Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 29th, ’23

[JackSpratts]

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"If you want to test a free platform’s ability to protect content over the long haul, here’s a fun test: Upload an image, post it somewhere, then wait a decade to see if it sticks around.

Odds are, it won’t." – Ernie Smith






































April 29th, 2023




AT&T Helps Complete the First 'Space-Based Voice Call' Using a Standard Smartphone

The successful AST SpaceMobile test brings consumer access one step closer to reality.
Sarah Fielding

AST SpaceMobile, a satellite communications specialist, with the help of AT&T, has announced the first two-way audio call using satellites with a standard smartphone. The initial call was placed using AT&T's networks in Midland, Texas, to mobile carrier Ratuken in Japan on an unmodified Samsung Galaxy S22 smartphone using AST SpaceMobile's BlueWalker 3 satellite.

The use of satellites could be a significant step toward increasing cellular access not only in the US, where large areas of the country struggle with service, but in developing countries too. Typically a mobile phone call requires nearby cell towers to provide service. Many areas across the United States, such as rural communities and national parks, are "dead zones" — yes, just like the eerie early 2000s Verizon commercials warned. The same technology could be a great solution to the same issues in developing countries. Instead, satellites could act as a sort of space-based network of cell towers — with AST SpaceMobile claiming it's "building the first and only space-based cellular broadband network."

AT&T aims to use satellites to provide global cellular broadband from 2G to 5G. "Achieving what many once considered impossible, we have reached the most significant milestone to date in our quest to deliver global cellular broadband from space," Abel Avellan, CEO and chairman of AST SpaceMobile, said in a release. "While we take a moment to celebrate this tremendous accomplishment, we remain focused on the path ahead and pivotal next steps that get us closer to our goal of transforming the way the world connects."

It's unclear whether satellite access would come at an extra cost. In AT&T's original AST SpaceMobile partnership annoucement, the company couldn't say whether existing plans would include satellite coverage.

AT&T is one of a few carriers looking to expand its satellite access. Verizon teamed up with Amazon's Project Kuiper satellite network in 2021 with the intention of connecting underserved communities and industries. Amazon is in the midst of launching its satellites into space, with its FCC license requiring at least half of the 3,236 they plan to deploy to be operational by July 2026.

T-Mobile has also partnered with SpaceX, a major competitor of Project Kuiper, with plans to "start getting into testing" its satellite mobile coverage this year. There are currently over 4,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, though some have experienced issues requiring them to be removed from orbit or tested further. T-Mobile has claimed customers should have satellite access through most existing plans and, like AT&T, that existing phones should work with the satellite offerings.

While satellite offerings aren't available for consumers yet, this successful test brings widespread access one step closer to becoming a reality.
https://www.engadget.com/att-complet...120012437.html





Half of Vinyl Buyers in the US Don’t Have a Record Player, New Study Shows
Abby Jones

One might think that the rise in vinyl sales would call for a corresponding rise in turntables. As it turns out, however, about half of vinyl LP buyers don’t own a record player, according to a recent study by the music sales data company Luminate (via Music Business Worldwide).

Luminate’s “Top Entertainment Trends for 2023” report found that of the 3,900 US-based respondents surveyed, “50% of consumers who have bought vinyl in the past 12 months own a record player, compared to 15% among music listeners overall.” So — feel free to double-check our math here — that would indicate that 50% of vinyl buyers over the past year have no way to play those records at home.

Luminate seems to credit these stats largely to “superfans,” who they define as “music listeners who spend above average (median) time AND money on music, actively discover new music, participate in music-related activities on social media, and plan on attending a live music event in the next 12 months.”

Still, the vast majority of music revenue — 84% in 2022 — still comes from streaming services, which could indicate that a lot of these “superfans” operate more on a completist mindset and tend to buy vinyl simply for the sake of owning rather than necessarily listening to it. It’s also worth noting that the highest-selling albums on vinyl last year were Taylor Swift’s Midnights (945,000 copies), Harry Styles’ Harry’s House (480,000), and Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR (263,000) — all artists with notoriously fervent fanbases.

