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Old 12-10-22, 06:19 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 15th, 22

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October 15th, 2022




VPN Use Skyrockets in Iran as Citizens Navigate Internet Censorship Under Tehran’s Crackdown
Ryan Browne

• Demand for VPN services skyrocketed over 2,100% on Sept. 22 compared with the previous 28 days, according to figures from Top10VPN.
• Swiss startup Proton said it saw daily signups to its VPN service balloon as much as 5,000% at the peak compared to average levels.
• Iranians have faced “curfew-style” network disruptions for the last two and a half weeks following protests over the death of Mahsa Amini.

Iranians are turning to virtual private networks to bypass widespread internet disruptions as the government tries to conceal its crackdown on mass protests.

Outages first started hitting Iran’s telecommunications networks on Sept 19., according to data from internet monitoring companies Cloudflare and NetBlocks, and have been ongoing for the last two and a half weeks.

Internet monitoring groups and digital rights activists say they’re seeing “curfew-style” network disruptions every day, with access being throttled from around 4 p.m. local time until well into the night.

Tehran blocked access to WhatsApp and Instagram, two of the last remaining uncensored social media services in Iran. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and several other platforms have been banned for years.

As a result, Iranians have flocked to VPNs, services that encrypt and reroute their traffic to a remote server elsewhere in the world to conceal their online activity. This has allowed them to restore connections to restricted websites and apps.

On Sept. 22, a day after WhatsApp and Instagram were banned, demand for VPN services skyrocketed 2,164% compared to the 28 days prior, according to figures from Top10VPN, a VPN reviews and research site.

By Sept. 26, demand peaked at 3,082% above average, and it has continued to remain high since, at 1,991% above normal levels, Top10VPN said.

“Social media plays a crucial role in protests all around the world,” Simon Migliano, head of research at Top10VPN, told CNBC. “It allows protesters to organize and ensure the authorities can’t control the narrative and suppress evidence of human rights abuses.”

“The Iranian authorities’ decision to block access to these platforms as the protests erupted has caused demand for VPNs to skyrocket,” he added.

Demand is much higher than during the uprisings of 2019, which were triggered by rising fuel prices and led to a near-total internet blackout for 12 days. Back then, peak demand was only around 164% higher than usual, according to Migliano.

Nationwide protests over Iran’s strict Islamic dress code began on Sept. 16 following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman. Amini died under suspicious circumstances after being detained — and allegedly struck — by Iran’s so-called “morality police” for wearing her hijab too loosely. Iranian authorities denied any wrongdoing and claimed Amini died of a heart attack.

At least 154 people have been killed in the protests, including children, according to the nongovernmental group Iran Human Rights. The government has reported 41 deaths. Tehran has sought to prevent the sharing of images of its crackdown and hamper communication aimed at organizing further demonstrations.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

Why VPNs are popular in Iran

VPNs are a common way for people under regimes with strict internet controls to access blocked services. In China, for instance, they’re often used as a workaround to restrictions on Western platforms blocked by Beijing, including Google, Facebook and Twitter. Homegrown platforms like Tencent’s WeChat are extremely limited in terms of what can be said by users.

Russia saw a similar rise in demand for VPNs in March after Moscow tightened internet curbs following the invasion of Ukraine.

Swiss startup Proton said it saw daily signups to its VPN service balloon as much as 5,000% at the peak of the Iran protests compared to average levels. Proton is best known as the creator of ProtonMail, a popular privacy-focused email service.

“Since the killing of Mahsa Amini, we have seen a huge uptick in demand for Proton VPN,” Proton CEO and founder Andy Yen told CNBC. “Even prior to that, though, VPN usage is high in Iran due to censorship and fears of surveillance.”

“Historically, we have seen internet crackdowns during periods of unrest in Iran which lead to a rise in VPN usage.”

The most popular VPN services during the protests in Iran have been Lantern, Mullvad and Psiphon, according to Top10VPN, with ExpressVPN also seeing big increases. Some VPNs are free to use, while others require a monthly subscription.

Not a silver bullet

The use of VPNs in tightly restricted countries like Iran hasn’t been without its challenges.

“It is fairly easy for regimes to block the IP addresses of the VPN servers as they can be found quite easily,” said Deryck Mitchelson, field chief information security officer for the EMEA region at Check Point Software.

“For that reason you will find that open VPNs are only available for a short duration before they are identified and blocked.”

Periodic internet outages in Iran have “continued daily in a curfew-style rolling manner,” said NetBlocks, in a blog post. The disruption “affects connectivity at the network layer,” NetBlocks said, meaning they’re not easily solved through the use of VPNs.

Mahsa Alimardani, a researcher at free speech campaign group Article 19, said a contact she’s been communicating with in Iran showed his network failing to connect to Google, despite having installed a VPN.

“This is new refined deep packet inspection technology that they’ve developed to make the network extremely unreliable,” she said. Such technology allows internet service providers and governments to monitor and block data on a network.

Authorities are being much more aggressive in seeking to thwart new VPN connections, she added.

Yen said Proton has “anti-censorship technologies” built into its VPN software to “ensure connectivity even under challenging network conditions.”

VPNs aren’t the only techniques citizens can use to circumvent internet censorship. Volunteers are setting up so-called Snowflake proxy servers, or “proxies,” on their browsers to allow Iranians access to Tor — software that routes traffic through a “relay” network around the world to obfuscate their activity.

“As well as VPNs, Iranians have also been downloading Tor in significantly greater numbers than usual,” said Yen.

Meanwhile, encrypted messaging app Signal compiled a guide on how Iranians can use proxies to bypass censorship and access the Signal app, which was blocked in Iran last year. Proxies serve a similar purpose as Tor, tunneling traffic through a community of computers to help users in countries where online access is restricted preserve anonymity.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/07/vpn-...ensorship.html





Android Leaks Some Traffic Even When 'Always-on VPN' is Enabled
Bill Toulas

Mullvad VPN has discovered that Android leaks traffic every time the device connects to a WiFi network, even if the "Block connections without VPN," or "Always-on VPN," features is enabled.

The data being leaked outside VPN tunnels includes source IP addresses, DNS lookups, HTTPS traffic, and likely also NTP traffic.

This behavior is built into the Android operating system and is a design choice. However, Android users likely didn't know this until now due to the inaccurate description of the "VPN Lockdown" features in Android's documentation.

Mullvad discovered the issue during a security audit that hasn't been published yet, issuing a warning yesterday to raise awareness on the matter and apply additional pressure on Google.

VPNs on Android

VPNs (virtual private networks) are protected network connections that encrypt internet traffic over public networks. When connected to a VPN, all your Internet connections will use the IP address of your VPN service rather than your public IP address.

This allows users to bypass censorship and throttling, and maintain privacy and anonymity while browsing the web, as the remote hosts will never see your actual IP address.

Android offers a setting under "Network & Internet" to block network connections unless you're using a VPN. This feature is designed to prevent accidental leaks of the user's actual IP address if the VPN connection is interrupted or drops suddenly.

Unfortunately, this feature is undercut by the need to accommodate special cases like identifying captive portals (like hotel WiFi) that must be checked before the user can log in or when using split-tunnel features.

This is why Android is configured to leak some data upon connecting to a new WiFi network, regardless of whether you enabled the "Block connections without VPN" setting.

Mullvad reported the issue to Google, requesting the addition of an option to disable connectivity checks.

"This is a feature request for adding the option to disable connectivity checks while "Block connections without VPN" (from now on lockdown) is enabled for a VPN app," explains Mullvad in a feature request on Google's Issue Tracker.

