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Old 03-01-18, 08:30 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 6th, 2018

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January 6th, 2018




Game Of Thrones And The Walking Dead Are Top TV Pirated Shows For 2017
Shawn Rice

Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead are among the top shows that are pirated by TV viewers.

The annual piracy lists have begun to be published with the first one taking into consideration the most pirated TV series of the year. TorrentFreak published the results which indicates piracy figures for TV episodes are down on last year. Though Game of Thrones had a shorten season.

However these numbers are from public BitTorrent trackers and several other sources for the site. Online streaming and downloads from filelocker services are not included since there are no public sources to draw data from, so total piracy numbers are much harder to calculate.

Game of Thrones has consistently broken a lot of records. Most seasons, it notches higher ratings than it had the year before, and last year, its season 7 premiere drew the largest audience of any premiere to date. The series has broken records for the highest ratings of any HBO show in the network’s history.

Over the years, the dynamics of Game of Thrones piracy have changed, with the arrival and growing popularity of HBO Go, HBO Now, and another avenues for legal streaming of the network’s shows, which have eliminated the justification by some pirates that the lack of an HBO subscription left them with no choice. Changes in the ease and availability of pirating technology, as well as faster download speeds, have also changed the dynamics over time.

Game of Thrones remained the clear favorite of piracy with the big budget fantasy series winning the title for a sixth year in a row. Rick and Morty and the Prison Break revival were new to the top ten this year with Westworld and Lucifer dropping out. The Top 10 are:

1. “Game of Thrones”
2. “The Walking Dead”
3. “The Flash”
4. “The Big Bang Theory”
5. “Rick and Morty”
6. “Prison Break”
7. “Sherlock”
8. “Vikings”
9. “Suits”
10. “Arrow”

George R.R. Martin’s best-selling book series “A Song of Ice and Fire” is brought to the screen as HBO sinks its considerable storytelling teeth into the medieval fantasy epic. It’s the depiction of two powerful families — kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars and honest men — playing a deadly game for control of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, and to sit atop the Iron Throne. Martin is credited as a co-executive producer and one of the writers for the series, which was filmed in Northern Ireland and Malta.

Based on the comic book series written by Robert Kirkman, this gritty drama portrays life in the weeks and months following a zombie apocalypse. Led by police officer Rick Grimes, his family and a group of other survivors find themselves constantly on the move in search of a safe and secure home. But the pressure each day to stay alive sends many in the group to the deepest depths of human cruelty, and Rick discovers that the overwhelming fear of the survivors can be more deadly than the zombies walking among them.

What do you think about Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead being the most popular shows to illegally download? Let us know in the comments section.
https://www.business2community.com/e...-2017-01982150





Kodi Media Player Might be the Best Xbox One Exclusive of the Year
Jacob Siegal

When it comes to console exclusives, the PS4 and Nintendo Switch wiped the floor with the Xbox One in 2017. With Crackdown 3 being delayed once again and Sea of Thieves not coming out of beta until 2018, the Xbox never really stood a chance. But with just a couple days left until the new year, Xbox One owners got a pleasant surprise.

On Friday, the team behind the open source home theater software Kodi revealed that the media player was available worldwide on the Xbox One digital store. The powerful and highly customizable software has become one of the most popular PC media players on the market, and its arrival on the Xbox One is worth celebrating.

As the Kodi team explains in a blog post, the software began life fifteen years ago as the XBMP (Xbox Media Player). The only way to get the open source player running on an OG Xbox was to hack the console, but Xbox owners who were willing to mod their consoles were rewarded with a surprisingly robust media player that added capabilities to the Xbox. XBMP eventually evolved into XBMC (Xbox Media Center), which then became Kodi.

Kodi is perhaps best known for its third-party add-ons, many of which allow users to stream pirated content on any device that will run the software. Kodi does not endorse pirating, but it is undoubtedly one of the reasons the player has gotten as much attention as it has over the past several years.

But the Kodi app that arrived on Xbox One this week is not quite the same version that you can download on PC. The team notes that the Xbox One app is still in development and lacks several major features, such as access to external storage devices or the Xbox One’s Blu-ray drive. There’s no telling when or if every feature of Kodi will make its way to the Xbox One version, but the developers are working to make the app as complete as possible.
http://bgr.com/2017/12/29/kodi-xbox-...nload-release/





People are Using PornHub to Stream “Hamilton” and “Zootopia”
Ashley Rodriguez

There’s more on PornHub than pornography.

People are using the streaming-video site—a sort of YouTube for pornography where users can upload and watch adult videos—to stream pirated copies of high-profile titles like the Broadway musical Hamilton and Disney’s animated movie Zootopia. Where YouTube has been fighting for years to keep pornography off its site, PornHub now finds itself in the position of having to purge its platform of videos that are decidedly safe for work.

The full, 75-minute first act of the historical, Tony Award-winning play, Hamilton—with its original cast, including creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda—is on PornHub, one Twitter user discovered. As the most sought after ticket in town, the play just set a new high-water mark (paywall) for Broadway after taking in $3.8 million at the box office for the week ending Dec. 24.

Somebody posted the entire first act of Hamilton, with original broadway cast, to PornHub

with the title REVOLUTIONARY TWINKS HAVE HISTORICAL FUN

because every day, we drift further from God’s light pic.twitter.com/5324sUXflz

— Elizabeth Sampat (@twoscooters) December 26, 2017

The clip that was first spotted appears to have been taken down, but another remains under the name “Revolutionary Boys Get Dirty on American Politics Part 1.” It had 3,590 views, at the time of this writing.

The romantic comedy The Big Sick, which is being called one of the best movies of 2017, was also on PornHub. Filmmaker and comedian Kumail Nanjiani noticed his film was circulating the platform and urged anyone who did not have Amazon Prime, where the film is streaming, to watch it on PornHub on Christmas Eve. The folks at PornHub made quick work of removing that copy, as well.

Oh no. Oh. Oh no. I didn’t mean it should be removed! Enjoy your Christmas! You’ve brought joy to so many people! You deserve this break! https://t.co/66VrTD5l32

— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) December 25, 2017

Nevertheless, Quartz found plenty of other family-friendly full-length features like the classic Back to the Future and animated children’s films like Cars 2, The Emoji Movie, and Zootopia, (under the name, “Hot Animal Action,”) on the site. (Warning: Do not watch any of these copies with children present. The movies are kid-friendly, but they are surrounded by lewd ads and videos.)

There are also steamy scenes from TV shows like Game of Thrones and movies like Revolutionary Road on the site. Those at least make some sense, unlike the PG-rated titles above.

The trend has gone on for some time; Gizmodo reported in March that copies of major movies like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Rogue One, Moana, Bad Santa 2, Dr. Strange, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Step Brothers were spotted on PornHub by users on Reddit.

PornHub did not immediately return Quartz’s request for comment. It said in March that, like other sites that allow users to upload videos, it complies with US copyright law takedown orders.
https://qz.com/1167277/people-are-st...ia-on-pornhub/





Ultima 6 Creator Forgives Player For Pirating The Game 27 Years Ago
William Usher

The Ultima series has long been a staple in the gaming industry as one of the most revered and respected gaming franchises ever. The creator of the series, Sir Richard Garriot, recently did something that you wouldn't have expected from someone who presumably has more important things to do with his time: he forgave a pirate for pirating the game... 27 years ago.

Lord Dudley, I am deeply moved and appreciative of your note to me, and fully absolve you of any debt or guilt! Your kind words are more than enough. I do hope you spend time in New Britannia. It is a fine land with wonderful people. Join us! https://t.co/vuHiSr7tav
— Richard Garriott (@RichardGarriott) December 23, 2017

The exchange started with Joshua Dudley, who explained in his original tweet that 27 years ago, when he was just 13, and back when Ultima VI was all the rage on PC, he pirated the game. Dudley admits that as a young teenager he only earned $3 a week for allowance and it just wasn't enough to pay full price for Ultima VI.

Dudley resolved to piracy as his means of getting his hands on the game, something a lot of youngsters (and some older folk) used to do back in the day to play a game when it wasn't available via shareware. Piracy wasn't the easiest thing to pull off back then via the internet, but it was super easy if a friend had a floppy disk of the original and you had an empty disk or two lying around.

Dudley, now 27 years older and a contributor for The Observer, beseeched Garriott for forgiveness. In a tweet, Garriott not only forgave Dudley but also invited him to New Britannia in his current game, Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues. The title is currently undergoing lots of development in Early Access over on Steam. The MMO is being hailed as a spiritual successor to Ultima Online.

If you were into CRPGS, then Ultima was the ultimate gaming experience way back in the day. Origin Systems, at the time headed up by Warren Spector and Richard Garriot, were rocking and rolling in success before it was sucked up by Electronic Arts and later had all of its projects canceled before being shut down completely.

Origin Systems was famous for making some of the most recognized games in the history of gaming, including Wing Commander, Crusader, and Privateer.

In fact, Chris Roberts -- who made his name with Wing Commander -- is attempting to revive and rekindle that nostalgia for a newer generation of gamer with the super high-end space simulator, Star Citizen, which is still currently in development at the moment.

It's amazing how influential Origin Systems' games were back in the day, and the amount of respect their titles demanded from an audience craving high-quality gaming experiences. In the case of Joshua Dudley, the childhood wonderment of playing Ultima VI may have come at the expense of pirating the game, but he felt compelled many years later to apologize for his offense and hopefully he paid for a legitimate copy of the title from GOG.com.
https://www.cinemablend.com/games/17...e-27-years-ago





Spotify Hit with $1.6 Billion Copyright Lawsuit

Music streaming company Spotify was sued by Wixen Music Publishing Inc last week for allegedly using thousands of songs, including those of Tom Petty, Neil Young and the Doors, without a license and compensation to the music publisher.

Wixen, an exclusive licensee of songs such as “Free Fallin” by Tom Petty, “Light My Fire” by the Doors, “(Girl We Got a) Good Thing” by Weezer and works of singers such as Stevie Nicks, is seeking damages worth at least $1.6 billion along with injunctive relief.

Spotify failed to get a direct or a compulsory license from Wixen that would allow it to reproduce and distribute the songs, Wixen said in the lawsuit, filed in a California federal court.

Wixen also alleged that Spotify outsourced its work to a third party, licensing and royalty services provider the Harry Fox Agency, which was “ill-equipped to obtain all the necessary mechanical licenses”.

Spotify declined to comment.

In May, the Stockholm, Sweden-based company agreed to pay more than $43 million to settle a proposed class action alleging it failed to pay royalties for some of the songs it makes available to users.

Spotify, which is planning a stock market listing this year, has grown around 20 percent in value to at least $19 billion in the past few months.

Reporting by Sonam Rai and Eric Auchard in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-sp...-idUKKBN1ER1RX





Sweeping New Music Law Expedites A $1.6 Billion Lawsuit Against Spotify
Andrew Flanagan

When it comes to reporting on Spotify and the company's strained relationship with songwriters and publishers, it's beginning to sound like a broken ... system. But a possible fix is in.

Just two days before New Year's Eve, the music publishing company Wixen, which manages the compositions of a wide cross section of artists from Neil Young to Rage Against The Machine, filed a lawsuit against Spotify over its failure to properly license those works before making them available to stream.

The new lawsuit is not the first (or the second or the third) brought against the world's most popular streaming service over compositions, which are legally discrete from recordings and require a separate license (a "mechanical"). In fact, Wixen's action is directly related to a $43 million settlement that Spotify struck six months ago over a largely identical suit against it that it hoped would sunset further court battles.

"Unfortunately, the Ferrick settlement," reads Wixen's complaint, referring to that agreement last year, "is still grossly insufficient to compensate songwriters and publishers for Spotify's actions, as well as procedurally unjust." It seeks a "total statutory award of at least $1.6 billion." That language closely mirrors that of another legal action, brought against Spotify one month after the Ferrick settlement was announced.

The timing of the suit is inauspicious for Spotify — Wednesday it reportedly filed papers with the SEC for an initial listing on the stock exchange some time in the first half of this year.

While the reason for the suit isn't new, the reason for its as-late-in-the-year-as-you-can-get filing is. If that settlement didn't quite protect Spotify against lawsuits like Wixen's (songwriters and publishers can opt out of the Ferrick deal) then a new piece of legislation will — and it's the reason the company is going after Spotify now.

On Dec. 21, 2017, Republican Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia introduced that new piece of bipartisan legislation, which makes sweeping changes to the labyrinthine licensing system for compositions that has left many songwriters in the lurch and tech companies on the hook. It would also prevent lawsuits like Wixen's from being filed.

"It's the Music Modernization Act, and the Jan. 1 deadline it imposes forced our clients' hands," Daniel Schacht of Donahue Fitzgerald LLP, the firm handling Wixen's case, tells NPR of the Dec. 29 filing.

"We've been working on this now for a little over 4 1/2 years," Collins said in an interview with NPR conducted on Dec. 20. "We're trying to provide a way so that [digital services] can provide the music they want to, have a safe haven where they can match the royalties, where the songwriters can also benefit — that they can get fairly compensated. It's really is a product of a lot of hard work to reach a consensus. I have to admit, there were times during the journey that I would have — that I'd just throw up my hands and not find the answer."

The Music Modernization Act establishes, among many other things, what tech companies, songwriters and publishers have needed but failed to create for some time: a central database that identifies which songwriter and/or publisher controls which composition. (A bill introduced late last summer by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., also attempted to address the database issue but was not taken seriously by the stakeholders involved.)

That database, while long needed, has never been created — or really even come close — mostly owing to its cost and disagreements about control of the proprietary information that would have to be held within it.

"It allows the digital service providers to have a central place to go for not only paying royalties," Collins says, "but protects songwriters from them using things they shouldn't be. But also, to give songwriters a place where they can be confident that they're going to be compensated as well."

To accomplish this, tech companies would foot the bill for its creation in exchange for a blanket license that would cover the compositions within it, helping them pay the songwriters who control those works.

Digital services "will basically be indemnified, where they will not be able to be sued, which is something that songwriters and publishers had to give them — with all these things, it's all quid pro quo," Michael Eames, president of the Association of Independent Music Publishers, tells NPR. Eames says that organizations like his, which represents smaller music publishers, could benefit from the bill. "We're having to monitor and police our data in multiple databases through multiple vendors in order to get paid. It's difficult, to say the least."

The bill was drafted after consultation with industry groups that represent the major stakeholders involved, including the National Music Publishers Association, the Digital Media Association (which represents services like Spotify), ASCAP and BMI (the two leading performance-rights organizations) and the Nashville Songwriters Association International, among others. All support its passage.

However, Songwriters Guild of America President Rick Carnes issued a letter the day of the bill's introduction detailing his organization's doubts around the new law. Among his concerns:

... serious fairness, transparency and practical issues related to the proposed processes of setting up the licensing collective, the distributing of unidentified monies on a market share basis and the need to better protect music creator economic rights in that context, the vague nature of any opt-out mechanisms, the granting of relief from statutory damages liability to prior willful infringers, the scope of the musical composition database (including songwriter/composer information), the provisions concerning shortfall and other funding aspects of the collective, the absence of direct distribution of royalties by the collective to songwriters and composers, the vague nature of the audit activities to be optionally conducted by the collective, and the complications in that and other regards raised by obvious conflicts of interest issues.

Spotify declined to comment on both the Music Modernization Act and Wixen's lawsuit. But considering its forthcoming public listing, it will have to assuage investors' worries over a seemingly endless parade of litigation. Apple was sued on Dec. 28 over the same issue.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thereco...gainst-spotify





DC Takes Over a Declining Market: Which Comics Sold Best in 2017

Movies like 'Logan,' and 'Spider-Man: Homecoming' did not boost sales.
Jason Fabok

Looking at the most-ordered comic books in the North American comic market, DC Entertainment had a particularly strong year, with seven of the top 10 issues of the year being published by the home of Superman, Batman and the Justice League. The numbers illustrate how much the market has changed in the past few years — in more ways than one.

Comparing this year’s most-ordered issues with the top 10 from 2014, the scale of DC’s success becomes more apparent; just four years ago, not one DC title made it to the list, with nine titles coming from Marvel alone. (By comparison, Marvel takes just three places this year, with one of those due to its inclusion in a subscription mystery box service.)

Here, with sales estimates from John Jackson Miller’s incredible ComicChron website, are the top 10 comic books from January through November, 2017 (December’s sales date will not be released until mid-January 2018):

Marvel Legacy No. 1 (303,574) (Marvel Entertainment) September
Dark Nights: Metal No. 1 (271,108) (DC Entertainment) August
Doomsday Clock No. 1 (238,643) (DC Entertainment) November
Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man No. 1 (231,566) (Marvel Entertainment) June
Batman No. 21 (219,472) (DC Entertainment) April
Batman No. 22 (186,914) (DC Entertainment) May
The Flash No. 21 (174,803) (DC Entertainment) April
The Flash No. 22 (163,767) (DC Entertainment) May
Dark Nights: Metal No. 2 (162,823) (DC Entertainment) September
Secret Empire No. 0 (162,718) (Marvel Entertainment) April

There are things to point out about these estimates before we go any further. First, these are not end-point sales estimates to readers, but the numbers of issues ordered by comic book stores, and only to those within North America — that’s the only information Diamond Comic Distributors releases publicly. This means that the data can be — and, in fact, is — skewed by a number of factors, not least of which are ordering incentives put in place by publishers that require that a certain number of copies are ordered by stores in order to achieve a specific discount, as is the case for the top-selling issue of the year, Marvel Legacy No. 1, or bulk orders on behalf of a third party, as in the fourth most-ordered release, Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man, which was part of the Marvel Collector Corps box for that month.

Beyond DC’s amazing comeback since 2014, there’s another comparison needing to be made that should be more troubling to publishers beyond just Marvel: Not one release on the top 10 list from 2015 has order numbers lower than 250,000, whereas the third most successful title of 2017 is already below that figure. While that year was an unusually good year for comics — thanks, in large part, to multiple issues being included in subscription boxes, as well as the phenomenal success of Marvel’s Star Wars line launch — it’s worth noting that, across the board, order numbers for comics in the North American market fell 10 percent compared with last year. The market is shrinking, unless something turns it around soon.

