a pathway for hackers — including those working for foreign governments like Russia, China and Iran — to gain access as well, and create a precedent for authoritarian governments demanding similar access.

Most Republican candidates for president have demanded that technology companies create a way for investigators to unlock encrypted communications, and on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton has taken a tough line on Silicon Valley companies, urging them to join the fight against the Islamic State.

Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, has led the charge on the other side. He recently told a group of White House officials seeking technology companies’ voluntary help to counter the Islamic State that the government’s efforts to get the keys to encrypted communications would be a boon for hackers and put legitimate business transactions, financial data and personal communications at greater risk.

The Harvard study, funded by the Hewlett Foundation, was unusual because it involved technical experts, civil libertarians and officials who are, or have been, on the forefront of counterterrorism. Larry Kramer, the former dean of Stanford Law School, who heads the foundation, noted Friday that until now “the policy debate has been impeded by gaps in trust — chasms, really — between academia, civil society, the private sector and the intelligence community” that have impeded the evolution of a “safe, open and resilient Internet.”

Among the chief authors of the report is Matthew G. Olsen, who was a director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Mr. Obama and a general counsel of the National Security Agency.

Two current senior officials of the N.S.A. — John DeLong, the head of the agency’s Commercial Solutions Center, and Anne Neuberger, the agency’s chief risk officer — are described in the report as “core members” of the group, but did not sign the report because they could not act on behalf of the agency or the United States government in endorsing its conclusions, government officials said.

“Encryption is a real problem, and the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies are right to raise it,” Mr. Olsen said Sunday. But he noted that in their testimony officials had not described the other technological breaks that are falling their way, nor had they highlighted cases in which they were able to exploit mistakes made by suspects in applying encryption to their messages.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who convened the group, said in an interview that the goal was “to have a discussion among people with very different points of view” that would move “the state of the debate beyond its well-known bumper stickers. We managed to do that in part by thinking of a larger picture, specifically in the unexpected ways that surveillance might be attempted.”

He noted that in the current stalemate there was little discussion of the “ever-expanding ‘Internet of things,’ where telemetry from teakettles, televisions and light bulbs might prove surprisingly, and worryingly, amenable to subpoena from governments around the world.”

Those technologies are already being exploited: The government frequently seeks location data from devices like cellphones and EZ Passes to track suspects.

The study notes that such opportunities are expanding rapidly. A Samsung “smart” television contains a microphone meant to relay back to Samsung voice instructions to the TV — “I want to see the last three ‘Star Wars’ movies” — and a Hello, Barbie brought out by Mattel last year records children’s conversations with the doll, processes them over the Internet and sends back a response.

The history of technology shows that what is invented for convenience can soon become a target of surveillance. “Law enforcement or intelligence agencies may start to seek orders compelling Samsung, Google, Mattel, Nest or vendors of other networked devices to push an update or flip a digital switch to intercept the ambient communications of a target,” the report said.

These communications, too, may one day be encrypted. But Google’s business model depends on picking out key words from emails to tailor advertisements for specific users of Gmail, the popular email service. Apple users routinely back up the contents of their phones to iCloud — a service that is not encrypted and now is almost a routine target for investigators or intelligence agencies. So are the tracking and mapping systems for cars that rely on transmitted global positioning data.

“I think what this report shows is that the world today is like living in a big field that is more illuminated than ever before,” said Joseph Nye, a Harvard government professor and former head of the National Intelligence Council. “There will be dark spots — there always will be. But it’s easy to forget that there is far more data available to governments now than ever before.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/us...udy-finds.html





Marco Rubio Wants to Permanently Extend NSA Mass Surveillance

The Florida Republican and likely White House contender is further separating himself from other 2016 hopefuls in the Senate.
Dustin Volz

Sen. Marco Rubio wants Congress to permanently extend the authorities governing several of the National Security Agency's controversial spying programs, including its mass surveillance of domestic phone records.

The Florida Republican and likely 2016 presidential hopeful penned an op-ed on Tuesday condemning President Obama's counterterrorism policies and warning that the U.S. has not learned the "fundamental lessons of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."

Rubio called on Congress to permanently reauthorize core provisions of the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act, which are due to sunset on June 1 of this year and provide the intelligence community with much of its surveillance power.

"This year, a new Republican majority in both houses of Congress will have to extend current authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and I urge my colleagues to consider a permanent extension of the counterterrorism tools our intelligence community relies on to keep the American people safe," Rubio wrote in a Fox News op-ed.

Rubio for years has positioned himself as a vocal defense hawk in Congress, and he has repeatedly defended the NSA's spy programs revealed to the public by former agency contractor Edward Snowden.

But Rubio's call to permanently extend the legal framework that allows the NSA to collect the bulk U.S. phone metadata—language that Congress has tweaked and in many cases made more permissive since 9/11—is particularly forceful. It comes in the wake of terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists in France at a satirical newspaper and a kosher deli that left 17 dead—violence that has prompted European officials to publicly consider whether more forceful surveillance laws are needed.

It also underscores the divisions among Rubio and his fellow Republican senators expected to jockey for the White House—namely, Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Cruz was one of only four Republicans to join with Democrats in November in voting to pass the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would have reformed several aspects of the NSA spying regime and would have barred the government from dragnet collection of Americans' phone records. Rubio voted against the measure, and so did Paul—though for divergent reasons. While Rubio warned that the bill could hamper intelligence agencies and bolster terrorists, Paul voted it down because he said it did not go far enough.

Paul has vowed to work to block the Patriot Act's reauthorization entirely this year, though many privacy and civil-liberties advocates have questioned the legitimacy of his strategy.

Many supporters of the Patriot Act have said one of the bill's strongest points is that its periodic sunsets force Congress to reconsider the authorities as it strives to balance civil liberties with security.