"This option should be added as the current VPN lockdown behavior is to leaks connectivity check traffic (see this issue for incorrect documentation) which is not expected and might impact user privacy."

Unfortunately, a Google engineer responded that this is intended functionality for Android and that it would not be fixed for the following reasons:

• Many VPNs actually rely on the results of these connectivity checks to function,
• The checks are neither the only nor the riskiest exemptions from VPN connections,
• The privacy impact is minimal, if not insignificant, because the leaked information is already available from the L2 connection.

Mullvad countered these points and highlighted the significant benefits of adding the option, even if not all issues will be addressed, and the case remains open.

Potential implications

The traffic that is leaked outside the VPN connection contains metadata that could be used to derive sensitive de-anonymization information, such as WiFi access point locations.

“The connection check traffic can be observed and analyzed by the party controlling the connectivity check server and any entity observing the network traffic,” explains Mullvad in the blog post.

“Even if the content of the message does not reveal anything more than "some Android device connected", the metadata (which includes the source IP) can be used to derive further information, especially if combined with data such as WiFi access point locations.”

While this isn't easy for unsophisticated threat actors, people who use VPNs to protect themselves from persistent attackers would still find the risk significant.

Furthermore, Mullvad explains that even if the leaks are not fixed, Google should at least update the documentation to correctly indicate that 'Connectivity Checks' would not be protected by the "Block connections without VPN" feature.

Mullvad is still debating the significance of the data leak with Google, calling them to introduce the ability to disable connectivity checks and minimize liability points.

Notably, GrapheneOS, Android-based privacy and security-focused operating system that can run on a limited number of smartphone models, provides this option with the intended functionality.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...pn-is-enabled/





iOS 16 VPN Tunnels Leak Data, Even When Lockdown Mode Is Enabled
Hartley Charlton

iOS 16 continues to leak data outside an active VPN tunnel, even when Lockdown mode is enabled, security researchers have discovered.

Speaking to MacRumors, security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry explained that iOS 16's approach to VPN traffic is the same whether Lockdown mode is enabled or not. The news is significant since iOS has a persistent, unresolved issue with leaking data outside an active VPN tunnel.

In August, it again emerged that third-party VPNs for iOS and iPadOS routinely fail to route all network traffic through a secure tunnel after they have been turned on – an issue that Apple has purportedly known about for years.

Typically, when a user activates a VPN, the operating system closes all existing internet connections and then re-establishes them through the VPN tunnel. In iOS, security researchers have found that sessions and connections established before the VPN is turned on are not terminated as one would expect, and can still send data outside the VPN tunnel while it is active, leaving it potentially unencrypted and exposed to ISPs and other parties.

According to a report from privacy company Proton, an iOS VPN bypass vulnerability had been identified in iOS 13.3.1, which persisted through three subsequent updates. Apple indicated it would add Kill Switch functionality in a future software update that would allow developers to block all existing connections if a VPN tunnel is lost, but this functionality does not appear to prevent data leaks as of iOS 15 and iOS 16.

Mysk and Bakry have now discovered that iOS 16 communicates with select Apple services outside an active VPN tunnel and leaks DNS requests without the user's knowledge:

Mysk and Bakry also investigated whether iOS 16's Lockdown mode takes the necessary steps to fix this issue and funnel all traffic through a VPN when one is enabled, and it appears that the exact same issue persists whether Lockdown mode is enabled or not, particularly with push notifications. This means that the minority of users who are vulnerable to a cyberattack and need to enable Lockdown mode are equally at risk of data leaks outside their active VPN tunnel.

iOS 16 introduced Lockdown mode as an optional security feature designed to protect the "very small number" of users who may be at risk of "highly targeted cyberattacks" from private companies developing state-sponsored spyware, such as journalists, activists, and government employees. Lockdown mode does not enable a VPN itself, and relies on the same third-party VPN apps as the rest of the system.

Due to the fact that iOS 16 leaks data outside the VPN tunnel even where Lockdown mode is enabled, internet service providers, governments, and other organizations may be able to identify users who have a large amount of traffic, potentially highlighting influential individuals. It is possible that Apple does not want a potentially malicious VPN app to collect some kinds of traffic, but seeing as ISPs and governments are then able to do this, even if that is what the user is specifically trying to avoid, it seems likely that this is part of the same VPN problem that affects iOS 16 as a whole.

It is worth noting that Apple only lists high-level features that activate when Lockdown mode is enabled, and Apple has not explicitly mentioned any changes that take place to affect VPN traffic. Nevertheless, as Lockdown mode claims to be an extreme protection measure, it seems like a considerable oversight that VPN traffic is a vulnerable point.
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/10/13...lockdown-mode/





Biden’s Internet Promises in Limbo Amid Long Battle Over FCC Nominee

Almost 250 groups will send a letter Friday to congressional leaders, calling for the Senate to vote to confirm Democratic nominee Gigi Sohn
Cat Zakrzewski

The nation’s telecommunications regulator has been without a Democratic majority for the entirety of President Biden’s 21-month tenure, hamstringing efforts to restore open internet protections and close the digital divide.

Breaking the deadlock at the Federal Communications Commission hinges on confirming Gigi Sohn, a longtime public interest advocate and former Democratic FCC official who was first nominated by the White House nearly a year ago. As the midterm elections approach and Democrats’ ability to retain their narrow control of the Senate remains uncertain, Sohn’s supporters are warning Congress that the clock is ticking to lock in a majority at the agency.

On Friday, about 250 industry and public interest groups wrote a letter to top Senate leaders calling for a vote on Sohn’s nomination before Congress adjourns at the end of the year.

“The FCC needs a full commission as it begins to deliberate on upcoming critical decisions that will have profound impacts on the economy and the American people,” leaders from groups including the Consumer Technology Association, Rural Wireless Association and Color Of Change wrote in a letter shared exclusively with The Washington Post.

The push from Sohn’s supporters follows what her allies describe as an unprecedented effort from some telecommunications and media lobbyists to block her nomination. Biden’s failure to secure a majority or full complement of commissioners at the FCC marks one of the longest delays in recent memory for a first-term president.

“It’s insane,” said Greg Guice, the director of Public Knowledge’s government affairs team who has worked in roles related to tech regulation for more than 20 years. (Sohn previously worked at Public Knowledge, which is among the signatories of the Friday letter). Lobbyists “know that being down one seat means they can better control the agenda,” he said.

The stakes for industry are high: During the Trump administration, the then Republican-led agency advanced a wave of deregulation, reversing Obama-era net neutrality protections and eliminating decades-old rules that preserve media diversity in local markets. With a majority again, Democrats are expected to reverse those moves.

Sohn’s nomination also comes as the federal government is expected to soon invest an unprecedented amount of funding in expanding internet access, following the infrastructure legislation that Congress passed last year. That legislation directed the agency to develop rules to address discrimination in internet access on the basis of income level or race. There are widespread inequities in how broadband is delivered, and new rules under a Democratic FCC could create more costs for major internet service providers.

Since the White House began vetting her for the position in the spring of 2021, Sohn has largely been sidelined from publicly commenting on telecommunications policy. Over the last year, she’s been frequently attacked as a partisan in publications including Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages. The process has taken a personal toll, opening Sohn up to threatening phone calls and emails and name-calling. Sohn, who would be the first openly gay FCC commissioner, has also faced attacks on her sexual orientation.

“It’s a tragedy,” said Gary Shapiro, the president of CTA and a friend of Sohn. “We can’t even let people we disagree with get into positions anymore without attacking them personally.”