That something isn’t likely to be Marvel’s Marvel Legacy relaunch. Whereas the publisher’s annual line-wide relaunches have tended to buoy sales in recent years — and the Marvel Legacy special issue that rolled out the entire promotional push was the most-ordered issue of the year — the Legacy relaunch stalled across the line, hurt by retailer pushback against Marvel’s order levels and customer cynicism towards the publisher in general.

Perhaps surprisingly, the big winner of 2017 looking at the top 10 list is DC’s crossover between its DC Universe and Watchmen properties. The first issue of the Doomsday Clock series charted third — and could end up higher on the final list for the year, depending on re-order numbers in December — but all four issues of the prologue storyline “The Button,” from summer issues of Batman and The Flash, also made it into the top 10. The crossover continues throughout 2018 with the remainder of the 12-issue Doomsday Clock series, with the second issue — out this week — bringing in a number of additional DCU characters, including Batman and Lex Luthor alongside Watchmen’s Adrian Veidt and Rorschach; it’ll be interesting to see how sales continue as the storyline evolves.

One last thing to note about the year’s top 10, and also the comic market as it currently exists in general: It’s probably time to stop pretending that mass media projects significantly impact comic book orders. In a year with Justice League, Wonder Woman, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Logan, Thor: Ragnarok and Spider-Man: Homecoming in theaters, there isn’t a Justice League, Wonder Woman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Wolverine, Thor or Spider-Man title in the top 10. Indeed, Marvel has just canceled the Guardians of the Galaxy comic book series.

With Marvel upping the amount of Black Panther product on the shelves ahead of February’s movie, it’ll be worth watching how order numbers and sales respond as the movie hits theaters. It’s possible that, contrary to popular belief, characters appearing on the big screen doesn’t appreciably increase demand for their comic book adventures, but instead demonstrates that comic books seem less necessary than ever to a mass audience when so much is possible onscreen.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/he...s-2017-1070490





How Bitcoin’s Blockchain Technology Is Changing the Media
James Frew

Bitcoin had a successful 2017, with the value of the cryptocurrency rising nearly 2,000 percent in a single year. Its meteoric rise brought cryptocurrencies into the mainstream, with competitors like Ethereum and Litecoin also seeing large gains. While this has been an interesting financial development, it has turned Bitcoin from a digital currency into a financial asset to be bought and sold. This has largely eclipsed what made Bitcoin so revolutionary: blockchain technology.

First laid out in Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, the blockchain is a decentralised, distributed ledger. The cryptographically sealed data is distributed across the network, preventing it from interference. Many businesses have been quick to jump onto the popular buzzword, suggesting that anything from mortgages to an individual’s creative output could be blockchain-based. However, one industry, in desperate need of change, that could benefit from the use of the blockchain, is the media.

The State of the Media

It’s no secret that journalism has struggled with the advent of the internet. In days gone by, you’d purchase a newspaper and your money would fund the high quality journalism. At some point, everyone agreed that content on the internet would be free, but the funds have to come from somewhere. Often it is through advertising, but this generates significantly less than sales. They could then accept a lower standard of reporting, without fact checking, which has given rise to churnalism. The other choice is to accept more money for sponsored posts.

The internet also gave rise to the personal blog, where regular folks could write content and post it to the web for the world to see. Blogs are the mouthpiece of an individual rather than a corporation or advertiser, and so have become incredibly important to the media landscape. However, they are also entirely unverified. If you could combine the freedom and independence of blogging, with the fact checking of journalism, could you reinvent the industry?

A New Model of Journalism

Two blockchain-based startups, Decentralized News Network (DNN) and Civil, certainly think so. DNN is based on the Ethereum blockchain, and allows anyone to submit content — as if they were writing a blog. The content is then assessed by a randomly assigned group of reviewers. If the article meet the DNN guidelines, then it will be made available to readers. Aside from residing on the blockchain to sidestep censorship and centralization, DNN operates a lot like a scientific journal with their peer review process.

Civil is also based on the Ethereum blockchain, but has a different operating model. Civil’s platform allows you to create newsrooms and stations, where readers and journalists intermingle to create a news platform. In many ways, this replicates the media structure, but removes barriers to entry so that the creation of news is democratized.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Fake News?

You may feel nauseous every time you hear it, but “fake news” was one of the most popular words of 2017. The term is sometimes applied too liberally, but verifying information on the internet is a huge challenge. The clearest example of this is Wikipedia, where even crowd-sourced content and multiple references can’t always be relied for unbiased fact.

One of the difficulties in debunking fake news it that often it has already spread and established as the “correct” version of events. In a fast paced and ever changing 24-hour news cycle, by the time thorough fact checking has been done, the narrative has already been cemented, and the news coverage has moved on.

Sites like Wikitribune, from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, and Snopes attempt to provide fact checked journalism, but they require readers to change their news source.

Instead, Copenhagen-based Media Sifter hopes to decentralize the media and promote critical thinking. Their blockchain-based SIFT protocol allows users to share multiple sources on a story. Then, when reading your favorite publication, you are presented with different viewpoints alongside it. Users are incentivized to do this crowd-sourced investigative work using the SFT token, which is their take on a cryptocurrency. It’s decentralized nature means that it should be free of government or business interference, an often-expressed problem in the current media landscape.

Preventing an Outbreak

Fake news is a problem, but it would be severely limited if it weren’t for social media. News travels fast through social media, and there is little verification of fact. People retweet, churn out their own views, and bots even parrot propaganda. The events at London’s Oxford Circus on Black Friday gave a demonstration on how social media spreads fake news.

A fight in the underground station led to evacuations, panic, and multiple tweets about terrorist attacks and gunshots. Even celebrities that weren’t in the immediate area helped to spread misinformation. It also doesn’t help when the platforms themselves intentionally promote misinformation all in the name of profit.

Steemit, a blockchain-based social network, hopes to change the nature of social media. Initially, Steemit seems like a mashup between Reddit and Twitter, where users can post content and get upvoted. However, if your content is well received you will be rewarded with STEEM, the platform’s cryptocurrency. The best content should then rise to the top as there is a monetary value to an upvote.

The best content, and therefore most respected users, have a financial incentive to produce high-quality content. For their part, Steemit users have an incentive to only reward high-quality posts as its their STEEM that pays the author.

Going Through Changes

The internet has changed many things for the better and put information into the palm of your hand. It should be easier than ever to find factual reporting of events around the world. Unfortunately, the economics of the industry hasn’t adapted to this new model. Blockchain technology offers a unique mechanism that may alleviate, or even eradicate, many of these issues. This could rid the world of fake news and propaganda — or at least make it easier to spot.

Platforms like Steemit and their micropayments offer an intriguing example of how high quality journalism could be funded, without the need for advertising. However, convincing people to adopt the blockchain is the largest challenge many of these platforms face. The democratic nature of blockchain tech presents a unique adoption problem — something that the multiple Bitcoin forks have found throughout the year.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/blockc...-change-media/





Blockchain Is Pumping New Life Into Old-School Companies Like IBM and Visa

Blockchain is getting bigger at Big Blue.

Demand for the technology, best known for supporting bitcoin, is growing so much that it will be one of the largest users of capacity next year at about 60 data centers that International Business Machines Corp. rents out to other companies around the globe. IBM was one of the first big companies to see blockchain’s promise, contributing code to an open-source effort and encouraging startups to try the technology on its cloud for free.

That a 106-year-old company like IBM is going all in on blockchain shows just how far the digital ledger has come since its early days underpinning bitcoin drug deals on the dark web. The market for blockchain-related products and services will reach $7.7 billion in 2022, up from $242 million last year, according to researcher Markets & Markets.

That’s creating new opportunities for some of the old warships of the technology world, companies like IBM and Microsoft Corp. that are making the transition to cloud services. And products that had gone out of vogue, such as databases sold by Oracle Corp., are becoming sexy again.

“All of these things will get a new life because of blockchain,” said Jerry Cuomo, vice president of technology for IBM Blockchain. “Our sales team loves blockchain because a customer that is buying blockchain rarely walks out of the store with just blockchain. They walk out with multiple things in their cart.”

Because multiple companies — such as all parties involved in a supply chain — can use the same blockchain, it’s spurring IBM to revise the way it compensates sales associates. In the past, sales reps got paid when their clients bought IBM technologies directly. Now they will also receive a commission when clients encourage other companies to join them on a blockchain network and use Big Blue’s systems and services, Cuomo said.

Bright Sector

The blockchain enables companies doing business with each other to record transactions securely. Its strength lies in its trustworthiness: It is difficult to reverse or change what’s been recorded. The blockchain can also hold many more documents and data than traditional database storage, allowing for more nuanced insights and analysis. It can also hold embedded contracts, such as a lease for a car, whose virtual key could be transferred to a bank in the event of a default.

“Blockchain is one of the bright sectors in technology,” said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc. “Since blockchain infrastructure is fairly beefy, there will be a large pool of revenue associated with sales of equipment, software and related services for blockchain installations.”

In addition to hiring third parties for cloud use, companies will rely more on their own databases for storage, said Amit Zavery, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud Platform.

“In traditional database systems, there is only one copy of the data for all parties to reference, but blockchain’s distributed nature means all of the peers now hold a copy of the data,” Avery said. “That will expand the data storage requirements on businesses, especially those in industries with typically high transaction rates.”

In October, Oracle announced the formation of Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service, which helps customers extend existing applications like enterprise-resource management systems. A month earlier, rival SAP SE said clients in industries like manufacturing and supply chain were testing its cloud service. And on Nov. 20, Microsoft expanded its partnership with consortium R3 to make it easier for financial institutions to deploy blockchains in its Azure cloud.

Big Blue, meanwhile, has been one of key companies behind the Hyperledger consortium, a nonprofit open-source project that aims to create efficient standards for commercial use of blockchain technology. IBM also offers companies a free trial of blockchain in its cloud.

Wal-Mart, Visa

Almost six in 10 large corporations are considering using blockchain, according to a Juniper Research survey of 400 executives, managers and tech staff. The technology is increasingly being tested or used by companies such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Visa Inc. to streamline supply chain, speed up payments and store records.

Deployments of blockchain should bump up sales growth in cloud services, databases and servers by 35 percent, according to Susan Eustis, chief executive officer of WinterGreen Research. Within five years, blockchain technology will push more than 55 percent of large companies with more than 1,000 employees to use the cloud instead of their own data centers, up from 17 percent today, she said.

IBM is selling more messaging systems to deliver transactions into the blockchain, web-interface products and API systems to easier communicate with the chain and web app environments, Cuomo said. Sales of databases could rise as well.

“We are seeing a lot of momentum and excitement in this space,” said Matthew Kerner, partner general manager for blockchain at Microsoft.
http://fortune.com/2017/12/26/blockc...companies-ibm/





An Antidote to Digital Dehumanization? Live Theater.

An award-winning playwright argues that the in-the-moment interplay between actors and audience can help us cope with an increasingly virtual world.
Ayad Akhtar

I recently learned that a group of neuroscientists have discovered that watching live theater can synchronize the heartbeats of an audience. One of the researchers put it this way: “Experiencing the live theater performance was extraordinary enough to overcome group differences and produce a common physiological experience.”

The living presence of the audience is what strikes me as so singular about the theater, why I love working in the theater so much and why I believe in the particular importance of our beloved form right now.

But first, let me say: I am not hopeful about where we are as a nation — as a species (if I can be so presumptuous). I’m not hopeful, because I am increasingly of the mind that even my hope is being monetized. That which is most enduring, most noble, most human about me — my urge for something brighter, more vivid, more loving, more alive — all of this is being used against me.

Some 60 years ago, Eisenhower warned us of the military-industrial complex — that nexus of hidden interests responsible for monetizing warfare. We are no longer a society caught in the fateful grip of lucrative warmongering. It turns out, there’s less money in war than in the merchandising of our attention.

And so a new nexus of hidden interests has arisen in its place: merchants of attention — Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, etc. — married to the mature technologies of finance, what we could label the attention-finance complex.

The attention-finance complex has given us devices to which we are tethered by more than compulsion. Our pleasure principle — long prey to the manipulations of capitalism — has been turned against us, irretrievably yoked to ends that are not ours, ends we cannot fully comprehend.

Transformed into economic subjects, our humanity is being redefined; we are valuable only insofar as our economic behavior can be predicted and monetized. Indeed, the technology has enabled the very movements of our mind to become a steady stream of revenue to someone, somewhere.

Somehow we are sold the story that this narrowing of the world into streams of monetized information is actually about liberation. That it represents a new era in human communication. The triumph of democracy. A victory over centralized power. All of these strike me as little more than hopeful memes sold over the very platforms they are intended to legitimize.

Indeed, the great fracture begun in earnest more than 30 years ago — the collapse of a vision of collective well-being — this fracture has finally been completed. We are little more than data points in a society that isn’t really that anymore. It’s a marketplace, nothing more than the sum of its sold and purchased parts.

A bleak vision, yes. And yet, this bleakness must also be something of a defense. My defense against the financed colonization of my desire and, yes, of my hope. A way to defend, to preserve the stirrings of the real hope inside me, what to work for, what to work toward.

Which brings me to the other side of the live performance equation — the actor’s body.

A living being before a living audience. Relationship unmediated by the contemporary disembodying screen. Not the appearance of a person, but the reality of one. Not a simulacrum of relationship, but a form of actual relationship.

The theater is an art form scaled to the human, and stubbornly so, relying on the absolute necessity of physical audience, a large part of why theater is so difficult to monetize. It only happens when and where it happens. Once it starts, you can’t stop it. It doesn’t exist to be paused or pulled out at the consumer’s whim. It can’t be copied and sold. In a world increasingly lost to virtuality and unreality — the theater points to an antidote.

A living actor before a living audience. The situation of all theater, a situation that can awaken in us a recollection of something more primordial, religious ritual — the site of our earliest collective negotiations with our tremendous vulnerability to existence. The act of gathering to witness the myths of our alleged origins enacted — this is the root of the theater’s timeless magic.

Because whether we like to admit it or not, we herding social animals are programmed at some very profound level to think and feel as one. To me, this is why the great lie of American individualism — that my experience is the most important thing, and should be protected and enabled at all costs — why this thinking is so pernicious. It isn’t really true to what we really are.

But the theater is — in its essence.

Indeed, at its best, it’s the experience of us as one mind, one heart, one body. That live performance can synchronize the heartbeats of an audience is no surprise to any of us who ply our trade in the theater. Certainly not to any writer or director or designer who has lived through four weeks of previews trying to get those heartbeats to sync up.

This sense of oneness with an audience, of losing all sense of time, of absorption in the travails and triumphs of the living actors — this is the daily antidote. For which I write. About which I dream. And from which so much of my truest hope is mined.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/t...e-theater.html





Even with 'Star Wars' Surge, Moviegoing Could Hit 22-Year Low. Blame Bad Sequels, Rising Ticket Prices and Streaming
Ryan Faughnder

Hollywood is celebrating the end of 2017 with astronomical sales from "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," which is on track to soon exceed $1 billion in global ticket sales and eventually become the biggest movie of the year. But that won't be enough to write a happy storyline for the industry.

Although movie ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada are expected to dip just below last year's record of $11.38 billion, the number of tickets sold is projected to drop 4% to 1.26 billion -- the lowest level since 1995, according to preliminary estimates from studio executives.

The falloff in ticket sales can mostly be explained by a handful of movies that flopped, especially during the dreary summer season that posted the worst results in more than two decades. Even such massive hits as "Wonder Woman," "Thor: Ragnarok" and "It" couldn't make up for a lackluster summer lineup populated by rickety franchises ("Alien: Covenant") and poorly reviewed retreads ("The Mummy").

However, the long-term decline in attendance reflects systemic challenges facing the industry. Audiences are spending less time going to the movies and are consuming more entertainment on small screens and through streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon that are spending billions on original video content.

At the same time, while higher ticket prices have helped to offset attendance declines, they have made consumers pickier about what movies they're willing to go see. And those increasingly discerning consumers turn to social media and Rotten Tomatoes to decide what's worth their time and money.

"You cannot pull a fast one on the audience," said Greg Foster, chief executive of Imax Entertainment. "The tools that are available for consumers to decide how and where to spend entertainment dollars are so vast. Consumers know what works and what doesn't long before the product becomes available."

Challenges at the box office are helping to fuel a wave of media consolidation. Walt Disney Co. this month announced a blockbuster deal to buy entertainment assets from Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox for $52.4 billion.

Murdoch's surprise decision to sell the bulk of his media empire was at least partly motivated by concerns about the future of the movie business in a world dominated by streaming, analysts said.

Cinema chains also are bulking up to better compete. Regal Entertainment Group, the nation's second-largest theater owner, last month agreed to sell to British theater company Cineworld for $3.6 billion.

For studios, the box office has become a land of princes and paupers, with a handful of movies and a couple studios increasingly dominating the business. As of Dec. 17, Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. accounted for 40% of domestic market share. In 2012, the top two studios (Sony and Warner Bros.) only took up 30% of the industry total.

Of the 165 wide-release movies this year, the top 20 claimed 51% of ticket sales in 2017, representing a 2% increase from last year, according to estimates from distributors. Five years ago, the 20 biggest movies accounted for about 40% of annual grosses.
"It's a really binary business between the haves and the have-nots," said Jeff Goldstein, head of domestic distribution for Warner Bros.

Nowhere was that trend clearer than last weekend, when the animated Fox movie "Ferdinand" opened against Disney's "The Last Jedi." The $111-million kids' film about a fighting-averse bull opened with a pitiful $13 million, due to a lack of audience interest in the story and competition from Pixar's hit computer-animated movie "Coco." By contrast, the new "Star Wars" opened with $220 million - nearly 17 times "Ferdinand's" debut.

Hollywood's lack of fresh ideas also dampened ticket sales. Consumers clearly rejected aging franchises and retreads of old concepts and characters, especially during the summer months. Few people wanted to see Paramount's R-rated "Baywatch" revival or Universal's reboot of "The Mummy," which was supposed to kick-start a series of monster movies. Ditto for the fifth "Transformers" movie.

"The films that underperformed were the fifth or eighth in the franchise," said Eric Wold, an entertainment and media analyst with B. Riley FBR Inc. "Those franchises were already on the decline, so you can't expect people to go run to them."

Originality and quality really pay off

On the other hand, movies with the right combination of originality and quality scored big numbers.

