Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 1st, 2022

[JackSpratts]

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January 1st, 2022




The Companies Benefiting From Fragmenting Internet Privacy Rules

Companies have sprouted up to help others navigate the varied laws around the world governing websites.
David McCabe

In 2018, California lawmakers mandated that consumers be able to request their personal data from companies through a toll-free number. And then a group of lawyers, engineers and salespeople for a company in Atlanta got to work.

The company, a start-up called OneTrust, now based in a suburb on the city’s outskirts, makes software for businesses trying to stay on the right side of the growing number of internet regulations. In response to the new California law, OneTrust made it easy for companies to set up a number to manage the requests.

In an attempt to rein in tech giants like Facebook and Google, governments around the world in recent years have approved new laws governing how websites must handle consumer data, treat their competitors and protect young people. The European Union has a data privacy law that governs the entire bloc. California has approved two privacy measures in recent years, and other states have followed suit.

Out of those regulations has arisen something else: An industry to help companies navigate the increasingly fragmented rules of the global internet.

It’s a booming market. OneTrust, a leader in the field, has been valued by investors at $5.3 billion. BigID, a competitor, raised $30 million in April at a $1.25 billion valuation. Another company that targets privacy regulations, TrustArc, raised $70 million in 2019. Yoti, a start-up that provides the kind of age-verification services that regulators are increasingly turning to to shield children from harmful content, has raised millions of dollars since it was founded in 2014.

The emergence of these companies shows how complex regulations governing the web have become — and how much more complicated it is expected to get. Several privacy laws will take effect around the world in the coming years, with more countries and states expected to consider their own proposals.

“They are all reactions to an underlying problem — and they all have their own flavor, they all have their own interpretations and they all have their own focus points,” said Bart Willemsen, an analyst at Gartner, a market research firm. “These regulatory changes nudge organizations — in addition to perhaps any ethical concerns they may have had — to really up their game here.”

Many of the new companies owe their start to the General Data Protection Regulation, a European Union law passed in 2016 that pushes websites to ask their users if they agree to being tracked online. It also mandates companies to catalog the personal data they hold.

The European rule was a landmark moment in the fracturing of internet regulation, putting Europe far ahead of Washington in creating guardrails for tech.

“We’re definitely kind of a child of G.D.P.R.,” said Dimitri Sirota, the chief executive of BigID, which was founded the year the law passed. In its earliest days, BigID helped companies map out their data holdings so they could respond to requests under privacy laws. The company now has offices around the world, including Australia, Israel and Switzerland.

OneTrust also owes its birth to the European law. Kabir Barday, the company’s chief executive, started the company in 2016, when he saw companies preparing to comply with the rules.

Under the European rules, websites largely must get users’ permission to use cookies, the tiny bits of code that can be used to track people as they move around the internet. In practice, that has meant that visitors to a website are often presented with a pop-up menu or a banner asking them if they will agree to be tracked.

OneTrust helps companies add those banners to their sites. Its clients include the pocket-tool maker Leatherman, the furniture titan Herman Miller and the California fashion designer James Perse, who sells $70 white T-shirts that are a favorite of Evan Spiegel, the Snapchat creator.

In 2018, lawmakers in California passed their own privacy rules, which gave users in the state the right to request their personal data from websites. Demand from companies racing to meet the California law was strong, said Mr. Barday.

“A customer would say, ‘Kabir, we need to get started today,’” he said. “And I just said, ‘Customer, we just had, in that time period, a thousand customers in about one quarter that came to us and just said the same thing.’”

Today, OneTrust and its competitors advertise that they can help clients comply with privacy laws in numerous countries, like Brazil, and in American states, like Nevada. OneTrust hands out spiral-bound texts of the California and European laws as swag.

Gabrielle Ferree, a OneTrust spokeswoman, said that its largest customers generally choose products at a price point that “runs in the six- to seven-figure range annually.”

Products meant to meet new internet regulations may vary in how effectively they actually protect the privacy of people browsing the web, experts said.

A website can, for example, nudge a visitor to agree to being tracked by using a more prominent color for the button that accepts cookies than for the button that rejects them. Or they can present a user with an uneven choice: accept ad tracking with one click or disable it using a complicated settings menu on a different page.

“I really think it’s up to the businesses, and they’re well within their power to make it easier for consumers to opt-out or opt-in,” said Maureen Mahoney, a policy analyst at Consumer Reports.

Mr. Barday said the interest of the businesses that use his products were aligned with the interests of their customers. Companies want to reach consumers who want their products or keep them engaged. And consumers prefer an internet experience personalized to them and their interests, as long as websites are upfront about collecting their data, he said.

“What we love about this market is that capitalism and commercial interest is not at odds with doing good for the world and doing good for people,” he said.

