Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 22nd, 22

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002































October 22nd, 2022




How to Become a Pirate Archivist
annas-blog.org, 2022-10-17

Before we dive in, two updates on the Pirate Library Mirror:

1. We got some extremely generous donations. The first was $10k from the anonymous individual who also has been supporting "bookwarrior", the original founder of Library Genesis. Special thanks to bookwarrior for facilitating this donation. The second was another $10k from an anonymous donor, who got in touch after our last release, and was inspired to help. We also had a number of smaller donations. Thanks so much for all your generous support. We have some exciting new projects in the pipeline which this will support, so stay tuned.
2. We had some technical difficulties with the size of our second release, but our torrents are up and seeding now. We also got a generous offer from an anonymous individual to seed our collection on their very-high-speed servers, so we're doing a special upload to their machines, after which everyone else who is downloading the collection should see a large improvement in speed.

Entire books can be written about the why of digital preservation in general, and pirate archivism in particular, but let us give a quick primer for those who are not too familiar. The world is producing more knowledge and culture than ever before, but also more of it is being lost than ever before. Humanity largely entrusts corporations like academic publishers, streaming services, and social media companies with this heritage, and they have often not proven to be great stewards. Check out the documentary Digital Amnesia, or really any talk by Jason Scott.

There are some institutions that do a good job archiving as much as they can, but they are bound by the law. As pirates, we are in a unique position to archive collections that they cannot touch, because of copyright enforcement or other restrictions. We can also mirror collections many times over, across the world, thereby increasing the chances of proper preservation.

For now, we won't get into discussions about the pros and cons of intellectual property, the morality of breaking the law, musings on censorship, or the issue of access to knowledge and culture. With all that out of the way, let's dive into the how. We'll share how our team became pirate archivists, and the lessons that we learned along the way. There are many challenges when you embark on this journey, and hopefully we can help you through some of them.

Community

The first challenge might be a supriring one. It is not a technical problem, or a legal problem. It is a psychological problem: doing this work in the shadows can be incredibly lonely. Depending on what you're planning to do, and your threat model, you might have to be very careful. On the one end of the spectrum we have people like Alexandra Elbakyan*, the founder of Sci-Hub, who is very open about her activities. But she is at high risk of being arrested if she would visit a western country at this point, and could face decades of prison time. Is that a risk you would be willing to take? We are at the other end of the spectrum; being very careful not to leave any trace, and having strong operational security.

* As mentioned on HN by "ynno", Alexandra initially didn't want to be known: "Her servers were set up to emit detailed error messages from PHP, including full path of faulting source file, which was under directory /home/ringo-ring, which could be traced to a username she had online on an unrelated site, attached to her real name. Before this revelation, she was anonymous." So, use random usernames on the computers you use for this stuff, in case you misconfigure something.

That secrecy, however, comes with a psychological cost. Most people love being recognized for the work that they do, and yet you cannot take any credit for this in real life. Even simple things can be challenging, like friends asking you what you have been up to (at some point "messing with my NAS / homelab" gets old).

This is why it is so important to find some community. You can give up some operational security by confiding in some very close friends, who you know you can trust deeply. Even then be careful not to put anything in writing, in case they have to turn over their emails to the authorities, or if their devices are compromised in some other manner.

Better still is to find some fellow pirates. If your close friends are interested in joining you, great! Otherwise, you might be able to find others online. Sadly this is still a niche community. So far we have found only a handful of others who are active in this space. Good starting places seem to be the Library Genesis forums, and r/DataHoarder. The Archive Team also has likeminded individuals, though they operate within the law (even if in some grey areas of the law). The traditional "warez" and pirating scenes also have folks who think in similar ways.

We are open to ideas on how to foster community and explore ideas. Feel free to message us on Twitter or Reddit. Perhaps we could host some sort of forum or chat group. One challenge is that this can easily get censored when using common platforms, so we would have to host it ourselves. There is also a tradeoff between having these discussions fully public (more potential engagement) versus making it private (not letting potential "targets" know that we're about to scrape them). We'll have to think about that. Let us know if you are interested in this!

Projects

When we do a project, it has a couple of phases:

• Domain selection / philosophy: Where do you roughly want to focus on, and why? What are your unique passions, skills, and circumstances that you can use to your benefit?
• Target selection: Which specific collection will you mirror?
• Metadata scraping: Cataloging information about the files, without actually downloading the (often much larger) files themselves.
• Data selection: Based on the metadata, narrowing down which data is most relevant to archive right now. Could be everything, but often there is a reasonable way to save space and bandwidth.
• Data scraping: Actually getting the data.
• Distribution: Packaging it up in torrents, announcing it somewhere, getting people to spread it.

These are not completely independent phases, and often insights from a later phase send you back to an earlier phase. For example, during metadata scraping you might realize that the target that you selected has defensive mechanisms beyond your skill level (like IP blocks), so you go back and find a different target.

1. Domain selection / philosophy

There is no shortage of knowledge and cultural heritage to be saved, which can be overwhelming. That's why it's often useful to take a moment and think about what your contribution can be.

Everyone has a different way of thinking about this, but here are some questions that you could ask yourself:

• Why are you interested in this? What are you passionate about? If we can get a bunch of people who all archive the kinds of things that they specifically care about, that would cover a lot! You will know a lot more than the average person about your passion, like what is important data to save, what are the best collections and online communities, and so on.
• What skills do you have that you can use to your benefit? For example, if you are an online security expert, you can find ways of defeating IP blocks for secure targets. If you are great at organizing communities, then perhaps you can rally some people together around a goal. It is useful to know some programming though, if only for keeping good operational security throughout this process.
• How much time do you have for this? Our advice would be to start small and doing bigger projects as you get the hang of it, but it can get all-consuming.
• What would be a high-leverage area to focus on? If you're going to spend X hours on pirate archiving, then how can you get the biggest "bang for your buck"?
• What are unique ways that you are thinking about this? You might have some interesting ideas or approaches that others might have missed.