Disney's well-reviewed live-action version of "Beauty and the Beast" and Warner Bros.' "Wonder Woman" scored with audiences, grossing $504 million and $412 million, respectively in the U.S. and Canada. Both offered fresh takes on beloved characters that audiences wanted to see on the big screen. New "Spider-Man" and "Thor" movies similarly avoided franchise fatigue.

It also helped if the moves appealed to women who've been underserved by the studios. The three highest-grossing films - "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," "Beauty and the Beast" and "Wonder Woman" - were all led by female protagonists.

"Girls Trip," an R-rated romp that centered on four black women, was the highest-grossing live-action comedy of the year, in a moviegoing climate that was not kind to comedies.

"We continue to hear that comedies are dead, but great content will disprove many current 'rules' as 'Girls Trip' did," said Jim Orr, president of domestic distribution for Universal Pictures. "The audience is often saying, show us something new, something we haven't seen before or done in a new and exciting way."

Horror movies, which benefit from being seen in a dark room with a big crowd, had a banner year. New Line's "It" defied all expectations by scoring $327 million, despite hitting theaters in the moviegoing dead zone of September. Universal Pictures' "Get Out," a social satire that's now a front-runner for awards consideration, became a cultural phenomenon earlier in the year by tapping into a national conversation about race relations. It took in $175 million domestically.

"Look what happens when you put out a good film that people want to see. It breaks records," said Phil Zacheretti, chief executive of Phoenix Theatres Entertainment, which operates 13 movie theaters. "When you put out mediocre product, people aren't stupid."

Contributing to the winners-and-losers dynamic was the rise of social media and review aggregation sites such as Rotten Tomatoes that let moviegoers determine whether a movie is good or bad before it's released. Some producers have estimated that a very high or very low Rotten Tomatoes score can cause a movie to miss or exceed pre-release estimates by as much as 50%. Critical reviews this year damaged Sony's "The Dark Tower," Warner Bros.' "Geostorm" and Universal's "The Snowman."

Global market is profitable - and expanding

The international box office remains a bright spot for moviegoing. The global box office, which includes domestic and international revenue, is expected to hit roughly $39.4 billion this year, up 2% from 2016, studio executives said. China is still a lucrative market despite a substantial slowdown in that market.

"We have some huge challenges in the years to come, and there's no question we're facing huge competition," Goldstein said. "But when you look at a global box office of $39 billion worldwide, there's clearly a lot of interest in motion pictures."

AMC, owned by China's Dalian Wanda Group, recently signaled its plans to expand into Saudi Arabia after the kingdom lifted its ban on movie theaters.

Beyond looking overseas, major theater chains are spending billions of dollars on improvements to their auditoriums, adding recliner seats as well as expanded menu options and even alcohol.

"If we had sat on our hands five years ago and not started to upgrade our theaters, I would think we'd be down a lot more," said Zacheretti of Phoenix Theatres, which is based in Knoxville, Tenn.

The investments in premium services, however, have made moviegoing more expensive. The average ticket price during the three months that ended in September hit a near-record $8.93 in the U.S. and Canada, according to the National Assn. of Theatre Owners. People in cities such as Los Angeles and New York often pay double that amount.

To lure patrons, some theaters are abandoning their traditional opposition to offering discounts.

Cinemark, based in Plano, Texas, and the nation's third-largest theater circuit, recently unveiled a subscription program that gives members a credit of one ticket a month, plus discounts on concessions, for a monthly fee of $8.99. The program is the industry's first direct answer to MoviePass, a fast-growing New York start-up that lets people see a movie a day for $9.95 a month.

"We want to make moviegoing a little more affordable and let people take a little more risk when they go to the movies," Cinemark Chief Executive Mark Zoradi said.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/comp...ing/ar-BBHchBd





NBN Protester's Problem Solved by Police Called to Remove Him from Telstra Store
William McInnes, Kate Aubusson

When Matt Dooley refused to leave a Telstra store after months of battling with the telco, the last people he might have expected to fix his problem were the police called to remove him from the store.

Having spent hours on the phone to Telstra trying to get his NBN connection properly installed, he had had enough and staged an impromptu sit-in at the Marrickville Metro store.

When the store called security, and then police, to have him removed from the store, he was surprised by what happened next.

The three officers – Probationary Constable Christopher Williams, Senior Constable Scott McCarthy and Detective Cameron Thomas – started negotiating with Telstra staff on Mr Dooley's behalf.

After 4 mths and no help whatsoever, my gf and I staged a sit in to demand our case be looked into. The @Telstra shop called the police to have us removed and the police took our side and negotiated the bundle. Its all still barely working and the case manager refuses to call me. pic.twitter.com/Rjb6z6ZEv7
— Bumbles (@mrkringerz) December 29, 2017

"The cops kind of took our side," Mr Dooley said. "They understood. They used their excellent negotiating skills to negotiate what I hadn't been able to in the last four months.

"One was very technically minded and got it. He knew what we needed.

"This cop was running back and forth between us to negotiate so we didn't have to talk to each other, talking about cables and routers and modems."
Business AM Newsletter

Mr Dooley said he and his girlfriend sat by the front door as the police moved back and forth, negotiating between the two parties before eventually solving the issue.

@nswpolice Using their excellent negotiation skills to get @telstra staff to actually resolve a basic broadband issue. A big win for community policing, a giant fail for Telstra's Terrible Teams!!!! @unabutorac
— Matt Dooley (@mrkringerz) December 29, 2017

"Lo and behold the next day there was a Star Track Express delivered to our house with all the things we needed and just all sorted out," he said.

"As a result of police coming to the store we had internet that afternoon and cable the next day."

The successful negotiating of the police ended a months-long saga for Mr Dooley, who had been trying to get internet at his new house since September.

Working from home in the film and television industry, he needed good and reliable upload capacity so chose an NBN plan through Telstra.

"It was horribly mishandled," he said. "A handful of technicians came and didn't install it properly. Everyone just didn't know what they were doing."

He tried calling their support line, making over 80 calls to the telco in a bid to rectify the issue. He said he was often passed between four or five people who were all unable to help.

"The aim has got to be for Telstra to get rid of you. They just don't care. If you call and ask to speak to sales you'll get through to someone right away."

He took his complaints to the industry ombudsman but was found that he was just one of many putting in complaints about their telco provider.

"They were so overwhelmed by complaints they couldn't do anything effectively. They told me they were backlogged by a month of cases they can't get through."

"I was temporarily disabled at the time. I had broken my leg and I was losing thousands of dollars in money not being able to do work because had no internet from home.

"I'm convinced it affected my mental health. I got so angry and frustrated. It sounds really whingey but internet is so essential but also my lifeline for work and being laid up for months," he said.

"What really got frustrating and got me down was in the end there was no one accountable."

After $3000, 100 hours on the phone and a temporary ADSL connection, Mr Dooley had had enough.

With a still-healing leg, Mr Dooley went with his girlfriend to the Telstra Marrickville Metro store on Wednesday.

Although he had managed to get the NBN cable installed, he still needed a modem, router and cable.

"I said just give me that stuff at least and I'll run it out the window. They said they couldn't help and I said we're not leaving so they called security."

While he was lucky to have three cops step in to assist, Mr Dooley said that there were others not so fortunate.

"I think about people who don't know about tech who are elderly or don't speak the language properly. They would never be able to deal with this. What really got frustrating and got me down was in the end there was no one accountable.

"[While we were in the store], an elderly man came and congratulated us saying 'I think it's great what we're doing'," Mr Dooley said.

"A whole lot of people came up and told us their horror stories of telstra problems."

Telstra is investigating the incident.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/consu...0171231-h0btca





Germany Blocks its Largest Telecom Company From Violating Net Neutrality

Regulators are protecting net neutrality after Telekom—which owns T-Mobile—began prioritizing content.
ByMotherboard Staff translated by Daniel Stächelin

One day after the lost net neutrality battle in the United States, officials in Germany arrived at an important decision. Last Friday, the Bundesnetzagentur, or Federal Network Agency, forbade the company Deutsche Telekom from throttling the streaming speeds of videos as part of its additional StreamOn service. The highest German regulatory officials responsible for issues relating to the internet ordered Telekom to restructure StreamOn accordingly—and to keep all data streaming fair and equal. Telekom criticized the decision as “very puzzling.”

Deutsche Telekom is the parent company of T-Mobile (including T-Mobile in the US).

With the StreamOn option, Telekom customers have the ability to stream songs and videos from certain service providers without it appearing on their monthly data bill, a practice known as “zero rating,” which violates what we traditionally think of as net neutrality. Depending on the chosen package, users are able to access content from Telekom partners like Netflix, Apple Music, and YouTube. The Federal Network Agency didn’t bring up zero rating in its decision, however. Instead, it say that Telekom and StreamOn prioritizes certain types of streaming content. It throttles video (and allows it to be streamed only at standard definition), while prioritizing music and other audio content. The agency argues that video streaming should also be offered at an uncurbed rated.

StreamOn is a similar program to T-Mobile US's BingeOn program.

In a press release, the agency justified its decision by saying it wished to preserve net neutrality in Germany. Prohibiting the limiting of video streaming not only “allows for a greater Internet diversity, but also bolsters the providers of video-streaming services who place worth on higher-definition content,” Jochen Homann, the head of the agency, said in the release. Furthermore, the agency also pointed to the standpoint that it is enforcing a decision set by European law. “Fair treatment is a cornerstone of European regulations for net neutrality,” Hohmann added.

Andrus Ansip, EU Commissioner for Digital Single Market, tweeted that “to access the open internet without discrimination or interference (like blocking or slowing down)” is enshrined in EU law. In an article in the French newspaper Le Monde, Ansip claimed that the elimination of net neutrality in the United States had “no effect on Europe.”

Telekom is defending itself against the decision made by the Federal Network Agency and signaled its intention to pursue legal action. The decision of the “Bonn-based regulatory” is, according to the company, “very puzzling” and targets 700,000 customers and 150 partners of Telekom, a spokesperson wrote in a blog post. StreamOn has been a “great success story,” which the Federal Network Agency “seems to resent.”

Telekom did not comment on the accusation that it intends on carving out net neutrality in Germany. However, the company defended bandwidths throttling for video streaming: the streaming of videos in DVD quality instead of in HD is “absolutely sufficient,” as evinced by the high number of subscriptions for the StreamOn option, according to Telekom.

Even Vodafone offers its customers certain packages for so-called “zero-rating” streaming not applied to their monthly data plans, and the Federal Network Agency is investigating zero rating as a possible infraction upon net neutrality.

Telekom now has until March 2018 to adjust its StreamOn offering according to the demands set by the network authority.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...lity-violation





The FCC is Still Tweaking its Net Neutrality Repeal (But that’s Normal)
Devin Coldewey

You may think, from the pomp accompanying the FCC’s vote in December to repeal the 2015 net neutrality rules, that the deed was accomplished. Not so — in fact, the order hasn’t even reached its final form: the Commission is still working on it. But while it may be frustrating, this is business as usual for regulations like this, and concerned advocates should conserve their outrage for when it’s really needed.

The “Restoring Internet Freedom” rule voted on last month was based on a final draft circulated several weeks before the meeting at which it would be adopted. But as reports at the time noted, significant edits (i.e. not fixing typos) were still going into the draft the day before the FCC voted. Additional citations, changes in wording and more serious adjustments may be underway.

It may sound like some serious shenanigans are being pulled, but this is how the sausage was always made, and it’s actually one of Chairman Ajit Pai’s handful of commendable efforts that the process is, in some ways at least, more open to the public.

Ordinarily the final draft of the rule might not be given out until after the vote, having been only circulated among FCC staff and other D.C. insiders. It’s something Pai has never tired of criticizing previous FCCs for, and one of the first changes he made.

Now orders like this one are released well ahead of time — but the process of fixing and updating them continues just as it did before, well past the actual vote (the timing, as Ars Technica notes, is all over the place). We’re just privy to the details now. It’s right there in the rule’s introduction:

The issues referenced in this document and the Commission’s ultimate resolution of those issues remain under consideration and subject to change. This document does not constitute any official action by the Commission. However, the Chairman has determined that, in the interest of promoting the public’s ability to understand the nature and scope of issues under consideration, the public interest would be served by making this document publicly available.

And indeed, it makes perfect sense that work should continue as long as it can in order to better bolster the chances of an order like this surviving. An extra citation, legal precedent or expert commentary could make all the difference.

The question of exactly what is being changed, however, we will have ample time to investigate: The rules will soon be entered into the federal register, at which point they both come into effect and come under intense scrutiny and legal opposition. And there’s plenty to scrutinize and oppose. I’ve asked the FCC if it will issue its own documentation of changes to the rule made after the final draft.

But that’s just the start of the next phase of the battle for net neutrality, which you can expect to last for years to come.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/02/th...-thats-normal/





Snubbing FCC, States Are Writing Their Own Net Neutrality Laws

California, New York, Washington, and likely more states are challenging both internet providers and the reach of the federal government.
Sean Captain

For those who either hoped or feared that a December 14 vote by the FCC to scrap net neutrality regulations would settle the matter, it must feel like extra innings of a long hard-fought game. Along with the expected flood of lawsuits by activist groups fighting to preserve net neutrality, states have also taken up the cause. “We all agree that in an ideal world it should be handled at the federal level,” says California state senator Scott Wiener. “But if the federal government’s going to abdicate, then we need to take action, and I’m glad that a number of states are looking at this.”

Along with pursuing lawsuits over irregularities in the FCC process (like millions of fake citizen comments being submitted), several states are crafting their own net neutrality laws, which they will start debating as new legislative sessions commence this month. They would prohibit internet service providers from blocking or hindering access to legal online content sources, or from offering premium-bandwidth “fast lane” deals to others. Washington State was first to act, with Democratic and Republican state representatives debuting nearly identical bills back on December 13 and 14.

Such bipartisanship is rare. In most cases, the charge is led by Democrats, often with anti-Trump overtones. “I would say California and New York are two deep-blue states where Donald Trump is the least popular president in modern history,” says New York state senator Brad Hoylman, who represents a large chunk of Manhattan. He’s teaming up with Wiener, whose district includes all of San Francisco, to craft legislation that each state can use. “We have very similar constituencies in many regards, including technology and immigrants and LGBT folks,” says Hoylman. It would be hard to find a bluer coalition.

Looking for Leverage

Regardless of their politics, state net neutrality advocates face a tough course through unfamiliar territory. In its lengthy order abolishing net neutrality policy, the FCC asserted the federal government’s right to preempt other laws or policies. “Allowing state and local governments to adopt their own separate requirements, which could impose far greater burdens than the federal regulatory regime, could significantly disrupt the balance we strike here,” reads the FCC’s abolition order.

“Telecommunications in particular—it’s very, very hairy to try to do this without triggering federal preemption,” says Jake Egloff, the legislative aide to New York Democratic assemblymember Patricia Fahy. They have also crafted legislation establishing net neutrality requirements. Rather than regulate ISPs directly, it would exert financial pressure by only allowing the state and local governments to contract with ISPs certified as meeting New York’s net neutrality requirements. “I don’t want to say backdoor, but it is a side door,” says Fahy, whose district includes the state capital, Albany.

The state’s “power of the purse” is just one of the side-door measures her colleague Hoylman and California’s Wiener are considering. They might also make meeting net neutrality standards a prerequisite for awarding cable franchises or providing access to state-owned land or utility poles for laying cables. And they are looking at the front door approach of regulating ISPs directly under consumer protection law. “The FCC issued their fiat that tells the states they can’t do anything. We don’t think the FCC has that power, and they’ve lost that argument in court before,” says Wiener.

He and other state legislators point to a March, 2016 court case as precedent. While under Democrat control, the FCC tried to preempt state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that prevented municipal-owned broadband networks from expanding. The FCC said its mandate to expand access to broadband allowed it to override the state restrictions, which critics called favors to private ISPs. The Sixth Circuit Court Of Appeals disagreed, finding that the FCC didn’t have the authority to meddle in state affairs.

Washington State went right for the front door with its legislation, directly telling ISPs what they can and cannot do, in the belief that the FCC can’t stop them. “There is not a specific granting of preemption authority from Congress in this space,” says Republican Norma Smith, who represents a largely rural area of islands north of Seattle. “[The FCC] said, on the one hand, that they don’t have the authority to regulate standards and conduct on the internet,” says Smith’s Democratic counterpart and frequent collaborator Drew Hansen. “But on the other hand, they can still have the authority to preempt state laws…I don’t know how both of those can exist at the same time.”

Neither Smith nor Hansen, who represents wealthy Bainbridge Island and other areas across the bay from Seattle, is waiting to find out. Their nearly identical legislation, which they expect to consolidate into one bill, is among the most concise descriptions of net neutrality, each running less than three pages. By comparison, the 2015 FCC order establishing net neutrality regulations ran 313 pages, and the order to abolish them ran 210.

Hansen’s bill for instance, first requires ISPs to “disclose accurate information regarding the network management practices, performance, and commercial terms of its broadband internet access services sufficient for consumers to make informed choices.” That gives the state and consumer groups information they can use to challenge ISPs on whether they are living up to commitments. It goes on to prohibit blocking and impairing access to content (often called throttling) or allowing “paid prioritization.” It defines that last item to include “favor[ing] some traffic over other traffic…In exchange for consideration, monetary or otherwise, from a third party; or To benefit an affiliated entity.” It goes through and prohibits all the technical ways that an ISP could do that.

Paid prioritization, often called fast lanes, is the biggest worry for net neutrality advocates. “Yes, I think blocking and throttling can happen,” says Scott Wiener, “but it’s so extreme [and] there would be such a public outcry that I think the companies are less likely to want to take that heat.” Wiener doesn’t trust ISPs to say no to fast lanes, despite pledges some of them have made, given the demands of shareholders. “There will be enormous pressure on them to try and monetize their newly obtained power to charge for a fast lane,” he says. “I mean, we’ve seen that with the airlines. They can’t resist charging you for everything.”

Even Congressional Republicans in D.C. who supported the net neutrality rollback claim to be against blocking and throttling. Both would be prohibited by legislation introduced by Tennessee representative Marsha Blackburn, who ranks perhaps second to FCC chairman Ajit Pai on the villain list for net neutrality advocates. Blackburn leaves the door to paid prioritization open by allowing ISPs to offer “specialized services.”

At least some fellow Republicans in Washington State feel otherwise. Norma Smith’s bill has the same prohibition on paid prioritization as Hansen’s. “We clearly have Republicans like myself who are concerned about the impact on consumers and the people we represent,” she says, “and I think you are going to see [legislation] that is indeed bipartisan.”