Sohn’s nomination has seen fierce opposition from congressional Republicans, and some companies appear to be taking steps to target moderate Democrats who could decide her nomination.

Comcast this year paid former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle (D) and his firm $30,000 to lobby on the “Status of FCC nominations,” among other issues, according to a July disclosure filing. Sohn is the only pending nomination for the commission.

The company in January also tapped a former state lawmaker who served alongside Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), widely seen as a crucial swing vote on the Sohn nomination, to lobby on FCC nominations. The filing disclosing the lobbying focus was later resubmitted and amended to scrub mention of the FCC nomination, as news outlets reported at the time. Comcast also retained Larry Puccio, the former top aide to Sen. Joe Manchin III, another critical Democrat to lobby on telecommunications issues, though it did not mention nominations.

Preston Padden, a former top executive at Fox and Disney, said he could recall no other occasion where companies “microtargeted” specific lawmakers to oppose a FCC nominee.

“What Comcast has done to Gigi Sohn in my experience is absolutely unprecedented,” Padden said.

The filings do not indicate how the groups lobbied on the nominations or other issues. Comcast did not return a request for comment. The company has previously declined to comment on lobbying filings.

“The Daschle Group did not lobby for or against any nominations,” Daschle’s vice president, Veronica Pollock, said. “We consistently track the status of nominations and share updates with clients when there is movement in Congress.”

Telecommunications companies are among the most formidable lobbying forces in Washington, but Sohn’s supporters say it’s impossible to calculate how much the industry has spent to specifically oppose her nomination because such figures are not broken out in federal lobbying disclosures. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and T-Mobile have spent over $23 million combined lobbying Washington so far this year, with Comcast leading the pack at $7.4 million, according to data from OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks spending on campaign finance and lobbying.

David Segal, founder of the left-leaning advocacy group Demand Progress, said the telecom lobby “still wields extraordinary political power” in Washington, which companies have used to stymie efforts to address what he called their “increasingly extractive business models.” And they stand to benefit from a Sohn-less FCC, he said.

“The Biden administration has been strong on competition policy, and the FCC has important jurisdiction there that can’t be deployed to full effect without a full commission,” he said.

The telecom giants have declined to publicly campaign against Sohn’s nomination, and some have said they have remained neutral behind closed doors.

AT&T spokesperson Alex Byers told The Post in a statement in May, “We have not taken a position on Gigi Sohn’s nomination, have not asked any third-party organization to take a position, and have not funded any campaigns against her nomination.”

Congressional Republicans have called into question Sohn’s commitment to bipartisanship, citing her old tweets criticizing conservative news outlet Fox News. Sohn has pushed back on the claims.

“In Ms. Sohn, President Biden has nominated someone who cannot fulfill part of the responsibilities of FCC commissioner, and whose record strongly suggests that she cannot be relied upon to fulfill any of her responsibilities in an impartial manner,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said during a March floor speech. All 14 Republicans on the key Senate Commerce Committee opposed advancing her nomination.

Sohn’s confirmation has also been bedeviled by procedural factors and complications in the 50-50 Senate. A committee vote on her nomination was delayed during the absence of a key Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, and she has to overcome additional hurdles because that vote split evenly on party lines.

Revolving Door Project director Jeff Hauser, whose watchdog group tracks federal appointments, said a scarcity of floor time and “outdated” Senate protocols have stymied Democrats’ ability to quickly confirm nominees. The dynamic has forced Senate Democrats to make difficult choices about which appointees to prioritize, particularly as they push to confirm an array of judicial nominees before potentially losing control of Congress.

“Obama-era Democrats did not prioritize judicial nomination, and it is overdue progress that Biden and Schumer have done much better on that front. But judicial confirmations alone will not make the lame duck remotely successful,” Hauser said, adding that “it is urgent that they fill vacuums at independent agencies.”

A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) declined to comment on timing for a potential floor vote on Sohn.

The White House reaffirmed its commitment to Sohn’s nomination in a statement Wednesday.

“We’ve been working relentlessly with Congress to get a confirmation vote,” White House spokesperson Olivia Dalton said. “The majority of the FCC hangs in the balance and we want Sohn’s talents, expertise and experience at the Commission.”

The FCC said in a statement that despite the deadlock, the agency has made progress on broadband access, network security and other initiatives.

“While we look forward to the Commission having a full dais again, we’ve done a lot with a 2-2 bench and will continue to do so on behalf of the American people,” the agency said in a statement.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...ock-gigi-sohn/





Frontier Details $800 Million Fiber Optic Internet Plan for Connecticut
Luther Turmelle

Frontier Communications officials expect to spend $800 million in Connecticut through the 2025 as part of the Norwalk-based company's continued roll out of fiber optic cable to provide ultra high speed internet service to homes and businesses across the state.

John Harrobin, Frontier's head of consumer products, said Wednesday that the company's expenditure is one of the largest private infrastructure build outs in Connecticut history. The expenditure covers a five-year period began in late 2020, Harrobin said.

"We hope to enter 2026 with 90 percent of customers having access to fiber optic cable," he said. "We just surpassed bringing fiber past 500,000 homes and we plan to have it installed past 800,000 homes by 2025."

The company isn't saying how many residential or business customers it has signed up for fiber optic service but is now available in 70 communities across Connecticut. That includes cities like Hartford, Norwalk, and Bridgeport, suburbs such as West Hartford, North Haven, and Glastonbury as well as in rural areas like Union and Stafford Springs.

North Haven Mayor Mike Freda said Frontier "has been an outstanding partner," as the company rolls out fiber optic service in the town.

"Their communication on the integration of this new fiber broadband here has been exceptional," Freda said. "We look forward to all of the opportunities that this new infrastructure will offer the people of North Haven."

Lon Seidman is an Essex businessman who has his own YouTube channel where he reviews technology products. He recently did a review of Frontier's fiber optic service when his father signed up for the company's 500 megabit per second offering in his Westbrook home.

"They're being very aggressive in marketing it," Seidman said. "They offered to come out and install it the same day they called him asking if he wanted the service. They are upping their game because they see there is significant competition out there now."

When Frontier emerged from a year-long stint in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in April 2021, the company's strategy was to go all in on providing fiber optic service.

The company's singular focus on fiber optic service seems to have come at the expense of other products. For example, though Frontier still provides a cable television offering, it no longer actively promotes it to new customers, according to Harrobin.

Instead, the company has partnered with streaming services like YouTube TV and DirectTV Stream, he said.

"Streaming is where future the future is," Harrobin said. "Cable television has built a great business. But if we just replicate their service, we're not serving our customers."

Frontier fiber optic customers who sign up with the company's streaming partners get special incentives that wouldn't receive otherwise, he said.

"YouTube TV's base rate is $64.99 a month," Harrobin said. "Frontier customers get $10 a month off that price for the first year of service."

Jeff Kagan, a Georgia-based independent telecommunications analyst, said Frontier singular focus on fiber optic service isn't necessarily a sound business strategy.

"It could be enough, but it's not going to put them in the fast lane in terms of growth," Kagan said. "They're kind of boxing themselves into this smaller arena."
https://www.newstimes.com/business/a...n-17507452.php





Amazon’s Set to Launch its Prototype Internet Satellites Early Next Year

Project Kuiper is starting to get off the ground after a slight delay and a change of rockets
Mitchell Clark

Amazon is getting ready to launch two test satellites for its Project Kuiper satellite internet constellation, built to compete with services like SpaceX Starlink and OneWeb. In a press release on Wednesday, the company says the prototypes, charmingly named Kuipersat-1 and Kuipersat-2, will be riding into orbit on a Vulcan Centaur rocket from the United Launch Alliance (ULA) in early 2023.