"I voted for the Patriot Act, but also believed it was very important that there was the expiration of the Patriot Act and the provisions that would ensure that we as members of Congress could analyze it a few years down the road," Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., told attendees at the State of the Net conference Tuesday. "Is this not just what we intended, but is this working effectively?"

Some lawmakers critical of the nation's surveillance programs used Rubio's op-ed to mock his position. Democratic Rep. Jared Polis called for the intelligence community to begin monitoring Rubio 24 hours a day.

"If Senator Rubio believes that millions of innocent Americans should be subject to intrusive and unconstitutional government surveillance, surely he would have no objections to the government monitoring his own actions and conversations," Polis said in a statement Tuesday. "Maybe after his 2016 strategy documents are accidentally caught up in a government data grab, he'll rethink the use of mass surveillance."

Republican Rep. Justin Amash, in reference to this story, tweeted "disqualified." His office would not clarify what the Michigan libertarian meant by the tweet.

Critics of government surveillance, including Snowden, insist that no evidence exists to support the claim that such bulk collection of U.S. phone records help protect national security—and may even distract intelligence agencies from other, more useful intelligence.

Rubio also used the op-ed to suggest that tech companies such as Apple and Google should not create too-tough-to-crack encryption standards on their mobile devices and digital services. Several officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director James Clapper, have warned that so-called unbreakable technology could hamper law enforcement's ability to catch criminals and threaten national security.

"The U.S. government should implore American technology companies to cooperate with authorities so that we can better track terrorist activity and monitor terrorist communications as we face the increasing challenge of homegrown terrorists radicalized by little more than what they see on the Internet," Rubio said.

Rubio's office did not respond to a request for additional comment.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/s/329...s-surveillance





NSA Hacker Chief Explains How to Keep Him Out of Your System
Kim Zetter

It was the talk most anticipated at this year’s inaugural Usenix Enigma security conference in San Francisco and one that even the other speakers were eager to hear.

Joyce is head of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations—the government’s top hacking team who are responsible for breaking into the systems of its foreign adversaries, and occasionally its allies. He’s been with the NSA for more than 25 years but only became head of the TAO division in April 2013, just weeks before the first leaks from Edward Snowden were published by the Guardian and Washington Post.

Joyce acknowledged that it was “very strange” for someone in his position to stand onstage before an audience. The TAO has largely existed in the shadowy recesses of the NSA—known and unknown at the same time—until only recently when documents leaked by Snowden and others exposed the workings of this cabal as well as many of its sophisticated hacking tools.

Joyce himself did little to shine a light on the TAO’s classified operations. His talk was mostly a compendium of best security practices. But he did drop a few of the not-so-secret secrets of the NSA’s success, with many people responding to his comments on Twitter.

How the NSA Gets You

In the world of advanced persistent threat actors (APT) like the NSA, credentials are king for gaining access to systems. Not the login credentials of your organization’s VIPs, but the credentials of network administrators and others with high levels of network access and privileges that can open the kingdom to intruders. Per the words of a recently leaked NSA document, the NSA hunts sysadmins.

The NSA is also keen to find any hardcoded passwords in software or passwords that are transmitted in the clear—especially by old, legacy protocols—that can help them move laterally through a network once inside.

And no vulnerability is too insignificant for the NSA to exploit.

“Don’t assume a crack is too small to be noticed, or too small to be exploited,” he said. If you do a penetration test of your network and 97 things pass the test but three esoteric things fail, don’t think they don’t matter. Those are the ones the NSA, and other nation-state attackers will seize on, he explained. “We need that first crack, that first seam. And we’re going to look and look and look for that esoteric kind of edge case to break open and crack in.”

Even temporary cracks—vulnerabilities that exist on a system for mere hours or days—are sweet spots for the NSA.

If you’ve got trouble with an appliance on your network, for example, and the vendor tells you to briefly open the network for them over the weekend so they can pop in remotely and fix it, don’t do it. Nation-state attackers are just looking for an opportunity like this, however brief, and will poke and poke your network patiently waiting for one to appear, he said.

Other vulnerabilities that are favorite attack vectors? The personal devices employees bring into the office on which they’ve allowed their kids to load Steam games, and which the workers then connect to the network.

The heating and cooling systems and other elements of building infrastructure also provide unexpected pathways into your network. Retail giant Target, of course, is very familiar with how a company’s HVAC system can be a gateway for attackers.

Left unsaid were a lot of the other nifty ways the NSA gets into systems, such as its Quantum insert code injection technique, which allowed it and the British spy agency GCHQ to hack the Belgium telecom Belgacom.

In general, Joyce noted, spies have little trouble getting into your network because they know better than you what’s on it.

“We put the time in …to know [that network] better than the people who designed it and the people who are securing it,” he said. “You know the technologies you intended to use in that network. We know the technologies that are actually in use in that network. Subtle difference. You’d be surprised about the things that are running on a network vs. the things that you think are supposed to be there.”

How to Keep the NSA Out

If you really want to make the NSA’s life hard, he ticked off a list of things to do: limit access privileges for important systems to those who really need them; segment networks and important data to make it harder for hackers to reach your jewels; patch systems and implement application whitelisting; remove hardcoded passwords and legacy protocols that transmit passwords in the clear.

Another nightmare for the NSA? An “out-of-band network tap”—a device that monitors network activity and produces logs that can record anomalous activity—plus a smart system administrator who actually reads the logs and pays attention to what they say.

Contrary to popular opinion, he says the NSA and other APT attackers don’t rely on zero-day exploits extensively—unique attacks that take advantage of previously unknown software holes to get into systems. That’s because they don’t have to.