In our case, we cared in particular about the long term preservation of science. We knew about Library Genesis, and how it was fully mirrored many times over using torrents. We loved that idea. Then one day, one of us tried to find some scientific textbooks on Library Genesis, but couldn't find them, bringing into doubt how complete it really was. We then searched those textbooks online, and found them in other places, which planted the seed for our project. Even before we knew about the Z-Library, we had the idea of not trying to collect all those books manually, but to focus on mirroring existing collections, and contributing them back to Library Genesis.

2. Target selection

So, we have our area that we are looking at, now which specific collection do we mirror? There are a couple of things that make for a good target:

• Large
• Unique: not already well-covered by other projects.
• Accessible: does not use tons of layers of protection to prevent you from scraping their metadata and data.
• Special insight: you have some special information about this target, like you somehow have special access to this collection, or you figured out how to defeat their defenses. This is not required (our upcoming project does not do anything special), but it certainly helps!

When we found our science textbooks on websites other than Library Genesis, we tried to figure out how they made their way onto the internet. We then found the Z-Library, and realized that while most books don't first make their appearance there, they do eventually end up there. We learned about its relationship to Library Genesis, and the (financial) incentive structure and superior user interface, both of which made it a much more complete collection. We then did some preliminary metadata and data scraping, and realized that we could get around their IP download limits, leveraging one of our members' special access to lots of proxy servers.

As you're exploring different targets, it is already important to hide your tracks by using VPNs and throwaway email addresses, which we'll talk about more later.

3. Metadata scraping

Let's get a bit more technical here. For actually scraping the metadata from websites, we have kept things pretty simple. We use Python scripts, sometimes curl, and a MySQL database to store the results in. We haven't used any fancy scraping software which can map complex websites, since so far we only needed to scrape one or two kinds of pages by just enumerating through ids and parsing the HTML. If there aren't easily enumerated pages, then you might need a proper crawler that tries to find all pages.

Before you start scraping a whole website, try doing it manually for a bit. Go through a few dozen pages yourself, to get a sense for how that works. Sometimes you will already run into IP blocks or other interesting behavior this way. The same goes for data scraping: before getting too deep into this target, make sure you can actually download its data effectively.

To get around restrictions, there are a few things you can try. Are there any other IP addresses or servers that host the same data but do not have the same restrictions? Are there any API endpoints that do not have restrictions, while others do? At what rate of downloading does your IP get blocked, and for how long? Or are you not blocked but throttled down? What if you create a user account, how do things change then? Can you use HTTP/2 to keep connections open, and does that increase the rate at which you can request pages? Are there pages that list multiple files at once, and is the information listed there sufficient?

Things you probably want to save include:

• Title
• Filename / location
• ID: can be some internal ID, but IDs like ISBN or DOI are useful too.
• Size: to calculate how much disk space you need.
• Hash (md5, sha1): to confirm that you downloaded the file properly.
• Date added/modified: so you can come back later and download files that you didn't download before (though you can often also use the ID or hash for this).
• Description, category, tags, authors, language, etc.

We typically do this in two stages. First we download the raw HTML files, usually directly into MySQL (to avoid lots of small files, which we talk more about below). Then, in a separate step, we go through those HTML files and parse them into actual MySQL tables. This way you don't have to re-download everything from scratch if you discover a mistake in your parsing code, since you can just reprocess the HTML files with the new code. It's also often easier to parallelize the processing step, thus saving some time (and you can write the processing code while the scraping is running, instead of having to write both steps at once).

Finally, note that for some targets metadata scraping is all there is. There are some huge metadata collections out there that aren't properly preserved.

4. Data selection

Often you can use the metadata to figure out a reasonable subset of data to download. Even if you eventually want to download all the data, it can be useful to prioritize the most important items first, in case you get detected and defences are improved, or because you would need to buy more disks, or simply because something else comes up in your life before you can download everything.

For example, a collection might have multiple editions of the same underlying resource (like a book or a film), where one is marked as being the best quality. Saving those editions first would make a lot of sense. You might eventually want to save all editions, since in some cases the metadata might be tagged incorrectly, or there might be unknown tradeoffs between editions (for example, the "best edition" might be best in most ways but worse in other ways, like a film having a higher resolution but missing subtitles).

You can also search your metadata database to find interesting things. What is the biggest file that is hosted, and why is it so big? What is the smallest file? Are there interesting or unexpected patterns when it comes to certain categories, languages, and so on? Are there duplicate or very similar titles? Are there patterns to when data was added, like one day in which many files were added at once? You can often learn a lot by looking at the dataset in different ways.

In our case, we deduplicated Z-Library books against the md5 hashes in Library Genesis, thereby saving a lot of download time and disk space. This is a pretty unique situation though. In most cases there are no comprehensive databases of which files are already properly preserved by fellow pirates. This in itself is a huge opportunity for someone out there. It would be great to have a regularly updated overview of things like music and films that are already widely seeded on torrent websites, and are therefore lower priority to include in pirate mirrors.

5. Data scraping

Now you're ready to actually download the data in bulk. As mentioned before, at this point you should already manually have downloaded a bunch of files, to better understand the behavior and restrictions of the target. However, there will still be surprises in store for you once you actually get to downloading lots of files at once.

Our advice here is mainly to keep it simple. Start by just downloading a bunch of files. You can use Python, and then expand to multiple threads. But sometimes even simpler is to generate Bash files directly from the database, and then running multiple of them in multiple terminal windows to scale up. A quick technical trick worth mentioning here is using OUTFILE in MySQL, which you can write anywhere if you disable "secure_file_priv" in mysqld.cnf (and be sure to also disable/override AppArmor if you're on Linux).

We store the data on simple hard disks. Start out with whatever you have, and expand slowly. It can be overwhelming to think about storing hundreds of TBs of data. If that is the situation that you're facing, just put out a good subset first, and in your announcement ask for help in storing the rest. If you do want to get more hard drives yourself, then r/DataHoarder has some good resources on getting good deals.

Try not to worry too much about fancy filesystems. It is easy to fall into the rabbit hole of setting up things like ZFS. One technical detail to be aware of though, is that many filesystems don't deal well with lots of files. We've found that a simple workaround is to create multiple directories, e.g. for different ID ranges or hash prefixes.

