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Old 29-06-22, 07:28 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 2nd, 22

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July 2nd, 2022




Federal Authorities Seize 6 Websites that were Pirating Latin Music

U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia say's 6.6 million total users were subscribed to the websites
AP

Federal authorities have seized six websites that prosecutors say were illegally distributing copyrighted music to millions of users.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia announced the seizures Monday of the websites that primarily targeted Latin music.

According to an affidavit, agents began investigating the websites in April after a music industry consortium complained.

The websites — Corourbanos.com, Corourbano.com, Pautamp3.com, SIMP3.com, flowactivo.co and Mp3Teca.ws — collectively reached about 6.6 million users per month.

According to the affidavit, the pirated music drew traffic that allowed the website operators to make money by selling ads on the website.
https://apnews.com/article/technolog...ca359977e85c97





Russian Demand Spikes for Pirated Microsoft Windows – Kommersant
Arian Darvishi

Russia-based web searches for pirated Microsoft products including the Windows operating system have skyrocketed after the company halted sales in the country over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kommersant daily reported Monday.

The U.S. tech giant behind the software that runs on over 1 billion devices worldwide announced the suspension of new sales in Russia in the early days of the war in March. In June, Microsoft said it would significantly scale down operations.

According to Kommersant, Google searches related to Windows 10 activation methods have surged by as much as 250% in the past three months.

Queries for free Excel spreadsheet downloads rose by 650% in June alone.

The past week has seen a 47-fold increase in searches for Windows 10 Media Creation Tools after users in Russia started receiving error messages when attempting to download Windows 10 and 11 installation files from Microsoft’s official website.

At the same time, Russian software developers based on the Linux operating system have reported a slight uptick in sales in recent months, Kommersant reported.

Russian government agencies have reportedly begun switching from Windows to Linux, which is used by around 2% of desktop computers, as Microsoft has suspended tech support for its products in Russia.

But IT experts expressed doubts to Kommersant that Linux would fully replace the more user-friendly Windows in Russia.

“More paid applications are created for Windows, where the quality of development, testing and user protection from errors is higher,” Igor Martyushev, development director at Russian software distributor Marcel Distributions, told the newspaper.

Last week, Microsoft vice chairman and president Brad Smith said the company would continue withdrawing from the Russian market until its full exit.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/...mersant-a78116





California's Attempt to Protect Kids Online could End Adults' Internet Anonymity

Websites may be forced to verify ages of visitors unless changes made
Thomas Claburn

California lawmakers met in Sacramento today to discuss, among other things, proposed legislation to protect children online. The bill, AB2273, known as The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, would require websites to verify the ages of visitors.
Critics of the legislation contend this requirement threatens the privacy of adults and the ability to use the internet anonymously, in California and likely elsewhere, because of the role the Golden State's tech companies play on the internet.

"First, the bill pretextually claims to protect children, but it will change the Internet for everyone," said Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University School of Law professor, in a blog post. "In order to determine who is a child, websites and apps will have to authenticate the age of ALL consumers before they can use the service. No one wants this."

The bill, Goldman argues, will put an end to casual web browsing, forcing companies to collect personal information they don't want to store and protect – and that consumers don't want to provide – in order to authenticate the age of visitors. And since age authentication generally requires identity details, that threatens the ability to use the internet anonymously.

Goldman also objects to this American state-level bill being modeled after the UK's Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) because European law makes compliance a matter of engagement and dialogue with regulators, in contrast to the US rules-based approach that allows more certainty about what is or not allowed.

Furthermore, he contends that the scope of the bill reaches beyond children's privacy and implicates consumer protection and content moderation. He thus considers the bill "a trojan horse for comprehensive regulation of Internet services" and would turn the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) into a general internet regulation agency.

At the same time, it's clear that current laws to protect children fall short. In an April letter [PDF] to California lawmakers, Justin Brookman, director of technology policy for Consumer Reports, said that businesses frequently bypass the requirements of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the federal law requiring parental consent for processing the data of children under 13. He pointed to 2018 research that found thousands of apps violating COPPA through the use of Software Development Kits (SDKs), code libraries for advertising and analytics that collect data about kids.