The company says the launch will let it perform tests on its satellite network technology with data from space and that the data will “help finalize design, deployment, and operational plans for our commercial satellite system.” The timeframe marks a slight delay from Amazon’s original plan; last year, the company announced it would launch the prototypes in Q4 of 2022, using a completely different rocket from a company called ABL Space Systems.

There’s a lot that’s (not quite) up in the air

Early 2023 isn’t too far away, but there are still a lot of things that have to go right for the launch to happen on schedule. For one, Amazon needs to actually finish building the satellites, which its press release says will be completed later this year. The rocket also isn’t done yet — ULA said in a press release on Wednesday that it expects to have Vulcan fully assembled by November and tested by December — for now, though, it still has to install the engines. It’s not exactly a proven launch platform, either; this will be the rocket’s first flight.

Both companies have deadlines to meet. As The Washington Post points out, ULA has to launch Vulcan twice before Q4 2023 to prove that it’s reliable enough to carry out missions for the US Space Force. Meanwhile, Amazon has to launch half of its satellites by 2026 to keep its FCC license. That’s further away than the end of next year, but given that Amazon’s constellation is set to be made up of 3,236 satellites, that’s going to require quite a few launches in the next few years. Thirty-eight of them are set to use the Vulcan, while several others will be with rockets from Arianespace and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. (Fun fact: the BE-4 engines that Vulcan uses are also from Blue Origin.) Notably absent from its list of partners is SpaceX, which other satellite providers like Lynk and AST SpaceMobile have used to launch equipment into space.

Once its fleet of satellites is in orbit, Amazon says its plan is to “deliver fast, affordable broadband to unserved and underserved communities around the world.” It also has an agreement with Verizon to act as a backhaul for remote LTE or 5G cell towers.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/...es-2023-launch





Survey: Video Game Piracy Set to Rise

Video game piracy is predicted to rise, after a nationwide survey has revealed that nearly 10 per cent of gamers have illegally accessed content in the last three months.

The findings show that more people are looking to cut their leisure costs now than ever before in order to save money – meaning video gamers are delving into the world of piracy to reduce their expenses, with the cost of living steadily increasing across the UK.

The data from the House of Commons shows consumer prices were 9.9 per cent higher in August 2022 than they were the year before, while gas prices have increased by 96 per cent, and electricity prices by 54 per cent.

Whilst many have had to reduce expenses around streaming service subscriptions (22 per cent), like travelling abroad (13 per cent) and indulging in online shopping (11 per cent), 8 per cent of gamers in the UK are turning to cost-free – and illegal – methods to access the latest releases.

According to the survey, almost 1 in 10 gamers have illegally downloaded or played a pirated copy of a video game in the past three months, with the intention to save some money.

When it comes to how people have accessed this content, the results show the most common route is through link sites (30 per cent) and ROM sites (19 per cent), whilst some players have instead chosen to make a copy of a friend’s game for their own use (14 per cent).

The survey also reveals which upcoming games players would be most tempted to pirate – either due to the high costs or difficulty of securing them – with WoW coming out on top.

When asked why they’re open to pirating content, respondents said reducing money was the main driver (30 per cent), while others said they’d prefer to boycott brands (perhaps as they consider them to charge too much for content) (15 per cent) or impress their friends (13 per cent).

Concerningly, over 1 in 10 (11 per cent) said they only pirate video games because they’re not sure about the legal or security implications of doing so – despite being adult gamers.

Just some of the consequences of pirating video games are a permanent suspension from gaming accounts, losing online gaming privileges, or even spending time in jail. Security-wise, pirated video games can result in malware spread by cracked games, personal data and login details being stolen, and an increased risk of cyberattacks.

It seems that even gamers who haven’t previously considered pirating content could turn to the dark side, with a further 15 per cent of those surveyed saying they’ve thought about it before.

With inflation set to increase, it’s clear video game piracy could also see a further rise in the run up to Christmas, as gamers are clearly turning to alternative ways to fuel their passion.

Other findings from the survey included that the majority (79 per cent) of gamers have had to alter their leisure spending in at least some way to save money, with the demographic most affected by rising costs coming out as those aged 25-34.
https://advanced-television.com/2022...y-set-to-rise/





Preventing Video Piracy in the Age of Streaming
Rohan Tewari

Rohan Tewari’s group won two awards at the BT Young Scientist 2022 competition for their project, which aims to detect illegally streamed video content.

Video piracy has been a scourge on the film and television industry for decades and has drastically worsened in recent years. The earliest iteration of this practice mainly occurred through the distribution of pirated DVDs, often containing low resolution media.

In the early 2000s, we saw the rise of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing platforms such as BitTorrent, and a clear surge in piracy, as consumers were now able to download content from the comfort of their homes.

Despite the success of BitTorrent, the act of accessing pirating films was, for the most part, confined to the fringes of the internet. Torrenting required a certain degree of technical knowledge, buying illegal DVDs was inconvenient and fundamentally, very few were willing to wait lengthy periods of time for high-quality streams of films initially released months ago to become available online.

In the last few years, we have seen an unprecedented level of piracy resulting in the loss of up to $71bn in the US alone every year and 230,000 jobs overall. Piracy has now become mainstream due to the rise of streaming, greatly impacting how consumers and pirates access content.

In the case of audiences, streaming is a significantly more convenient and simple way to access content as opposed to purchasing DVDs or downloading films. Coupled with the ease of obtaining high-speed internet connectivity and mobile devices, it is little wonder that approximately 80pc of global online piracy can be attributed to illegal streaming services.

The streaming challenge

The rise of streaming and subscription-based streaming services means that pirates are no longer required to wait lengthy amounts of time for DVD releases to pirate content. Instead, malicious third parties have developed techniques with which one is able to reverse-engineer streaming applications/players distributed by streaming companies such as Netflix.

Pirates can identify where unencrypted streams are being dumped out within the app, thereby isolating high-quality video content on the day of release. This has had two major effects: audiences are no longer required to wait lengthy periods of time to access pirated films and pirates can reliably upload high-quality versions of the content, thereby dramatically improving the consumer experience. Long gone are the days of shaky camcorder footage!

This new technique has also rendered prevailing industry practices ineffective. Currently, anti-piracy systems rely on techniques such as watermarking and digital rights management (DRM) to prevent the illegal distribution of video content.

The former involves placing a visual indicator within the video content and the latter makes use of 128-bit advanced encryption standard (AES), with authenticated users provided with secret keys for the decryption of the video content.

These approaches are fundamentally flawed as they cannot prevent the easy extraction of video content from streaming service players. Once streams are isolated, they can be distributed on the internet and accessed time and time again, even if they have been watermarked. DRM has also experienced backlash from privacy and consumer rights groups, thus undermining the impact of this technique.

Industry players have consistently attempted to prevent their content from being inappropriately extracted and distributed. However, I propose that a new form of thinking needs to be adopted.

Starting with the end user

We need to make accessing illegally streamed video content as unpredictable and time-consuming for the end user as possible, thus preventing mainstream use. I believe this can be achieved through the use of a user-end detection system, which can reliably delineate between pirated and legally streamed content, thus allowing relevant parties to block access reliably.

For the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition 2022 I led a group that developed a detection system based upon the use of audio-fingerprinting to accurately identify video content. Our algorithm which also won the CISCO special award adapted the system first developed by Shazam for the identification of music.