But the vinyl craze extends far beyond the world of young pop artists, too: Last year, Jack White called on major record labels to build their own vinyl record pressing plants in an effort to alleviate delays in manufacturing. Last month, Metallica bought their own pressing plant after their albums were pressed to vinyl nearly a million times in 2022.
https://consequence.net/2023/04/half...-player-study/





In Praise of the Long Movie

In the right hands, a three-hour-plus film expands the boundaries of cinematic possibilities.
Richard Brody

In a year in which a three-hour-plus film, “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” was named the best film of all time in the decennial Sight and Sound poll, and another three-hour movie, “Avatar: The Way of Water,” became the third-biggest box-office hit ever, it’s hard to imagine that anyone in the art or the business of movies is put off by long running times. But the announcement, in February, that Martin Scorsese’s new film, “Killers of the Flower Moon” (based on a book by the New Yorker writer David Grann), was going to be three hours plus was accompanied by a report that the Cannes Film Festival (coming in May) would be unwilling to screen it at such a length. Fortunately, the festival executives’ philistine rigidity gave way: after weeks of speculation regarding the length of the film (climbing as high as three hours and fifty-four minutes), it’s been confirmed that it will première at the festival (as of now, out of competition) at a run time of three hours and twenty-six minutes.

Another nearly three-hour movie, Ari Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid,” opened on April 14th; many prominent critics have damned the movie as “self-indulgent,” in large part for its length. A long movie, especially one that’s director-driven, proclaims its high ambition. And Scorsese’s films have always displayed vast ambitions, including by way of duration. Few of his films have come in under two hours, many push past two and a half hours, and his longest dramatic films have been among his most recent works.

Scorsese has, in the past decade, unleashed a mighty torrent of creative inspiration. His Oscar, in 2007, for the direction of “The Departed,” enshrined his status in the industry, however belatedly, and anointed him a venerable master at the top of his game—it turned him at once, in his mid-sixties, into a living icon of the art of movies, of movies as an art. I think that the Oscar also liberated him personally, left him feeling that he had nothing more to prove to the business and that he was ready to cut loose from whatever vestiges of expectations and norms he still deferred to. Moreover, that Oscar came at a moment when the studios were getting out of the kind of serious dramas that he makes, and when independent producers of many stripes (including streaming services) found benefits in allying themselves with this new instant celebrity of the art. “The Wolf of Wall Street” is one of the greatest of all modern movies, and it runs three hours; “The Irishman” is nearly as great, and in some ways even more ambitious and accomplished, and it runs three hours and twenty-nine minutes (and if I’d had to say the length without checking, I’d have said a full four hours, based not on the feeling of sitting for too long but on the feeling of a cinematic experience of an all-consuming amplitude). The length of “Killers of the Flower Moon” comes as no surprise—and, given the mighty achievement to match the mighty length of Scorsese’s two longest fiction films, it’s odd and dismaying to imagine anyone, especially the potentates of Cannes (who aren’t held to the commercial demands of film distributors), wishing that the forthcoming film would be any shorter.

The history of the length of movies takes place in two dimensions—on the axis of the ordinary and the axis of the extraordinary, or, of the rule and the exception. The average Hollywood movie got longer from the nineteen-thirties to the nineteen-fifties, and the expansion correlates with expansions in the art of movies from the early days of talking pictures through the postwar era. The greater length marks a shift in character psychology, from types to individuals, requiring more character development; it marks the rise, after the war, of independent productions that accorded directors more freedom; it marks the swell of a new directorial ambition, led by the example of Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane.” It also reflects changes in the business, the changing habits of viewers, who were going to movies less often (owing in part to television and in part to suburbanization). As moviegoing became rarer, studios made films bigger experiences, ramping up spectacle to go with such technical enticements as wide-screen movies, stereo sound, and 3-D.

What’s fascinating is that, commercially, length has often worked. Not only was Hollywood’s longtime box-office champion the nearly four-hour-long “Gone with the Wind” but, in Hollywood’s troubled fifties and sixties, such three-hour-plus films as “The Ten Commandments,” “Ben-Hur,” “Spartacus,” and “Lawrence of Arabia” were major hits (as were “My Fair Lady,” ten minutes shy of the mark, and “Camelot,” one minute from it). Then “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Godfather: Part II,” and “The Deer Hunter” were among the biggest hits of the following decade. In recent years, the length of the leading box-office champions has, on average, increased, as with such films as “Dances with Wolves,” “Schindler’s List,” “Titanic,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” “King Kong,” and “Pearl Harbor.”