Supporters of the California bill point to technical changes following from the UK AADC, like Google making SafeSearch the default browsing mode for everyone under 18 and TikTok and Instagram disabling direct messages between children and adults they do not follow, as examples of how the legislation might improve the internet for kids.

While the UK AADC may have led to worthwhile improvements in children's privacy, proposed legislation often entails collateral damage if not carefully devised. Both the UK and the EU, for example, have floated legal changes to protect children from abuse and exploitation by demolishing privacy and encryption.

Brookman, in a message to The Register, said, "I generally disagree with Eric on most things but I think he has a point here." And he pointed to his April letter in which he said Consumer Reports would support the bill if some changes were made.

He suggested the bill needs to make distinctions between how teens and children under 13 are treated, and to adopt clear rules-based language rather than ambiguous, aspirational mandates like directing websites to "maintain the highest level of privacy by default."

He also urged lawmakers to drop the age verification requirement.

"Mandated identity verification would require invasive and expensive data collection and eliminate consumers’ right to read and speak anonymously, undermining the bill’s fundamental objectives," he wrote in the letter.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/...ill_anonymous/





A Wide Range of Routers are Under Attack by New, Unusually Sophisticated Malware

Router-stalking ZuoRAT is likely the work of a sophisticated nation-state, researchers say.
Dan Goodin

An unusually advanced hacking group has spent almost two years infecting a wide range of routers in North America and Europe with malware that takes full control of connected devices running Windows, macOS, and Linux, researchers reported on Tuesday.

So far, researchers from Lumen Technologies' Black Lotus Labs say they've identified at least 80 targets infected by the stealthy malware, infecting routers made by Cisco, Netgear, Asus, and DrayTek. Dubbed ZuoRAT, the remote access Trojan is part of a broader hacking campaign that has existed since at least the fourth quarter of 2020 and continues to operate.

A high level of sophistication

The discovery of custom-built malware written for the MIPS architecture and compiled for small office and home office routers is significant, particularly given its range of capabilities. Its ability to enumerate all devices connected to an infected router and collect the DNS lookups and network traffic they send and receive and remain undetected is the hallmark of a highly sophisticated threat actor.

"While compromising SOHO routers as an access vector to gain access to an adjacent LAN is not a novel technique, it has seldom been reported," Black Lotus Labs researchers wrote. "Similarly, reports of person-in-the-middle style attacks, such as DNS and HTTP hijacking, are even rarer and a mark of a complex and targeted operation. The use of these two techniques congruently demonstrated a high level of sophistication by a threat actor, indicating that this campaign was possibly performed by a state-sponsored organization."

The campaign comprises at least four pieces of malware, three of them written from scratch by the threat actor. The first piece is the MIPS-based ZuoRAT, which closely resembles the Mirai Internet of Things malware that achieved record-breaking distributed denial-of-service attacks that crippled some Internet services for days. ZuoRAT often gets installed by exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities in SOHO devices.

Once installed, ZuoRAT enumerates the devices connected to the infected router. The threat actor can then use DNS hijacking and HTTP hijacking to cause the connected devices to install other malware. Two of those malware pieces—dubbed CBeacon and GoBeacon—are custom-made, with the first written for Windows in C++ and the latter written in Go for cross-compiling on Linux and macOS devices. For flexibility, ZuoRAT can also infect connected devices with the widely used Cobalt Strike hacking tool.

ZuoRAT can pivot infections to connected devices using one of two methods:

• DNS hijacking, which replaces the valid IP addresses corresponding to a domain such as Google or Facebook with a malicious one operated by the attacker.
• HTTP hijacking, in which the malware inserts itself into the connection to generate a 302 error that redirects the user to a different IP address.

Intentionally complex

Black Lotus Labs said the command and control infrastructure used in the campaign is intentionally complex in an attempt to conceal what's happening. One set of infrastructure is used to control infected routers, and another is reserved for the connected devices if they're later infected.

The researchers observed routers from 23 IP addresses with a persistent connection to a control server that they believe was performing an initial survey to determine if the targets were of interest. A subset of those 23 routers later interacted with a Taiwan-based proxy server for three months. A further subset of routers rotated to a Canada-based proxy server to obfuscate the attacker's infrastructure.

This graphic illustrates the steps listed involved.

The threat actors also disguised the landing page of a control server to look like this.