Our work involved developing and testing our algorithm on 91 hours of audio associated with various films. Our results proved this novel application is viable as our system could match with 98pc accuracy from a sizeable and varied database.

After developing our algorithm, we designed a framework with the aim of laying down a foundation for the industry-wide implementation of our detection system. The first stage of the framework involves participation of the streaming companies and film studios.

All parties would be required to publish the addresses of servers used by them on a permissioned blockchain. We propose the use of this database structure as blockchains are immutable. This means that any transactions (ie, addition of addresses to the blockchain) cannot be deleted.

In the unlikely event that a malicious individual or group tries to delete all transactions on the blockchain, they would not be able to as there are multiple copies of the blockchain stored in the many nodes on the internet.

Film studios would also have to provide information on what films are being rented to smaller streaming services, such as the RTÉ player. The server addresses affiliated with small, national streaming services would be uploaded by national broadcasting bureaus such as the Irish Broadcasting Agency.

All server addresses provided would be considered whitelisted for the duration of which they are showing the rented film. The blockchain would also contain the pre-computed fingerprints of all video content.

The detection system begins when a stream is relayed by an ISP enterprise router and the server IP address is checked. If the given IP address matches with a whitelisted address, then we can safely assume that the incoming stream originates from a legal source.

If no match occurs, then we treat the incoming stream as potentially illegal and further analysis begins. Given the current lack of computing power in ISP routers, the rest of the process could be offloaded to a cloud service provider. We propose a round-based approach to matching.

Firstly, the algorithm would dump out a five-minute section of audio for analysis whilst the stream plays. This sample audio would undergo our fingerprinting process, including the generation of unique identifiers.

Secondly, these unique identifiers would be searched for in our database. All films that are matched with a certain degree of accuracy would be deemed as potential candidates for an overall match.

The first round is now finished, and the process repeats with another five-minute section of audio being dumped out and analysed. At the end of round two, every previously matched film that is matched again is retained as a potential candidate and the rest are abandoned.

Films matched for the first time in this round are also retained. The rounds continue until we are left with one film that has been matched in every round since it was first identified. At this point the ISP can throttle the stream if they so wish in order to disrupt the users viewing experience. If no match fits these parameters, then the ISP may assume that the stream being analysed is some other form of video content, like a YouTube video or a Twitch stream.

We believe the system described above has the power to drastically reduce video piracy in the age of streaming. Our novel approach utilises audio fingerprinting to prevent access to content, as opposed to current strategies designed to prevent the extraction of content. Our framework also describes roles for all relevant industry players and most importantly lays down a foundation to counter streamed video piracy.
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/ente...reaming-btyste





Roanoke's 'Slumlord Millionaire' Accuses Netflix of Copyright Infringement
Laurence Hammack

For better or for worse, the title “Slumlord Millionaire” is copyright Spanky Macher.

That, at least, is how the low-rent Roanoke landlord — whose past troubles include a string of complaints from tenants, housing code violations, eviction battles and a prison term for tax evasion — sees his latest legal situation.

Roland “Spanky” Macher has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Netflix, claiming the entertainment giant took his idea for a reality show based on his book, which he registered with the U.S. Copyright Office in 2016.

Against Macher’s wishes, Netflix used the Slumlord Millionaire name for an episode of Dirty Money, an investigative series that uncovers acts of corporate greed and corruption, according to a $10 million lawsuit he filed in Roanoke’s federal court.

Netflix bestowed on Jared Kushner, a former White House advisor and real estate developer, the title of a book and television idea that Macher said he came up with for himself, while serving a 30-month sentence in federal prison.

The lawsuit claims that Netflix “has a history of pirating ideas from creators without authorization or compensation.”

Macher, 69, admits to being a not-so-likeable version of David in a battle with a subscription streaming service that has more than 200 million customers worldwide.

“I’m annoying, and I know that is not a strength,” he said Monday.

“But I sat here and said ‘dammit, I think I’m right,’” Macher said as he slapped the desk of his office. “I really believe I’m in a David and Goliath situation, and I’m fighting not only for myself but for all the little people who think they’re right.”

Efforts to reach Netflix were unsuccessful.

Macher, a former restaurateur with a reputation for shaking things up with city officials, was convicted in 2011 of failing to pay taxes when his Spanky’s restaurant business struggled, making false statements in bankruptcy court as his empire collapsed and later obtaining food stamps illegally by lying about his finances.

Calling his behavior “totally beyond the pale,” a federal judge sentenced Macher to 30 months in prison.

While doing time in a minimum security camp, Macher wrote hundreds of pages of what became the first draft of a book. Slumlord Millionaire was self-published in 2016.

Taking its title from a play on the Academy Award-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire,” Macher’s book is a guide to navigating the real estate world, from buying a first home to investing in multiple properties and managing them.

In 2018, while attending an international trade show for the television and movie business, Macher pitched his concept of making the copyrighted book into a reality show.

A number of shows and networks, including Netflix, showed an interest, Macher said, but no deal was struck.

After Netflix aired the episode of Dirty Money that it called Slumlord Millionaire, Macher wrote a cease-and-desist letter to company officials in October 2021, his lawsuit alleges.

“Macher has never been contacted by Netflix Inc. or any of its executives,” the lawsuit, which he filed without an attorney, states. “He has never been given compensation for his creative work, his ideas, concept, marketing direction and blue print for success.”

To this day, Macher says he has mixed feelings about his book’s title.

“I get a lot of heat off the name,” he said. The title is as much about the realities of renting properties to low-income tenants as it is about making money in the real estate business, he said.

“I pride myself on giving people a second chance and a second opportunity,” Macher said. “I don’t look at it as a tag that I do low-income property…I wish people could understand it better.”
https://martinsvillebulletin.com/new...e46eb5352.html





Netflix’s Ad Tier will Cost $6.99 a Month and Launch in November

Starting in November, Netflix Basic with Ads will be available in 12 countries.
Charles Pulliam-Moore

Starting in November, Netflix will finally roll out its new ad-supported tier for just a few bucks a month, yet another sign that the onetime disruptive upstart streaming service has slowly become a cable package by another name.

Netflix announced today that its new Basic with Ads tier is slated to launch on November 3rd, 2022, for $6.99 in the US, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, and the UK. In exchange for making you watch an average of four to five minutes of ads per hour, Basic with Ads will give subscribers access to a large swath of Netflix’s programming. Not the platform’s full catalog, though.

A small selection of television shows and movies will not be available to Basic with Ads subscribers due to licensing restrictions that Netflix says it’s currently working on. Each of Netflix’s ads will run anywhere from 15-30 seconds, and will be placed before and during programs. Additionally, Basic with Ads subscribers will not be able to download content onto their devices, and video quality is capped at 720p / HD.

During a press conference about the new tier, Netflix described it as “pro-consumer” and detailed how its internal content tagging teams have been tasked with finding natural breakpoints in different shows and films to place commercials in. Netflix also emphasized how Basic with Ads has come together over the past six months in the buildup to its debut this November but noted that “what we do at launch will not be representative of the long term opportunity of what the product will be.” At launch, Netflix’s ad space will be sold with a fixed-price model rather than being auctioned off, and Netflix’s says “hundreds of advertisers worldwide” have already purchased most of its initial inventory.