“[With] any large network, I will tell you that persistence and focus will get you in, will achieve that exploitation without the zero days,” he says. “There’s so many more vectors that are easier, less risky and quite often more productive than going down that route.” This includes, of course, known vulnerabilities for which a patch is available but the owner hasn’t installed it.

Trust the NSA

Following his talk, Juan Guerrero, an analyst with Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research and Analysis Team, asked about the issue of attribution and efforts by some attack groups to manipulate and alter indicators of compromise to thwart attribution or point the finger at someone else.

“It’s amazing the amount of lawyers that DHS, FBI and NSA have,” Joyce said. “So if the government is saying that we have positive attribution too, you ought to book it. Attribution is really really hard, so when the government’s saying it, we’re using the totality of the sources and methods we have to help inform that. [But] because those advanced persistent threats aren’t going away, … we can’t bring all that information to the fore and be fully transparent about everything we know and how we know it.”

Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, asked a question in reference to recent news about the NSA engaging in actions that undermine the security of US systems—actions that are directly at odds with the spy agency’s other mission to help defend and protect US government systems.

“After this kind of activity, how do you guys hope to regain trust?” Weaver asked.

“Over time there will be that interaction and that ability,” Joyce replied. “NSA does a lot with industry, does a lot with standards, works with industry. I think we’ll build that trust back up. But I can absolutely tell you, in the NSA world defense wins. I continually interact with both the Information Assurance Directorate and our director and the defensive community of the US, and absolutely hands-down, defense wins in this space.”

He ended his talk with a slide showing a huge QR code, which got a laugh.

“Anybody holding up a camera?” Joyce asked. “Who’s gonna [photograph] the QR code from the NSA guy?”

QR codes are one way hackers attack systems by sending their browser to a malicious web site where malware is downloaded to it. Joyce, however, said his QR code was on the up-and-up and would take visitors to a legitimate NSA web site for more information. “[T]hat is a real link,” he said. “Trust me.”
http://www.wired.com/2016/01/nsa-hac...f-your-system/





The British Want to Come to America — with Wiretap Orders and Search Warrants
Ellen Nakashima and Andrea Peterson

If U.S. and British negotiators have their way, MI5, the British domestic security service, could one day go directly to American companies like Facebook or Google with a wiretap order for the online chats of British suspects in a counter#terrorism investigation.

The transatlantic allies have quietly begun negotiations this month on an agreement that would enable the British government to serve wiretap orders directly on U.S. communication firms for live intercepts in criminal and national security investigations involving its own citizens. Britain would also be able to serve orders to obtain stored data, such as emails.

The previously undisclosed talks are driven by what the two sides and tech firms say is an untenable situation in which foreign governments such as Britain cannot quickly obtain data for domestic probes because it happens to be held by companies in the United States. The issue highlights how digital data increasingly ignores national borders, creating vexing challenges for national security and public safety and new concerns about privacy.

The two countries recently concluded a draft negotiating document, which will serve as the basis for the talks. The text has not been made public, but a copy was reviewed by The Washington Post.

The British government would not be able to directly obtain the records of Americans, if a U.S. citizen or resident surfaced in an investigation. And it would still have to follow the country’s legal rules to obtain warrants.

Any final agreement will need congressional action, through amendments to surveillance laws such as the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act.

Senior administration officials say they have concluded that British rules for data requests have “robust protections” for privacy and that they will not seek to amend them. But British and U.S. privacy advocates argue that civil liberties safeguards in Britain are inadequate.

The negotiating text was silent on the legal standard the British government must meet to obtain a wiretap order or a search warrant for stored data. Its system does not require a judge to approve search and wiretap warrants for surveillance based on probable cause, as is done in the United States. Instead, the home secretary, who oversees police and internal affairs, approves the warrant if that cabinet member finds that it is “necessary” for national security or to prevent serious crime and that it is “proportionate” to the intrusion.

If U.S. officials or Congress do not seek changes in the British standards, “what it means is they’re going to allow a country that doesn’t require independent judicial authorization before getting a wiretap to continue that practice, which seems to be a pretty fundamental constitutional protection in the United States,” said Eric King, a privacy advocate and visiting lecturer in surveillance law at Queen Mary University of London. “That’s being traded away.”

Senior administration officials said that they are seeking to relieve the pressure on U.S. companies caught in a “conflict of laws.” The United States bars American firms from providing intercepts to anyone but its government after U.S. law enforcement has obtained a court order. Britain wants to directly compel the production of the data and has already passed legislation to make that happen.

To obtain stored emails, a foreign government must rely on a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) by which the country makes a formal diplomatic request for the data and the Justice Department then seeks a court order on its behalf — a process that is said to take an average of 10 months.

“This has been an issue with the U.K. and other countries for a number of years,” said one senior administration official, who like several others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations. “Because of technological changes, the U.K. can no longer access data in the U.K. like they used to be able to, and more and more, U.K. nationals — including criminals in their country — are using providers like Google, Facebook, Hotmail. The more they are having challenges getting access to the data, the more our U.S. providers are facing a conflict of laws.”

Administration officials and officials from several tech firms said the stakes are high if no agreement is reached.

They fear that if the trend continues, more foreign governments will force U.S. firms to host their data in those countries — a practice known as “data localization.” They also fear passage of laws, like the one in Britain that has not yet been enforced, requiring foreign firms doing business in their country to comply with their surveillance orders, even if the orders conflict with U.S. law.

“We’re reaching a moment where the status quo is no longer workable,” said an official at a major tech firm. “We’re concerned about the mounting frustration and the inability of foreign governments, including the U.K., to receive responsive data in law enforcement investigations in a timely manner.”

Up to now, he said, U.S. firms have “held their ground” when pressured to turn over data or conduct wiretaps in conflict with U.S. law. “Increasingly, that’s not something we’ll be able to do,” he said.