The researchers wrote:

Black Lotus Labs visibility indicates ZuoRAT and the correlated activity represent a highly targeted campaign against US and Western European organizations that blends in with typical internet traffic through obfuscated, multistage C2 infrastructure, likely aligned with multiple phases of the malware infection. The extent to which the actors take pains to hide the C2 infrastructure cannot be overstated. First, to avoid suspicion, they handed off the initial exploit from a dedicated virtual private server (VPS) that hosted benign content. Next, they leveraged routers as proxy C2s that hid in plain sight through router-to-router communication to further avoid detection. And finally, they rotated proxy routers periodically to avoid detection.

The discovery of this ongoing campaign is the most important one affecting SOHO routers since VPNFilter, the router malware created and deployed by the Russian government that was discovered in 2018. Routers are often overlooked, particularly in the work-from-home era. While organizations often have strict requirements for what devices are allowed to connect, few mandate patching or other safeguards for the devices' routers.

Like most router malware, ZuoRAT can't survive a reboot. Simply restarting an infected device will remove the initial ZuoRAT exploit, consisting of files stored in a temporary directory. To fully recover, however, infected devices should be factory reset. Unfortunately, in the event connected devices have been infected with the other malware, they can't be disinfected so easily.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...cated-malware/





Wild Solar Weather is Causing Satellites to Plummet from Orbit. It's Only Going to Get Worse.

The change coincided with the onset of the new solar cycle, and experts think it might be the beginning of some difficult years.
Tereza Pultarova

European Space Agency's Swarm satellites have been monitoring the magnetic field around Earth since 2013.
The European Space Agency had to raise the orbit of the Swarm satellites as they were sinking too fast because of space weather. (Image credit: ESA)

In late 2021, operators of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm constellation noticed something worrying: The satellites, which measure the magnetic field around Earth, started sinking toward the atmosphere at an unusually fast rate — up to 10 times faster than before. The change coincided with the onset of the new solar cycle, and experts think it might be the beginning of some difficult years for spacecraft orbiting our planet.

"In the last five, six years, the satellites were sinking about two and a half kilometers [1.5 miles] a year," Anja Stromme, ESA's Swarm mission manager, told Space.com. "But since December last year, they have been virtually diving. The sink rate between December and April has been 20 kilometers [12 miles] per year."

Satellites orbiting close to Earth always face the drag of the residual atmosphere, which gradually slows the spacecraft and eventually makes them fall back to the planet. (They usually don't survive this so-called re-entry and burn up in the atmosphere.) This atmospheric drag forces the International Space Station's controllers to perform regular "reboost" maneuvers to maintain the station's orbit of 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.

This drag also helps clean up the near-Earth environment from space junk. Scientists know that the intensity of this drag depends on solar activity — the amount of solar wind spewed by the sun, which varies depending on the 11-year solar cycle. The last cycle, which officially ended in December 2019, was rather sleepy, with a below-average number of monthly sunspots and a prolonged minimum of barely any activity. But since last fall, the star has been waking up, spewing more and more solar wind and generating sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections at a growing rate. And the Earth's upper atmosphere has felt the effects.

"There is a lot of complex physics that we still don't fully understand going on in the upper layers of the atmosphere where it interacts with the solar wind," Stromme said. "We know that this interaction causes an upwelling of the atmosphere. That means that the denser air shifts upwards to higher altitudes."

Denser air means higher drag for the satellites. Even though this density is still incredibly low 250 miles above Earth, the increase caused by the upwelling atmosphere is enough to virtually send some of the low-orbiting satellites plummeting.

"It's almost like running with the wind against you," Stromme said. "It's harder, it's drag — so it slows the satellites down, and when they slow down, they sink."

Knocked down by a solar storm

The Swarm constellation, launched in 2013, consists of three satellites, two of which orbit Earth at an altitude of 270 miles (430 km), about 20 miles (30 km) above the International Space Station. The third Swarm satellite circles the planet somewhat higher — about 320 miles (515 km) above ground. The two lower-orbiting spacecraft were hit more by the sun's acting out than the higher satellite was, Stromme said.

The situation with the lower two got so precarious that by May, operators had to start raising the satellites' altitude using onboard propulsion to save them.