After downloading the data, be sure to check the integrity of the files using hashes in the metadata, if available.

6. Distribution

You have the data, thereby giving you possession of the world's first pirate mirror of your target (most likely). In many ways the hardest part is over, but the riskiest part is still ahead of you. After all, so far you've been stealth; flying under the radar. All you had to do was using a good VPN throughout, not filling in your personal details in any forms (duh), and perhaps using a special browser session (or even a different computer).

Now you have to distribute the data. In our case we first wanted to contribute the books back to Library Genesis, but then quickly discovered the difficulties in that (fiction vs non-fiction sorting). So we decided on distribution using Library Genesis-style torrents. If you have the opportunity to contribute to an existing project, then that could save you a lot of time. However, there are not many well-organized pirate mirrors out there currently.

So let's say you decide on distributing torrents yourself. Try to keep those files small, so they are easy to mirror on other websites. You will then have to seed the torrents yourself, while still staying anonymous. You can use a VPN (with or without port forwarding), or pay with tumbled Bitcoins for a Seedbox. If you don't know what some of those terms mean, you'll have a bunch of reading to do, since it's important that you understand the risk tradeoffs here.

You can host the torrent files themselves on existing torrent websites. In our case, we chose to actually host a website, since we also wanted to spread our philosophy in a clear way. You can do this yourself in a similar manner (we use Njalla for our domains and hosting, paid for with tumbled Bitcoins), but also feel free to contact us to have us host your torrents. We are looking to build a comprehensive index of pirate mirrors over time, if this idea catches on.

As for VPN selection, much has been written about this already, so we'll just repeat the general advice of choosing by reputation. Actual court-tested no-log policies with long track records of protecting privacy is the lowest risk option, in our opinion. Note that even when you do everything right, you can never get to zero risk. For example, when seeding your torrents, a highly motivated nation-state actor can probably look at incoming and outgoing data flows for VPN servers, and deduce who you are. Or you can just simply mess up somehow. We probably already have, and will again. Luckily, nation states don't care that much about piracy.

One decision to make for each project, is whether to publish it using the same identity as before, or not. If you keep using the same name, then mistakes in operational security from earlier projects could come back to bite you. But publishing under different names means that you don't build a longer lasting reputation. We chose to have strong operational security from the start so we can keep using the same identity, but we won't hesitate to publish under a different name if we mess up or if the circumstances call for it.

Getting the word out can be tricky. As we said, this is still a niche community. We originally posted on Reddit, but really got traction on Hacker News. For now our recommendation is to post it in a few places and see what happens. And again, contact us. We would love to spread the word of more pirate archivism efforts.

Conclusion

Hopefully this is helpful for newly starting pirate archivists. We're excited to welcome you to this world, so don't hesitate to reach out. Let's preserve as much of the world's knowledge and culture as we can, and mirror it far and wide.

- Anna and the Pirate Library Mirror team (Twitter, Reddit)

http://annas-blog.org/blog-how-to-be...archivist.html





Heads Up, Movie Pirates: This Film Festival Wants You
Ryan Lattanzio

Those who’ve attended a film festival know the infamous “arrrrrr” erupting from select corners of the audience whenever an anti-piracy disclaimer flashes onscreen. The sound is meant to evoke, of course, pirates, but it also reminds of the inherent community of the moviegoing experience — and it doesn’t just exist in the rarified space of a film festival.

The 11th annual Montclair Film Festival, running October 21-30 in the namesake town in New Jersey, has come up with a clever way to combat piracy while also targeting its very practitioners — in the form of a fake streaming website promising free rips of movies like “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” “The Whale,” “White Noise,” and “She Said.”

The website very much resembles one of those Angelfire-esque websites that, through its aggressive ad placement and the sheer number of links you have to click through, seems perilously close to crashing your computer. The activation, however, is a bait and switch designed to lure movie pirates to the festival’s online program guide and then offer them free tickets to screenings.

“We thought, what can we do that’d be an interesting way to get people who are actually trying to download films, to get their attention, and say, ‘Why don’t you come and check it out in the theater because we think the experience you’ll have with us will be superior to the experience you’re having online?,” said Tom Hall, Montclair Film’s co-head and artistic director, during a recent interview with IndieWire.

Montclair Film, which year-round runs the six-screen theater The Clairidge, partnered with Goodby Silverstein & Partners New York on the campaign. Hall says that the experiences we have in theaters are the “ones that we remember. I don’t remember stuff I download at home and watch on a screen as much as I do the cathartic, empathetic experience of being in a room with other people. We thought, let’s do this as a fun way to highlight the stay-at-home disconnect between the theatrical experience and what people are experiencing at home,” he said, adding that the festival did some SEO tweaking and keyword buys for better search placement.

“We don’t want to take a shot at streamers,” Hall said of the festival, which hosts multiple Netflix titles, including “Glass Onion,” “White Noise,” and “The Good Nurse.” “We get that’s where the industry is going, but piracy seemed like a fun way to do that, and invite people who are [pirating] for economic reasons or for convenience reasons to maybe take a chance on theatrical with us,” Hall said.

Hall is also hoping to bring back a little bit of the anticipation factor with the festival, even when we know movies like “White Noise” and “Glass Onion” are a stone’s throw from coming out on Netflix after their theatrical window shutters.

The idea used to be that you’d wait for a title to come out at the video store, but “now you can just get a copy online right away,” Hall said. “That’s changed people’s perspective. Everything now is so instantaneous. There’s something to be said about waiting. We [at The Clairidge] are not in the New York City break for independent films to come out. We wait two, three, four weeks to be on the next wave of films. Our patrons can easily go to New York City and see a film. We understand intimately how … instant gratification impacts theatrical for even a town like ours.”