The Privacy Precedent

A recent battle between Washington, D.C. and Washington State shows how the net neutrality fight may develop. Last March, Blackburn joined Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona on legislation abolishing FCC regulations that prevented ISPs from collecting and selling customer information such as browsing history, app usage history, and location data. “While congressional Republicans may be making it easier to sell your data, lawmakers in Olympia have a strong record of accomplishment in protecting your personal information,” wrote Norma Smith in a Seattle Times op-ed after the Blackburn-Flake repeal passed.

In April, Hansen, Smith and 73 other state reps, including a few Republicans, introduced legislation to create a state version of the privacy rules that the U.S. Congress had just abolished. Despite the bipartisan support and success in the state house of representatives, the privacy billed failed to clear the Republican-controlled Senate in 2017. “My Republican colleagues in the senate just refused to give it a hearing,” says Hansen, the bill’s original author. He and Smith expect the fortunes to be better this year, now that Democrats control both houses in Olympia. “There was bipartisan support there, I know that personally,” says Smith, “but it didn’t get out of the senate, and I think it will probably have a much better chance this time around.”

Brad Hoylman makes a similar prediction for New York State, where the senate is also passing to Democratic control. At least seven internet privacy bills have been kicking around the senate and assembly in Albany. “I’ve not seen any indication that Senate Republicans in New York are prepared to stand up to Trump,” says Hoylman.

But even one-party ruled California has had a hard time. Its ISP privacy bill also failed to move ahead last year. “The legislative process, even for easy bills with no opposition, is treacherous,” says Wiener. And privacy legislation had opposition not only from ISPs but from Silicon Valley companies like Facebook worried about how it would affect their ability to profile and advertise to users.

“With [privacy legislation], there was unified, tech-telecom opposition to it,” says Wiener. “Net neutrality has divided industry, so you have the Googles and Facebooks and Netflixes and other technology companies that strongly support net neutrality, and you have the ISPs that oppose it.”

Plenty of other challenges remain for privacy and net neutrality legislation. “This is new territory for any state legislator to do net neutrality [policy],” says Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They’ve had the luxury of always having the FCC doing that for them, whether it was a Republican administration or a Democratic administration.”

Another challenge is time. The California legislature meets for most of the year, from January to November in 2018, but other states have much shorter schedules. New York State adjourns in June, and Washington runs only till March. Washington has a “citizen legislature,” where serving is only a part-time job.

States United Against the United States

In all, 22 states have introduced some legislation responding to the rollback of ISP privacy regulations, according to a compilation by the National Conference of State Legislatures. (Although only a few bills have passed so far.) That provides a list of usual suspects for states that will also come out with net neutrality legislation in the coming weeks, says Flacon, who is advising Wiener, Hoylman, and other states that he declines to name. “On a practical level, [privacy and net neutrality] are both areas where the people are demanding something very different from what Congress and the FCC are willing to permit,” says Drew Hansen.

Another clue to where legislation may appear is the growing list of states upset about irregularities and fraud in the public comments process for the FCC’s net neutrality rollback. Several have already announced plans to sue, with New York angling to lead a coalition.

As more states get active in the coming weeks, collaboration may increase. “As we craft bills, we’ll look at what other states are doing,” says Wiener. “We’ll make sure they know what we’re doing—not re-create the wheel.” Just the combination of California and New York is a mighty one. Together they account for about one-fifth of the country’s population and economic output.

These states also have a personal connection. Wiener and Hoylman have been friends since their Harvard Law School days in the mid-’90s, and they have traded legislative ideas before. “I’m stealing this idea from Scott Wiener,” says Hoylman. “I’m not at all embarrassed to say that I borrow from counterparts on the other coast.”

Patricia Fahey in New York State got the idea for her bill from Washington governor Jay Inslee, who first proposed limiting state business to net neutrality-friendly ISPs. (On December 13, Inslee held a joint press conference with Smith, Hansen, state attorney general Bob Ferguson, and business leaders to announce a multi-pronged net neutrality offensive.)

All the legislators I spoke to say they are keeping an eye on other states. But they are also watching their own constituencies. Several national polls show that majorities of Americans, even a majority of Republicans, support some form of net neutrality regulation. “One of the things that has been significant is hearing from so many small business owners [and] our small telecom providers all supporting this effort [for a net neutrality law],” says Smith. “I represent a rural economy, and I want the folks that I represent to be able to participate fully in the economy of the 21st century.”

With her Republican counterparts in D.C. holding very different notions of how to achieve those goals, Smith and all the state legislators working on net neutrality laws are in for a long fight. Preemption will be the big battle, and with each state writing its own laws, it may take more than a single case to resolve. Meanwhile state attorney generals, along with activists, will also be suing the FCC over how it handled the whole repeal process.

Just dragging the issue out could be a win for those who advocate more aggressive net neutrality protections. Uncertainty about regulations makes businesses nervous and hesitant to invest. The ISPs that lobbied to undo federal regulations may regret the move, warns Wiener. “For the companies that repealed net neutrality, they need to understand that they’re going to have a fight state by state,” he says. “So maybe we should go back and have net neutrality [regulated] federally to avoid that.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/40510095...eutrality-laws





After Beating Cable Lobby, Colorado City Moves Ahead with Muni Broadband

Fort Collins plans universal broadband, net neutrality, and gigabit speeds.
Jon Brodkin

The city council in Fort Collins, Colorado, last night voted to move ahead with a municipal fiber broadband network providing gigabit speeds, two months after the cable industry failed to stop the project.

Last night's city council vote came after residents of Fort Collins approved a ballot question that authorized the city to build a broadband network. The ballot question, passed in November, didn't guarantee that the network would be built because city council approval was still required, but that hurdle is now cleared. Residents approved the ballot question despite an anti-municipal broadband lobbying campaign backed by groups funded by Comcast and CenturyLink.

The Fort Collins City Council voted 7-0 to approve the broadband-related measures, a city government spokesperson confirmed to Ars today.

"Last night's three unanimous votes begin the process of building our city's own broadband network," Glen Akins, a resident who helped lead the pro-municipal broadband campaign, told Ars today. "We're extremely pleased the entire city council voted to support the network after the voters' hard fought election victory late last year. The municipal broadband network will make Fort Collins an even more incredible place to live."

Net neutrality and privacy

While the Federal Communications Commission has voted to eliminate the nation's net neutrality rules, the municipal broadband network will be neutral and without data caps.

"The network will deliver a 'net-neutral' competitive unfettered data offering that does not impose caps or usage limits on one use of data over another (i.e., does not limit streaming or charge rates based on type of use)," a new planning document says. "All application providers (data, voice, video, cloud services) are equally able to provide their services, and consumers' access to advanced data opens up the marketplace."

The city will also be developing policies to protect consumers' privacy. FCC privacy rules that would have protected all Americans were eliminated by the Republican-controlled Congress last year.

The items approved last night (detailed here and here) provide a $1.8 million loan from the city's general fund to the electric utility for first-year start-up costs related to building telecommunications facilities and services. Later, bonds will be "issued to support the total broadband build out," the measure says.

The city intends to provide gigabit service for $70 a month or less and a cheaper Internet tier. Underground wiring for improved reliability and "universal coverage" are two of the key goals listed in the measure.

Building a citywide network is a lengthy process—the city says its goal is to be done in "less than five years."

Telecom lobby failure

The telecom industry-led campaign against the project spent more than $900,000, most of which was supplied by the Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association. Comcast is a member of that lobby group.

Fort Collins Mayor Wade Troxell criticized incumbent ISPs and the local Chamber of Commerce for spreading "misinformation" to voters, The Coloradoan reported at the time.

The pro-municipal broadband effort led by community members won despite spending just $15,000. More than 57 percent of voters approved the measure.

"We're incredibly excited about the voting results from last night," Colin Garfield, who led the residents' pro-broadband effort, told Ars today. "The tireless work our committee performed and the voice of the voters have been rewarded."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...et-neutrality/





LePage Dashes off Unhelpful Response to Student’s Concerns about Loss of Net Neutrality

'Pick up a book and read!' the governor writes in his terse response to Camden Hills Regional High sophomore Hope Osgood.
Susan Mustapich

A high school student who wrote to Gov. Paul LePage because she was concerned about the loss of net neutrality received a handwritten response from the governor last week in which he told her to “pick up a book and read!”

In the month leading up to the recent vote by the Federal Communications Commission to repeal net neutrality regulations, Camden Hills Regional High School sophomore Hope Osgood learned about the issue and how junking the longtime principle that all web traffic be treated equally could affect consumers’ internet access. While browsing social media, she found an application that would generate a letter expressing her concerns and used it to email a message to LePage.

She wrote, “The internet is the easiest way to access anything. News, information, etc. Companies being able to put restrictions on internet usage isn’t ideal! People will be left in the dark about some things. All my school work is internet-based, but what happens if I can’t reach what I need to? What about my lessons in school?”

About a month after Osgood emailed LePage, she received a response: a copy of her letter with a message handwritten in the white space below it that read: “Hope. Pick up a book and read! Governor.”

Osgood’s first impression was that his comment was snarky.

“I’m only 16 years old, I’ve only talked to so many people,” she said. “I just thought it was rude. I didn’t know how to react to that. I’m a kid. I can’t really do that much.”

Because she’s from Maine, Osgood thought a state official would be more likely to listen to her than a member of Congress. She reasoned that “there’s only so many people that could write to him (LePage), rather than Congress, where people from all 50 states could write to them.”

Osgood said she’s concerned that the loss of net neutrality could impede her studies. Beyond school, she’s worried about the impact on social media because that’s how she connects with friends.

LePage’s communications director and press secretary did not respond to telephone and email requests for comment.

‘OUR ACCESS IS AT OUR FINGERTIPS’

Osgood said she is concerned that big companies “might have more control over everything. If you wanted to go to a certain website, it might be slowed down. You might have to pay to access that, or it might be completely blocked off what you can see. They could filter news, media, or things they don’t agree with. I don’t think that should be able to happen. Everybody should be able to get information.”

The decision to eliminate net neutrality has created concerns among consumer advocates, Democrats, many web companies and ordinary Americans that the cable and phone giants will be able to control what people see and do online. The broadband industry, however, has promised that the public’s internet experience isn’t going to change.

The FCC decision is likely to be challenged in court and in Congress.

Osgood explained that at Camden Hills, the students use an application called Schoology. The classes she takes, her grades, assignments, worksheets and homework are posted there. If she misses an assignment, she can “get it right away” and “pass it in.”

Osgood is on the school’s basketball and soccer teams, and plans to run track this year as well. On Schoology, she can monitor her grades if she’s at risk of probation, which would prevent participation in athletics.

She described a recent history assignment that started with a reading on Schoology: “You read it, you annotate and write notes on it. Independent research was required as part of the assignment, and this is where the internet is used, and students have to document the resources they use.”

Class discussions of the topics follow, and the project culminates with students writing a paper. “We had to cite eight sources from our reading, and six sources from our research,” she said.

Osgood also noted that older books in classrooms are in bad condition or have outdated information.

“With books, there’s a certain limitation,” she said. “With the old books, I don’t want to say that’s wrong, but it’s not updated information. In my generation, we don’t pay attention to books. Our access is at our fingertips on our technology.”

GRANDFATHER: LEPAGE ‘HAS ONE LESS VOTE’

Osgood showed the letter to her grandfather, Rick Osgood, a LePage supporter who didn’t like the tone of the governor’s response.

Rick Osgood has voted for LePage twice and supports much of what the governor is doing in Maine, but he called LePage’s message “just a snide remark.”

“I think it’s mighty rude,” he said.

Osgood said he realizes that the governor “has plenty to do,” but if LePage had the time to write the comment, he could have explained his views about the elimination of net neutrality.

“I think he could have explained a little more than one little sentence,” Osgood said.

Hope and her grandfather wondered how LePage could sign legislation to give students iPads for school work, then show no concern about how changes in internet access could affect their use.

“I’m not a computer-savvy person,” Rick Osgood said. He thinks students “ought to learn to read, write and do arithmetic before they ever use a computer. But in this day and age, they need the computer. Reading a book is fine, but it isn’t the answer.”

Osgood said he didn’t intend any disrespect toward the governor. “I think he’s doing a great job on some things, and other things, not so much,” he said. “I’m still in favor of what he’s doing. Things have to change.”

But Osgood has changed his mind about one thing.

“I voted for him, but I shan’t again,” he said. “If he decides to run for the Senate, he has one less vote.”
http://www.pressherald.com/2018/01/0...et-neutrality/





AT&T to Provide 5G to 12 Markets by End of 2018, Fibre to 82 Metros by Mid-2019

AT&T will deploy 5G services in a dozen markets by late 2018, with plans to extend its 5G Evolution advanced LTE from 23 to 'hundreds' of metro areas while also expanding AT&T Fiber to 82 metros by mid-2019.
Corinne Reichert

AT&T has announced that it will be providing 5G services in around 12 markets by late 2018, with plans to offer the service to consumers while it trials 5G technology with businesses across all industries.

Calling it an "ambitious milestone", AT&T said these 5G networks will be ready by the end of the year thanks to 3GPP completing 5G New Radio (5G NR) standards last month.

"We're moving quickly to begin deploying mobile 5G this year," president of AT&T Technology and Operations Melissa Arnoldi said.

"With faster speeds and ultra-low latency, 5G will ultimately deliver and enhance experiences like virtual reality, future driverless cars, immersive 4K video, and more."

AT&T said it is also continuing to work on advanced LTE technologies including LTE-LAA, which is expected to launch in around 24 metros during 2018.

AT&T's 5G Evolution network technology has now been deployed in 23 metro areas: Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, San Antonio, and Houston, Texas; Boston, Massachusetts; Hartford and Bridgeport, Connecticut; Buffalo, New York; Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Fresno, California; Greenville, South Carolina; Indianapolis, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee; New Orleans, Louisiana; Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

"While we are rolling out mobile 5G in 2018, we also plan to continue to enhance our network with 5G Evolution technology in hundreds of additional metro areas," the mobile carrier added.

"We will give you more options to access our latest wireless network offers by making additional 5G Evolution-capable devices available throughout the year."

It also plans to add 3 million more locations to the AT&T Fiber network, for a total of 12.5 million locations across 82 metro areas by mid-2019. New metros being targeted by AT&T's full-fibre network include Waco, Amarillo, and Beaumont, Texas; Gainesville and Panama City, Florida; Springfield, Missouri; and Evansville, Indiana.

By the end of 2017, AT&T Fiber had reached 7 million locations across 67 metros nationwide.

G.fast will be launched to apartment communities across 21 states during 2018, AT&T added, after launching the fibre technology last year to enable speeds of up to 500Mbps in eight metro areas.

AT&T's fixed-wireless network, meanwhile, will also continue being expanded during 2018, out to a total of 660,000 locations. By 2020, AT&T said it plans to reach 1.1 million locations with its fixed-wireless network, which is being deployed in partnership with Australian telecommunications technology company NetComm Wireless.

During 2017, AT&T also rolled out its nationwide Cat-M1 or LTE-M Internet of Things (IoT) network, as well as extending this to Mexico.

It last month kicked off its biggest 5G trial network in Waco, Texas, using millimetre-wave (mmWave) spectrum and 5G radio and antenna prototypes after announcing in August that it would expand its 5G trials to three more cities by the end of 2017 in Waco, as well as in South Bend, Indiana, and Kalamazoo, Michigan.

For those three trial networks, AT&T is using Ericsson's 28GHz radios, virtualised RAN (vRAN), and full 5G virtualised core; Intel's 5G mobile trial platform; Samsung's 5G router, 5G RFIC chipset, virtualised core, and vRAN; and Nokia's 5G equipment and solutions.

AT&T launched its 5G Evolution upgrade on its network in Austin, Texas in June, followed by Indianapolis, Indiana, in July.

At the end of December, AT&T also combined with Ericsson on 5G NR interoperability trials.

The trials also included T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint, along with Australian mobile carrier Telstra; Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo; Korean carrier SK Telecom; and European carriers Vodafone and Orange.

The live lab demonstrations saw the companies utilise the 3.6GHz and millimetre-wave (mmWave) 28GHz spectrum frequencies using Ericsson's pre-commercial 5G base stations and Qualcomm's 5G NR UE prototypes.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/at-t-to...s-by-mid-2019/





Starry Internet’s Beaming Broadband Tech Hits LA and DC this Month, with More Cities Coming Soon
Brian Heater

Starry’s mostly been pretty quiet since coming out of stealth roughly this time two years ago. The Boston-based startup has been busy raising funds and running limited testing in its hometown. Starry Internet is still firmly in beta mode, mind, but later this month, it’s going to expand that testing to two new key markets, Los Angeles and Washington, DC.

Launched by Aereo founder Chet Kanojia, the service has drummed up some excitement around these parts for its claims of delivering broadband speed internet over the air, using millimeter waves. The company refers to the tech as “pre-standard 5G,” delivering similar speeds to the long promised next generation telecom standard. Though it’s got the decided advantage of actually being commercially available — albeit in limited supply.

The exact timing of the launches isn’t clear at the moment, and Starry Internet will only be available in “select areas” at launch, widening out in those markets over time. More details on all of that are available on Starry’s site. The company is also planning an even bigger push over the course of the year, adding 14 more major US cities to its beta program.

The full list includes, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Detroit, Atlanta, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Miami and Minneapolis. A pretty solid selection metropolitan areas in the continental US.

The process of bringing the tech to new markets is much less invasive than more traditional ISPs. “We identify vertical assets, such as managed rooftops or towers, to locate our Starry Beams,” says Kanojia. “Our teams then identify buildings and homes to locate Starry Points. The Beams and Points are deployed.”

The deal sounds like a good one, too. In its beta form, at least, Starry’s 200 mbps up/download service runs $50 a month, which includes installation and the company’s fancy pants touchscreen Starry Station WiFi hub. More to the point, though, it represents an alternative to the handful of ISPs that currently have a stranglehold on much of the US market.

Kanojia tells TechCrunch that Boston was a good dry run for the technology, given the city’s extreme weather conditions. “We’ve built a robust network in Boston and our technology is working well,” the founder explained. “We’ve gone through a full year of seasonality to test various weather and foliage conditions and we’ve been very happy with our network’s performance. Boston’s weather can get pretty rough, so we’re confident that if we performed well here, we’ll do the same, if not better, in other markets.”