ESA's Swarm satellites are not the only spacecraft struggling with worsening space weather. In February, SpaceX lost 40 brand-new Starlink satellites that were hit by a solar storm just after launch.

In such storms, satellites suddenly drop to lower altitudes. The lower the orbit of the satellites when the solar storm hits, the higher the risk of the spacecraft not being able to recover, leaving operators helplessly watching as the craft fall to their demise in the atmosphere.

Starlink satellites have operational orbits of 340 miles (550 km), which is above the most at risk region. However, after launch, Falcon 9 rockets deposit the satellite batches very low, only about 217 miles (350 km) above Earth. SpaceX then raises the satellites' orbits using onboard propulsion units. The company says that approach has advantages, as any satellite that experiences technical problems after launch would quickly fall back to Earth and not turn into pesky space debris. However, the increasing and unpredictable behavior of the sun makes those satellites vulnerable to mishaps.
New space and the unpredictable sun

All spacecraft around the 250-mile altitude are bound to have problems, Stromme said. That includes the International Space Station, which will have to perform more frequent reboost maneuvers to keep afloat, but also the hundreds of cubesats and small satellites that have populated low Earth orbit in the past decade. Those satellites — a product of the new space movement spearheaded by private entrepreneurs pioneering simple, cheap technologies — are particularly vulnerable.

"Many of these [new satellites] don't have propulsion systems," Stromme said. "They don't have ways to get up. That basically means that they will have a shorter lifetime in orbit. They will reenter sooner than they would during the solar minimum."

By coincidence (or beginner's luck), the onset of the new space revolution came during that sleepy solar cycle. These new operators are now facing their first solar maximum. But not only that. The sun's activity in the past year turned out to be much more intense than solar weather forecasters predicted, with more sunspots, more coronal mass ejections and more solar wind hitting our planet.

"The solar activity is a lot higher than the official forecast suggested," Hugh Lewis, a professor of engineering and physical sciences at the University of Southampton in the U.K. who studies the behavior of satellites in low Earth orbit, told Space.com. "In fact, the current activity is already quite close to the peak level that was forecasted for this solar cycle, and we are still two to three years away from the solar maximum."

Stromme confirmed those observations. "The solar cycle 25 that we are entering now is currently increasing very steeply," she said. "We do not know if this means that it will be a very tough solar cycle. It could slow down, and it could become a very weak solar cycle. But right now, it's increasing fast."
Cleaning up orbits

While the harsh solar activity is bad news for satellite operators, who will see the lifetimes of their missions shortened (even satellites with onboard propulsion will run out of fuel much faster because of the need for frequent altitude boosts), the situation will have some welcome purifying effects on the space around Earth.

In addition to becoming populated with hundreds of new satellites over the past decade, this region of space is cluttered with a worrying amount of space debris (old satellites, spent rocket stages and collision fragments). Researchers like Lewis have long warned that the omnipresent junk hurtling around the planet threatens the safety of satellite services, forcing operators to conduct frequent avoidance maneuvers. Moreover, the debris might trigger an out-of-control situation known as Kessler syndrome, an unstoppable cascade of collisions as depicted in the 2013 Oscar-winning movie "Gravity."

"Generally speaking, increasing solar activity — and its effect on the upper atmosphere — is good news from a space debris perspective, as it reduces orbital lifetimes of the debris and provides a useful 'cleaning service,'" Lewis said.

According to Jonathan McDowell, a space debris expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the positive effect can already be observed, as fragments produced by the November 2021 Russian anti-satellite missile test are now coming down much faster than before.

However, there is a downside to this cleansing process.

"The increased rate of decay of debris objects can be perceived almost like rain," Lewis said. "When solar activity is high, the 'rain' rate is higher, and missions at lower altitudes will potentially experience a greater flux of debris."

A greater flux of debris means the need for even more frequent fuel-burning avoidance maneuvers and a temporarily increased risk of collisions, which could potentially generate more dangerous fragments.

Stromme and her colleagues are currently raising the orbit of the two low-orbiting Swarm satellites by 28 miles (45 km). The satellites might require even more adjustments later this year, she added. The goal is to help the mission, which is currently in its ninth year and beyond its originally planned lifetime, to get through the solar cycle. Whether the team succeeds will largely depend on the behavior of the sun.