Last week, the White House gave the State Department the green light to begin the formal negotiations. Officials stressed that they were in the very early stages of the talks, which probably will go on for months. They said they will seek to ensure that any agreement protects civil liberties.

But Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington-based privacy group, said allowing Britain to go to U.S. firms directly with wiretap orders “would be a sea change in current law. I don’t see Congress going down that road.”

Senior administration officials said that the goal is to help a close ally investigate serious crimes — something that the United States has a shared interest in.

One potential example: London police are investigating a murder-for-hire plot, and the suspects are using Hotmail to communicate, and there’s no connection to the United States other than the fact that the suspects’ emails are on a Microsoft server in Redmond, Wash. Today, the police would have to use the MLAT process and wait months.

“Why should they have to do that?” said the administration official. “Why can’t they investigate crimes in the U.K., involving U.K. nationals under their own laws, regardless of the fact that the data happens to be on a server overseas?”

Jennifer Daskal, a national security law professor at American University and a former Justice Department official, said before U.S. firms are asked to turn over data, they should be assured that the legal standard for the request is sufficiently high. It need not mimic precise U.S. standards, she said, but should at least require that requests be targeted, subject to independent review and privacy protections that weed out irrelevant information. If not in the agreement, Congress should mandate requirements, said Daskal, who is part of a coalition of privacy groups, companies and academics working on the issue.

A second administration official said that U.S. officials have concluded that Britain “already [has] strong substantive and procedural protections for privacy.” He added: “They may not be word for word exactly what ours are, but they are equivalent in the sense of being robust protections.”

As a result, he said, Britain’s legal standards are not at issue in the talks. “We are not weighing into legal process standards in the U.K., no more than we would want the U.K. to weigh in on what our orders look like,” he said.

The agreement is intended to be reciprocal, so that the U.S. government could directly request wiretaps or stored data of a British provider as long as the target is American and not a British citizen.

Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...2c9_story.html





UK Gov’t Must Clarify Its Position On End-To-End Encryption, Says Parliamentary Committee
Natasha Lomas

It’s not just TechCrunch saying it, a UK parliamentary science and technology committee has now warned the government needs to clarify the legal position around end-to-end encryption in its draft Investigatory Powers Bill (IP bill).

The government is hoping to pass the legislation, which expands intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ surveillance capabilities, by the end of this year. Critics have dubbed it a new ‘Snooper’s charter’ and there have been specific concerns about the implications for encryption — so the committee is just the latest to call for more clarity on the latter point.

Writing with recommendations in its report on the draft bill, the committee notes: “There is some confusion about how the draft Bill would affect end-to-end encrypted communications, where decryption might not be possible by a communications provider that had not added the original encryption.”

Home Secretary Theresa May was specifically queried on this point last month, by a joint select committee also scrutinizing the proposed legislation. That committee, which has held multiple evidence hearings and also accepted written submissions, is due to publish its report later this month.

May was grilled on whether the government wants companies to insert backdoors into services to afford access to the intelligence agencies. She denied this is the case but reiterated that it would be expecting companies to provide data in a “legible” form when served with a warrant — which, if end-to-end encryption has been properly implemented, would of course be impossible.

“What we are saying to companies… is that when a warrant is lawfully served on them there is an expectation that they will be able to take reasonable steps to ensure that they can comply with that warrant. i.e. that they can provide the information that is being requested under that lawful warrant in a form which is legible for the authorities,” May said.

The science and technology committee has rightly identified this fudge as a problem, writing in its recommendations that: “The Government should clarify and state clearly in the Codes of Practice that it will not be seeking unencrypted content in such cases, in line with the way existing legislation is currently applied.”

“In tightly prescribed circumstances, law enforcement and security services should be able to seek to obtain unencrypted data from communications service providers. They should only seek such information where it is clearly feasible, and reasonably practicable, and where its provision would be consistent with the right to privacy in UK and EU law. The obligations on potential providers of such data should be clarified in the proposed Codes of Practice to be published in draft alongside the Bill later this year,” it adds.

The committee is also generally unhappy with the various vague pieces of terminology used in the bill — ostensibly, says the government, to attempt to future proof the legislation — warning that ill-defined terms have led to “significant confusion on the part of communications service providers and others” as to the scope of the proposed legislation.

“Terms such as “telecommunications service”, “relevant communications data”, “communications content”, “equipment interference”, “technical feasibility” and “reasonably practicable” need to be clarified as a matter of urgency,” it writes.

“The Government should review the draft Bill to ensure that the obligations it is creating on industry are both clear and proportionate. Furthermore, the proposed draft Codes of Practice should include the helpful, detailed examples that the Home Office have provided to us.”

The Home Office has evidently provided tighter definitions for some of the terminology used in the legislation to the committee — such as what is covered by Internet Connection Records (ICRs): aka the web browsing data the IP Bill will require ISPs to collect and store for a year. But such information should be visibly appended to the bill, the committee argues.

It is also concerned about the economic and operational impact of the bill on comms businesses in the UK, such as from the requirement they store ICR data, and again flags up problems with a lack of clarity on costs and compliance requirements.

“The Government should reduce uncertainty about compliance burdens for businesses, proportionality and about cost recovery, by explicitly addressing such issues in the Codes of Practice,” it writes.

“These Codes of Practice should clearly address the requirements for protecting ICR data that will have to be retained and managed by CSPs, along with the security standards that will have to be applied to keep them safe. Businesses based in the UK and those serving UK customers should not be placed at a commercial disadvantage compared with their overseas competitors.”
http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/uk-...ary-committee/





WikiLeaks' Assange Calls on Sweden, Britain to Allow Him Freedom after U.N. Panel Report
Costas Pitas and Andy Bruce

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called on Britain and Sweden on Friday to let him freely leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London after a U.N. panel ruled he had been arbitrarily detained and should be awarded compensation.