The exceptions, the extraordinary among long films, are ones that have been made with overtly artistic intentions that run afoul of their producers’ commercial plans. The template for such movies was set just over a century ago, in 1922, with “Foolish Wives,” Erich von Stroheim’s third feature, a high-budget early masterwork. Stroheim edited it down to six hours plus; the studio executive Irving Thalberg, who was all of twenty-two, asserted his principle that producers, not directors, must and would control the industry, by commandeering the film and cutting it down to just under two. Power announces itself through displays of cruelty, including in Hollywood; there are many ways for producers to interfere with directors’ work (Thalberg simply fired Stroheim from his next film), but the simplest of them is merely to cut, on the pretext of commercial necessities. (In 1915, D. W. Griffith’s hectically innovative yet horrifically racist film “The Birth of a Nation,” which ran more than three hours, was a huge box-office hit, but in the early twenties, the two-hour feature was fairly standard for prestige productions, and most films were much shorter.) Orson Welles endured similar indignities with his great second feature, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” which started at a hundred and forty-eight minutes and from which the studio pulled an entire hour (with the additional insult that the studio rewrote parts and, hiring another director to shoot the material, shoehorned it in). In 1954, George Cukor made his masterwork, the remake of “A Star Is Born,” in close collaboration with its star, Judy Garland (the movie is her greatest, too), a musical that ran over three hours and from which the studio hacked twenty-eight minutes, thinking that the changes would enhance the movie’s box-office prospects. (The studio was wrong.)

The cruellest scandal is when critical opinion sides with the producers, bringing to mind the dictum that critics are like soldiers who fire on their own troops. One of the most appalling was the public assassination of Michael Cimino’s masterpiece, “Heaven’s Gate,” which, at its original run time of three hours and thirty-nine minutes, was received by critics and by industry people at its première with bewilderment, hostility, and derision. (Cimino, whose art of overwhelming images and infinitesimal details differed from that of the era’s other grand-scale filmmakers, had simply created a work so original and unusual that it was ahead of its time.) Cimino himself, desperate and panicked, took part in a drastic edit, cutting out seventy minutes; it didn’t help, not least, because advance word on the long version tarnished expectations. (The resuscitation of the long version—which restored Cimino’s uncompromised, overwhelming original vision—led to the rightful reassessment of the movie and the recognition of its greatness.)
Isabelle Ruppert and Kris Kristofferson dance in“Heavens Gate.” A band is behind them on a small stage.

In 2010, I wrote that the ideal lengths for movies are sixty-three minutes (an hour’s exposition capped by a tag scene) and three hours (an hour’s exposition followed by two hours of resolutions). They’re not the best lengths but the natural ones. The classic ninety-minute-to-two-hour feature is a compromise between two ideals, one of compression and the other, of expansion. Yet there’s nothing inherently wrong with such artifices; this compromise can be an immensely fruitful one, which, for better or worse, urges filmmakers to find creative, abstract, symbolic solutions to their dramatic problems. Perhaps the most famous of them is found in Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, “Breathless.” He’d come up with a rough cut of two and a half hours but was contractually obligated to deliver a ninety-minute movie. Advised by his friend, the elder director Jean-Pierre Melville, to remove many scenes, Godard took a different approach: he cut freely within scenes and even within shots, leading to the notorious and celebrated jump cuts with which the film is identified and creating an agitated, jazz-like rhythm that has much to do with its insolent, youthful, invigorating charm. He both revealed the artifices and conventions on which most of the commercial film world depended and created a new kind of remixed, second-order art on the basis of those conventions. (The next colossal mindshift of the French cinema came with Jean Eustache’s 1973 film “The Mother and the Whore,” an intimate drama on an epic scale that considered the personal lives of young people in the light of the vast changes after the Events of May, 1968, which premièred at that year’s Cannes Film Festival; it’s three and a half hours long, and the reissue of a new restoration of it will be among the major New York movie events this summer. Two years later, “Jeanne Dielman” followed, all three hours and twenty-one minutes of it—and also premièred at Cannes.)

The long film is without conventions—it’s like turning a football field, with its sidelines and yard lines, into an open field, unmarked and unbounded and in demand of exploration. It’s therefore recalcitrant, its lack of pushback, its inherent freedom offering filmmakers the opportunity to discover the unknown at the risk of getting lost. The long film both provides directors with artistic freedom and symbolizes that freedom; as such, it’s a precious value and a treacherous challenge. What such length provides is more—more of whatever a filmmaker has to offer, more self-revelation, for better or worse. Ordinary filmmakers make long movies mere slogs: those whose ambition exceeds their artistry reveal their public-facing strivings and pleadings for recognition; but, for the greats, such as Scorsese, it’s a canvas as big as the world.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cu...the-long-movie





Steven Spielberg: ‘No Film should be Revised’ Based on Modern Sensitivity

Director has criticised the practice of re-editing older films while expressing remorse over removing guns in a later edition of ET
Benjamin Lee

Steven Spielberg has criticised the idea that older films should be re-edited to appease modern sensibilities.