"We still have fuel to get us hopefully through another solar cycle," Stromme said. "If it grows like now, I will use up the fuel before the solar cycle is finished. If it slows down a little, I might save them through the solar cycle."
https://www.space.com/satellites-fal...-solar-weather





FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Mobile Starlink Internet Service to Boats, Planes and Trucks
Michael Sheetz

Key Points

• The Federal Communications Commission authorized SpaceX to provide Starlink satellite internet to vehicles in motion, a key step for Elon Musk’s company to further expand the service.
• SpaceX will now be able to provide mobile Starlink service to consumers, businesses and more.
• The company has signed early deals with commercial air carriers in preparation for this decision.

The Federal Communications Commission authorized SpaceX to provide Starlink satellite internet to vehicles in motion, a key step for Elon Musk’s company to further expand the service.

“Authorizing a new class of [customer] terminals for SpaceX’s satellite system will expand the range of broadband capabilities to meet the growing user demands that now require connectivity while on the move, whether driving an RV across the country, moving a freighter from Europe to a U.S. port, or while on a domestic or international flight,” FCC international bureau chief Tom Sullivan wrote in the authorization posted Thursday.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the FCC decision.

Starlink is SpaceX’s network of satellites in low Earth orbit, designed to deliver high-speed internet anywhere on the globe. SpaceX has launched about 2,700 satellites to support the global network, with the base price of the service costing users $110 a month. As of May, SpaceX told the FCC that Starlink had more than 400,000 subscribers.

SpaceX has signed early deals with commercial air carriers in preparation for this decision: It has pacts with Hawaiian Airlines and semiprivate charter provider JSX to provide Wi-Fi on planes. Up until now SpaceX has been approved to conduct a limited amount of inflight testing, seeing the aviation Wi-Fi market as “ripe for an overhaul.”

The FCC’s authorization also includes connecting to ships and vehicles like semitrucks and RVs, with SpaceX having last year requested to expand from servicing stationary customers. SpaceX had already deployed a version of its service called “Starlink for RVs,” with an additional “portability” fee. But portability is not the same as mobility, which the FCC’s decision now allows.

The FCC imposed conditions on in-motion Starlink service. SpaceX is required to “accept any interference received from both current and future services authorized,” and further investment in Starlink will “assume the risk that operations may be subject to additional conditions or requirements” from the FCC.

The ruling did not resolve a broader SpaceX regulatory dispute with Dish Network and RS Access, an entity backed by billionaire Michael Dell, over the use of 12-gigahertz band — a range of frequency used for broadband communications. The FCC continues to analyze whether the band can support both ground-based and space-based services, with SpaceX pushing for the regulator to make a ruling.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/fcc-...ts-planes.html





Energy-Hungry Data Centers are Quietly Moving into Cities

Companies are pushing more server farms into the hearts of population centers.
Michael Waters

In 1930, the telegraph giant Western Union put the finishing touches on its new crown jewel: a 24-story art deco building located at 60 Hudson Street in lower Manhattan. Soon after, over a million telegraphs each day shuttled in and out, carried by a network of cables, pneumatic tubes, and 30 employees in roller skates who sped across the building’s linoleum floors.

Today, much of it is home to vast halls of computer servers. It is a physical manifestation of the cloud: when you stream a TV show, upload a file to Dropbox, or visit a website, chances are you will be relying on the processing power of a data center just like it. Hundreds of companies rent out space in 60 Hudson Street, and it is one of a growing number of buildings, sometimes called “colocation centers” in industry parlance, that host data centers in or near major population centers.

When you think of data centers, you probably picture a giant server farm in a rural area where electricity is cheap and tax breaks are plentiful. Big tech companies like Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Meta have placed millions of square feet worth of server space in places like Northern Virginia or Hillsboro, Oregon. But now, to reduce lag times, companies are increasingly weaving nodes in their network into the fabric of cities. The One Wilshire building in Los Angeles, for example, formerly home to a network of law offices, now oversees one-third of all internet traffic between the US and Asia.