One of the big-ticket items at the festival is an evening with Daniel Craig, with the actor in-person for a live conversation with Stephen Colbert, that also serves as a fundraising event for Montclair Film. See more highlights from the 10-day festival and get tickets here.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/heads-mov...170001701.html





Porn Copyright Troll Lawyer The Absolute Worst; Bureau Of Prisons Says, 'Hold My Beer'

Solitary confinement is torture generally. In this case, it's absurd.
Joe Patrice

Close up hand of woman prisoner holding old iron bar in jail.It’s been a while since we wrote about Prenda Law, a mercifully defunct copyright trolling venture that made its nut by shaking down people for downloading porn videos. The outfit — previously known as Steele|Hansmeier PLLP after lawyers John Steele and Paul Hansmeier — crossed from seedy trolling to criminal extortion when experts figured out that the firm was making the porn itself and then uploading the material to pirating sites itself and then suing people for downloading the material never intended for sale in the first place.

Pornography? Well, what did you expect when you named someone John Steele? That’s like naming a kid “Jeeves” and being shocked he becomes a butler. “John Steele” is involved in porn or a Golden Age comic alter ego and there is no in between.

Anyway, these lawyers cum porn producers ended up in jail, pleading guilty to a bevy of extortion and fraud charges. Paul Hansmeier received a 14 year sentence for his role in the scheme.

It’s hard to imagine anyone coming out of this story looking worse, but based on a new filing, the Bureau of Prisons officials holding Hansmeier seem to have a real hard-on for turning him the sympathetic figure.

In a new handwritten amended complaint, Hansmeier details a pattern of retaliation at the hands of prison officials based on his continued litigation over the constitutionality of his conviction. Hansmeier questions whether the government can really convict someone for using undercover methods to enforce copyright. His interpretation of the law would be frigging ludicrous, but he has every right to litigate it out.

His jailers, however, cited him for “use of the mail for an illegal purpose” and “extortion.” Hansmeier’s complaint indicates that in conversation with officials, they told him they consider it extortion to “demand money from someone on the streets, including in a lawsuit, or in a settlement proposal letter.”

Now, it is possible for a settlement proposal letter to amount to extortion. See, e.g., United States v. Hansmeier. But when the lawsuit is against the U.S. Attorney as an official, it’s not a shakedown effort.

Hansmeier claims officials subjected him to unique searches and sanctioned him for offenses they’d previously never minded. But then… this:

On June 7, 2021, Defendants amped up their retaliation by placing Hansmeier in administrative detention (a/k/a the “Hole”). Under the BOP Inmate Discipline Program, administrative detention is reversed for inmates where specific and objective evidence shows an “inmate’s continued presence in the general population poses a serious threat to life, property, self, staff, other inmates, or to the security or the orderly running of the institution.” 28 C.F.R. Part 541 Subpart B. Defendants ordered Hansmeier’s placement in administrative detention even though they knew that Hansmeier posed no such threat much less a serious threat. Rather, Defendants’ motive for detaining Hansmeier was to punish him for his petitioning activity.

Solitary confinement is recognized as torture by the United Nations for a reason — it’s considered such after 15 days. Hansmeier claims he’s been there for 112+ days.

There are temporary justifications for someone physically threatening the rest of the population, but something tells me a pencil-pushing lawyer is not posing a threat to anyone. I’m naturally inclined NOT to trust extortion convicts but “being in administrative detention” is not a controvertible fact and I doubt he’s putting that in a filing if it’s not easily confirmed. And if he is there then the BoP had better be quick to produce evidence that Hansmeier shivved two guys and runs a prison gang. Anything less and this is Cool Hand Luke nonsense.

Because absent something like that, the fact that administrative detention limits access to legal materials and availability to communicate with attorneys… well, res ipsa yadda yadda.

He further claims that the defendants prevented him from accessing the materials to challenge his solitary confinement.

Defendants are in the process of completing a retaliatory transfer of Hansmeier to another BoP institution. On or around June 24, 2021, Defendant Fikes stopped by Hansmeier’s administrative detention cell to announce that he was going to transfer Hansmeier to a Bureau of Prisons institution “as far away” as possible in retaliation for Hansmeier’s petitioning.

Again, if there’s a whiff that this is true absent evidence that Hansmeier is digging an Andy Dufresne tunnel, this is egregious. He’s pursuing litigation. He’s fully capable of pursuing that same litigation elsewhere. The only difference is another location strips him of any chance to see friends and loved ones since he’s currently incarcerated in his home state.

Not to be outdone by Defendant Fikes, Defendant Dawson threatened to transfer Hansmeier to a medium security level institution unless Hansmeier discontinued his petitioning activity.

Again, they had better be prepared to prove that he’s throwing cafeteria brawls every day. He’s a nonviolent offender! And, yes, the federal system wrongly places many nonviolent offenders in medium security prison, but the fact that the BoP is terrible at its job is not an excuse to continue being terrible at its job.

To be clear, Hansmeier’s scum. He threatened people for his own financial interest and made a mockery of the legal process to do it. But there’s hardly any excuse to put a nonviolent offender in solitary for a day, and by day 112 those excuses dwindle to zero.

Maybe the prison can produce some evidence that he’s an extraordinary physical threat, but based on these allegations it seems like we’ve finally found someone who makes “porn copyright troll extortionist” look like the good guy by comparison.
https://abovethelaw.com/2022/10/porn...-hold-my-beer/





NY Leaders Propose Measures to Keep Violent Videos Offline
Carolyn Thompson

Two top New York state officials on Tuesday called on lawmakers to outlaw the creation of videos of homicides, citing the viral spread across the internet of footage livestreamed by a gunman as he killed Black shoppers and workers during a racist mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket.

Attorney General Letitia James and Gov. Kathy Hochul, both Democrats, recommended state legislation that would both criminalize graphic images or videos created by a killer and create “significant” civil penalties for online platforms that don’t take “reasonable steps” to stop such recordings from being circulated.

The recommendations are contained in a report examining the role of online platforms in the May 14 attack at a Tops Friendly Market in which 10 people died.

The report by James’ office found that the most widely-shared video of the shooting began rocketing around the Internet within minutes of being uploaded to an obscure file-sharing site by one person in Washington state, who then shared a link. The link and video continued to spread for days, including on Twitter and other mainstream sites, despite efforts by some social media services to take them down.