Speaking at Time’s 100 Summit in New York City, the 76-year-old film-maker expressed regret over taking out guns from a later release of his 1982 sci-fi blockbuster ET: The Extra Terrestrial. In the 20th anniversary edition, agents saw their firearms replaced with walkie-talkies.

“That was a mistake,” he said on stage. “I never should have done that. ET is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through.”

In 2011, Spielberg had already explained that the guns would be returning for the 30th anniversary release, explaining that he was “disappointed” in himself.

This week he added: “I should have never messed with the archives of my own work, and I don’t recommend anyone do that. All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there. So I really regret having that out there.”

Spielberg was also asked about the controversial re-editing of Roald Dahl’s work which has included changing words like “fat” to “enormous” and “ugly and beastly” to just “beastly”.

Initially he joked that “Nobody should ever attempt to take the chocolate out of Willy Wonka! Ever!” before adding “For me, it is sacrosanct. It’s our history, it’s our cultural heritage. I do not believe in censorship in that way.”

Other authors whose work has recently been tweaked for modern readers include Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming.

Spielberg’s most recent film, autobiographical drama The Fabelmans, received seven Oscar nominations. The director’s next project is yet to be confirmed but he has been attached to a drama based around the lead character from 1968 drama Bullitt with Bradley Cooper set to star.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/202...uns-movie-edit





The Imgur Apocalypse Is Going to Break Large Parts of the Internet

It’s not just porn that’s getting deleted from Imgur. Millions of images that are embedded elsewhere will also eventually be taken down.
Ernie Smith

If you want to test a free platform’s ability to protect content over the long haul, here’s a fun test: Upload an image, post it somewhere, then wait a decade to see if it sticks around.

Odds are, it won’t.

Which is why, perhaps, it’s not totally surprising to learn that Imgur, a popular photo-uploading service that has been informally tied to Reddit since its 2009 founding, will remove two types of content from its platform starting next month: explicit or pornographic imagery, and images uploaded anonymously—the latter with a lean on unused images, according to the company. While technically banned from Imgur for years through its community rules, adult content hasn’t been actively removed (and is incredibly popular). Until now.

“We understand that these changes may be disruptive to Imgurians who have used Imgur to store their images and artwork,” the company stated in a terms of service update announcing these changes. “These changes are an important step in Imgur’s continued efforts to remain a safe and fun space on the internet.”

The move is also going to be disastrous for the continuity of the internet. Like Photobucket before it, Imgur has been widely used to host millions of photos that are linked to, embedded, or used elsewhere, and lots of these photos were uploaded by people who didn't bother to sign up for accounts. Imgur is especially popular as a host for Reddit, meaning the content of those old posts could suddenly disappear off the internet. The move will likely also break embeds in various forum posts and blog posts all over the internet, creating an unpleasant form of link rot.

(The Archive Team, generally a harbinger of shuttering sites, is working on backing up this material, according to an announcement on Reddit.)

That Imgur, a meme-friendly platform that has been active for nearly 15 years and is most widely used on Reddit, is making this move is not totally a surprise. A number of major image-hosting platforms have done essentially the same thing in the past decade.

Perhaps the best-known example of this kind of image-gating is Photobucket, which in 2017 announced plans to charge expensive annual subscription fees, particularly for those who used the site as an external image host. (Since the platform was designed to host images on forums, it created severe digital disruption in its wake.) The company eventually had a change of heart about the removals and the high pricing, but not before destroying much of its digital goodwill.

Especially at risk of disappearing are sites that take on a symbiotic relationship with a larger host, with platforms such as TwitPic and yFrog disappearing entirely because they gradually found themselves replaced by their parent service. (In the case of TwitPic, Twitter nearly acquired it, only to back out amid a trademark dispute.)

While more resilient than those services, Imgur generally fits this category, especially as it’s now possible to host images on Reddit without using a service like Imgur. When that change happened in 2016, the number of Imgur submissions to Reddit fell by a quarter basically overnight, according to one data analysis.

Why Image Hosts Inherently Face Risks

A number of factors can lead to decisions that restrict image uploads. For example, high bandwidth is a major pressure point for image hosts, leading to an increased reliance on advertising and business decisions that gradually favor paid users. A change in ownership can shift priorities in unforeseen directions, leading to business decisions that go against the original mission of the platforms.