To the uninitiated, these urban physical internet nodes probably don’t look like much at all. And that’s by design. Equinix, the largest owner of colocation data centers with 10.9% of the world market, operates data centers that generally aren’t supposed to draw attention to themselves. In Dallas, the company owns a sprawling industrial building just outside the city center that doubles as a data center hub and the headquarters of a for-profit college. In Tokyo, the operation is largely conducted on various floors within the city’s sea of skyscrapers, “so you wouldn’t even know it’s there,” says Jim Poole, the company’s vice president of business development. In Sydney, Australia, Equinix is building a new data center in an expressionist style not unlike that of the city’s famed opera house. And around one of its facilities in Amsterdam, Equinix built a moat—less for security, Poole says, than to make the building match its surroundings, given that Amsterdam is a city of canals. “For the most part, people actually do try to make their buildings fit the environment,” he says, adding that sometimes local regulators even require it.

The demand for such facilities, especially in urban centers, is growing quickly: last year, spending on colocation data centers jumped 11.7%. The biggest cloud companies are not far behind. Amazon Web Services has been pushing shrunk-down data centers, which it calls Local Zones, close to major population areas; so far, it has placed them in 32 cities across the US. The trend has even piqued the interest of Walmart, which may soon start renting out sections of its superstores to host data centers for third-party companies.

One explanation for the flurry of demand, Poole says, is that consumers themselves have changed. As more of our lives have gone online, “people’s tolerance for latency has continued to go down,” he says. The main drivers are those applications where a delay in the milliseconds can prove critical: you might not notice a quarter-second lag on Netflix, but you certainly will if you are using an online sports betting app, trading stocks, or participating in a multiplayer game like Fortnite.

Companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, for instance, are betting on cloud gaming, which involves streaming games over the internet without a console or a phone to provide processing power. But many popular games, such as first-person shooters, “require a lot of quick reaction times and therefore really fast connectivity,” says Jabez Tan, the head of research at the firm Structure Research. And games like that will not function on a streaming service without the help of large numbers of data centers.

Or take the metaverse—the favorite, if sparingly sketched-out, new talking point of Nvidia, Meta (previously Facebook), and other tech giants. If a virtual-reality world is ever going to achieve mass appeal, it’s going to need to mirror the immediacy of our own. That means intricately detailed graphics, nimble motion, and audio reactions with hardly a millisecond of buffering. All told, writes Raja Koduri, a senior VP at Intel, we need “several orders of magnitude more powerful computing capability” to make it possible.

It’s this demand for computing power, Tan says, that has spurred the “decentralization” of data center networks: tech companies are looking around at their existing infrastructure and saying, “Hey, we’re not able to give to people in Jakarta, or people in Manila, the same performance levels that people in Singapore [are] enjoying.”

“It’s almost like an accordion,” says Pat Lynch, who studies data centers for the commercial real estate research firm CBRE. Data centers are still being built in places like rural Oregon. But now they are “expanding out.”

The way these new data centers blend into the urban and suburban landscape of office buildings or custom warehouses or industrial parks is a double-edged sword. The approach might make sense from a security standpoint. It also spares people from looking at the eyesore of vast halls crammed with computer servers.

The downside of this invisibility, though, is that we aren’t often forced to think about what all our internet use is costing us. Data centers account for 1.8% of all electricity use in the US and 0.5% of the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions, according to a report last year—far from a negligible amount. Some strategies could help, such as reusing the heat that they produce in copious quantities. But getting to that point would require stepping back from the rush to build and truly intertwining data centers—with all the heat they generate, the energy they consume—into our existing urban ecosystems.
https://www.technologyreview.com/202...-farms-energy/





Why Captions are Suddenly Everywhere and How they Got There
Tali Arbel

People with hearing loss have a new ally in their efforts to navigate the world: Captions that aren’t limited to their television screens and streaming services.

The COVID pandemic disrupted daily life for people everywhere, but many of those with hearing loss took the resulting isolation especially hard. “When everyone wears a mask they are completely unintelligible to me,” said Pat Olken of Sharon, Massachusetts, whose hearing aids were insufficient. (A new cochlear implant has helped her a lot.)

So when her grandson’s bar mitzvah was streamed on Zoom early in the pandemic, well before the service offered captions, Olken turned to Otter, an app created to transcribe business meetings. Reading along with the ceremony’s speakers made the app “a tremendous resource,” she said.

People with hearing loss, a group estimated at roughly 40 million U.S. adults, have long adopted technologies to help them make their way in the hearing world, from Victorian-era ear trumpets to modern digital hearing aids and cochlear implants.