Nevertheless, the platforms cannot legally be held liable “given the present state of the law,” the report concluded.

“There are no laws on the books that directly address the conduct at issue here, not even for the distribution of a graphic, uncensored video created by an attacker killing another person in cold blood,” it said.

Payton Gendron, 19, is charged with killing 10 people and wounding three others in the mass shooting. He detailed his plans and white supremacist views in a private diary on the chat platform Discord, which he made public shortly before the attack began.

The shooter livestreamed the attack to the gaming platform Twitch, which is owned by Amazon. Twitch removed the video in less than two minutes. But a small number of the roughly 28 people who tuned in for part of his broadcast circulated recordings.

The video link posted by the Washington state resident was removed by a moderator of the site 4chan, an anonymous message board, after just 30 minutes, the report said. But by that time, other users had reposted the link about 75 times.

“Shortly thereafter, the link began appearing on mainstream websites, including on Twitter within 17 minutes and on Reddit within an hour. In the following days, the link was posted and reposted on these and other sites thousands of times,” the report said.

Hochul and James called for changes to the federal Communications Decency Act to require companies take reasonable steps to block violent criminal content, while acknowledging that platforms could potentially claim First Amendment and other protections.

“Extremist content is flourishing online, and we must all work together to confront this crisis and protect our children and communities,” James said.

The shooter wrote in his online diary that he was inspired in part by violent videos and writings accessible across various platforms, especially by a video clip he saw on 4chan of the mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.

“By his own account, the Buffalo shooter’s path towards becoming a white supremacist terrorist began with that clip,” the report said.
https://www.whec.com/national-world/...ideos-offline/





Netflix Adds More than 2.4 Million Subscribers

Reveals details about password-sharing crackdown
Sarah Whitten

Key Points

• Netflix beat third-quarter expectations on the top and bottom lines Tuesday.
• The company said it added 2.41 million net subscribers during the quarter, higher than the 1 million it had forecast.
• Netflix will begin to crack down on password sharing next year.

Netflix shares skyrocketed more than 14% after the bell Tuesday as the company posted better-than-expected results on the top and bottom lines. The streamer also reported the addition of 2.41 million net global subscribers, more than doubling the adds the company had projected a quarter ago.

Additionally, Netflix will begin to crack down on password sharing next year, opting to allow people who have been borrowing accounts to create their own. The company will also allow people sharing their accounts to create sub-accounts to pay for friends or family to use theirs.

Here are the results:

• EPS: $3.10 vs. $2.13 per share, according to Refinitiv.
• Revenue: $7.93 billion vs. $7.837 billion, according to Refinitiv survey.
• Expected global paid net subscribers: Addition of 2.41 million subscribers vs. an addition of 1.09 million subscribers, according to StreetAccount estimates.

The majority of Netflix’s net subscriber growth during the quarter came from the Asia-Pacific region, which accounted for 1.43 million subscribers. The U.S.-Canada region had the smallest growth of Netflix’s regions, contributing just 100,000 net subscribers.

“We’re still not growing as fast as we’d like,” Spencer Neumann, Netflix’s chief financial officer, said during the company’s earnings call. “We are building momentum, we are pleased with our progress, but we know we still have a lot more work to do.”

Starting next quarter, Netflix will no longer provide guidance for its paid memberships but will continue to report those numbers during its quarterly earnings release.

Netflix forecast it would add 4.5 million subscribers during its fiscal first quarter and said it expects revenue of $7.8 billion, largely due to currency pressures overseas.

The company touted shows and movies such as “Stranger Things” season four, “The Gray Man” and “Purple Hearts” as hits that helped move the needle during the third quarter.

It also teased the addition of its new lower-priced ad-supported plan, which launches in 12 countries in November.

The streamer said it was “very optimistic” about its new advertising business. While it doesn’t expect the new tier will add a material contribution to its fourth-quarter results, it foresees membership growing gradually over time. Its current forecast for subscriber growth is based on its upcoming content slate and the typical seasonality that comes during the last three months of the year.

“After a challenging first half, we believe we’re on a path to reaccelerate growth,” the company said in a statement Tuesday. “The key is pleasing members. It’s why we’ve always focused on winning the competition for viewing every day. When our series and movies excite our members, they tell their friends, and then more people watch, join and stay with us.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/18/netf...s-q3-2022.html





The Great Netflix Debate: Do Its Movies Belong in Theaters?
Helen Gray

Netflix Inc.’s movie studio, top executives lobbied Ted Sarandos, the company’s co-chief executive, for much of this year to experiment with releasing more Netflix original movies broadly in theaters.

They outlined their case in a memo shared in June on the company network. Some argued that Netflix is leaving hundreds of millions in box-office receipts on the table with its current strategy of showing only select movies in a few hundred theaters for at most a few weeks before streaming them, according to people familiar with the matter. Other executives thought showing movies in more theaters would create valuable buzz for the streaming service.

Soon after, in an internal meeting, Mr. Sarandos told Netflix studio leaders that he had doubts, and still felt that streaming is the future of entertainment, movies included. Instead, he suggested that studio chief Scott Stuber and other executives meet with their counterparts at Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. to see if they would agree to let Netflix stream Sony’s movies just four to six weeks after they came out in theaters, instead of after six to eight months, as spelled out in a partnership the two studios reached last year.

If a new deal could be struck, some executives said, it would help Netflix understand how the company might benefit from streaming a movie shortly after it had been shown on thousands of big screens across the country.

The debate inside Netflix over how best to distribute its films—details of which haven’t been previously reported—is one that is playing out across an entertainment industry that has been rapidly upended by the rise of streaming video. Every major company in Hollywood is facing some version of the same question: What is the best way to release a movie?

Is it in a cinema, with stadium seating, popcorn and digital surround sound? Or is it at home, streamed on a flat-screen TV or a laptop? Should movies go to theaters first, then to streaming, or should they be released at the same time? How long should a studio wait between theatrical and streaming release? How many theaters should show a film? Should all movies go to the big screen, or just splashy action thrillers?