And then there’s the risk of explicit material, something that has bedeviled a variety of platforms, Imgur included. Legal realities, such as copyright removal and the risk of CSAM imagery, are an ongoing challenge for image hosts, but more acute are the pressures from payment processors, advertisers, and distribution partners to limit access to questionable material.

The brand-safety concern has perhaps been the most disruptive for communities with a NSFW element. Tumblr disrupted its own user base by blocking adult content in 2018, along with a whole slew of amusing false positives, largely as a result of aggressive pushback by Apple App Store, which at one point removed the social network from its service.

(For fans of schadenfreude, Imgur has said it will pull images with the help of AI-driven tools—though with assistance from human moderators—so Tumblr-style false positives are very possible in the coming weeks.)

While this situation is not the best to navigate, some platforms have been more successful at this than others. Since being acquired by SmugMug in 2018, Flickr has gained a reputation of removing images carefully while keeping the interests of the larger community in mind, which has allowed the firm to maintain a semblance of goodwill.

Through its history, Flickr has had to navigate each of the above issues, including putting strict limitations on free accounts and reining in explicit imagery. The company removed millions of images from unpaid accounts—but strained to maintain goodwill by continuing to support its large library of Creative Commons images. And while Flickr announced plans to limit explicit image uploads last year, it created room for compromise by allowing paid users to continue hosting them on the service.

And it’s possible that issues could expand beyond image hosting, too: Last year, Vimeo began charging Patreon users dramatically high fees for video hosting, as a part of a larger shift to business-to-business hosting. While it walked back some of those changes, it ultimately reflects how the company shifted its approach dramatically as a part of an ownership change.

Image Hosts vs. Corporate Tides

Ultimately, image hosting platforms are subject to the same kinds of business pressures as everyone else—and when those pressures prove incompatible with free hosting, that makes them potential victims of the whims of partners, governments, even shifting interests.

Imgur, while on its face the same service it was in 2012 or 2015, has seen significant ownership changes in recent years, with the holding company MediaLab AI acquiring it in 2021 and its founder, Alan Schaaf, departing about a year ago, according to his LinkedIn page.

In a Reddit comment, Schaaf suggested that the changes went against the spirit of the company he founded—though he ultimately has no say, because he sold it off.

“I’m not sad about selling at all. I’m sad about the decisions they’re making that aren’t aligned with Imgur’s vision or values,” he wrote.

It’s possible other services you rely on for image hosting could someday face the same fate as Imgur or PhotoBucket. For example, there’s no evidence anything might happen to the GIF-hosting platform Giphy, but its failed acquisition by Meta—the British government is forcing the company to divest the service for competitive reasons—puts it at risk of this kind of disruption in the future.

It’s enough to make you want to self-host.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3v...f-the-internet





Dropbox Lays Off 500 Employees, 16% of Staff, CEO says Due to Slowing Growth and ‘the Era of AI’
Ingrid Lunden

Cloud storage giant Dropbox today joined the fray of tech companies announcing layoffs. The company today announced that it would be laying off 16% of its staff, equivalent to about 500 employees, due to slowing growth, and — in the words of CEO Drew Houston — because “the AI era of computing has finally arrived.”

These appear to be the first layoffs the company has made since January 2021, when it laid off 315 employees in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The latest cull was announced to staff in a memo from CEO and co-founder Drew Houston, as well as in an SEC filing.

The SEC filing noted that the company will incur charges of approximately $37 million to $42 million in connection with layoffs, which will be recorded in Q2. Q1 results, which will be reported next Thursday, May 4, will be in-line or even above expectations, it added.

Ironically, even with the strong results, and the fact that Dropbox is profitable, Houston said the company is choosing to take a preemptive step to cut jobs and invest in new areas to keep up with the pace of change, given that growth is slowing.

“While our business is profitable, our growth has been slowing. Part of this is due to the natural maturation of our existing businesses, but more recently, headwinds from the economic downturn have put pressure on our customers and, in turn, on our business. As a result, some investments that used to deliver positive returns are no longer sustainable,” he wrote.

The interesting thing is that he also cites AI as a major factor.

“Second, and more consequentially, the AI era of computing has finally arrived,” he continued. “We’ve believed for many years that AI will give us new superpowers and completely transform knowledge work. And we’ve been building towards this future for a long time, as this year’s product pipeline will demonstrate.”