But today’s hearing aids can cost upward of $5,000, often aren’t covered by insurance and don’t work for everyone. The devices also don’t snap audible sound into focus the way glasses immediately correct vision. Instead, hearing aids and cochlear implants require the brain to interpret sound in a new way.

“The solutions out there are clearly not a one-size-fits-all model and do not meet the needs of a lot of people based on cost, access, a lot of different things,” said Frank Lin, director of the Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. That’s not just a communication problem; researchers have found correlations between untreated hearing loss and higher risks of dementia.

Cheaper over-the-counter hearing devices are on the way. But for now, only about 20% of those who could benefit from hearing aids use one.

Captions, by contrast, are usually a lot easier to access. They’ve long been available on modern television sets and are cropping up more frequently in videoconferencing apps like Zoom, streaming services like Netflix, social media video on TikTok and YouTube, movie theaters and live arts venues.

In recent years, smartphone apps like Otter; Google’s Live Transcribe; Ava; InnoCaption, for phone calls; and GalaPro, for live theater performances, have emerged. Some are aimed at people with hearing loss and use human reviewers to make sure captions are accurate.

Others, like Otter and Live Transcribe, instead rely on what’s called automatic speech recognition, which uses artificial intelligence to learn and capture speech. ASR has issues with accuracy and lags in transcribing the spoken word; built-in biases can also make transcriptions less accurate for the voices of women, people of color and deaf people, said Christian Volger, a professor at Gallaudet University who specializes in accessible technology.

Jargon and slang can also be a stumbling block. But users and experts say that ASR has improved a lot.

While welcome, none of these solutions are perfect. Toni Iacolucci of New York says her book club could be draining even when she was using Otter to transcribe the conversation. The captions weren’t always accurate and didn’t identify individual speakers, which could make it hard to keep up, she said.

“It worked a little bit,” said Iacolucci, who lost her hearing nearly two decades ago. After coming home, she would be so tired from trying to follow the conversation that she had to lie down. “It just takes so much energy.” She got a cochlear implant a year ago that has significantly improved her ability to hear, to the point where she can now have one-on-one conversations without captions. They still help in group discussions, she said.

Otter said in a statement that it welcomes feedback from the deaf and hard of hearing community and noted that it now provides a paid software assistant that can join virtual meetings and transcribe them automatically.

Transcription lag can present other problems -- among them, a worry that conversation partners might grow impatient with delays. “Sometimes you say, ‘I’m sorry, I just need to look at my captions in order to hear,’” said Richard Einhorn, a musician and composer in New York. “That doesn’t mean I’m not aware sometimes it’s a hassle for other people.”

Other issues crop up. When Chelle Wyatt of Salt Lake City went to her doctor’s office, the Wi-Fi there wasn’t strong enough for the transcription app to work. “It was gestures and writing things down and making sure I got a written report afterward so I knew what was said,” she said.

Movie theaters provide devices that amplify sound, as well as glasses and individual screens that show captions to go with the movie. But those aren’t always comfortable and sometimes aren’t well-maintained or just don’t work. Many people with hearing loss want more films to run captions on the big screen, just like you’d have in the comfort of your own home.

A new law that took effect In New York City on May 15 requires movie theaters to offer captions on the screen for up to four showtimes per movie each week, including during the most popular hours to go to the movies — Friday nights and weekends. Hawaii passed a state law in 2015 that required two screenings a week of each movie with captions on the screen. AMC, the big movie chain, also says it screens some movies with captions at about a third of its U.S. theaters.

Captions are more available now for live performances, too. Several Broadway theaters promote a smartphone app that captions live performances; there are also handheld individual devices that show captions. Theaters also have a few performances with “open captions” everyone can see.

During the pandemic, the shift to online meetings and school meant videoconferencing services became a tool of survival — but captions came only after a big push. Zoom added live transcription to its free service only in October 2021, but the meeting’s host has to enable them. Google Meet was quicker to make captions available to everyone for free in May 2020; Microsoft Teams, a workplace messaging app, did so that June.

“We need captioning everywhere and we need people to be more sensitive,” Olken said. “The more I advocate the more other people benefit.”
https://apnews.com/article/technolog...0d84c84c3127d5



































Until next week,

- js.



















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