“If a business can show that they’re trustworthy and respectful and transparent in how they collect that data, guess what?,” he said. “Consumers provide them the data.”

The business has faced setbacks: At the outset of the pandemic, OneTrust laid off 10 to 15 percent of its 2,200 employees. Some of those employees threatened to sue the company in Britain last year, saying they had been fired en masse for poor performance despite never receiving bad performance reviews. Employees also told the media that the layoffs came after Mr. Barday told his staff that no jobs were at risk.

Ms. Ferree, the spokeswoman for OneTrust, said that the company was “not exempt from the impact of pandemic-related uncertainty in 2020.”

“Ultimately, we had to make difficult employment decisions and strived to protect jobs for the long term,” she said.

But OneTrust and other companies in the industry have continued to grow. OneTrust, which is not yet profitable, says it now has more than 10,000 customers. And it has introduced products aimed at helping companies comply with other regulations, like new protections for whistle-blowers in Europe.

OneTrust recently moved out of Atlanta’s city limits into an archetypical tech office with glass-walled conference rooms, exposed ductwork and wide bullpens in the nearby suburb of Sandy Springs.

On a recent Thursday, a smattering of employees gathered to watch part of OneTrust’s annual conference for its customers. They tapped away on their laptops while the warm-up act — a British duo composed of a man who spins upbeat music from a set of turntables while his partner jams on her saxophone — played in the background.

The DJ and the saxophonist wrapped up and Mr. Barday appeared on the screen. In a sleek, prerecorded video, he laid out the company’s priorities.

“No. 1: Do not lose focus on privacy because this is complex and getting more complex,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/t...-onetrust.html





Hollywood Tests the Limit of Marquee Names a Single Film Can Hold

Boldface names have always mattered at the movies, but a number of recent casts have been full of them. That hasn’t always helped at the box office.
Brooks Barnes

On Friday, Netflix began streaming “Don’t Look Up,” a big-budget satire starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Tyler Perry, Ariana Grande, Jonah Hill, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and Timothée Chalamet.

It sure seemed like a must-watch event, mixed reviews be darned. Casts so ultra-celestial — embarrassments of celebrity riches — don’t come along every day.

Except that now they do.

One star playing Spider-Man? How quaint. “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” released in theaters on Dec. 17, has three A-listers in Spidey spandex: Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire. “No Way Home,” a runaway hit at the global box office, taking in $1.05 billion for Sony Pictures Entertainment as of Sunday, also stars Zendaya, Jamie Foxx, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei, Willem Dafoe and Jon Favreau. About 43 percent of opening-weekend viewers in the United States cited the cast as the reason they bought tickets, according to PostTrak surveys. Twenty percent specifically cited Zendaya.

Guillermo del Toro’s latest art film, “Nightmare Alley,” stars Bradley Cooper, Ms. Blanchett, Toni Collette, Mr. Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Mary Steenburgen and David Strathairn. (They have 22 Oscar nominations for acting and three wins among them.) Other recent examples of star ensembles include “The French Dispatch,” “Red Notice,” “House of Gucci,” “The Harder They Fall” and the superhero story “Eternals,” which Disney marketed with 11 names above the title. (Angelina Jolie! Kumail Nanjiani! Salma Hayek!)

In the months ahead, Universal will release “The 355,” a spy thriller anchored by five female stars, including Lupita Nyong’o, Penélope Cruz and Jessica Chastain. Disney will roll out a starry “Death on the Nile” remake, and Focus Features is preparing “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” which reassembles the franchise’s ensemble cast. Netflix is working on “The Adam Project,” a science-fiction adventure (Ryan Reynolds, Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana, Catherine Keener), and “The Gray Man,” a thriller starring Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Ryan Gosling, Billy Bob Thornton and Regé-Jean Page of “Bridgerton” fame.

“Someday, someone will decide to make one movie with two Batmans — oh, wait, it’s happening,” Terry Press, one of Hollywood’s top marketers, said with signature dryness. She was referring to “The Flash,” a superhero movie from Warner Bros. that is scheduled for late next year; Ben Affleck’s Batman will appear alongside Michael Keaton’s Batman.

Taken one film at a time, star amassment is nothing new. “Grand Hotel” (1932), “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (1963), “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), “The Towering Inferno” (1974) and the entire “Ocean’s 11” franchise come to mind, not to mention Marvel’s recent “Avengers” movies.

All of a sudden, though, they are everywhere.

Why?

“Stars matter — always have, always will — and Hollywood retreats to them, leans harder on them, when it gets nervous about a wandering audience,” said Jeanine Basinger, a film scholar and the author of Hollywood histories like “The Star Machine,” which examines the old studio system. “Stars are insurance — for studio executives who want to keep their jobs, certainly, but also for viewers: ‘Is this movie going to be worth my time and money?’”