Meantime, the company plans to spend some significant resources, scaling the tech and headcount. Starry is currently at 150 employees, a number it plans to double by year’s end.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/04/st...s-coming-soon/





FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s CES Appearance has been Canceled
Devin Coldewey

If you hoped to attend a “candid conversation” with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai at CES, I have bad news: he won’t be there. In a tersely worded statement, Consumer Technology Association head Gary Shapiro announced:

“Unfortunately, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is unable to attend CES 2018. We look forward to our next opportunity to host a technology policy discussion with him before a public audience.”

The CTA and FCC both declined to offer any further comment.

Reasons for cancellation with such late notice could be almost anything (and on either side), but one would expect in the case of a sudden scheduling conflict (not uncommon with government officials) or personal leave, the CTA’s statement would have reflected that. Certainly the CTA has no reason to cancel; despite the unpopularity of Pai’s policies, the talk would certainly have been well attended and perhaps even productive.

The session would have been moderated by Shapiro and Pai would have been joined by the Chairman of the FTC, Maureen Ohlhausen. The CTA has not said whether it will be cancelled or if it will go on regardless of Pai’s absence.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/03/fc...ces-after-all/





What Would Really Happen If Russia Attacked Undersea Internet Cables
Louise Matsakis

It might seem like a nightmare scenario. A terrorist organization or nefarious nation state decides to derail the global internet by faulting the undersea fiber optic cables that connect the world. These cables, which run along the ocean floor, carry almost all transoceanic digital communication, allowing you to send a Facebook message to a friend in Dubai, or receive an email from your cousin in Australia.

US Navy officials have warned for years that it would be devastating if Russia, which has been repeatedly caught snooping near the cables, were to attack them. The UK’s most senior military officer said in December that it would “immediately and potentially catastrophically” impact the economy were Russia to fault the lines. NATO is now planning to resurrect a Cold War-era command post in part to monitor Russian cable activity in the North Atlantic.

The idea of the global internet going dark because some cables were damaged is frightening. But if Russia or anyone else were to snip a handful of the garden hose-sized lines, experts say that the consequences would likely be less severe than the picture the military paints. The world’s internet infrastructure is vulnerable, but Russia doesn't present the greatest threat. There are plenty of more complicated problems, that start with understanding how the cable system actually works.

“The amount of anxiety about somebody sabotaging a single cable or multiple cables is overblown,” says Nicole Starosielski, a professor at New York University who spent six years studying internet cables to write the The Undersea Network. “If somebody knew how these systems worked and if they staged an attack in the right way, then they could disrupt the entire system. But the likelihood of that happening is very small. Most of the concerns and fears are not nearly a threat at all.”

For one, ruptures aren’t exactly an anomaly. One of the estimated 428 undersea cables worldwide is damaged every couple of days. Nearly all faults aren’t intentional. They’re caused by underwater earthquakes, rock slides, anchors, and boats. That’s not to say that humans are incapable of purposefully messing with the cables; off the coast of Vietnam in 2007, fishermen pulled up 27 miles of fiber cords, disrupting service for several months. (It wasn't cut off completely, because the country had one more cable that kept the internet going.)

You don’t notice when a cable faults, especially if you live somewhere like the United States, because your Instagram message or Google Voice call is instantly re-routed. If you’re Skyping with a friend in Romania for instance, and a fishing boat or anchor ruptures a cable—as causes two-thirds of faults—your conversation simply goes over another line. Many regions, like Europe, the United States, and East Asia have numerous cables running over the same path. You can check out a map of them all here.

That means Russia snipping a handful of cables in the Atlantic, where its submarines have been spotted, would disturb the global internet very little. In fact, even if it ruptured every single cable in the Atlantic Ocean, traffic could still be re-routed the other way, across the Pacific.

“It wouldn’t work very well or be the highest quality, but it’s not like there wouldn’t be any communication happening,” says Alan Mauldin, research director at TeleGeography, a market research firm that specializes in telecommunications, including undersea cables.

Even in a hypothetical, Black Mirror-esque world in which Russia somehow chops every cable that connects to the United States from every side, the internet would not go out like a light. Americans would still be able to utilize land networks that connect the continent; it would just be impossible to communicate overseas.

“You can still email people in the US if all submarine cables were gone,” says Mauldin. “But people in Europe wouldn’t see your silly cat video you posted on your Facebook profile.”

Because faults happen so frequently, cable repair ships patrol nearly all of the world’s waters. Even if Russia did start snipping, there are crews equipped to rapidly repair them. Besides, Russia’s epic hypothetical cable attack would primarily harm its own people, as another Telegeography analyst pointed out in a video. “It would hurt the Russians perhaps even more than it would hurt [Americans]. They’re far more dependent on international networks than we are, because so much of our content is stored locally” says senior analyst Jonathan Hjembo.

That’s not to say that the world’s undersea cables aren’t at risk, or that they don’t need protection—especially in areas of the world with less internet infrastructure, like Africa and some parts of Southeast Asia. When a fault happens there, the consequences can be more severe, including genuine internet disruption.

“Cable damage can be a really serious problem, and can impair connectivity in parts of the world where they have limited access to cables,” says Mauldin. In 2011, for example, an elderly woman sliced through an underground cable while scavenging for copper, accidentally cutting off internet access for all of Armenia. The country spent five hours offline. The impact was so dramatic because Georgia provided nearly all of Armenia's access to the internet, making that one cable vitally important.

That single cable could be considered a “choke point,” or place where the internet infrastructure is at most risk, as Starosielski describes in a forthcoming article for the journal Limn. For example, in some areas, ocean cables must travel through narrow bodies of water that border several countries, like in the Strait of Malacca and the Red Sea. In these tight spots, there’s a greater risk of threats like dropped anchors. They’re also potentially subject to geopolitical disputes, since a larger number of countries and companies have an interest in the lines that run through those waters.

Several locales also serve as hubs for a large number of cables, and thus are sites of consolidated risk. If Egypt's undersea cables ruptured, for instance, at least one third of the global internet could go down, according to Starosielski’s research. Fortaleza, a city in northern Brazil, is an undersea cable capital that connects North and South America. Were it compromised, it would take all data flowing from Brazil to the United States down with it.

Sometimes, the global internet is threatened not by anchors and the like, but by bad policies. In 2011 for example, as Starosielski notes in her article, Indonesia required that only ships with an Indonesian crew fix ruptured cables in its waters. The problem was that no such ships existed, causing repair delays for not just the country, but other regions that routed through it.

One thing we don’t need to worry about are sharks. Despite numerous media reports, they, and other fish, don’t pose a risk to the undersea cables we rely on to connect the world. “There’s been zero percent of cable faults attributable to fish bites or shark bites,” says Mauldin.

There have also been no ruptures attributed to Russian aggression. It appears that Putin has largely left the undersea cables alone, at least for now. In the meantime, we can work on addressing the more pressing ways the internet infrastructure is vulnerable.
https://www.wired.com/story/russia-u...ternet-cables/





Iran Blocks Internet, May Shut Down Telegram App as Protests Spread

Anti-regime demonstrators attack town hall in Tehran, burn Iranian flag; 3 said shot dead in central Iran by Revolutionary Guards
AFP and TOI staff

Demonstrators attacked a town hall in the Iranian capital Saturday as protests spilled into a third night despite government warnings against any further “illegal gatherings” and moves to cut off the internet on mobile phones.

Unverified videos on social media appeared to show thousands marching through the western cities of Khorramabad, Zanjan and Ahvaz, while reports spread rapidly that several people had been shot dead by police in the town of Dorud. According to Al-Arabiya, three Iranian protesters were killed by the Revolutionary Guards in the central Iran town.

A swirl of rumors, combined with travel restrictions and a near-total media blackout from official agencies, made it difficult to confirm the reports.

People of #Kashan tear down banner of Ayatollah #Khamenei, dictator supreme leader of Islamic regime of Iran. #IranProtests pic.twitter.com/HvZyG1z4mN

— Babak Taghvaee (@BabakTaghvaee) December 30, 2017

The authorities appeared to respond by cutting internet access to mobile phones, with the main networks interrupted at least in Tehran shortly before midnight, AFP reporters said.

Several Iranian news agencies warned Telegram, the most popular social media service in the country, might soon be shut down after communications minister Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi accused one popular channel, Amadnews, of encouraging an “armed uprising.”

Meanwhile, the conservative Mehr news agency posted videos of protesters attacking a town hall in central Tehran, overturning a police car and burning the Iranian flag.

Iranian social media accounts posted videos of demonstrators tearing down regime billboards featuring Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s photo.

There was chaos earlier around the capital’s university as hundreds took to the streets, blocking traffic and shouting slogans against the regime. The semi-official Fars news agency said 70 students protested at Tehran University, throwing rocks at police. They reportedly chanted “Death to the dictator,” in reference to Khamenei.

Reuters reported that footage on social media showed riot police clubbing and arresting the demonstrators, and said protesters were also arrested elsewhere in Tehran.

But the authorities could also count on a show of strength, with hundreds of counter-demonstrators seizing control of the university entrance, chanting “Death to the seditionists.”

Annual rallies marking the defeat of the last major protest movement in 2009 had already been scheduled for Saturday morning and brought thousands of regime supporters to the streets across the country.

#Update76– After the death of four protesters in #Lorestan, young protesters are burning police and security forces’ bases in the city.

Chanting Death to(down with) Khamenei#IranProtests pic.twitter.com/NkqLQL4Sbp

— Raman Ghavami (@Raman_Ghavami) December 30, 2017

The protests began in the second city of Mashhad on Thursday as an attack on high living costs but quickly turned against the Islamic regime as a whole.

There were even chants in favor of the monarchy toppled by the Islamic revolution of 1979, while others criticized the regime for supporting the Palestinians and other regional movements rather than focusing on problems at home.

State news channel IRINN said it had been banned from covering the protests that spread to towns and cities including Qom and Kermanshah.

“The enemy wants once again to create a new plot and use social media and economic issues to foment a new sedition,” Ayatollah Mohsen Araki, a prominent cleric, told a crowd in Tehran, according to the conservative Fars news agency.

#Update72– In response to the death of four protesters-shot at by the #IRGC forces- protesters in #KhorramAbad burned the governor’s office. Governors in Iran are all have ties to the IRGC or security services.#IranProtests pic.twitter.com/jceF8pupjJ

— Raman Ghavami (@Raman_Ghavami) December 30, 2017

Other officials also pointed the blame outside Iran.

Iranian state-controlled media characterized the worst anti-regime protests in eight years, which began on Thursday, as masterminded by American, British, and Israeli spies seeking “to stir unrest” in the Islamic Republic.

US President Donald Trump tweeted later that Iran’s people wanted change and “oppressive regimes cannot endure forever.”
Iranian pro-regime protesters chant slogans at a rally in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, Dec. 30, 2017. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Iranian regime opponents held small-scale demonstrations Saturday in France and Germany to show support for the opposition groups who have held rallies inside their country in recent days.

Some 40 people demonstrated near the Iranian embassy in Paris to call for an end to Tehran’s “interference” in Syria and Lebanon, which Afchine Alavi, from the National Council of Iranian Resistance (CNRI), told AFP mirrored demands being made within Iran.

In Berlin, around 100 regime opponents gathered near the Iranian embassy to demand the immediate release of people arrested during three days of protests.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-bl...otests-spread/





Telegram is Shutting Down a Channel that Called for Violent Protests Against Iran’s Government

“There are lines one shouldn’t cross,” says the CEO of the popular messaging app.
Theodore Schleifer

The executives of Telegram, the widely used messaging app in Iran, are heeding calls from Iranian government officials to better police its users as rallies in support and protest of the government sweep the country.

Telegram is a major platform for information in Iran and counts more than 40 million users among the country’s 80 million people. And it has played an especially key role in this week’s anti-government protests against Ayatollah Khamenei. Counter-rallies supporting the government also emerged on Saturday.

But also on Saturday, the Iranian telecommunications minister, Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi, wrote a message on Twitter to Pavel Durov, the CEO and founder of Telegram.

@Durov: A Telegram channel is encouraging hateful conduct, use of Molotov cocktails, armed uprising, and social unrest. NOW is the time to stop such encouragements via Telegram.
— MJ Azari Jahromi (@azarijahromi) December 30, 2017

A few hours later, the Dubai-based Durov signaled that he would take the government’s request seriously.

Calls for violence are prohibited by the Telegram rules. If confirmed, we'll have to block such a channel, regardless of its size and political affiliation.
— Pavel Durov (@durov) December 30, 2017

And by later the same day, Durov had apparently confirmed the problem and announced that Telegram would suspend the channel.

A Telegram channel (amadnews) started to instruct their subscribers to use Molotov cocktails against police and got suspended due to our "no calls for violence" rule. Be careful – there are lines one shouldn't cross. Similar case from October – https://t.co/OWQFBLywjr
— Pavel Durov (@durov) December 30, 2017

Other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have similarly had to determine what type of political speech is permissible on their platforms and what violates their rules.

“For us, the line is pretty straightforward. Criticizing local authorities, challenging the status quo and engaging in political debate are OK,” Durov wrote in the linked blog post, originally published this October. “Meanwhile, promoting violence and calling for actions that can harm innocent people are not OK. This is a rule of thumb we’re always applying when moderating public channels.”
https://www.recode.net/2017/12/30/16...ts-pavel-durov





Congo Orders Internet and SMS Cut Ahead of Anti-Government Demonstrations

Democratic Republic of Congo’s government on Saturday ordered telecommunications providers to cut internet and SMS services across the country ahead of planned anti-government demonstrations.

Grassroots Catholic activists have called for marches in major cities on Sunday to demand that President Joseph Kabila commit to not changing the constitution to stand for a third term and release political prisoners.

Kabila was required by the constitution to step down in December last year when his mandate expired but an election to replace him has been repeatedly delayed and is now scheduled for December 2018.

Security forces killed dozens of protesters during anti-Kabila demonstrations last year, and deteriorating security has led to fears of renewed civil strife in Congo, where millions of people died in civil wars around the turn of the century.

“It is for reasons of state security,” telecommunications minister Emery Okundji told Reuters. “In response to violence that is being prepared ... the government has the duty to take all measures to protect Congolese lives.”

Okundji wrote a letter to telecoms providers ordering them to suspend internet and SMS services by 6 p.m. in the capital Kinshasa (1700 GMT) until further instruction, although some users still had access more than two hours later.

Congolese authorities have banned Sunday’s demonstrations, which have been backed by most opposition leaders, and warned that all gatherings of more than five people will be dispersed.

A series of appeals by opposition leaders for protests this year have been easily suppressed by security forces but the Catholic activists’ call has managed to unite nearly all of Congo’s fractious opposition.

Some 40 percent of Congo’s population is Catholic and the church enjoys rare credibility with the public, even though its leadership has not formally backed Sunday’s protests.

On Dec. 31 last year, Kabila’s ruling majority and opposition leaders struck a deal that allowed Kabila to stay in power beyond the end of his mandate but required that the election to replace him be held by the end of 2017.

The country’s electoral commission, however, later said that was not possible and scheduled the vote for Dec. 23, 2018.

Congo’s government also cut internet and SMS service during anti-government demonstrations in January 2015 and more recently ordered limits to certain social media access, one of more than a dozen African governments to have done so in the past two years.

Reporting By Aaron Ross and Fiston Mahamba, editing by David Evans
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKBN1EO0KV





Singapore Bans Film Focused on Indicted Palestinian Teen Activist
Fathin Ungku

Singapore has banned a film festival from screening a documentary later this week that features a teenage Palestinian female activist whose arrest last month has made her a symbol of resistance to Israeli military occupation in the West Bank.

Justifying the ban, authorities in the Southeast Asian city state said the film “Radiance of Resistance” was “skewed” and potentially divisive for Singapore’s multi-ethnic population.

The documentary, which looks at the Palestine-Israeli conflict through the eyes of 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi and another young female activist, lacked “counterbalance”, the Info-communications Media Development Authority of Singapore (IMDA) said on its website.

“The skewed narrative of the film is inflammatory and has the potential to cause disharmony amongst the different races and religions in Singapore,” the IMDA said.

The documentary was due to have been shown at the Singapore Palestinian Film Festival on Thursday.

It was screened at a number of festivals worldwide in 2017 and won Best Documentary at the Respect Human Rights Film Festival in Belfast, but has become even more topical following Tamimi’s arrest last month.

Tamimi was charged on Monday with counts of aggravated assault and will be tried in an Israeli military court. An adult found guilty of assaulting a soldier could be jailed for up to 10 years, but Tamimi is a minor so such an outcome is unlikely.

While Singapore’s authorities are known to keep a tight rein on public speech and the media, especially when it comes to matters related to race and religion, outright bans are more rare.

Adela Foo, the organizer of the Singapore festival, called the ban “understandable”, without elaborating.

“At the end of the day, the IMDA’s position is one to be respected,” the 23-year-old student told Reuters.

With a sizable Muslim minority and surrounded by Muslim majority neighbors where sympathy for the Palestinian cause runs high, Singapore maintains friendly diplomatic and military ties with Israel. But it has lined up with many other countries opposed to U.S. President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Around 15 percent of Singapore’s 3.3 million resident population aged 15 years and over identify as Muslim, recent government surveys show.

Reporting by Fathin Ungku; Editing by John Geddie & Simon Cameron-Moore
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-is...-idUKKBN1ES0P8





Germany Starts Enforcing Hate Speech Law
BBC

Germany is set to start enforcing a law that demands social media sites move quickly to remove hate speech, fake news and illegal material.

Sites that do not remove "obviously illegal" posts could face fines of up to 50m euro (£44.3m).

The law gives the networks 24 hours to act after they have been told about law-breaking material.

Social networks and media sites with more than two million members will fall under the law's provisions.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will be the law's main focus but it is also likely to be applied to Reddit, Tumblr and Russian social network VK. Other sites such as Vimeo and Flickr could also be caught up in its provisions.

Act faster

The Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz (NetzDG) law was passed at the end of June 2017 and came into force in early October.

The social networks were given until the end of 2017 to prepare themselves for the arrival of NetzDG.

The call to police social media sites more effectively arose after several high-profile cases in which fake news and racist material was being spread via the German arms of prominent social media firms.