Assange, a computer hacker who enraged the United States by publishing hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, has been holed up in the embassy since June 2012 to avoid a rape investigation in Sweden.

Both Britain and Sweden denied that Assange was being deprived of freedom, noting he had entered the embassy voluntarily. Britain said it could contest the decision and that Assange would be arrested if he left the embassy.

Assange, an Australian, appealed to the U.N. panel, whose decision is not binding, saying he was a political refugee whose rights had been infringed by being unable to take up asylum in Ecuador.

It ruled in his favour, although the decision was not unanimous. Three of the five members on the panel supported a decision in Assange's favour, with one dissenter and one recusing herself.

Brandishing a copy of the U.N. panel's decision from the balcony of the embassy in the Knightsbridge area of London, Assange called on Britain and Sweden to implement the ruling.

"How sweet it is. This a victory that cannot be denied," said Assange, wearing a loosened gold tie with the top button of his shirt undone

"What right does this government, or the U.S. government, or the Swedish government have to deny my children their father?" he said below the yellow, blue and red Ecuadorian flag.

When a heckler persistently asked whether he planned to stay for five more years in the embassy, Assange quipped: "Can someone close that person up."

Assange, 44, denies allegations of a 2010 rape in Sweden, saying the accusation is a ploy that would eventually take him to the United States where a criminal investigation into the activities of WikiLeaks is still open.

"The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention considers that the various forms of deprivation of liberty to which Julian Assange has been subjected constitute a form of arbitrary detention," the group's head, Seong-Phil Hong, said in a statement.

"(It) maintains that the arbitrary detention of Mr Assange should be brought to an end, that his physical integrity and freedom of movement be respected, and that he should be entitled to an enforceable right to compensation.”
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-ecu...-idUKKCN0VD0BJ





Denmark Confirms US Sent Rendition Flight for Snowden

The revelation that the US landed a private aircraft in Copenhagen intended to capture Snowden in June 2013 was first reported last month by the Danish online media Denfri, but Danish officials initially denied the report.

On Friday however it was reported that Justice Minister Søren Pind told parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee that the Danish government did allow the Americans to use both Danish airspace and the airport knowing full well that the aircraft was intended to take a captured Snowden back to the US.

“The purpose of the plane’s presence at Copenhagen Airport was apparently to have the ability to transport Edward Snowden to the USA in case he was delivered from Russia or another country,” Pind said in a written statement.

As recently as Wednesday, Pind said that he “wasn’t aware of the purpose of the aircraft in question”.

Denfri first broke the news after obtaining heavily-redacted documents from the Justice Ministry to follow up on a 2014 report from The Register that revealed that a US government jet previously used on CIA rendition flights was sent to Europe with the goal of nabbing Snowden. That report stated that the flight landed and waited at Copenhagen Airport, something that was never confirmed by Danish authorities.

Documents Denfri obtained from the Justice Ministry confirmed that the US-owned Gulfstream aircraft was given permission to land in Copenhagen as Snowden was stranded at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport waiting for Russia to grant him asylum.

It had previously been reported that the US sought the help of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish authorities in tracking down the NSA whistleblower.

"The FBI requests that your service immediately notify the necessary and applicable agencies of the below information in the event that Snowden should board a flight from Moscow to one of your respective countries for either transit purposes or as a final destination," a sent that the FBI sent out of the US Embassy in Copenhagen read.

In November, Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen dismissed calls from Denmark’s left wing to offer the whistleblower asylum.

“I have a very hard time seeing what the reasoning would be for parliament to pass a special law taking the extraordinary step of offering an American citizen political amnesty in Denmark,” Rasmussen said.

“He is sought for a series of legal violations; that's what he is. And the US is a democratic constitutional state,” he added.

Snowden used the Denfri revelations to accuse the PM of “having a secret”:

Reacting to the disclosure, Snowden on Friday tweeted that it "seems to confirm Denmark intended to violate principle of non-refoulement as I sought asylum".

According to the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, the principle of non-refoulement stipulates that "no one shall expel or return ('refouler') a refugee against his or her will, in any manner whatsoever, to a territory where he or she fears threats to life or freedom."

Snowden, 32, has been living in exile in Russia since June 2013, after stealing electronic documents from the US National Security Agency that revealed its secret surveillance programmes.

The US government has charged him with espionage and theft of government property, crimes for which he could be imprisoned for 30 years if found guilty.

Snowden was recently tipped as a favourite to win this year's Nobel Peace Prize by Nobel watcher Kristian Berg Harpviken, the director of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo.
http://www.thelocal.dk/20160205/denm...ht-for-snowden





EU Data Protection Authorities Welcome New EU-U.S. Data Transfer Deal

EU data protection authorities welcomed on Wednesday an agreement between the United States and the European Union on transferring data, but said they still needed information to assess whether it answered privacy concerns.

"We want to receive documents in order to assess whether the Privacy Shield can answer the privacy concerns raised," Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, chair of the working party told a news conference, adding she hoped to receive such information by the end of February.

European and U.S. negotiators finally agreed a data pact on Tuesday to replace the Safe Harbour framework used by over 4,000 firms to transfer Europeans' data to the United States, that was outlawed by a top EU court last year.

(Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-eu-...-idUKKCN0VC1EF





Everything You Need to Know About the Big New Data-Privacy Bill in Congress
Eric Geller

The United States and the European Union have agreed to a transatlantic data-sharing arrangement to protect U.S. companies' overseas activities and European citizens' privacy, but another initiative—one that's still working its way through Congress—could be just important to U.S.–E.U. relations and transnational privacy rights.