Describing Hollywood’s customer base as “wandering” is rather kind. AWOL might be more apt.

The pandemic seems to have hastened a worrisome decline at the box office for bread-and-butter dramas, musicals and comedies — everything except leviathan fantasy franchises and the occasional horror movie. “Spider-Man: No Way Home” collected $260 million in the United States and Canada on its opening weekend. Total ticket sales for the two countries totaled $283 million, according to Comscore. That means “No Way Home” made up 92 percent of the market. “Nightmare Alley,” which was released on the same weekend, played to virtually empty auditoriums. It took in $2.7 million.

The vast majority of opening-weekend ticket buyers for “No Way Home” were under the age of 34, according to Sony.

Between Friday and Sunday, the Spider-Men remained the biggest domestic draw, taking in roughly $81.5 million. The animated “Sing 2” (Universal-Illumination) was second, with $23.8 million in ticket sales. Warner Bros. failed to generate much interest in “The Matrix Resurrections,” which took in a feeble $12 million in third place; it was also available on HBO Max.

“The King’s Man” (Disney), the third movie in Matthew Vaughn’s action-comedy series, collected $6.4 million, a result that one box office analyst described as a franchise “collapse.” (“American Underdog,” a faith-based sports drama from Lionsgate and Kingdom Story Company, managed $6.2 million on Saturday and Sunday alone.)

Streaming services have picked up a big portion of the audience, particularly older people. But competition among the services has grown extreme, with Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, Apple TV+, HBO Max, Peacock, Hallmark Movies Now, BritBox and dozens more fighting for subscriber growth. Stars help: Netflix is writing megachecks for A-list actors ($30 million to Mr. DiCaprio for “Don’t Look Up”) and ensemble franchises ($465 million for two “Knives Out” sequels).

“Stars matter more than ever,” said Bryan Lourd, the Creative Artists superagent who orchestrated the “Knives Out” deal. “When stars meet material that is their fastball, it cuts through all the noise.”

There are other explanations for the barrage. In a severely disrupted marketplace, stars are seeking safety in numbers; no one person can be held responsible for failing to deliver an audience, as with “Nightmare Alley.” Movie marketing has also changed, becoming less about carpet-bombing prime-time TV with ads and more about tapping into social media fan bases. Ms. Grande has 284 million Instagram followers. (Pity Mr. DiCaprio and Mr. Holland, with only about 50 million apiece.)

Ms. Basinger, who founded Wesleyan University’s film studies department, noted that individual star power has faded. Studios have become fixated on intellectual property — pre-existing franchises and characters. As a result, there has been less of a need to manufacture new stars and keep the older ones burning hot; Iron Man, Dominic Toretto, Wonder Woman and Baby Yoda are the stars now.

“In the old days, movie stars were the brands,” she said. “They reached the whole audience. Not a slice of the audience. Everybody. But that all fell apart. Now, it’s about adding up niches.”

In other words, few stars remain bankable in and of themselves, requiring Hollywood to stack casts with an almost absurd number of celebrities. Flood the zone.

And don’t forget Hollywood’s favorite game: Follow the leader. “The Avengers: Endgame,” which packed its cast with Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Chadwick Boseman, Jeremy Renner, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Olsen and a dozen other boldface names, became one of the highest-grossing movies of all time in 2019. On a much different scale, an all-star remake of “Murder on the Orient Express” in 2017 was also a box office winner.

“It’s trendy at the moment,” Tim Palen, a producer and former studio marketing chief, said of what he called an “all skate” approach to casting. “Not new but certainly symptomatic of the battle for attention that’s raging.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/26/b...hollywood.html





Monero Miner Found on Torrent Download of New Spider-Man Movie
Steve Zurier

A Monero miner was found in a torrent download of what researchers believe to be the new movie, Spider-Man: No Way Home.

A ReasonLabs blog post reported that the file identifies itself as: spiderman_net_putidomoi.torrent.exe. This translates from the Russian to: spiderman_no_wayhome.torrent.exe.

The researchers theorize that the origin of the file most likely comes from a Russian torrenting website. According to the researchers, the miner adds exclusions to Windows Defender, creates persistence, and spawns a watchdog process to maintain its activity.

Hiding a cryptominer or similar malware in an enticing file, such as the new Spider-Man movie is nothing new, said Sean Nikkel, senior cyber threat intel analyst at Digital Shadows. Nikkel said there are plenty of GenXers and Millennials who remember the days of downloading random files from strangers across Kazaa and Limewire in search of rare or free MP3 or video files and ended up with a Trojan or similar nastiness.