In the US, Netflix said it will partner with Nielsen to provide advertisers with ratings data that will be published via Nielsen One. Nielsen’s digital ad ratings will play an important role in how Netflix measures its audience, and Netflix said that it will not be using its data to build user profiles that lead to targeted ads outside the platform. All of these new tools will be rolling out to advertisers over the course of 2023.

Netflix’s ad tier arrives in response to a sudden slump for the streamer, which lost over 1 million subscribers in the US and Canada earlier this year and has seen its stock price plunge in response to investor concerns that its period of rapid growth has ended. Despite co-CEO Reed Hastings’ well-documented opposition to the idea of including advertising, it’s clear that his recent change of heart has been spurred by the recent declines.

But after years of Netflix being ad-free, the concept of paying for a version of the service that has them might be something that people really need to be sold on before it takes off.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/...edc32c19ef33b4





What is Torrenting and How Does it Work?

If you've ever been curious about BitTorrent or torrenting, we have the explainer for you!
David Gewirtz

Torrenting is a term used for distributing and downloading files using the BitTorrent protocol. Because of how that protocol works, torrenting is particularly well-suited to the distribution of very large files. Once you understand how it works, you'll understand why it's so incredibly powerful… and so incredibly controversial.

How big are files?

Let's make sure we're all on the same page when it comes to understanding how big certain kinds of files are. You'll need to understand this to truly understand what a game-changer BitTorrent is.

A byte is 8 bits, or eight items that can either be a one or a zero. A character like "a" is 1 byte. Back in the day (before 2017) a Twitter tweet was limited to 140 characters, which would have been 140 bytes. Today, of course, a tweet maxes out at 280 characters or 280 bytes. Depending on context, a kilobyte (KB) is either 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes (or roughly four maxed-out tweets).

I took a look at a recent email thread where a colleague and I had emailed back and forth five or six times, and found it took up a little over 6,000 characters. A typical 1,200-word article (again, text only) is about 7,200 characters. We generally measure pure text in kilobytes.

A megabyte is about 1 million bytes or about 1,024KB (about 4,000 maxed-out tweets). You could store 142 typical articles in a single megabyte. We generally measure photos and music in megabytes, because photos and music need to contain a lot more data. A typical iPhone photo is about 3.5MB. An MP3 track is roughly 8MB. And a 10-minute 1080p YouTube video is 158MB (with a lot of compression).

Okay, let's get even bigger. Remember that a megabyte is about a thousand kilobytes. A gigabyte is roughly a thousand megabytes. You can store about 125 MP3 tracks in 1GB. We use gigabytes for measuring the size of big files like movies and operating system distributions.

The Ubuntu Linux installer clocks in at 3.6GB. A DVD can hold 4.7GB. The Windows 11 ISO (the downloadable installer) is 5.4GB. The MacOS Monterey installer is 12.16GB. And a Blu-ray movie can range from 25GB to 50GB depending on how the Blu-ray disc is produced.

Today, most hard drives are sold in terabyte sizes (although stand-alone SSDs are still available with capacities as little as 64GB and many laptops ship with 256GB SSDs as their default loadout). A terabyte is roughly 1,000GB or… hold on tight now…1,000,000,000 kilobytes.

What is BitTorrent?

BitTorrent is a file-sharing and data distribution protocol created by programmer Bram Cohen in 2001. BitTorrent changed the way files were distributed to computers across the Internet, making it much more practical to distribute large and even giant files.

Before BitTorrent, if you wanted to distribute a file (say a Linux distro), you'd put it up on a server and individual users would download it. The server had to have the bandwidth to be able to handle all the users who wanted to download the file, which meant that popular files that were also large files would often clog the server's pipes rather quickly.

Some of the more popular large files were mirrored onto other sites, but each mirror also had to distribute the entire file to a given user. This meant that the mirror's bandwidth would also get used up rather quickly — and many people downloading files either didn't know about the mirrors, or preferred to download from the originating server anyway.

BitTorrent changed that up. Rather than distributing an entire file from one server, the BitTorrent protocol splits the file up into hundreds and even thousands of chunks, and sends those chunks to BitTorrent client software running on users' machines. The BitTorrent client software then reassembles the original file, chunk-by-chunk, from those other individual machines, for the user doing the downloading.

Take a minute to wrap your head around this idea. Rather than using one server to distribute a file, every person who wants that file runs an app that turns their own computer into a mini server that then distributes parts of that file to other users. Essentially, every user downloading the file becomes part of the network that's distributing it.

You may have heard of SETI@Home, which used the distributed computer power of thousands of volunteer computers all across the world to help analyze radio signals in the search for extraterrestrial life. Folding@Home also uses the distributed computing power of volunteered computers across the planet to analyze protein dynamics in an attempt to cure some diseases. BitTorrent is another example of the same idea. It uses thousands of computers — the computers of those who want the file or files being shared — to help distribute those files.

You can see how this might be a game-changer. Where, previously, it might have taken a considerable investment in resources and bandwidth to distribute a big file like an operating system release (or a popular movie), that investment is no longer necessary because the crowd of users doing the downloading are also sharing the file chunks amongst themselves.

BitTorrent effectively removed the barrier of entry for the distribution of ginormous data files. This enormous change in the dynamics of data distribution has been used as a force of good… and not so good. More on that in a bit.

Is there a special jargon for BitTorrent?

BitTorrent uses its own special set of buzzwords to describe various aspects of how the system works. If you want to really understand what's happening, it helps to understand what the terms mean.

Seed: This is the machine that originally distributes the shared file. Technically, any peer that has 100% of the shared file also becomes a seed.

Peer: This is a machine that downloads the shared file and then shares parts of the file to other peers. When you run a BitTorrent client on your machine to get a file, you're running a peer.

Piece: Part of a shared file, to be combined with other pieces when reassembled into a usable whole.

Torrent: Torrent is used in two ways. When specified with the word file (as in "torrent file"), this is a file containing metadata describing all of the pieces of the shared file and its checksum (validation) data. When used on its own (as in "I downloaded a torrent of Ubuntu"), it means the shared file (and all its pieces).

Swarm: This is the full network that's sharing a file, consisting of all the peers and seeds.

Tracker: This is a server that keeps track of the seeds and peers in the swarm. A tracker is often not involved in the actual transfer of data, but acts as more of an index or search engine for people looking for torrents. Trackers are often the target of legal action, because they're seen as the enablers of illicit file sharing.

Leech: This is a term for a peer that does not share pieces of a shared file. Basically, this is someone who wants to download a file using BitTorrent, but is not willing to do their part to support the swarm. Some leeches on very low-bandwidth connections can't download and share, so they download first, then share. But most leeches simply choose to be a "bit piggy" and download files without giving back.

Health: Do not confuse the BitTorrent term "health" with quality or safety of a file. In BitTorrent, health means how much of a file is available to download (anything less than 100% health means you're not getting a full file today). Do not assume something that shows 100% health is, for example, free of viruses. This also spotlights one of the downfalls of torrenting: Not all files are fully available to download. You may have to wait until a peer shows up with the missing pieces or, for less popular files, you may never get those missing pieces.

Fake: A file that spoofs what it claims to have. Generally, it's a file that contains malware or just junk bytes, designed to either attack users or improve the uploader's ratio.

Ratio: This is a measure of how much you've uploaded. It is sometimes used by trackers to allow more access to more files.

TOR: Folks often get confused by this. TOR stands for The Onion Router and is unrelated to BitTorrent. Because TOR is a way of communicating over the Internet anonymously, some people do run torrents over TOR. But the TOR Project and BitTorrent are completely separate beasts.

Have I missed any important terms for torrents? If I did, let us know in the comments below.