For those who have been warning that AI will inevitably lead to the loss of more jobs, this will come as an alarming development. The more cynical might argue that it’s an easy and timely excuse for cutting costs right now, to keep the market and investors optimistic that Dropbox is changing with the times and itself won’t get disrupted in the next wave of innovation.

Houston said that impacted staff will be getting notified today and will be finished with work by tomorrow. The company had 3,125 employees prior to the move today.

More than 184,000 people have been laid off in the tech sector in 2023 across nearly 620 tech companies, according to the Layoffs.fyi tracker.

More to come.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/27/dr...the-era-of-ai/





Liberals' Online Streaming Bill C-11 Passes Parliament
Rachel Aiello

After years of political pushback and considerable parliamentary scrutiny, the federal Liberal government's Online Streaming Act known as Bill C-11 passed the Senate and has become law.

Thursday evening, Bill C-11 cleared its final legislative hurdle in the Senate, seeing senators agree to bill sponsor Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez's take-some-and-leave-some approach to amendments made by the upper chamber.

This clears the path for the contentious bill, focused on substantively reforming the Broadcasting Act for the first time since 1991 to take into consideration online content, to come into effect.

Senators voting 52 to 16 on a motion informing the House of Commons that the Senate agreed with the version of Bill C-11 the majority of MPs passed last month, made passing the bill possible. The House was then informed of the Senate's decision, and royal assent was granted by 6:55 p.m. ET.

Bill C-11 is aimed at ensuring increasingly popular and profitable social media platforms and streaming services such as Netflix, Crave, Spotify, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and YouTube are subjected to Canadian content requirements and regulations comparable to traditional broadcasters. The policy change comes with a requirement for these platforms to spend millions investing in Canadian content and creators.

While the NDP and Bloc Quebecois, as well as many in the "CanCon" music, film, and television industries, have backed Bill C-11, alarms have been sounded by critics that the Liberal proposal could have knock-on effects for content creators and what everyday users see online, due to provisions that would require platforms to promote Canadian content.

In their efforts to lobby against this bill, some of the tech companies have gone to great lengths, such as YouTube, which ran an online campaign warning users who earn money from making videos about how the legislation could impact their livelihoods. The Conservatives, arguing that the legislation will have the impact of censoring what Canadians see online, led the charge against Bill C-11 inside Parliament.

As a result of this divide, this piece of legislation has been under the parliamentary microscope in both the House and Senate for more than a year, following a failed attempt prior to the last election.

Between the more than 100 amendments contemplated by the House of Commons, and the longest study ever conducted by a Senate committee, the minister responsible for Bill C-11 has repeatedly emphasized the important contributions of parliamentarians to the final wording of the legislation, while asserting that the time had come to "move on."

"Today, we are standing up for our stories, our artists, our producers and our creators. We're standing up so that Canadians have even more opportunities to see themselves in what they watch and listen to," said Rodriguez, reacting to the bill's passage in a statement.

"With this legislation, we are ensuring that Canada's incredible talent has a bigger and brighter stage online. They tell our stories, they make our voices heard, they contribute to our economy, and they make our culture what it is: strong, diverse and unique," the minister said.

Over the last two weeks, the Senate has been mired in a largely procedural battle over whether to assert itself and insist on the substantive amendments made by the upper chamber that were rejected by the majority of MPs.

Attempts to have the Senate stand its ground on certain amendments were unsuccessful, seeing the majority of senators vote against related motions on Wednesday evening. Though, the passed motion was amended to note the Liberals gave a "public assurance" that Bill C-11 "will not apply to user-generated digital content."

A key sticking point raised in the numerous hours of debate recently held was the Senate's attempt to instill further protections for individual content creators in Bill C-11.

The government asserted that the existing safeguards in the bill were sufficient and rejected this amendment on the basis that it would impact the government's ability to "publicly consult on, and issue, a policy direction to the CRTC to appropriately scope the regulation of social media services."

While the Conservatives have pledged to repeal Bill C-11 should they form government, for now, seeing the Online Streaming Act become law is a long-awaited political victory for the Liberals.

Complicating the back and forth between those who think Bill C-11's critics were doing the bidding of big tech, and those who fear the legislation's free speech implications, is that a lot is being left to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) as the regulatory body to determine how the new rules will be enforced.

Now that Bill C-11 has passed, that regulatory work can begin.

The next step will be for the CRTC to get to work on drafting the policy framework for how the broadcasting and communications regulator will implement the new powers Bill C-11 grants, informed by a federal policy directive as well as public consultations.