Some 52% of consumers now prefer to watch films at home, according to a report by market research firm National Research Group, which interviewed more than 11,000 people across nine countries in August.

However, most major studios have concluded that wide release plays an important role in the distribution plan for most movies, especially as the box office recovers strongly from the coronavirus pandemic. Netflix remains a holdout. It has produced hundreds of feature films and feature-length documentaries since 2015, when its studio started releasing movies, but few of them are released in theaters.

Netflix movies such as “The Irishman,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and “The Power of the Dog,” which critics thought had a shot at winning Oscars or other awards that require a bare minimum of public screenings, might get a few weeks in cinemas on a few hundred screens before streaming online. But none of Netflix’s movies have received the kind of wide release—meaning thousands of screens for more than a month—that leads to hundreds of millions in ticket sales.

Netflix said in a third-quarter letter to shareholders Tuesday it is able to make a wider variety of films because it isn’t preoccupied with theatrical attendance. “We’re in the business of entertaining our members with Netflix movies on Netflix,” Mr. Sarandos said on the company’s earnings call Tuesday.

Movies made by the five biggest Hollywood studios have earned more than $39 billion over the last five years, excluding the pandemic year of 2020, according to box-office tracker Comscore. Theater operators and studios typically each take about half of the proceeds from ticket sales.

Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. this year scrapped “Batgirl,” a nearly-completed superhero film that had been headed for theaters. Nonetheless,

David Zaslav, the company’s CEO, later told investors that he was committed to theatrical exhibition because it “generates word-of-mouth buzz” and increases the value of movies once they stream on the company’s HBO Max platform.

Walt Disney Co., Netflix’s biggest streaming rival, has sent its last three Pixar Animation Studios movies straight to streaming, including this year’s “Turning Red,” but CEO

Bob Chapek has said that the company still considers cinemas a major benefit to its business, especially for big-budget superhero pictures.
Scott Stuber (with his wife, actress Molly Sims) is the studio chief at Netflix.

Theatrical releases can also help drive profits from merchandise sales and fan events, which help build franchise loyalty, some film executives say.

“You’re creating this touchstone for people,” said Mitchel Berger, senior vice president for global commerce at Sony-owned Crunchyroll, a distributor and streaming service focused on Japanese anime titles, including the most recent “Dragon Ball Super” film.

Netflix’s co-CEOs have said streaming video is the company’s core business offering and they don’t want to devalue subscriptions by offering content too widely in any other format, according to people familiar with their thinking. Mr. Sarandos and co-CEO Reed Hastings declined to comment.

The debate surrounding broader and longer theatrical releases intensified inside Netflix after its share price plummeted this spring and growing competition in streaming led the company to re-examine its business model. This year it announced changes that would have been unthinkable in the past, including adding a lower-priced ad-supported tier, cracking down on password-sharing and reining in content spending.

Messrs. Sarandos and Hastings, however, have signaled repeatedly that they are unwilling to build a significant theatrical business within Netflix. Marketing is too expensive, they have said, and Netflix lacks deep relationships with theater chains.

During internal debates, some Netflix executives said more theatrical releases could create what is known inside the company as a “trust buster,” or a move that betrays the expectations of subscribers and degrades the perceived value of a subscription, people familiar with the discussions said. Plus, they want movies to drive new subscribers to Netflix when there is cultural chatter about them.

Netflix product executives this year explored the potential for a new premium tier of membership that included theater tickets or early access to films, people familiar with the matter said. Such a plan, which was one of several ideas discussed, could open the door to more theatrical releases, offer customers a new service tier and appeal to creative talent the company worked with who wanted the visibility and sheen of a traditional Hollywood debut, they added. It is unlikely that the company will pursue that idea, people familiar with the matter said.

When Netflix executives met with Sony in June to broach the possibility of a shorter window, they were told that Sony makes too much money in the months following a theatrical run selling DVDs, digital downloads and on-demand movie rentals to consider letting Netflix stream their movies at the same time, according to people familiar with the talks.

Later that month, Mr. Stuber met with Sony’s studio chief, Tom Rothman, who told Mr. Stuber the same thing, according to people familiar with the discussions, but said he might be open to revisiting the idea at a later date.

Shortly after the meetings between the two studios, Mr. Sarandos hosted a town-hall style meeting with all film-studio employees. He announced that he had reviewed their ideas and the company wouldn’t be significantly changing its approach to theatrical releases after all.

Still, there have been some recent signs that Netflix leadership might be willing to make small adjustments to the theatrical release policy under the right circumstances.

Earlier this month, the company agreed to release “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” in 600 theaters for a week around Thanksgiving, then stream it a month later. Filmmaker Rian Johnson said at the time he couldn’t wait “to feel the energy of the crowd” in theaters.

Netflix plans to release “Bardo,” an upcoming Spanish-language drama from filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, director of the Best Picture winner “Birdman,” for four weeks in U.S. theaters starting in November before streaming, and will get a wider, earlier release in Mexico. Netflix’s more than 223 million global subscribers around the world are also appealing to Mr. González Iñárritu, according to a spokeswoman for the director.

—Jessica Toonkel contributed to this article.
https://technoblender.com/the-great-...g-in-theaters/





YouTube’s Latest Revenue Grab: A 27 Percent Price Increase for Family Plans

After several failed revenue experiments, YouTube decides to just charge more.
Ron Amadeo

Not content with doing $28.8 billion in revenue in 2021, YouTube has recently gone on the hunt for more revenue-generating strategies. So far, we've seen canceled experiments like saddling videos with up to 10 unskippable pre-roll ads and charging for 4K content. Now, the Google division has announced a price hike for YouTube Premium family plans.

As 9to5Google was the first to spot, the family plan is jumping over 27 percent in the US, from $17.99 to $22.99, with other regions also seeing price hikes. Instead of making an official announcement, Google is quietly emailing existing subscribers. So far, it does not seem like the single-person YouTube Premium price (still $11.99 per month) is going up. The family plan lets a user share ad-free YouTube Premium with up to five same-household family members for a discounted rate.