The Judicial Redress Act is considered essential to a broader agreement between the U.S. and Europe over the sharing of data in criminal and terrorism investigations. The negotiations over the newly announced E.U.–U.S. Privacy Shield may have received more attention, but the concerns at the heart of this bill are no less important.

Here's what you need to know about the Judicial Redress Act, aka H.R.1428 in the House and S.1600 in the Senate.

What does the Judicial Redress Act do?

The bill authorizes the attorney general to extend the protections of the Privacy Act of 1974 to the citizens of designated foreign countries.

The Privacy Act empowers Americans to challenge U.S. companies' disclosure of their private data to the government, as well as the government's use of the data and any inaccuracies in resulting federal records about them.

Why is this important?

Government agencies regularly use warrants to compel U.S. tech companies to turn over user data—including that of foreigners—but only U.S. citizens, relying on the Privacy Act, can challenge those procedures.

Americans and Europeans may differ on many questions of governance, but they agree that privacy and checks on government power are important. Privacy is considered a fundamental right in the European Union, akin to freedom of speech in the United States.

What's the status of the bill?

The House passed its version on Oct. 20. It sailed through on a voice vote, indicating that there was no opposition.

The Senate is partway through its own process. The Judiciary Committee passed a modified version of the bill, and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is trying to move it through the full Senate by unanimous consent—meaning that, if no senator objects, it can bypass the normal floor procedures.

Are there any complications?

Yes. This is Congress, after all.

The modified Senate version of the House bill includes an amendment that puts conditions on the attorney general's ability to grant Privacy Act rights to foreigners.

The amendment says that the attorney general can only add foreign countries to the Privacy Act list if he or she certifies that:

1) The country has a deal with the U.S. regarding privacy protections for data shared in the course of joint investigations, or has "effectively shared" such information with the U.S. and adequately protects privacy;

2) The country allows U.S. companies to transfer its citizens' data between its territory and the United States; and

3) The aforementioned data-transfer agreement does not "materially impede the national security interests of the United States."

Why is this problematic? Because conservative lawmakers are concerned that Privacy Shield, the newly announced data-transfer agreement, will impede national-security investigations. By requiring the attorney general to certify otherwise, this amendment raises the bar for implementing the law.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the amendment's sponsor, has criticized the Obama administration for making "concessions" by pushing the Judicial Redress Act in order to secure the law-enforcement data-sharing agreement.

Okay, so one senator hates this bill.

Well, actually, at least two senators hate it.

Cornyn voted for it in the Senate Judiciary Committee, thanks to the committee adopting his amendment. But Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) opposed even the Cornyn version. He is considered a possible impediment to Hatch's efforts to fast-track the bill through the full Senate.

Okay, and who's on the other side? Who's pressing for the bill?

The U.S. tech industry.

In a letter to House leaders a few days before the lower chamber passed the bill, a coalition of leading tech companies and trade groups called it "a critical step in rebuilding the trust of citizens worldwide in both the U.S. government and our industry."

Last week, after the bill passed the Senate committee, the Information Technology Industry Council urged the full chamber to "quickly pass the Judicial Redress Act to improve national security and our collective economies."

Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA surveillance didn't just hurt Silicon Valley's reputation at home and abroad. It also led the European Court of Justice to strike down the deal that Privacy Shield is meant to replace. That decision jeopardized the ability of U.S. companies to do business overseas. The tech industry is concerned about the broader consequences of not addressing some of the international community's post-Snowden concerns.
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/wha...-privacy-bill/





Stop Using Microsoft Edge's InPrivate Mode if You Value Your Privacy
Mark Wilson

It's possible that you reached this article purely by chance, or you may have Googled 'how to change the default search engine in Microsoft Edge'. However you got here, the fact that you're reading this indicates that you're either interested in Windows 10's Edge, or actively use it -- and this means there's something you need to know.

If you fall into the latter camp and use Edge's InPrivate mode to cover your online tracks, you might want to think about changing your web browser. Edge has already got some stick for its lack of extension support -- "it's coming, it's coming!" Yeah, whatever... so's Christmas -- but now it turns out that InPrivate mode is a privacy nightmare. It is possible to peak behind the curtain and see which sites have been visited when using a browsing mode that should mask this.

There are similar features found in other browser. Chrome has Incognito mode, Safari has Private Browsing, Firefox has... actually, Firefox has Private Browsing too. Whatever the name, what these browsing modes all have in common is that once the browser is closed, there is no record of which sites have been visited. That's not to say that ISPs and law enforcement agencies wouldn’t be able to determine the browsing history, but from a local point of view it is as though no browsing has taken place.

But Edge is different.

Somewhat counterintuitively, Edge actually records browsing history in InPrivate mode. More than this, by examining the WebCache file it is a relatively simple task for someone to reconstruct full browsing history, regardless of whether surfing was performed in regular or InPrivate mode. These were the finding of infosec expert Brent Muir.

Over on Forensic Focus, researcher Ashish Singh warns:

The forensic examination of most web browsers has proven that they don't have a provision for storing the details of privately browsed web sessions. Private browsing is provided for a purpose, i.e. privately browsing the web, which is being delivered.
However, in the case of Microsoft Edge even the private browsing isn't as private as it seems. Previous investigations of the browser have resulted in revealing that websites visited in private mode are also stored in the browser’s WebCache file.

NOTE: The Container_n table stores web history. There a field named 'Flag' will be available. A website visited in the private mode will have a flag value as '8'. Generally the purpose of storing this information is to retrieve crashed private sessions.

\Users\user_name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WebCache

Therefore any skilled investigator can easily spot the difference and get concrete evidence against a person’s wrongdoings. Plenty of artifacts are maintained by the browser, which makes examination quite easy. However, there are stages where evidence is not so easy to find. The not-so-private browsing featured by Edge makes its very purpose seem to fail.