Germany's justice ministry said it would make forms available on its site, which concerned citizens could use to report content that violates NetzDG or has not been taken down in time.

As well as forcing social media firms to act quickly, NetzDG requires them to put in place a comprehensive complaints structure so that posts can quickly be reported to staff.

Most material will have to be removed within 24 hours but networks will have a week to act on "complex cases".

Facebook has reportedly recruited several hundred staff in Germany to deal with reports about content that breaks the NetzDG and to do a better job of monitoring what people post.

The law has been controversial in Germany with some saying it could lead to inadvertent censorship or curtail free speech.

The German law is the most extreme example of efforts by governments and regulators to rein in social media firms. Many of them have come under much greater scrutiny this year as information about how they are used to spread propaganda and other sensitive material has come to light.

In the UK, politicians have been sharply critical of social sites, calling them a "disgrace" and saying they were "shamefully far" from doing a good job of policing hate speech and other offensive content.

The European Commission also published guidelines calling on social media sites to act faster to spot and remove hateful content.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42510868





Toutiao, a High-Flying Chinese App, Delivers News to Millions. China’s Censors Have Noticed.
Raymond Zhong

One of the world’s most valuable start-ups got that way by using artificial intelligence to satisfy Chinese internet users’ voracious appetite for news and entertainment. Every day, its smartphone app feeds 120 million people personalized streams of buzzy news stories, videos of dogs frolicking in snow, GIFs of traffic mishaps and listicles such as “The World’s Ugliest Celebrities.”

Now the company is discovering the risks involved, under China’s censorship regime, in giving the people exactly what they want.

The makers of the popular news app Jinri Toutiao unveiled moves this week to allay rising concerns from the authorities. Last week, the Beijing bureau of China’s top internet regulator accused Toutiao of “spreading pornographic and vulgar information” and “causing a negative impact on public opinion online,” and ordered that updates to several popular sections of the app be halted for 24 hours.

In response, the app’s parent company, Beijing Bytedance Technology, took down or temporarily suspended the accounts of more than 1,100 bloggers that it said had been publishing “low-quality content” on the app. It also replaced Toutiao’s “Society” section with a new section called “New Era,” which is heavy on state media coverage of government decisions.

The change was made, the company said, to “promote the spirit of the Communist Party congress,” referring to the gathering of top party leaders that took place in Beijing in October.

The episode points to the fine line that Toutiao’s creators must walk.

Despite China’s famously strict censorship, online news is a big business there. More than 610 million people in the country accessed some news on the internet in 2016, according to official statistics.

Toutiao, which says it uses complex algorithms to decide what its users see, combines China’s hunger for media content with its rising ambitions in artificial intelligence. Its daily user base of 120 million people is equivalent to more than one-third of the population of the United States.

Suan Lin, a 24-year-old private equity analyst in Shanghai, said that she normally has to search high and low online to find articles about the Chinese historical dramas she watches on television. But Toutiao delivers, she said.

“Once you’re on it,” she said, “you just can’t stop.”

In China, however, a strong position in media invites scrutiny from the government’s censorship apparatus. That scrutiny has become heightened over the past two years as the authorities have looked beyond the political to crack down on news it sees as degrading to society as a whole, which can include things as seemingly unsubversive as celebrity gossip.

In Toutiao’s case, one of the accounts that was suspended this week had posted a saucy video of a woman in a short skirt. It got 57,000 views. Another suspended account had recently put up a post titled “The World’s Ugliest Celebrities, Michael Jackson Is Ranked First, You Won’t Want to Eat After Reading This.”

“Once you have more people watching, then you want to be more cautious,” Wei-Ying Ma, who heads Toutiao’s artificial intelligence lab, told a conference in Beijing last month.

As Toutiao’s popularity has skyrocketed, Bytedance has become a darling of Silicon Valley investors such as Sequoia Capital. The company, which is presently valued at $20 billion, has been in talks with existing backers to raise new financing that would value the company at more than $30 billion, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity because the details are not public.

That price tag would make Bytedance among the most valuable privately held technology companies in the world, not just in China. Airbnb is said to be valued at around $30 billion. SpaceX, the rocket maker founded by Elon Musk, is valued at $21 billion.

Bytedance has big plans for overseas expansion, too. It recently spent between $800 million and $1 billion to purchase Musical.ly, a video-based social network popular with teenagers in the United States and Europe. At the Beijing conference last month, a top Bytedance executive, Liu Zhen, said the company hopes to be earning half its revenue from outside China within the next five years.

Jinri Toutiao, whose name means “today’s headlines” in Chinese and is pronounced JING-er TOE-tee-yow, aggregates content from various sources and looks much like Facebook’s newsfeed. But instead of displaying articles and videos based on what your friends have shared, the app does so based on what you have previously read and watched on the app.

If you click on articles about iPhones, then Toutiao will feed you more tech coverage. After you watch a few cooking videos, the app will fetch you more clips of people wrapping dumplings and braising chicken’s feet.

This approach has helped Toutiao thrive amid China’s heavily controlled environment for social media. Instead of policing the sharing activity of tens of millions of users, the company needs only to calibrate and adjust its centralized recommendation software.

But it also needs to make sure the app’s content does not cross the lines of censors. That is a huge task, particularly given that the overwhelming majority of content on Toutiao is produced by individual bloggers, not professional news organizations or other institutions. Ms. Liu said at last month’s conference in Beijing that 90 percent of the app’s content comes from blogger accounts. Toutiao has around 1.2 million content-producing accounts in total.

At the Beijing conference, Mr. Ma of the Toutiao A.I. Lab said that videos that are seen by only a handful of people do not get automatically screened. But once a video has attracted several thousand viewers, the system triggers a more sophisticated algorithm to check that the content is acceptable. Certain material also gets examined by humans as a final check.

Bytedance also takes more overt steps to stay on the right side of the authorities. Important updates from the government sometimes get pinned to the top of a user’s feed. That can lead to awkward juxtapositions — between, say, a state media write-up on President Xi Jinping’s recent decisions and a photo slide show on six women who are “so beautiful that rich businessmen immediately became attracted to them,” as the piece’s headline puts it.

Toutiao has come in for official rebuke before. Last June, the Beijing bureau of the Cyberspace Administration of China ordered around a dozen accounts on the app shut down, calling on Toutiao and other news portals to “actively promote socialist core values” and create a “healthy, uplifting environment for mainstream opinion” by eschewing dishy coverage of celebrity scandals.

In September, the website of the People’s Daily newspaper, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, published a series of opinion articles strongly criticizing A.I.-based news apps, including Toutiao, for spreading misinformation and superficial content.

Despite Toutiao’s popularity, some in China share that view. Yang Sun, a 26-year-old financial analyst in Shanghai, decried the app’s sensationalist headlines.

“It should absolutely be taken offline,” Ms. Yang said. “Totally deserves it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/b...ensorship.html





U.S. Government's Embattled Email Surveillance Program Proves Resilient
Evan Halper

Ever since Edward Snowden revealed the extent to which the U.S. government searches and reads the email of millions of people — and the complicity of telecom and tech companies in the effort — demands that the massive surveillance program be reined in have been intense across party lines.

Yet with the imminent expiration of the legal authority that allows law enforcement to monitor the email of foreigners and many Americans, lawmakers are no closer to overhauling the surveillance process than they were when Snowden, the now-fugitive former National Security Agency contractor, sought asylum in Russia four years ago.

Congress is paralyzed on the contentious national security challenge. Lawmakers appear most likely to throw their hands up and leave in place, for now, the machinery of online surveillance by extending the Dec. 31 expiration date of the existing authority, potentially for years.

Lawmakers have burned endless hours trying to find a fix aimed at easing public concerns that the program has grown evermore Orwellian. The tech industry worries that American government snooping will motivate clients to move their business abroad. Yet they can’t agree on a solution. Civil libertarians on the right and left who demand searches be limited and accompanied by warrants clash with national security hawks who say any such modifications would endanger Americans.

The pressure from law enforcement to keep the program unchanged has been strong.

“We need every tool and every authority we’ve got to keep people safe,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week. “I would implore the committee and the Congress not to begin rebuilding the wall that existed prior to 9/11.”

The Trump administration has signaled that even if Congress fails to act, an obscure legal ruling could allow it to keep the program in place for at least several months. Those negotiating the issue on Capitol Hill now anticipate Congress will just grant a two-year extension of the status quo. It would be tacked on to the budget bill Congress must pass this month to keep government open. Lawmakers would have little choice but to approve it.

A broad coalition of civil rights, internet freedom and free market advocacy groups is warning lawmakers that punting will have consequences.

“This is an issue that concerns people across party lines, and they want Congress to have this debate,” said Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel for the ACLU. “They don’t want something snuck through at the last minute without vetting.”

Even as action to change the program is stalling in Congress, hand-wringing over it isn’t.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), whose steadfast advocacy for the surveillance program had long put her at odds with Democratic activists back home, is among those shifting course. As a high-ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, the issue is prominent on Feinstein’s plate as she faces a primary battle.

She is now calling for warrants to be required before law enforcement can access the emails found through one of the most controversial and legally precarious types of searches, in which the NSA scrapes databases for messages of Americans who may have had incidental contact with — or merely mentioned — foreigners on watch lists.

Some experts read the legal authority to search and read emails of Americans, known as Section 702, to go even further. For example, if an American participates in or promotes an event abroad as benign as a climate change protest or an academic conference on international affairs, they could get swept into the surveillance, according to the interpretations.

The government doesn’t always limit its probes to issues of national security. The FBI might use “backdoor searches” in pursuit of a tax-evasion case, for example. The information may not be usable as evidence in a criminal complaint, but it can be used to help the FBI find other information that is.

“This improperly obtained information has been used in court against Americans charged with crimes that have nothing to do with national security,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough) at a congressional hearing last week. The FBI won’t say how often that happens, only that it is infrequent. It told the federal Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board in 2014 that it is “extremely unlikely” that an agent pursuing a case unrelated to national security would find their target’s email in the Section 702 database.

The assurance did not impress privacy advocates, who note that law enforcement searches of the 702 databases targeted at Americans have surged. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed in April that more than 30,000 such searches were conducted last year.

“This is not just an abstract legal concern,” said a recent letter to Congress from the advocacy groups coalition, which warned the intelligence report revealed a “strikingly high number” of searches of Americans.

The groups recently found themselves in an unexpected place: praising their longtime nemesis Feinstein, after she joined the push for warrant requirements in a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Feinstein argued that “Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their communications” and that the 4th Amendment requires the government to show probable cause before reading private email messages, according to a committee report made public.

But most of the committee was not persuaded, and Feinstein ultimately joined her colleagues in voting to advance a plan that reauthorizes the surveillance authority without the new warrant requirement. Other Democrats, including California Sen. Kamala Harris, voted against the bill.

The political odd couple of Sens. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, have found common ground in their distaste for warrantless searches. In the House, tea party activists have joined liberals in crusading to limit the opaque online intelligence gathering.

The full House has twice voted in recent years to restrict the type of data collection that concerns Feinstein. The House Judiciary Committee included such a restriction in the reauthorization measure it recently advanced. But the House Intelligence Committee left it out.

There are so many competing visions for how to reshape the program that none of them right now appear to have enough support to reach the desk of President Trump, who has signaled little interest in restricting the monitoring.

Trump’s own disputes with intelligence agencies have further complicated the debate.

Politically compromising and possibly illegal communications between Trump associates and Russian nationals intercepted by intelligence officials before Trump took office have moved the president’s allies to demand their own tweaks to Section 702. They would prohibit intelligence agencies from revealing to other government officials — or “unmasking” — the identities of Americans whose communications with foreigners are monitored through the surveillance program.

After the provision was tucked into what had been a bipartisan House Intelligence Committee plan to make some reforms to Section 702, Democrats abandoned the bill. The ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of Burbank, lamented that the provision has imperiled the measure, as Republicans don’t have enough support to pass it through the House on their own.

But they may ultimately have saved Schiff a lot of grief. The bill he was poised to vote for is not popular among activists influential in his district. They complain it does not go far enough in restricting warrantless surveillance.

Schiff is unmoved.

“If we put a warrant requirement on the front end for everything, there are a number of circumstances where we would want law enforcement and intelligence agencies to do searches, but they would lack probable cause,” Schiff said. “Some groups will not be satisfied with anything short of a blanket warrant requirement. I fear that could lead to a reluctance to conduct searches in national security cases, and a stove-piping of information.”
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-n...213-story.html





How Antivirus Software Can Be Turned Into a Tool for Spying
Nicole Perlroth

It has been a secret, long known to intelligence agencies but rarely to consumers, that security software can be a powerful spy tool.

Security software runs closest to the bare metal of a computer, with privileged access to nearly every program, application, web browser, email and file. There’s good reason for this: Security products are intended to evaluate everything that touches your machine in search of anything malicious, or even vaguely suspicious.

By downloading security software, consumers also run the risk that an untrustworthy antivirus maker — or hacker or spy with a foothold in its systems — could abuse that deep access to track customers’ every digital movement.

“In the battle against malicious code, antivirus products are a staple,” said Patrick Wardle, chief research officer at Digita Security, a security company. “Ironically, though, these products share many characteristics with the advanced cyberespionage collection implants they seek to detect.”

Mr. Wardle would know. A former hacker at the National Security Agency, Mr. Wardle recently succeeded in subverting antivirus software sold by Kaspersky Lab, turning it into a powerful search tool for classified documents.

Mr. Wardle’s curiosity was piqued by recent news that Russian spies had used Kaspersky antivirus products to siphon classified documents off the home computer of an N.S.A. developer, and may have played a critical role in broader Russian intelligence gathering.

“I wanted to know if this was a feasible attack mechanism,” Mr. Wardle said. “I didn’t want to get into the complex accusations. But from a technical point of view, if an antivirus maker wanted to, was coerced to, or was hacked or somehow subverted, could it create a signature to flag classified documents?”

That question has taken on renewed importance over the last three months in the wake of United States officials’ accusations that Kaspersky’s antivirus software was used for Russian intelligence gathering, an accusation that Kaspersky has rigorously denied.

Last month, Kaspersky Lab sued the Trump administration after a Department of Homeland Security directive banning its software from federal computer networks. Kaspersky claimed in an open letter that “D.H.S. has harmed Kaspersky Lab’s reputation and its commercial operations without any evidence of wrongdoing by the company.”

For years, intelligence agencies suspected that Kaspersky Lab’s security products provided a back door for Russian intelligence. A draft of a top-secret report leaked by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, described a top-secret, N.S.A. effort in 2008 that concluded that Kaspersky’s software collected sensitive information off customers’ machines.

The documents showed Kaspersky was not the N.S.A.’s only target. Future targets included nearly two dozen other foreign antivirus makers, including Checkpoint in Israel and Avast in the Czech Republic.

At the N.S.A., analysts were barred from using Kaspersky antivirus software because of the risk it would give the Kremlin broad access to their machines and data. But excluding N.S.A. headquarters at Fort Meade, Kaspersky still managed to secure contracts with nearly two dozen American government agencies over the last few years.

Last September, the Department of Homeland Security ordered all federal agencies to cease using Kaspersky products because of the threat that Kaspersky’s products could “provide access to files.”

A month later, The New York Times reported that the Homeland Security directive was based, in large part, on intelligence shared by Israeli intelligence officials who successfully hacked Kaspersky Lab in 2014. They looked on for months as Russian government hackers scanned computers belonging to Kaspersky customers around the world for top secret American government classified programs.

In at least one case, United States officials claimed Russian intelligence officials were successful in using Kaspersky’s software to pull classified documents off a home computer belonging to Nghia H. Pho, an N.S.A. developer who had installed Kaspersky’s antivirus software on his home computer. Mr. Pho pleaded guilty last year to bringing home classified documents and writings, and has said he brought the files home only in an attempt to expand his résumé.

Kaspersky Lab initially denied any knowledge or involvement with the document theft. But the company has since acknowledged finding N.S.A. hacking software on Mr. Pho’s computer and removing it, though the company said it had immediately destroyed the documents once it realized they were classified.

The company also said in November that in the course of investigating a surveillance operation known as TeamSpy in 2015, it had tweaked its antivirus program to scan files containing the word “secret.” The company said it had done this because the TeamSpy attackers were known to automatically scan for files that included the words “secret,” “pass” and “saidumlo,” the Georgian translation for the word secret.

Kaspersky continues to deny that it knew about the scanning for classified United States programs or allowed its antivirus products to be used by Russian intelligence. Eugene Kaspersky, the company’s chief executive, has said he would allow the United States government to inspect his company’s source code to allay distrust of its antivirus and cybersecurity products.

But Mr. Wardle discovered, in reverse-engineering Kaspersky antivirus software, that a simple review of its source code would do nothing to prove its products had not been used as a Russian intelligence-gathering tool.

Mr. Wardle found that Kaspersky’s antivirus software is incredibly complex. Unlike traditional antivirus software, which uses digital “signatures” to look for malicious code and patterns of activity, Kaspersky’s signatures are easily updated, can be automatically pushed out to certain clients, and contain code that can be tweaked to do things like automatically scanning for and siphoning off classified documents.

In short, Mr. Wardle found, “antivirus could be the ultimate cyberespionage spying tool.”

Mr. Wardle said it was relatively easy to use a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Windows software to manipulate the Kaspersky software. Because officials routinely classify top secret documents with the marking “TS/SCI,” which stands for “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information,” Mr. Wardle added a rule to Kaspersky’s antivirus program to flag any documents that contained the “TS/SCI” marker.

He then edited a document on his computer containing text from the Winnie the Pooh children’s book series to include the marking “TS/SCI” and waited to see whether Kaspersky’s tweaked antivirus product would catch it.

Sure enough, as soon as the Winnie the Pooh text was saved to his machine, Kaspersky’s antivirus software flagged and quarantined the document. When he added the same TS/SCI marker to another document containing the text “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” it, too, was flagged and quarantined by Kaspersky’s tweaked antivirus program.

“Not a whole lot of surprise that this worked,” Mr. Wardle said, “but still neat to confirm that an antivirus product can be trivially, yet surreptitiously, used to detect classified documents.”

The next question was: What happens to these files once they are flagged? Mr. Wardle stopped short of hacking into Kaspersky’s cloud servers, where suspicious files are routinely uploaded.

However, he noted that antivirus customers, including Kaspersky’s, agreed by default to allow security vendors to send anything from their machine back to vendors’ servers for further investigation.