The draft federal policy direction will be published in the Canada Gazette, for the public, artists, digital creators, and businesses to read and provide feedback on. The draft will then be updated and re-published, taking into consideration what the government hears. The CRTC will also give notice about its consultation plans, regarding how it intends to enforce Bill C-11. This will include multiple public proceedings.

It is expected that the consultations will be where stakeholders with outstanding concerns about the bill turn next. Marking Bill C-11's passage, internet advocacy organization OpenMedia accused the Senate of backing down and letting a version of the bill become law that is "largely unchanged" from the initial version tabled in Parliament in February 2022.

"Make no mistake: the fight isn’t over yet. While legal protection of our content was the best option, Heritage Minister Rodriguez can still issue a clear policy direction to the CRTC that tells them our user content should not be regulated in practice, and our choices must be respected. That's where the fight will go next," said OpenMedia campaigns director Matt Hatfield.

In an email to CTV News, TikTok spokesperson Danielle Morgan said that they plan to keep fighting for the interests of Canadian digital-first creators to be able to "create content for global audiences without being subject to gatekeepers or encumbered by regulatory red tape."

Remarking on the passage of Bill C-11, pro-Canadian broadcasting organization FRIENDS called it "one of the most epic Canadian stories ever told."

"While we wholeheartedly applaud the House and the Senate for the leading roles they have played in this suspense-filled drama, there is still work to be done before the credits roll on Bill C-11," said FRIENDS executive director Marla Boltman in a statement, indicating plans to push the CRTC to make sure the standards are equal for Canadian broadcasters and streaming giants' Canadian content requirements, or decades of "carefully crafted cultural policy" meant to protect Canadian talent could be undermined.

Also flagging concerns about the legislation as drafted leading to a two-tier system, the Canadian Media Producers Association said that it still welcomes the bill and expressed gratitude for Rodriguez' "heroic efforts" in securing its passage.

"We are on the precipice of a pivotal moment in Canadian broadcasting history. It took 30 years before the Broadcasting Act was updated. Since we don’t know when this opportunity will present itself again, it’s important that we get it right,” said the CMPA’s president and CEO Reynolds Mastin in a statement.

It remains to be seen what the timeline will be for Bill C-11's policy changes to come into effect.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/libe...-law-1.6373912





Tokyo has Millions of Surplus Wi-Fi Access Points that should be Shared with Blockchain, Says NTT

Claims it's verified viability of city-scale network that would free vast resources, in Japan or elsewhere
Simon Sharwood

Tokyo has five million Wi-Fi access points – and that's 20 times what the city needs, because they’re reserved for private use, according to NTT. The Japanese tech giant proposes sharing the fleet to cope with increased demand for wireless comms without adding more hardware.

NTT says it's successfully tested network sharing with a scheme that starts by asking operators of Wi-Fi access points or other connections if they're open to sharing their bandwidth and allowing random netizens to connect. In return they get a share of revenue from those connections.

Under the scheme, netizens search for available networks and, as they connect, a contract would be executed allowing a link to be made. That contract would use Ethereum Proof of Authority to verify identities and initiate the back-end billing arrangements before allowing signed-up users and devices to join private networks.

The operator of the Wi-Fi access point gets paid, the punter gets a connection, and everything's on a blockchain so the results can be read for eternity.

NTT has added more tech to ensure that these ad hoc connections share spectrum efficiently and don't swamp a single access point.

All participating network nodes "use blockchain-ledger information to smooth out the number of terminal connections in a decentralized and autonomous manner and improve communications quality," states NTT's announcement of its trials. Those tests were conducted on "a mixture of wireless access systems having different administrators."

If this all scales, NTT estimates Tokyo won't need to add any more Wi-Fi access points or private 5G cells, even as demand for connectivity increases. The company also suggests it can enable networks to scale without requiring commensurate increases in energy consumption, and that spectrum will also be freed for other uses.

Those are outcomes it's hard to oppose.

NTT hasn't explained how it isolates transient connections from traffic created by an access point's owner or operator – a matter potential participants will surely want explained before sharing connectivity. The scheme will also need to overcome all sorts of other security objections about the dangers of using public networks. Not even the mighty power of blockchain can erase all of those issues.