What BitTorrent client should I use?

As you might imagine, there are quite a few BitTorrent clients out there. Some are even good. Among those available include two from Rainberry (formerly BitTorrent, Inc.) the company formed by BitTorrent's developer, Bram Cohen. Rainberry has since been bought out by a cryptocurrency firm, and Cohen is no longer associated with it. We won't be recommending the BitTorrent clients BitTorrent and uTorrent from Rainberry, because both come with advertising, fees, and associated software.

With that, let's look at some BitTorrent apps you might want to install.

qBittorent: My strongest recommendation is the free and open-source qBittorrent. While its interface is a bit cumbersome, it's been around for a long time, is a clean distribution, works with Macs, Windows, and Linux, and is generally quite powerful. It's not quite as extensible and customizable as other clients, but if you're just getting started, this will get you going.

Transmission: Transmission is another free and open-source implementation, this time tuned for MacOS. While there are builds of Transmission for Windows and Linux, this is a gorgeous implementation designed with MacOS users in mind. If you're a Mac user, you probably want to start here.

Deluge: Deluge is another free and open-source BitTorrent client. Its claim to fame is that it is very lightweight, meaning it uses very few system resources. You can run this on an old, retired machine and it will do just fine. Deluge also has a pile of extensions and add-ons if you want to customize it.

There are lots more, and some commercial applications. But, honestly, I haven't found a commercial application that has enough to offer for its fee, given the considerable capabilities of the three programs spotlighted above.

Is it legal to use BitTorrent?

And now we come to the elephant in the room. BitTorrent is a protocol and is perfectly legal. But what people do with BitTorrent can be illegal, immoral, and possibly fattening.

If you're using BitTorrent to distribute a Linux distribution or large dataset, what you're doing is legal. One of my favorite sources for large gobs of data to explore (what can I say, I'm a geek) is Academic Torrents, a site that more than 127TB of torrentable data.

Did you know you could download the HAM10000 dataset, a 3.6GB collection of multi-source dermatoscopic images of common pigmented skin lesions? You can, and it's legal. Did you know you can download 115 paintings (2.6GB) from the Hermitage museum, in high-resolution? You can, and it's legal. Did you know you can download the 2.8GB NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive, which currently has 7,800 images? Yep. You can. And it's legal.

But…

A lot of people aren't using BitTorrent to download legal skin lesion libraries. Instead, they're downloading pirated movies.

Think about it. Most DVDs are more than 4GB and Blu-rays can be as much as 50GB. That amount of data is very hard to share from a centralized server. But if all of that is distributed across thousands of clients, it becomes easy and inexpensive to share copyrighted material.

Worse, it's hard to go after thousands of peer machines, so it's very difficult for the movie studios to shut down illegal BitTorrent sharing. They have managed to go after tracker sites like The Pirate Bay, but if a group of individuals wants to seed and share movies, it's hard to stop them.

So let's be clear: Do not download pirated movies and television using BitTorrent. First, it may well be illegal. And second, many of those files may not be what they claim. Many torrents that claim to be recent popular movie releases are fakes designed to help distribute malware.

Just get yourself a subscription to Paramount+ to support the production of more Star Trek or to MotorTrend+ to support more car shows. Yes, I know there are other streaming services, but I'm writing this article and I like car shows and Star Trek.

My point though is this: Before there was fairly affordable streaming, torrenting media was popular. But when you can spend $15 bucks a month or so and get all the content you could possibly watch, why take the chance?

Final thoughts

Torrenting is still a "thing" now, in 2022. But it was huge piracy problem back in the 2000s and early 2010s, before streaming services made so much content available for relatively affordable rates. Torrents are still out there. You should probably install a torrent client in case you need to download Linux or a dataset, but it's not as big an issue as it once was.

That said, as we continue to produce more and more huge files, it's a nice resource to have in our file-sharing kit bag.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-i...-does-it-work/





Sharing Audio Files Securely, The Best Services

The competition for sharing audio files securely has been heating up lately. We round up the best ones available today for musicians looking for a secure, easy-to-use service.

A quick show of hands. Does this naming and annotation format look familiar?

But what if we told you there’s a much easier way to track, annotate and securely send audio? In addition to Google Drive, if you don’t already know, there are a host of other excellent companies that are designed for musicians. So if you are sending your music to labels, distributors, publishers, magazines, mixing engineers, mastering houses and the endless list of places that need your ‘history’ then it’s worth having everything in one place.

With the list of companies, growing, we show you the best audio-sharing services available today.

Highnote

Over the last few months, the team at Attack Magazine has been using Highnote. Released with a public beta today, Highnote enters a growing industry, following Adobe’s acquisitions of creative workflow tools Figma and Frame.IO.

For our purposes at Attack, we found annotating audio, and sharing audio files securely, with real-time collaboration, incredibly useful for our content streamlining. We distribute audio files every day to our contributors and Highnote has been invaluable with real-time commenting.

Highnote, a newcomer, is strongly backed and made by musicians

Highnote has well-established competition in particular WeTransfer, Dropbox and SoundCloud. However, with the exception of SoundCloud, none of these are designed for musicians by musicians. Their team of founders have backgrounds with Splice, Squarespace, and Songtrust. Between them, they have scaled consumer-focused tech companies. And the company has been backed, so it’s not just the team that sees their value.

Until now, audio creators have largely relied on tools like email, SMS, and generic file-sharing services not optimized for audio content. Highnote wants to change that with some attractive features including polls, reactions, and real-time discussion in easy-to-manage workspaces called Spaces.

In addition to annotation tools, Highnote is building a workflow platform that actually works, as demonstrated by some of the additional features found throughout. With the attachments feature, you can attach Spotify, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Soundcloud links to reference playlists, stems, and even upload .zip files of stems, samples, or entire projects. This makes it easy to share references, assets, or links to other sites while working on a project.

With their versioning feature, you can upload new versions of a track as you progress. Revisit, review, and compare with real-time toggling between versions as well as comments and conversations that are tied directly to those versions.

It’s currently free with paid tiers coming – such as Teams and also Pro Level 2 tiers. But, right now it’s free and will be forever. As a cloud drive alone, it’s totally worth it. There are some pressing cons, but any new platform takes time to iron out bugs. It’s been years and Splice’s desktop app remains lacking after all.

Pros

• Record voice notes directly over a track
• Create polls to gather group opinionAttach links, files, and more with attachments
• Shared timestamped reactions
• Toggle between multiple versions seamlessly
• Real-time commenting
• Free tier

Cons

• It has a slow processing time
• High res files need better sync management
• No iOS or Android app currently
• Some new design features would be helpful

SIGN UP TO HIGHNOTE.FM

BOUNCE BOSS

A direct competitor to Highnote is Bounce Boss. Originally founded in 2017, Bounce Boss is a secure collaboration platform for anyone that works with audio or music. It’s designed to give you the necessary tools required to organize, listen and communicate better, so you can complete your audio projects, faster.

Bounce Boss has a great feature for letting engineers know they need to master for vinyl

Bounce Boss was born in 2017 when co-founder, Tom Frampton, realized he was wasting precious time searching through audio files, emails, and texts. Sending and receiving audio files every day was turning his downloads folder into a mess. Producers – does this all sound familiar?

Bounce Boss was thus born and would appear to have significant traction with engineers in the studio world.

At £4 a month, it’s not free but nothing worth having comes free.