“Unfortunately, the tactic carried into the Torrent world,” Nikkel said. “There have been many cases of people downloading the wrong file, thinking it was a popular movie, TV show, or new remix. While we're on the subject, this same thing occurs with popular applications, such as those from Adobe, Microsoft, or specialized music programs that are themselves often pirated. Sometimes the key generators themselves were malicious or the applications are executable. There have been plenty of office workers looking to cut corners or use programs they're familiar with on their work computer. These users run the risk of downloading "free" versions or versions hosted on bad sites and end up getting burned.”

Jake Williams, co-founder and CTO at BreachQuest, added that threat actors have long used torrents as a distribution mechanism for malware, in fact, long before cryptominers emerged as a force. Williams said a “Trojaned” torrent doesn't benefit the threat actor if nobody downloads it, so threat actors will continue capitalizing on the latest hype.

“I remember seeing a wave of threat actors compromising victims with screen savers celebrating Whitney Houston's career in the wake of her passing,” Williams said. “Given that cryptominers are the easiest way for threat actors to cash out, it's not surprising that threat actors will use these as their malware payload of choice.”

Jasmine Henry, field security director at JupiterOne, said it's been extremely common for more than a decade for threat actors to attach cryptominers and other malware to popular torrent files.

“Security teams should revisit their acceptable use policies and periodically remind employees that illegal peer-to-peer file sharing at home or on work devices carries some pretty nasty security risks,” Henry said.
https://www.scmagazine.com/news/clou...ider-man-movie





People Surprised Napster Is Still Around After T-Pain Shared Image on How Much Streaming Platforms Pay Artists
Brad Callas

Some people were surprised to learn that Napster is still around after T-Pain shared a tweet that compared how much streaming platforms pay artists. Following T-Pain’s tweet, the legendary file-sharing service began trending on social media on Wednesday.

According to the screenshot T-Pain shared, the OG streaming platform, which merged with Rhapsody after being purchased by Best Buy, paid artists the most money for streams when compared to heavy-hitters like Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal. Specifically, the screenshot of the chart shows how many times a song has to be streamed in order for the artist to make $1. It’s important to note that the numbers featured on the chart have not been verified.

Napster filed for bankruptcy in June 2002 after being hit with several lawsuits. The peer-to-peer file sharing software service was founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker in 1999.

After posting the chart on Twitter, T-Pain wrote, “I see a lot of ‘well I guess I’ll use the best one’ and not ‘we gotta make our owm.’ Keep in mind, most artists don’t even get the whole $1. I’m just letting the up and coming know what the real is. I worked for mine and there are tons of ways around this if you move right.”

It didn’t take long for people on social media to react to T-Pain’s tweets. Scroll down to see the best reactions to Napster still existing.

Just so you know…… pic.twitter.com/t8m3PerxT9
— T-Pain (@TPAIN) December 29, 2021

I see a lot of “well I guess I’ll use the best one” and not “we gotta make our own” keep in mind, most artists don’t even get the whole $1. I’m just letting the up and coming know what the real is. I worked for mine and there are tons of ways around this if you move right
— T-Pain (@TPAIN) December 29, 2021

NAPSTER is the highest paying streaming platform???? Just broke my neck on this plot twist. https://t.co/Aajf4sLloc
— ��SONGMESS�� (@songmess) December 28, 2021

Surprised to see @napster go from villain to the hero of this story... https://t.co/nud9q0AVmX
— AZcomm (@AZcomm) December 29, 2021

Napster did more for artists than Spotify by a factor of like 5, wild how narratives have shifted to where this is now "business practice" https://t.co/iPw7ASpBjn
— Shiv Ramdas Traing To Rite Buk (@nameshiv) December 29, 2021

Me when Napster is trending pic.twitter.com/vZJ9rZU8XX
— Pizza Dad (@Pizza__Dad) December 29, 2021

You’ve never heard of #Napster?

In 1999 I set up 3-5 .mp3 file transfers on Napster every night and hoped they’d be done by morning. #TrueStory

That’s right, kids. It took ALL NIGHT to download a few songs.

Napster is the #GenX equivalent of walking to school uphill both ways. pic.twitter.com/XDGh2Iaqt2
— Jennifer Korey (@JenniferKorey) December 29, 2021

Napster being the highest paying platform is some serious M. Night Shyamalan shit https://t.co/HbZkEZkcg4
— ��Christmas Penguin Johnny Danger❄ (@K_NoiseWaterMD) December 29, 2021

Napster era kids be like pic.twitter.com/Cpq9jtD80B
— SVM (@ShivamChatak) December 29, 2021

Ice T warned y’all years ago pic.twitter.com/DetjhUKgFJ
— Paul Little �� (@ItsPaulLittle) December 29, 2021

https://www.complex.com/music/people...ming-platform/


















Until next week,

- js.



















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