There are legitimate reasons for this: By uploading these items to Kaspersky’s cloud, security analysts can evaluate whether they pose a threat, and update their signatures as a result.

Kaspersky Lab said Mr. Wardle’s research did not reflect how the company’s software works.

“It is impossible for Kaspersky Lab to deliver a specific signature or update to only one user in a secret, targeted way because all signatures are always openly available to all our users; and updates are digitally signed, further making it impossible to fake an update,” the company said in a statement.

The company added that it applied the same security standards and maintained the same levels of access as other security vendors, and reiterated that it was willing to make its source code, threat detection rules and software updates available for audit by independent experts.

But, as Mr. Wardle’s research demonstrated, an untrustworthy vendor, or hacker or spy with access to that vendor’s systems, can abuse its deep access to turn antivirus software into a dynamic search tool, not unlike Google, to scan customers’ computers for documents that contain certain keywords.

“And no one would ever know,” he added. “It’s the perfect cybercrime.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/t...antivirus.html





macOS Exploit Published on the Last Day of 2017
Catalin Cimpanu

On the last day of 2017, a security researcher going online by the pseudonym of Siguza published details about a macOS vulnerability affecting all Mac operating system versions released since 2002, and possibly earlier.

Siguza did not notify Apple in advance, so at the time of writing, there is no fix for this flaw.

Despite the doom and gloom, the vulnerability is only a local privilege escalation (LPE) flaw that can only be exploited with local access to a computer or after an attacker has already got a foothold on a machine. The vulnerability grants root access to an attacker.

Vulnerability affects IOHIDFamily macOS kernel driver

The issue affects the IOHIDFamily macOS kernel driver, a component that handles various types of user interactions.

Siguza said he read about various flaws in this component and took a look at it to find new ways to compromise iOS, Apple's mobile operating system, where IOHIDFamily is also deployed. The expert says he found the LPE flaw in the IOHIDFamily code specific to macOS versions only.

While Siguza did not contact Apple, he did write a very detailed report on how someone could exploit the flaw. Nonetheless, Siguza clarified his position in a tweet published on January 1.

"My primary goal was to get the write-up out for people to read. I wouldn't sell to blackhats because I don't wanna help their cause. I would've submitted to Apple if their bug bounty included macOS, or if the vuln was remotely exploitable," he said.

According to Siguza, the flaw is easy to exploit because it triggers on logout operations. This means attackers can get root access on a machine whenever the user logs off, reboots, or shuts down his computer, all very common operations that take place on a daily basis, meaning there's no need for social engineering to exploit the flaw.

Update probably not coming

Bleeping Computer has reached out to Apple for comment on the vulnerability. Taking into account the holiday season, Apple will most likely not release an update in the following days.

In addition, LPE flaws are not considered critical, and it's likely that Apple won't release an emergency update to fix the issue, but address it as part of its next monthly security update train.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...t-day-of-2017/





Ad Targeters are Pulling Data From Your Browser’s Password Manager

New research shows an alarming new way to track web users
Russell Brandom

Nearly every web browser now comes with a password manager tool, a lightweight version of the same service offered by plugins like LastPass and 1Password. But according to new research from Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, those same managers are being exploited as a way to track users from site to site.

The researchers examined two different scripts — AdThink and OnAudience — both of are designed to get identifiable information out of browser-based password managers. The scripts work by injecting invisible login forms in the background of the webpage and scooping up whatever the browsers autofill into the available slots. That information can then be used as a persistent ID to track users from page to page, a potentially valuable tool in targeting advertising.

The plugins focus largely on the usernames, but according to the researchers, there’s no technical measure to stop scripts from collecting passwords the same way. The only robust fix would be to change how password managers work, requiring more explicit approval before submitting information. “It won't be easy to fix, but it's worth doing,” says Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer science professor who worked on the project.

In the case of AdThink, that information was also being funneled back to Axciom, a massive consumer data broker, presumably to be added to the growing file on whoever was visiting the site. AudienceInsights, which operates AdThink, lets users see their unique user ID for the system and attempt to opt out, although it’s unclear how robust that opt-out truly is. Audience Insights did not respond to a request for comment.

For Narayanan, most of the blame goes to the websites who choose to run scripts like AdThink, often without realizing how invasive they truly are. “We'd like to see publishers exercise better control over third parties on their sites,” Narayanan says. “These problems arise partly because website operators have been lax in allowing third-party scripts on their sites without understanding the implications.”
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/30/...ceton-research





Kernel-Memory-Leaking Intel Processor Design Flaw Forces Linux, Windows Redesign

Performance hits loom, other OSes need fixes
John Leyden and Chris Williams

Updated A fundamental design flaw in Intel's processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.

Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernel's virtual memory system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday: these changes were seeded to beta testers running fast-ring Windows Insider builds in November and December.

Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model. More recent Intel chips have features – such as PCID – to reduce the performance hit. Your mileage may vary.

PostgreSQL SELECT 1 with the KPTI workaround for Intel CPU vulnerability https://t.co/N9gSvML2Fo

Best case: 17% slowdown
Worst case: 23%
— The Register (@TheRegister) January 2, 2018

Similar operating systems, such as Apple's 64-bit macOS, will also need to be updated – the flaw is in the Intel x86-64 hardware, and it appears a microcode update can't address it. It has to be fixed in software at the OS level, or go buy a new processor without the design blunder.

Details of the vulnerability within Intel's silicon are under wraps: an embargo on the specifics is due to lift early this month, perhaps in time for Microsoft's Patch Tuesday next week. Indeed, patches for the Linux kernel are available for all to see but comments in the source code have been redacted to obfuscate the issue.

However, some details of the flaw have surfaced, and so this is what we know.

Impact

It is understood the bug is present in modern Intel processors produced in the past decade. It allows normal user programs – from database applications to JavaScript in web browsers – to discern to some extent the layout or contents of protected kernel memory areas.

The fix is to separate the kernel's memory completely from user processes using what's called Kernel Page Table Isolation, or KPTI. At one point, Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines, aka FUCKWIT, was mulled by the Linux kernel team, giving you an idea of how annoying this has been for the developers.

Whenever a running program needs to do anything useful – such as write to a file or open a network connection – it has to temporarily hand control of the processor to the kernel to carry out the job. To make the transition from user mode to kernel mode and back to user mode as fast and efficient as possible, the kernel is present in all processes' virtual memory address spaces, although it is invisible to these programs. When the kernel is needed, the program makes a system call, the processor switches to kernel mode and enters the kernel. When it is done, the CPU is told to switch back to user mode, and reenter the process. While in user mode, the kernel's code and data remains out of sight but present in the process's page tables.

Think of the kernel as God sitting on a cloud, looking down on Earth. It's there, and no normal being can see it, yet they can pray to it.

These KPTI patches move the kernel into a completely separate address space, so it's not just invisible to a running process, it's not even there at all. Really, this shouldn't be needed, but clearly there is a flaw in Intel's silicon that allows kernel access protections to be bypassed in some way.

The downside to this separation is that it is relatively expensive, time wise, to keep switching between two separate address spaces for every system call and for every interrupt from the hardware. These context switches do not happen instantly, and they force the processor to dump cached data and reload information from memory. This increases the kernel's overhead, and slows down the computer.

Your Intel-powered machine will run slower as a result.

How can this security hole be abused?

At best, the vulnerability could be leveraged by malware and hackers to more easily exploit other security bugs.

At worst, the hole could be abused by programs and logged-in users to read the contents of the kernel's memory. Suffice to say, this is not great. The kernel's memory space is hidden from user processes and programs because it may contain all sorts of secrets, such as passwords, login keys, files cached from disk, and so on. Imagine a piece of JavaScript running in a browser, or malicious software running on a shared public cloud server, able to sniff sensitive kernel-protected data.

Specifically, in terms of the best-case scenario, it is possible the bug could be abused to defeat KASLR: kernel address space layout randomization. This is a defense mechanism used by various operating systems to place components of the kernel in randomized locations in virtual memory. This mechanism can thwart attempts to abuse other bugs within the kernel: typically, exploit code – particularly return-oriented programming exploits – relies on reusing computer instructions in known locations in memory.

If you randomize the placing of the kernel's code in memory, exploits can't find the internal gadgets they need to fully compromise a system. The processor flaw could be potentially exploited to figure out where in memory the kernel has positioned its data and code, hence the flurry of software patching.

However, it may be that the vulnerability in Intel's chips is worse than the above mitigation bypass. In an email to the Linux kernel mailing list over Christmas, AMD said it is not affected. The wording of that message, though, rather gives the game away as to what the underlying cockup is:

AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernel page table isolation feature protects against. The AMD microarchitecture does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode when that access would result in a page fault.

A key word here is "speculative." Modern processors, like Intel's, perform speculative execution. In order to keep their internal pipelines primed with instructions to obey, the CPU cores try their best to guess what code is going to be run next, fetch it, and execute it.

It appears, from what AMD software engineer Tom Lendacky was suggesting above, that Intel's CPUs speculatively execute code potentially without performing security checks. It seems it may be possible to craft software in such a way that the processor starts executing an instruction that would normally be blocked – such as reading kernel memory from user mode – and completes that instruction before the privilege level check occurs.

That would allow ring-3-level user code to read ring-0-level kernel data. And that is not good.

The specifics of the vulnerability have yet to be confirmed, but consider this: the changes to Linux and Windows are significant and are being pushed out at high speed. That suggests it's more serious than a KASLR bypass.

Also, the updates to separate kernel and user address spaces on Linux are based on a set of fixes dubbed the KAISER patches, which were created by eggheads at Graz University of Technology in Austria. These boffins discovered [PDF] it was possible to defeat KASLR by extracting memory layout information from the kernel in a side-channel attack on the CPU's virtual memory system. The team proposed splitting kernel and user spaces to prevent this information leak, and their research sparked this round of patching.

Their work was reviewed by Anders Fogh, who wrote this interesting blog post in July. That article described his attempts to read kernel memory from user mode by abusing speculative execution. Although Fogh was unable to come up with any working proof-of-concept code, he noted:

My results demonstrate that speculative execution does indeed continue despite violations of the isolation between kernel mode and user mode.

It appears the KAISER work is related to Fogh's research, and as well as developing a practical means to break KASLR by abusing virtual memory layouts, the team may have somehow proved Fogh right – that speculative execution on Intel x86 chips can be exploited to access kernel memory.

Shared systems

The bug will impact big-name cloud computing environments including Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine, said a software developer blogging as Python Sweetness in this heavily shared and tweeted article on Monday:

There is presently an embargoed security bug impacting apparently all contemporary [Intel] CPU architectures that implement virtual memory, requiring hardware changes to fully resolve. Urgent development of a software mitigation is being done in the open and recently landed in the Linux kernel, and a similar mitigation began appearing in NT kernels in November. In the worst case the software fix causes huge slowdowns in typical workloads.

There are hints the attack impacts common virtualisation environments including Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine...

Microsoft's Azure cloud – which runs a lot of Linux as well as Windows – will undergo maintenance and reboots on January 10, presumably to roll out the above fixes.

Amazon Web Services also warned customers via email to expect a major security update to land on Friday this week, without going into details.

There were rumors of a severe hypervisor bug – possibly in Xen – doing the rounds at the end of 2017. It may be that this hardware flaw is that rumored bug: that hypervisors can be attacked via this kernel memory access cockup, and thus need to be patched, forcing a mass restart of guest virtual machines.

A spokesperson for Intel was not available for comment.


Updated to add

The Intel processor flaw is real. A PhD student at the systems and network security group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has developed a proof-of-concept program that exploits the Chipzilla flaw to read kernel memory from user mode:

Bingo! #kpti #intelbug pic.twitter.com/Dml9g8oywk
— brainsmoke (@brainsmoke) January 3, 2018

The Register has also seen proof-of-concept exploit code that leaks a tiny amount of kernel memory to user processes.

Finally, macOS has been patched to counter the chip design blunder since version 10.13.2, according to operating system kernel expert Alex Ionescu. And it appears 64-bit ARM Linux kernels will also get a set of KAISER patches, completely splitting the kernel and user spaces, to block attempts to defeat KASLR. We'll be following up this week.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01...u_design_flaw/





Researchers Discover Two Major Flaws in the World’s Computers
Cade Metz and Nicole Perlroth

Computer security experts have discovered two major security flaws in the microprocessors inside nearly all of the world’s computers.

The two problems, called Meltdown and Spectre, could allow hackers to steal the entire memory contents of computers, including mobile devices, personal computers and servers running in so-called cloud computer networks.

There is no easy fix for Spectre, which could require redesigning the processors, according to researchers. As for Meltdown, the software patch needed to fix the issue could slow down computers by as much as 30 percent — an ugly situation for people used to fast downloads from their favorite online services.

“What actually happens with these flaws is different and what you do about them is different,” said Paul Kocher, a researcher who was an integral member of a team of researchers at big tech companies like Google and Rambus and in academia that discovered the flaws.

Meltdown is a particular problem for the cloud computing services run by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. By Wednesday evening, Google and Microsoft said they had updated their systems to deal with the flaw.
Continue reading the main story

Amazon told customers of its Amazon Web Services cloud service that the vulnerability “has existed for more than 20 years in modern processor architectures.” It said that it had already protected nearly all instances of A.W.S. and that customers must update their own software running atop the service as well.

To take advantage of Meltdown, hackers could rent space on a cloud service, just like any other business customer. Once they were on the service, the flaw would allow them to grab information like passwords from other customers.

That is a major threat to the way cloud-computing systems operate. Cloud services often share machines among many customers — and it is uncommon for, say, a single server to be dedicated to a single customer. Though security tools and protocols are intended to separate customers’ data, the recently discovered chip flaws would allow bad actors to circumvent these protections.

The personal computers used by consumers are also vulnerable, but hackers would have to first find a way to run software on a personal computer before they could gain access to information elsewhere on the machine. There are various ways that could happen: Attackers could fool consumers into downloading software in an email, from an app store or visiting an infected website.

According to the researchers, the Meltdown flaw affects virtually every microprocessor made by Intel, which makes chips used in more than 90 percent of the computer servers that underpin the internet and private business operations.

Customers of Microsoft, the maker of the Windows operating system, will need to install an update from the company to fix the problem. The worldwide community of coders that oversees the open-source Linux operating system, which runs about 30 percent of computer servers worldwide, has already posted a patch for that operating system. Apple had a partial fix for the problem and is expected to have an additional update.

The software patches could slow the performance of affected machines by 20 to 30 percent, said Andres Freund, an independent software developer who has tested the new Linux code. The researchers who discovered the flaws voiced similar concerns.

This could become a significant issue for any business running websites and other software through cloud systems.

There is no evidence that hackers have taken advantage of the vulnerability — at least not yet. But once a security problem becomes public, computer users take a big risk if they do not install a patch to fix the issue. A so-called ransomware attack that hit computers around the world last year took advantage of machines that had not received a patch for a flaw in Windows software.

The other flaw, Spectre, affects most processors now in use, though the researchers believe this flaw is more difficult to exploit. There is no known fix for it, and it is not clear what chip makers like Intel will do to address the problem.

It is not certain what the disclosure of the chip issues will do to Intel’s business, and on Wednesday, the Silicon Valley giant played down the problem.

“Intel and other technology companies have been made aware of new security research describing software analysis methods that, when used for malicious purposes, have the potential to improperly gather sensitive data from computing devices that are operating as designed,” the company said in a statement. “Intel believes these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data.”

The researchers who discovered the flaws notified various affected companies. And as is common practice when such problems are identified, they tried to keep the news from the public so hackers could not take advantage of the flaws before they were fixed.
But on Tuesday, news of the Meltdown flaw began to leak through various news websites, including The Register, a science and technology site based in Britain. So the researchers released papers describing the flaws on Wednesday, much earlier than they had planned.

For now, computer security experts are using a patch, called Kaiser, that was originally discovered by researchers at the Graz University of Technology in Austria to respond to a separate issue last year.

Spectre will be much more difficult to deal with than issuing a software patch.

The Meltdown flaw is specific to Intel, but Spectre is a flaw in design that has been used by many processor manufacturers for decades. It affects virtually all microprocessors on the market, including chips made by AMD that share Intel’s design and the many chips based on designs from ARM in Britain.

Spectre is a problem in the fundamental way processors are designed, and the threat from Spectre is “going to live with us for decades,” said Mr. Kocher, the president and chief scientist at Cryptography Research, a division of Rambus.

“Whereas Meltdown is an urgent crisis, Spectre affects virtually all fast microprocessors,” Mr. Kocher said. An emphasis on speed while designing new chips has left them vulnerable to security issues, he said.

“We’ve really screwed up,” Mr. Kocher said. “There’s been this desire from the industry to be as fast as possible and secure at the same time. Spectre shows that you cannot have both.”

The Meltdown flaw was discovered by Jann Horn, a security analyst at a Google-run security research group called Google Project Zero, last June. Mr. Horn was the first to alert Intel. The chip giant then heard from other researchers who had also discovered the flaw, including Werner Haas and Thomas Prescher, at Cyberus Technology; and Daniel Gruss, Moritz Lipp, Stefan Mangard and Michael Schwarz at the Graz University of Technology.

The researchers had been working through the Christmas holiday on a patch, and coordinating with companies like Microsoft and Amazon to roll out the fix.

The second flaw, Spectre, was also discovered by Mr. Horn at Google and separately by Mr. Kocher, in coordination with Mike Hamburg at Rambus, Mr. Lipp at Graz University and Yuval Yarom at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

A fix may not be available for Spectre until a new generation of chips hit the market.

“This will be a festering problem over hardware life cycles. It’s not going to change tomorrow or the day after,” Mr. Kocher said. “It’s going to take a while.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/b...ter-flaws.html





Take it from the Insiders: Silicon Valley is Eating Your Soul

Former Google and Facebook executives are sounding the alarm about the pervasive power of tech. Will we listen?
John Harris

One source of angst came close to being 2017’s signature subject: how the internet and the tiny handful of companies that dominate it are affecting both individual minds and the present and future of the planet. The old idea of the online world as a burgeoning utopia looks to have peaked around the time of the Arab spring, and is in retreat.

If you want a sense of how much has changed, picture the president of the US tweeting his latest provocation in the small hours, and consider an array of words and phrases now freighted with meaning: Russia, bots, troll farms, online abuse, fake news, dark money.