Pros

• Everything is securely in one place with version control.
• Jump easily between level-matched audio and compare changes for any version of an audio file
• Communication is clear and effective with clickable timestamps, loops and automated email notifications
• Export your entire project and all its data easily into a single ZIP file for easy archiving

Cons

• No iOS or Android app
• No annotation types outside text
• Can’t do polls
• Commenting is not real-time

SIGN UP TO BOUNCE BOSS

BYTA

Byta, pronounced “Bee-tah”, also made the cut in last year’s round-up of secure audio file sharing services. At the time of publishing, last year Byta didn’t offer comments-based feedback. As of 20222, they still don’t but not withstanding that, the service is still an attractive proposition.

Byta: Great for pre-releases and ideas

Their standout features are to be found in their impressive tagging and secure sharing features. In particular, their approach to stopping leaks is attractive. If you are a label looking to send music around secure, Byta is well worth a look. It’s powerful for pre-releases, works in progress or sending files to mastering and mixing houses.

Their new additions in the past 12 months include an embeddable player and “smart attachments”. The former, available for Creatore, Freelancer and Teams Plans, allows you to add audio to your website using Byta’s Embeddable player. You can limit to stream only or share downloads in lossless file formats and track stats. No need to send your listeners to other platforms.

Their other recent addition is Smart Attachments. You can attach Spotify, Dropbox, Google Drive and Soundcloud links to the music you share and strengthen that first impression by including links to Spotify Artist Profiles, Soundcloud links, or Dropbox or Google Drive folders. This can help artists and their teams include relevant assets, streaming platform profiles and previous releases to music shares.

Marc Brown, CEO, once mentioned that audio file sharing had become so bad that going back to CDs “might be an improvement”. However, with Highnote and Byta competing against one another, there’s no need to buy that CD tower anytime soon.

Pro’s

• It’s free
• Very easy to use
• Connects with email databases such as Mailchimp. Great for sending to your newsletter for example

Con’s

• No time-based feedback (was due 2021 but not yet unveiled)
• Very good for delivery, less for community

SIGN UP TO BYTA

Dropbox

Dropbox remains popular and makes the cut again this year. We’re aware it might send a shudder down the spine of all those who’ve tried to use it (there’s a reason the companies above were able to get traction) but with Dropbox being so massive it’s here to stay.

I said it last year, the snare still sounds shit bro!

Music is not their primary focus. It still works well as a rival to Google Drive and is an excellent storage facility. It has commenting features and can share audio securely. However, it’s clunky and often users get fed up with broken links, slow services or requests for permission not being set correctly.

It’s a monster as it nearly single-handedly created this space and thus many people continue with Dropbox when sharing audio files securely. It remains hugely valuable, (we use it to distribute our sounds for our books) but for music sharing, you’re better off with Highnote or Byta.

To share a link privately, the end-user must have the Dropbox link and if you want time-based feedback you’ll need the paid plan. With plans starting at £16.58 a month, it’s not pocket money. Throw in the question of the compression on the audio file and while it’s still widely used, many producers have looked elsewhere.

Dropbox had a first mover advantage in this space but as a company, musicians are not their core market.

Pro’s

• It’s ubiquitous and trusted
• Overall it is ‘fairly’ easy to use if you sign up
• It does have time-based feedback (useful for highlighting specific elements in a track)
• Easy-to-use track navigation

Con’s

• Time-based feedback is not free
• Audio previews are compressed
• No annotation types outside text
• Plans are expensive if used for music sharing only

SIGN UP TO DROPBOX

SoundCloud

Not a year goes by where SoundCloud doesn’t seem to have a financial problem. They appeared to be on the right track with their fan-powered royalties, putting them in great contrast to Spotify. But they are not just in competition with Spotify, many do also use SoundCloud to share and distribute music privately. It makes their value proposition somewhat inconsistent. You can’t be all things to all people.

What instrument is this?

How does that fare? Well, not great given the wealth of new competition. A bit like Dropbox there’s a sense people are using it as ‘everyone else does. However, major labels and distributors, working in professional capacities, will soon tire of the lack of features and find a better home with Highnote or Byta.

SoundCloud should focus its energy on being the best music community with streaming. Spotify offers nearly no community and SoundCloud has it in spades. If we were running the company, and we’re open to negotiation, that’s where we would focus.

In short, we wouldn’t recommend the Swedish behemoth for securely sharing large amounts of audio files for collaboration, annotating and more.

That being said, we’re delighted to see SoundCloud lead the change in paying artists correctly for their music. Alongside, Bandcamp and Mixcloud, these three companies have successfully changed the narrative about treating musicians fairly. With SoundCloud also offering a private, secure sharing platform, it remains a formidable option.

Pro’s

• It’s free
• Very easy to use
• Great sounding widget
• Trusted by many musicians who already have an account

Con’s

• GUI could be improved still
• No annotation types outside public text
• Not made for audio production, mostly for sharing final tracks
• App still needs some work but has been improved greatly in recent years
• Recipients need an account
• Comments remain if you intend to release on SoundCloud afterwards

https://www.attackmagazine.com/revie...best-services/





Movie about Japan’s File Sharing Pioneer Winny Coming in March 2023

A story of innovation lost.
Master Blaster

The late ’90s and early 2000s were an interesting time for the Internet. P2P file sharing was in vogue and in many ways was the precursor to some of the Internet’s biggest successes today, such as YouTube, blockchains, and social media.

However, the powers that be at the time failed to see the potential and constantly worked to shut down services such as Napster, LimeWire, and BitTorrent to name a few. In Japan, a file sharing system called Winny was the most popular, but would also become the most tragic case of wasted talent and technology.

The creator of Winny, Isamu Kaneko, shared it on the message board site 2-channel where it took off almost overnight. However, because of the anonymity Winny offered, it was widely used to share copyrighted music and movies.

Although this was a problem that affected P2P network creators all over the world at the time, Japan proved to be an especially punishing country and Kaneko was arrested in 2004 for assisting in copyright infringement. This began a legal battle that lasted until 2011 and went all the way to the Supreme Court. The University of Tokyo professor was ultimately found not guilty, but his victory was short-lived as he passed away from a heart attack in 2013 at the age of 42.

These facts are widely known, but to give a better idea of who exactly Kaneko was, Winny the movie was made to more intimately chronicle the rise and fall of the platform and its creator. It stars Masahiro Higashide (Death Note: Light Up the New World) as Kaneko and Takahiro Miura (Attack on Titan) as Kaneko’s lawyer, Toshimitsu Dan, who tenaciously fought on his behalf for all those years.

The movie is slated for a release in March of 2023, and even though this all happened over a decade ago, many online comments still remembered Winny and Kaneko well.

“And after he went down, torrents just rose up to take his place. They just crushed a genius for no reason.”
“They should have got a better actor for Kaneko.”
“Japan is unfortunately a country where really talented people are punished.”
“Whether its Winny or TRON, Japan just likes to throw away opportunities to be the best in the world.”
“He’s the guy who made Bitcoin too, right?”
“I think people going after AI art is kind of the same thing happening now.”
“If you don’t adapt to new technology, there will be no progress.”
“If he spread Winny using 2-channel, why wasn’t the owner of 2-channel arrested too?”
“Arresting this guy set Japan back a good 10 years.”
“I want to see this in the theater just for the irony of the anti-copyright-infringement ads that come on before.”


It’s actually surprising this movie was made at all considering the main antagonist in it is presumably the entire movie industry. In the early stages, production was given a big boost by a very successful crowdfunding campaign which in itself is probably a fitting tribute to the legacy of Kaneko.
https://soranews24.com/2022/10/11/mo...in-march-2023/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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