Microsoft is aware of the problem, and says:

We recently became aware of a report that claims InPrivate tabs are not working as designed, and we are committed to resolving this as quickly as possible.

As is often the case, there is no indication of quite when this might be fixed, but it will be fixed. At some point. But you can't help but ask how such a fundamental aspect of private browsing could be so fantastically borked. It beggars belief.
http://betanews.com/2016/01/30/stop-...-your-privacy/





Software Bug Leaves Several MediaTek-Powered Android Devices Vulnerable to Attack
Manish Singh

Several Android smartphones and tablets powered by MediaTek chipsets are vulnerable to security attacks due to a software bug. The flaw, if exploited, allows an attacker to glean private data including photos, contacts, and even remotely monitor all traffic. The chipmaker confirmed the existence of the vulnerability to Gadgets360, and added that its security team is currently working on the issue.

Justin Case, a security researcher reported about the vulnerability on Twitter earlier this month. Explaining the vulnerability, Case told Gadgets360 that MediaTek software has a "backdoor" that allows a user - or a malicious app - to enable root access. The problem, as Case explained, is a user or a malicious app can change the usually restricted and read only properties on the device, which "can trivially lead to privilege escalation to the root user."

"Root user could do many things, such as access data normally protected from the user/ other apps, or brick the phone, or spy on the user, monitor communications etc," Case told Gadgets 360 over email.

Taiwan-based MediaTek, whose chips power several popular Android phones, told us that the vulnerability exists on devices running Android 4.4 KitKat. Explaining how the vulnerability got there in the first place, MediaTek said that a debug feature was created for telecommunication inter-operability testing mainly in China. The smartphone manufacturers, however, didn't disable the debug feature before shipping the smartphones, the company added. MediaTek didn't disclose the names of the manufacturers.

"We are aware of this issue and it has been reviewed by MediaTek's security team. It was mainly found in devices running Android 4.4 KitKat, due to a de-bug feature created for telecommunication inter-operability testing in China," a MediaTek spokesperson told Gadgets 360 in an emailed statement. "After testing, phone manufacturers should disable the de-bug feature before shipping smartphones. However, after investigation, we found that a few phone manufacturers didn't disable the feature, resulting in this potential security issue."

Case noted that read-only properties - ro.properties - should not change after booting the device, however, MediaTek has "'nerved' the property space, they made it so these properties can be changed, and changed by anyone/app. A malicious app could set the 'ro.secure' property to 0, ro.debuggable one to 1, ro.adb.secure prop to 0 (this would mean ADB didn't need authentication) and then enable the ADB over Wi-Fi property, and get a local root shell."

MediaTek declined to specify the smartphone models and the number of handsets that are impacted. The company insists that the issue only affects certain manufacturers and it has begun to alert them. "While this issue affected certain manufacturers, it also only affected a portion of devices for those manufacturers. We have taken steps to alert all manufacturers and remind them of this important feature."
http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news...-attack-795743





Fine Bros Back Down, Rescind Trademark Claim On the Word “React”

Claim was for "programs... in the field of observing, interviewing groups of people."
Sam Machkovech

Up until last week, the Fine Bros' biggest claim to fame was their YouTube series of videos that revolved around a "reaction" gimmick, in which they filmed children, elderly people, or other groups of people as they happened upon some popular toy, show, or object. That changed on Tuesday when the duo announced plans to expand its empire—which involved the real-life brothers filing a trademark claim on the word "react."

The resulting backlash proved so monstrous that the duo made an official announcement late Monday, backing off of every initiative they'd announced on January 26. "We're here to apologize," the Fine Bros wrote, before confirming that they'd rescinded all trademarks and applications pertaining to the word "react."

Additionally, the duo confirmed that it would shutter a new "React World" initiative before it had even taken off. As announced, React World would have allowed other video makers to pay the Fine Bros to license their react videos' "format." The Fine Bros tried comparing what they had to offer to the proliferation of "Got Talent" TV series across the globe, but critics complained about an aggressive takedown wave in the meantime. Several YouTube channels complained that they'd received takedown notices from Fullscreen Inc, a company related to the Fine Bros, over their own original "react" videos.

The Fine Bros had confirmed in statements this past week that Fullscreen had indeed filed those Content ID claims, which would be rescinded, and Monday's announcement confirmed that the duo would continue to back off such claims. (The duo didn't formally announce that it had also deleted all proof of React World from its various social media feeds and video channels.)

"The concerns people have about React World are understandable, and that people see a link between that and our past video takedowns, but those were mistakes from an earlier time," the Fine Bros wrote. "It makes perfect sense for people to distrust our motives here, but we are confident that our actions will speak louder than these words moving forward."

The narrow genre of "observing and interviewing groups of people"

The Fine Bros' US Patent and Trademark Office filing for the word "react" didn't revolve around all use of the word, but it was still incredibly broad, as the filing described "programs and webisodes via the Internet in the field of observing and interviewing various groups of people." That trademark attempt was filed in July 2015 and approved for a 30-day opposition period beginning February 2.

According to the USPTO, if no parties had filed an opposing claim against the trademark request within its 30-day period, it would have proceeded through the trademark application process. In the Fine Bros' case, that had already happened twice in 2012 via claims on the phrases "teens react" and "elders react." Monday's announcement confirmed that those previously awarded trademarks would also be rescinded.