On iOS, all the prices are higher if you sign up through the App Store, which charges a 30 percent fee on every transaction. In Apple land, YouTube Premium's family plan was always $22.99, and now it's jumping up to $29.99 a month. You can avoid the Apple tax by just paying Google directly through the YouTube website.

The new pricing will go into effect on or after November 21 for people who were on the $17.99 plan. Google is also giving users with grandfathered-in deals the boot. If you've been subscribed since the days of Google Play Music All Access in 2015, it's been possible to continue paying $14.99 for a YouTube Premium family plan. Google has told users that those deals are ending in April 2023, and everyone will have to pay the $22.99 price, representing a 53 percent increase.

The YouTube subreddit is filled with complaints over the surprise change. YouTube posted a feedback form specifically about the change, where the company is no doubt getting a flood of user feedback. Every YouTube support page features a pinned notice about the price right now, along with a message that YouTube is currently "experiencing high contact volumes." The support page on how to cancel your membership is here.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022...cent-increase/





UK’s Ofcom Proposes Easing Net Neutrality Rules Following Brexit
Thomas Seal

UK regulator Ofcom proposed changes to net neutrality rules carried over from the European Union to give telecommunications and internet providers more flexibility.

Internet service providers should be allowed to offer a broader range of premium packages on a wider variety of parameters such as latency, and could include discounted tariffs during off-peak hours, according to proposals from the watchdog published Friday.

“The net neutrality rules constrain the activities of broadband providers, and could be restricting their ability to develop new services and manage their networks,” Ofcom said in the report.

Net neutrality is shorthand for rules that intend to ensure traffic carried over telecom networks is treated equally, without favoring certain services or content. Debates over such regulations often prove controversial due to tensions over what constitutes an open and free internet and fears consumers could suffer if it becomes harder to compare prices.

The report proposed that telecom providers be allowed to not charge a customer’s overall allowance for certain services, like public health advice.

UK internet service provider TalkTalk Telecom Group Ltd welcomed the guidance.

“We think the rules can and should support innovation and network efficiency,” a spokeswoman said. “In addition, content providers should in some cases be able to support network capacity growth while also ensuring consumers continue to have unrestricted access to content.”

On a wider debate over getting Big Tech to pay phone companies for carrying traffic, Ofcom said it hadn’t “yet seen sufficient evidence that this is needed and believe there is sufficient flexibility provided for internet service providers in our other proposals.”

Ofcom is soliciting responses to the proposals until Jan. 13 and plans revised guidance in the second half of 2023. It added that changes in the rules would ultimately be a matter for the government.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/uk-s-ofc...exit-1.1835778





Poor, Less White Areas get Worst Internet Deals
Leon Yin and Aaron Sankin

A couple of years into the pandemic, Shirley Neville had finally had enough of her shoddy internet service.

“It was just a headache,” said Neville, who lives in a middle-class neighborhood in New Orleans whose residents are almost all Black or Latino. “When I was getting ready to use my tablet for a meeting, it was cutting off and not coming on.”

Neville said she was willing to pay more to be able to Zoom without interruption, so she called AT&T to upgrade her connection. She said she was told there was nothing the company could do.

In her area, AT&T only offers download speeds of 1 megabit per second or less, trapping her in a digital Stone Age. Her internet is so slow that it doesn’t meet Zoom’s recommended minimum for group video calls; doesn’t come close to the Federal Communications Commission’s definition of broadband, currently 25 Mbps; and is worlds below median home internet speeds in the U.S., which average 167 Mbps.

“In my neighborhood, it’s terrible,” Neville said.

But that’s not the case in other parts of New Orleans. AT&T offers residents of the mostly white, upper-income neighborhood of Lakeview internet speeds almost 400 times faster than Neville’s—for the same price: $55 a month.

The Markup gathered and analyzed more than 800,000 internet service offers from AT&T, Verizon, Earthlink, and CenturyLink in 38 cities across America and found that all four routinely offered fast base speeds at or above 200 Mbps in some neighborhoods for the same price as connections below 25 Mbps in others.

The neighborhoods offered the worst deals had lower median incomes in nine out of 10 cities in the analysis. In two-thirds of the cities where The Markup had enough data to compare, the providers gave the worst offers to the least white neighborhoods.

These providers also disproportionately gave the worst offers to formerly redlined areas in every one of the 22 cities examined where digitized historical maps were available. These are areas a since-disbanded agency created by the federal government in the 1930s had deemed “hazardous” for financial institutions to invest in, often because the residents were Black or poor. Redlining was outlawed in 1968.

By failing to price according to service speed, these companies are demanding some customers pay dramatically higher unit prices for advertised download speed than others. CenturyLink, which showed the most extreme disparities, offered some customers service of 200 Mbps, amounting to as little as $0.25 per Mbps, but offered others living in the same city only 0.5 Mbps for the same price—a unit price of $100 per Mbps, or 400 times as much.

Residents of neighborhoods offered the worst deals aren’t just being ripped off; they’re denied the ability to participate in remote learning, well-paying remote jobs, and even family connection and recreation—ubiquitous elements of modern life.

“It isn’t just about the provision of a better service. It’s about access to the tools people need to fully participate in our democratic system,” said Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU. “That is a far bigger deal and that’s what really worries me about what you’re finding.”

Christopher Lewis, president and CEO of the nonprofit Public Knowledge, which works to expand internet access, said The Markup’s analysis shows how far behind the federal government is when it comes to holding internet providers to account. “Nowhere have we seen either the FCC nor the Congress, who ultimately has authority as well, study competition in the marketplace and pricing to see if consumers are being price gouged or if those service offerings make sense.”

None of the providers denied charging the same fee for vastly different internet speeds to different neighborhoods in the same cities. But they said their intentions were not to discriminate against communities of color and that there were other factors to consider.

The industry group USTelecom, speaking on behalf of Verizon, said the cost of maintaining the antiquated equipment used for slow speed service plays a role in its price.