The scheme will be detailed in mid-May at Tsukuba Forum – NTT’s annual networking conference. The Register will tune in to see if we can learn more about this technology.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/...ng_blockchain/





First Appellate Court Finds Geofence Warrant Unconstitutional
Jennifer Lynch

The California Court of Appeal has held that a geofence warrant seeking information on all devices located within several densely-populated areas in Los Angeles violated the Fourth Amendment. This is the first time an appellate court in the United States has reviewed a geofence warrant. The case is People v. Meza, and EFF filed an amicus brief and jointly argued the case before the court.

Geofence warrants, which we have written about extensively before, are unlike typical warrants for electronic information because they don’t name a suspect and are not even targeted to specific individuals or accounts. Instead, they require a provider—almost always Google—to search its entire reserve of user location data to identify all users or devices located in a geographic area during a time period specified by law enforcement.

In the Meza case, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department deputies were investigating a homicide and had video footage suggesting the suspects followed the victim from one location to another before committing the crime. To try to identify the unknown suspects, they sought a warrant that would force Google to turn over identifying information for every device with a Google account that was within any of six locations over a five hour window. The warrant covered time periods where people were likely to be in sensitive places, like their homes, or driving along busy streets. In total, police requested data for geographic area equivalent to about 24 football fields (five to six city blocks), which included large apartment buildings, churches, barber shops, nail salons, medical centers, restaurants, a public library, and a union headquarters.

Typically, as in this case, geofence warrants lay out a three-step process by which police are supposed to execute the warrant: first, Google provides anonymized identifiers for each device within the geofenced area; second, police identify a subset of those devices and ask Google for additional information on where those devices traveled over an expanded time period; and finally, police identify a further subset of the anonymized devices and ask Google to unmask them and provide detailed account information for those device owners. A judge is only involved in issuing the initial warrant, and police have little or no direction from the court on how they should narrow down the devices they ultimately ask Google to identify. This can allow the police to arbitrarily alter the process, as they did in this case, or attempt to unmask hundreds or even thousands of devices, as they have in other cases.

In Meza, the Court of Appeal found that these problems doomed the geofence warrant at issue. The court held the warrant was invalid under the Fourth Amendment because it failed “to place any meaningful restriction on the discretion of law enforcement officers to determine which accounts would be subject to further scrutiny or deanonymization.” The court also held the warrant was overbroad because it “authorized the identification of any individual within six large search areas without any particularized probable cause as to each person or their location.” The court held the geographic areas and time periods covered by the warrant were impermissibly broad because they included areas where the suspects could not have been (like inside apartments) and covered time periods when police knew—based on time-stamped video footage—that the suspects had already moved on. This part of the court’s opinion largely tracks prior lower court rulings.

Defendants also argued that the warrant violated California’s landmark Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), which requires state warrants for electronic communication information to “describe with particularity the information to be seized by specifying, as appropriate and reasonable . . . the target individuals or accounts.” Defendants argued that a warrant that seeks information on every individual or account fails to meet this requirement.

Unfortunately, here the court disagreed. The court focused on the statutory language limiting CalECPA’s particularity requirement to requiring police only specify accounts and individuals when it is “appropriate and reasonable” to do so. The court held the geofence warrant met this requirement by making it clear that police sought “individuals whose devices were located within the search boundaries at certain times,” even though it failed to identify those individuals.

Ultimately, the court’s CalECPA analysis proved fatal to the defendants’ case. Despite ruling the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment, the court refused to suppress the evidence, finding the officers acted in good faith based on a facially valid warrant. And while CalECPA has its own suppression remedy, the court held it only applied when there was a statutory violation, not when the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment alone. This is in clear contradiction to an earlier California geofence case, although that case was at the trial court, not at the Court of Appeal.

The court’s ruling creates an incongruous and possibly dangerous precedent on CalECPA’s particularity requirements and suppression remedy. Contrary to the court’s interpretation, CalECPA was intended to offer greater protections than existing Fourth Amendment and federal statutory law—especially for location data like that revealed through a geofence warrant. CalECPA also makes clear that its suppression remedy applies to violations of both the Fourth Amendment and CalECPA itself. Yet the California Court of Appeal’s holding in Meza ignores legislators’ clear intent in passing CalECPA. It appears to create a lower particularity standard for CalECPA warrants than warrants issued under the Fourth Amendment alone, and it significantly undermines CalECPA’s power by constraining its suppression remedy solely to statutory violations.

Given the court’s harmful CalECPA analysis and the fact that the number of geofence warrants used by police continues to increase year over year, we hope defendants will petition the California Supreme Court for review. We will continue to support them if they do.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/0...constitutional

















Until next week,

- js.



















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