Opposition had already begun before February 2, mostly in the meta-tastic form of video creators posting videos of themselves reacting to the Fine Bros' many reaction videos. Our favorite was a curse-loaded tirade from video game designer Tommy Refenes, who filmed himself mocking the children who the Fine Bros had previously filmed playing his game Super Meat Boy. He took extra care to point out any "random" children in the video who he recognized as child actors from various TV series. (Update: We forgot to add another great one, in which popular YouTube host Boogie2988 reacted to the React World announcement video—whose value has grown since its original source video has since been deleted by the Fine Bros.)
http://arstechnica.com/business/2016...he-word-react/





Europe’s Top Court Mulls Legality of Hyperlinks—Shockwaves Could be Huge for Web Users

Imagine having to check that none of your links' links are unauthorised, and so on.
Glyn Moody

Are the Web's links under threat from a new CJEU court case?

Europe's highest court is considering whether every hyperlink in a Web page should be checked for potentially linking to material that infringes copyright, before it can be used. Such a legal requirement would place an unreasonable burden on anyone who uses hyperlinks, thereby destroying the Web we know and love.

The current GS Media case examining hyperlinks builds on an earlier ruling by the European Union's Court of Justice (CJEU) in 2014. In that case, known as Svensson, the court decided that netizens didn't need a licence from the copyright holder to link to an article that had already been posted on the Internet, where previous permission had been granted by the copyright owner.

Although that was good news for the online world, it left open a related question: what would the situation be if the material that was linked to had not been posted with the copyright owner's permission? Would it still be legal under EU law to link to that pirated copy? Those are the issues that the latest CJEU case seeks to resolve for the whole of the 28-member-state bloc, and its 500 million citizens.

The Disruptive Competition Project has a good summary of the facts of the GS Media saga: "The defendant is a popular Dutch blog that posted links to photos meant for publication in the Dutch version of Playboy magazine, but which were leaked on an Australian server. No one knows who posted the photos to the Australian server, but everyone agrees that the blog only posted links to them." The details of how the case finally arrived at the CJEU are complicated, and explained well in a long post on the EU Law Radar blog.

Even if the facts are convoluted, a ruling that hyperlinks to unauthorised copies of material are themselves an infringement of copyright would clearly be disastrous for the online world. As the Disruptive Competition Project noted:

If the CJEU rules that every web user, in Europe and beyond, is expected to verify the copyright status of every item on a page before linking to that page, it could effectively destroy the web as we know it today.

Would you have to repeatedly check back on the sites you link to, in case the content on the site you linked to has changed? Would you need to confirm that their licences are all paid in full? Would you also have to verify the copyright status of links on the pages that you’re linking to?


Leaving aside the huge issue that ordinary Web users can hardly be expected to make expert calls on the copyright status of online material, the last question asked there is a particularly important one. If the answer is yes, it would mean that you would need to check the legality, not just of everything that you link to, but also of everything that those linked pages link to, and so on, until every single link that is linked in any way has had its licensing checked.

The manifest impossibility of doing so may well help the CJEU come to the common-sense decision that even though posting material without the owner's permission can be copyright infringement—and even then, it isn't always—providing a link to that infringing copy definitely isn't.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy...for-web-users/





TPP Signed Off, Marking the Beginning of the Final Fight
Drew Wilson

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been signed by all countries involved in the agreement. The agreement was marked by protests from citizens all around the world. Now, all that remains is ratification.

The TPP missiles have launched and citizens have about 2 years before the agreement hits their countries. That may be one way of describing the feeling many are having after trade ministers from around the world signed off on the agreement that has been so heavily criticized. News has just broke that the TPP has officially been signed:

Signed and sealed but not yet delivered, the Trans-Pacific Partnership will now be put through the wringer in member countries for ratification.

The 12 ministers in Auckland yesterday for the signing were relentlessly positive about its likely benefits to their economies and to the ease of trade in goods and services.

Malaysia was so enthusiastic the deal passed a vote in Parliament last week, even though it didn’t need its approval. And in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam it will just require the consent of the state president.

Protesters in Auckland were estimated at more than 5000 at their height and a rump gathered outside SkyCity for several hours after the signing.


The moment where all 12 countries were to sign off on the agreement was predicted as far back as January 12, even if some countries at the time officially told the public no decision was made on the matter.

So, what’s next? The final step of TPP implementation is ratification. It’s the only step remaining before the agreement becomes law. It’s likely that citizens are only going to ramp up pressure to try and have the deal rejected in their respective countries. Unfortunately, stopping the TPP dead in its tracks may be an uphill battle from now on. Provisions in the agreement legally oblige the signatory countries to ratify the provisions in the agreement within a certain time frame. Which provisions and which countries this affects varies, but deadlines do exist within the TPP to force countries to carry through on their promises all based on their signatures. Still, killing the deal isn’t entirely impossible either.

From a technological perspective, the trade deal would bring in a host of restrictive copyright laws. As we earlier examined, the trade deal would force countries to ratify many other copyright treaties including various WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) treaties, kill Internet privacy for domain name registrants, create a so-called “TPP Commission”, extend the length of copyright, add criminal liability to the circumvention of a DRM, effectively institute statutory damages for non-commercial infringement, mandate government spying on the Internet for the purpose of tracking copyright infringement, possibly add unlimited damages for copyright infringement, allow “destruction” orders of any product circumvents copy protection, allows authority to enforce copyright laws even when infringement hasn’t taken place (ala “imminent” infringement), seize personal devices at the border for the purpose of enforcing copyright law (and destroys your property and forces you to pay if a border guard believes you have copyright infringing content on your personal devices), institute traffic shaping and site blocking for the purpose of allegedly enforcing copyright, implement a notice-and-takedown regime, force ISPs to install backdoors for others to enforce copyright law, and force ISPs to hand over customer’s personal information without court oversight or compensation to the ISP. So, in short, the TPP is a major crackdown on civil rights on the Internet.

Regardless, the fight to stop the TPP before the signature hits the paper is over and civilians lost. The fight isn’t over, but civilians are being forced to take their final stand now.
http://www.freezenet.ca/tpp-signed-o...e-final-fight/

















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