Another sign of how much things have shifted is a volte-face by Silicon Valley’s most powerful man. Barely more than a year ago the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, seemed still to be rejoicing in his company’s imperial phase, blithely dismissing the idea that fabricated news carried by his platform had affected the outcome of the 2016 US election as a “pretty crazy idea”. Now scarcely a week goes by without some Facebook pronouncement or other, either updating the wider world about its latest quest to put its operations beyond criticism or assuring us that its belief in an eternally upbeat, fuzzily liberal ethos is as fervent as ever.

The company has reached a fascinating point in its evolution; it is as replete with importance and interest as any political party. Facebook is at once massively powerful and also suddenly defensive. Its deeply questionable tax affairs are being altered; 1,000 new employees have been hired to monitor its advertising. At the same time, it still seems unable to provide any answers to worries about its effects on the world beyond more and more Facebook. A pre-Christmas statement claimed that although “passive” use of social media could harm users, “actively interacting with people” online was linked not just to “improvements in wellbeing”, but to “joy”. In short, if Facebook does your head in, the solution is apparently not to switch off, but more

While Zuckerberg and his colleagues do ethical somersaults, there is rising noise from a group of people who made headlines towards the year’s end: the former insiders at tech giants who now loudly worry about what their innovations are doing to us. The former Facebook president Sean Parker warned in November that its platform “literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

At around the same time, the former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya held a public interview at Stanford University in which he did not exactly mince his words. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” he said. “No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth … So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion.” (Strangely, around a week later he seemed to recant, claiming he had only meant to “start an important conversation”, and that Facebook was still a company he “loved”.)

Then there is Tristan Harris, a former high-up at Google who is now hailed as “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”. Under the banner of a self-styled “movement” called Time Well Spent, he and his allies are urging software developers to tone down the compulsive elements of their inventions, and the millions who find themselves hooked to change their behaviour.

What they are up against, meanwhile, is apparently personified by Nir Eyal, a Stanford lecturer and tech consultant who could be a character from the brilliant HBO sitcom Silicon Valley. In 2013 he published Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products. His inspiration for the book is the behaviourist psychology pioneered by BF Skinner. Among his pearls of wisdom is one both simple and chilling: “For new behaviours to really take hold, they must occur often.” But on close inspection, even he sounds somewhat ambivalent: last April, at something called the Habit Summit, he told his audience that at home he had installed a device that cut off the internet at a set time every day.

Good for him. The reality for millions of other people is a constant experience that all but buries the online world’s liberating possibilities in a mess of alerts, likes, messages, retweets and internet use so pathologically needy and frantic that it inevitably makes far too many people vulnerable to pernicious nonsense and real dangers.

Thanks to manipulative ephemera, WhatsApp users anxiously await the ticks that confirm whether a message has been read by a receiver; and, a turbocharged version of the addictive dots that flash on an iPhone when a friend is replying to you, Snapchat now alerts its users when a friend starts typing a message to them. And we all know what lies around the corner: a world of Sensurround virtual reality, and an internet wired into just about every object we interact with. As the repentant Facebookers say: if we’re not careful, we will soon be at risk of being locked into mindless behavioural loops, craving distraction even from other distractions.

There is a possible way out of this, of course. It resides not in some luddite fantasy of an army of people carrying old Nokia phones and writing each other letters, but the possibility of a culture that actually embraces the idea of navigating the internet with a discriminating sensibility and an emphasis on basic moderation. We now know – don’t we? – that the person who begins most social encounters by putting their phone on the table is either an addict or an idiot.

There is also a mounting understanding that one of the single most important aspects of modern parenting is to be all too aware of how much social media can mess with people’s minds, and to limit our children’s screen time. This, after all, is what Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did, as evidenced by one of the latter’s most pithy statements. In 2010 he was asked about his children’s opinion of the iPad. “They haven’t used it,” he said. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

Two billion people actively use Facebook; at least 3.5 billion are now reckoned to be online. Their shared habits, compulsions and susceptibilities will clearly have a huge influence on the world’s progress, or lack of it. So we ought to listen to Tristan Harris and his campaign. “Religions and governments don’t have that much influence over people’s daily thoughts,” he recently told Wired magazine. “But we have three technology companies” – he meant Facebook, Google and Apple – “who have this system that frankly they don’t even have control over … Right now, 2 billion people’s minds are already jacked in to this automated system, and it’s steering people’s thoughts toward either personalised paid advertising or misinformation or conspiracy theories. And it’s all automated; the owners of the system can’t possibly monitor everything that’s going on, and they can’t control it.”

And then came the kicker. “This isn’t some kind of philosophical conversation. This is an urgent concern happening right now.” Amid an ocean of corporate sophistry and doublethink, those words have the distinct ring of truth.
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-facebook-tech





The Upside to America’s Infatuation with Gadgets
Nathaniel Bullard and Adam Minter

Americans have never been more addicted to devices. Thanks to the mobile revolution initiated by the iPhone, the U.S. alone is home to 238 million mobile phones and 140 million tablets that are rarely shut down. And their numbers are growing, thanks to a perpetual upgrade cycle and demand for new features. For environmentalists, it’s a looming electronic nightmare in which America’s gadget obsession consumes increasingly higher volumes of the world’s limited resources.

Thankfully, the data shows that’s not happening. As Americans shift from big devices such as traditional tube televisions and personal computers to smaller mobile devices, electricity and resource consumption is declining rapidly. America’s gadget habit has never been greener.

First, those electronics, courtesy of a new study for the Consumer Technology Association: Despite the hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets now in U.S. pockets and on bedside tables, there are far fewer electronic devices around now than there were four years ago.

This finding will probably surprise many readers, but think, for a moment, about the devices each new smartphone replaces. Tablets ate your secondary TV, for instance, and with it the set-top box that accompanied it. Tablets also ate your laptop computer (after the laptop ate your desktop), and smartphones eliminate all of those devices together.

The result for energy is striking. The reduction in total devices in use since their peak in 2013 pales in comparison to the decrease in actual electricity consumption per device since 2006. And since 2010, there has been a 25 percent reduction in total energy consumption by those electronics.

For all of their ubiquity -- and their contribution (whatever your opinion on that contribution) to contemporary life — smartphones and tablets use very little electricity, especially compared to earlier generations of technology.

For example, Americans’ 284 million TVs use 35 times more electricity than their 238 million smartphones. For that matter, the remaining 104 million cordless phones in the U.S. use more electricity than U.S. smartphones — and the remaining 113 million clock radios use more electricity than 140 million tablets.

Finally, the 284 million TVs in use in American households is down from 353 million in 2010. Smartphones and tablets really are eating everything -- and replacing them with something many times more energy-efficient.

Electricity isn’t the only thing gadgets are consuming in smaller amounts. The shift away from heavy, traditional tube TVs to lightweight flatscreens, phones and tablets has resulted in a substantial decrease in the amount of raw materials going into electronics. According to recent research led by Callie Babbitt, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, the total weight of consumer electronics sold in the U.S. every year peaked in 2000 and had declined to 1993 levels by 2015 (the last year for which data was available) — despite the fact that Americans consumed 350 million more devices in 2015.

Leaded glass, a heavy and difficult-to-recycle component of traditional cathode-ray tube TVs, was the biggest weight loss. But since the late 2000s, steel, aluminum and copper have also seen declines. In 1990, tube TVs and computer monitors made up more than three-quarters of all U.S. household electronic inflows by weight — and were more than 50 percent in 2006. By 2008, they had nearly vanished.

A smaller footprint at the electronics store makes for a smaller footprint in the waste stream, and since 2015, America’s e-waste volume has been in decline. This isn’t just a matter of lighter gadgets. Every year, 120 million used smartphones are sold, creating a global market worth at least $17 billion. Previous generations of used electronics also traded globally but never in such numbers.

It’s one reason that, in 2017, small gadgets have comprised only 8.7 percent of what the United Nations defines as e-waste — refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners and other large devices make up the rest). Despite massive uptake of gadgets worldwide, the global weight of discarded small equipment like smartphones will only grow 2 percent annually through 2020.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t more work to be done. Today’s small gadgets may use less power and materials than previous generations did, but their size makes them difficult to repair or recycle. That shortens their life span — a bad outcome for consumers and the environment alike. But manufacturers are beginning to address these problems, too. Companies such as HP Inc. and Dell Inc. are leading the way with designs that extend the life span of devices and enable recyclers to extract materials affordably. That’s good news for consumers, and even better news for the environment.
http://www.ctpost.com/opinion/articl...o-12463629.php





Eelo: A Google-Less Android Alternative Emerges

Linux pioneer Gaël Duval is working on an easy-to-use, Google-free, pro-privacy Android clone for your smartphone.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Dislike Apple's iPhone proprietary software with its battery malware? Tired of having Google look over your shoulder on Android? You're not alone. Gaël Duval, creator of the popular early Linux distribution, Mandrake Linux, is sick and tired of both, so he's building his own Android-based mobile operating system: eelo.

Duval thinks, "Apple, Google, Facebook etc., business models are harmful for our economical and social environments." In particular, he wants his privacy back. Stock Android depends on Google services, which means he doesn't control his privacy. So, eelo is being designed with open-source software to preserve privacy while still using online services and adding a more attractive interface.

Unlike the failed CyanogenMod, Duval has no intention of turning eelo into a business. "I want eelo to be a non-profit project 'in the public interest,'" he said.

Before turning his talents to building eelo, Duval looked at alternatives. Duval said [sic], "I looked at Firefox OS. But, as I want eelo to be for 'for Mum and Dad.'"

Duval, however, will not try create a Linux-based smartphone operating system as others have attempted. That's because, frankly, building a complete operating system on smartphone hardware isn't easy. Just ask Mozilla, Canonical, or even Microsoft. Instead, Duval is launching eelo from the existing Android clone LineageOS.

LineageOS is a CyanogenMod fork. But, Duval explained, it's not enough for his purposes: "The core of AOSP [Android Open Source Project]/LineageOS is usable, and performing well, but it's not good enough for my needs: the design is not very attractive and there are tons of micro-details that can be showstoppers for a regular user. Also, unless you are a geek, LineageOS is not realistically usable if you don't want Google inside."

Duval admits he's no Android expert. "The bad news is that I'm new to Android development and I don't consider myself a great developer," he said. Fortunately, "The good news is that I have found a very talented full-stack developer who is interested in the project. We have agreed, as a first collaboration, to release a new launcher, new notification system and new 'control center.'"

After several weeks of development, eelo is running as a beta.

The real challenge isn't building a new front-end. It's removing Google Play Store, Google Play Services, and Google Services. That's not easy. While Android developers don't have to use any of them, they are very useful.

For installing programs, Duval is turning to the alternative Android program repositories F-Droid and APKPure. Ideally, he wants an an "eelo store," which would deliver both official free applications like APKPure and open-source applications such as offered in F-Droid.

To replace Google Services, Duval plans on using MicroG. This is an open-source implementation of Google's proprietary Android user space apps and libraries. To deal with programs that use Google's SafetyNet Attestation Application Programming Interface (API) -- an API that checks to make sure the application runs in a Google Android compliant environment -- Duval thinks eelo will probably use Magisk Manager. This is a program that enables Android applications to run on smartphones, such as rooted systems, that would normally block them.

For search, the plan is to offer privacy-enabled DuckDuckGo and the new privacy oriented search engine Qwant. You'll also be able to pick your own search engine, since as Duval admits, "in some cases, it [Google] is still offering the best results."

Then, there are all the invisible internet services most people never think about, such as Domain Name System (DNS), which can also be used to track you. To deal with this, by default, eelo will use the Quad 9 DNS. The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA)'s Quad 9 both preserves privacy while blocking access to known malicious sites.

Low-level proprietary smartphone hardware drivers remain a problem -- but, short of building an eelo phone from the circuits up, that's beyond eelo's current scope.

It's still early days for eelo, and Duval is welcoming support both on eelo's KickStarter page, where the current goal is to raise $120,000, and by talking directly to him via e-mail at gael@eelo.io or by following him on Twitter or Mastodon.

Can it work? While alternatives to Android and iOS have failed more often than not, Android forks have had more success. With people increasingly desiring more privacy, I think eelo has an excellent chance of becoming a viable niche operating system.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/eelo-a-...ative-emerges/





Target Bharat: Indian Phone Vendors to Release $30 Android Oreo Go Smartphones this Month On
Sunny Sen

Search giant Google has partnered with Indian phone vendors such as Micromax, Intex, Lava, Karbonn, among others, to launch cheap smartphones based on its Android Oreo (Go edition) operating system, say multiple sources.

Micromax is expected to launch its phone based on Android Oreo Go at around Rs 2,000 apiece ($31) later in January with other vendors to follow in the weeks after. The average price of a 4G smartphone today is around $100 (nearly Rs 6,400).

The Micromax launch “might be on Republic Day or around it,” said a source close to the company, not authorised to comment on the subject.

Phones from other Indian handset makers will follow. “We expect Android Oreo (Go edition) devices to launch in early 2018,” said a Google company official, asking to stay anonymous.

Android Oreo is the eighth version of the mobile phone OS. The Go variant is aimed at phones with memory less than 1 GB and can be configured for use with a handful of Go versions of Google’s main Google app, maps, YouTube, email, assistant and other apps. In presenting a lightweight option to phone makers, Google enables them to cut down on not just memory but also processor capacity — helping them to come up with cheaper smartphones.

The Google official added, “As more users come online for the first time, the number of entry-level Android devices available has been rising quickly, and is expected to make up a much larger percentage of all smartphone sales going forward. Given the acceleration, we thought it is time to take our investment to the next level.”

Xiaomi on Monday announced the rollout of the Android Oreo update on its Mi A1 phone making it the first sub-Rs 15,000 phone to have the OS.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, during his India visit a year ago, had said that the cost of entry-level smartphones should come down to $30 (Rs 1915). For a country like India, $30 phones can “unlock” the smartphone market, he said. “The right price point for smartphones in India is $30, and pursuing high-quality smartphones at the price point will unlock it even more. Hopefully, we can all push and make $30 smartphones happen,” Pichai said in different interviews.

Ray of hope for Indian vendors

The Oreo Go OS is being first adopted by Indian handset makers who have traditionally targeted the feature phone market. A senior executive with an Indian handset brand said that Oreo Go offers a chance to Indian vendors to bounce back after the Chinese took over the phone sales league tables here. Data from Massachusetts-headquartered research firm IDC shows the share of Indian phone makers at 15% of the smartphone market. Two years ago, it was 50%.

The Chinese are more focussed on the top of the smartphone pyramid, the executive said. “The Chinese companies are not looking at the base of the pyramid actively.”

The numbers stack up well for a pivot of the smartphone market towards affordable devices in a country where three-fourths of the population accounts for just about one-third of income generation. About half the phones sold in India today (smart and feature phones included) are in the sub-Rs 2,000 range — making such a price a compelling proposition in a price-sensitive market.

In its report ‘Connecting the Next Billion – Propelling towards $5T economy‘, consultancy Deloitte India ranks India No. 36 globally in internet inclusion (based on availability, affordability, relevance, and readiness). The internet penetration in rural India stands at 16%; the country’s average is 33%. Deloitte estimates that net addition to the smartphone volumes will be 350 million by 2020.

With cheap smartphones, Google and the phone vendors hope to ride the wave of mass scale internet access on mobile phones in India. From a monthly consumption of 20 crore GB of data about 16 months ago, Indians now consume over 150 crore GB a month making the country No. 1 among mobile data consuming countries. Much of this change is credited to aggressive data pricing plans by Reliance Jio, which launched services in September 2016.

Like Mukesh Ambani, chairman of the Reliance group of companies, Google is targeting India’s 500 million feature phone users with Android Oreo Go. It’s a segment Ambani went after with the KaiOS-based JioPhone. Even Jio is said to be coming out with a Go-based cheap smartphone with not enough apps around KaiOS – leading Jio to look at Google optimised OS. Jio had been in discussions with a Facebook, WhatsApp, and Google for popular apps to work on the KaiOS-based JioPhone.

“Other apps will be coming soon. Many of our developer partners have already optimized their apps; developers can learn more about our recommendations for best practices called Building for Billions,” the Google official said.

Google has decided to put the entire catalogue of Google Play on Android Oreo (Go edition) devices, but apps that are optimised for entry-level devices will be given extra visibility in the Play Store app.

The Oreo Go affordability

Experts said that without Oreo Go, it was nearly impossible to bring down the price of the phone without compromising the quality of the device. “There were restrictions and optimisation wasn’t there,” said Faisal Kawoosa, principal telecom analyst with Gurgaon-headquartered CyberMedia Research. “There was no way Indian handset makers could make low-cost phones on the regular Android OS… That requires more memory, more processing power, which comes at a cost.”

In India, six out of 10 devices are sold below Rs 5,000 and five out of 10 are in the sub-Rs 2,000 band. “That’s quite a big chunk of customers,” said Jaipal Singh, senior market analyst (client devices) at IDC.

One reason why Singh said that feature phones still have such high adoption in India is not just because of the price, but also because of the durability. To bring down the smartphone price handset makers compromise of storage and processing speed, which reduces the life. With a new ecosystem of devices, software and chipsets tailor-made for cheap phones, the durability will increase.

Singh added that Google is building the ecosystem along with the operating system. “Chipset makers like Qualcomm and MediaTek are optimising chipsets (for Oreo Go), which will do away with problems of hanging and heating up. It will also give better experience over data.”

This is not the first time Google, which makes more than $1 billion in India revenues, is trying attract the lower-affordability segment with the Android One platform. Google claimed that it is the purest form of Android that would always keep the operating system fresh and updated.

The product was launched by Google CEO Pichai when he was Google’s chief product officer in 2014, keeping India as the standard market for development. When the product was launched it went to emerging countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, among other countries.

Over time, Android One lost its charm. Oreo Go is not an extension of Android One. It is specifically designed for the next billion users, insisted the Google official quoted earlier. “It is a new experience for devices having memory between 512MB and 1GB, and it also comes with a suite of new Google apps that are built to run faster on devices with limited hardware capabilities.”

The official did not divulge details of the partners it is working to bring out the Oreo Go devices with but clarified that the devices will not be limited to India. “Partners are actively working on devices that will be running Android Oreo (Go edition), to be launched around the world. These devices will naturally range in price,” he said.
https://factordaily.com/india-30-and...o-smartphones/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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