“Fiber can be hundreds of times faster than legacy broadband—but that doesn’t mean that legacy networks cost hundreds of times less,” USTelecom senior vice president Marie Johnson said in an email. “Operating and maintaining legacy technologies can be more expensive, especially as legacy network components are discontinued by equipment manufacturers.”

AT&T spokesperson Jim Greer said in an emailed statement that The Markup’s analysis is “fundamentally flawed” because it “clearly ignored our participation in the federal Affordable Connectivity Program and our low-cost Access by AT&T service offerings.” The Affordable Connectivity Program was launched in 2021 and pays up to $30 a month for internet for low-income residents, or $75 on tribal lands.

“Any suggestion that we discriminate in providing internet access is blatantly wrong,” he said, adding that AT&T plans on spending $48 billion on service upgrades over the next two years.

Recent research looking at 30 major cities found only about a third of eligible households had signed up for the federal subsidy, however, and the majority use it to help cover cellphone bills, which also qualify, rather than home internet costs. Connectivity advocates told The Markup that it’s hard to get people to jump through the bureaucratic hoops needed to sign up for the program when service is slow.

Greer declined to say how many or what percentage of AT&T’s internet customers are signed up for either the ACP or the company’s own low-cost program for low-income residents.

In a letter to the FCC, AT&T insisted its high-speed internet deployments are driven by “household density, not median incomes.” But when The Markup ran a statistical test controlling for density, it still found AT&T disproportionately offered slower speeds to lower-income areas in three out of four of the 20 cities where it investigated their service.

“We do not engage in discriminatory practices like redlining and find the accusation offensive,” Mark Molzen, a spokesperson for CenturyLink’s parent company, Lumen, wrote in an email.” He said that The Markup’s analysis is “deeply flawed” without specifying how. He did not respond to requests for clarification.

EarthLink, which doesn’t own internet infrastructure in the examined cities but rather rents capacity from other providers, did not provide an official comment despite repeated requests.

Internet prices are not regulated by the federal government because unlike telephone service, internet service is not considered a utility. As a result, providers can make their own decisions about where they provide service and how much to charge. The FCC declined a request to comment on the findings.

The investigation is based on service offers collected from the companies’ own websites, which contain service lookup tools that list all available plans for specific addresses, using a method pioneered by researchers at Princeton University. The Markup analyzed price and speed for nearly 850,000 offers for addresses in the largest city in 38 states where these providers operate.

Las Vegas is one city where large swaths of CenturyLink’s offers were for slow service. Almost half didn’t meet the current federal definition of broadband. These fell disproportionately on Las Vegas’s lower-income and least white areas.

Las Vegas councilwoman Olivia Diaz said that in the summer of 2020, she approached families where children had stopped showing up to virtual lessons the previous school year to find out what went wrong.

City schools were preparing to begin their second school year marked by COVID-19 lockdowns.

“We kept hearing there were multiple children trying to connect in the household, but they weren’t able to,” said Diaz, who represents a district that’s predominantly Latino and on the lower end of the city’s income spectrum.

More than 80% of CenturyLink’s internet offers in her district were for service slower than 25 Mbps. Education advocacy group Common Sense Media recommends at least 200 Mbps download speeds for a household to reliably conduct multiple, simultaneous video conferencing sessions.

“I think it’s unfair knowing that it is slow service that we’re paying for that is not commensurate with the faster speeds that they have in the other parts of the city that are paying the same price,” Diaz said. “It just breaks my heart to know we’re not getting the best bang for our buck.”

Diaz said city officials have asked CenturyLink to expand high-speed service in her district, but the company declined, citing the prohibitive cost of deploying new infrastructure in the area. CenturyLink did not respond to emails asking about this request.

Some officials told The Markup they’ve been yelling for years about bad service for high prices.

“If I was paying $6 a month,” Joshua Edmonds, Detroit’s director of digital inclusion, “well you get what you’re paying for.” But he objects to people being asked to pay premium rates for bad service. “What I pay versus what I get doesn’t really make sense.”

In a 2018 report, Bill Callahan, who runs the online accessibility organization Connect Your Community, coined the term “tier flattening” to describe charging internet customers the same rate for differing levels of service. He said The Markup’s findings show how much of America’s internet market is based on the “basic unfairness” of internet service providers deciding to deprioritize investing in new, high-speed infrastructure in marginalized areas.

“They’ve made a decision that those neighborhoods are going to be treated differently,” said Callahan. “The core reason for that is they think they don’t have enough money in those neighborhoods to sustain the kind of market they want.”

The FCC is currently drafting rules under a provision of the 2021 infrastructure bill aimed at “preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin.”

A coalition of 39 groups led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Center for Accessible Technology urged the FCC to take aggressive action rectifying broadband inequality by examining the socioeconomics of the neighborhoods getting the slowest speeds and the prices they pay—regardless of whether the companies intended to discriminate.

AT&T insisted in filings with the agency that the standard for discrimination should be explicit, deliberate efforts to avoid building infrastructure in areas that are populated by people of color or lower-income residents.

It also asked for subsidies to build high-speed internet in lower-income neighborhoods because, as AT&T asserted in its letter to the FCC, “most or all deficiencies in broadband access appear to result not from invidious discrimination, but from ordinary business-case challenges in the absence of subsidy programs.”

Advocates say that’s just not true. “There are very few places in the country where it is not economically feasible to deploy broadband,” said Brian Thorn, who served as a senior researcher for the Communication Workers of America, a union representing telecom employees, which has been vocal on the issue and filed its own comment to the FCC. (The CWA is the parent union of The NewsGuild-CWA, which represents employees at The Markup and The Associated Press.) He said members are tired of seeing their employers make inequitable infrastructure deployment decisions.

“We would hear from members all the time that they’re out laying lines on one side of the neighborhood and not on the other,” he said.

In a letter to the FCC, the coalition asserted that “broadband users are experiencing discriminatory impacts of deployment that are no different than the impacts of past redlining policies in housing, banking, and other venues of economic activity.”

The term “redlining” derives from efforts by the federal government to stem the tide of foreclosures during the Great Depression by drawing up maps, with the help of real estate agents, to identify areas that were safe for mortgage lending. Predominantly white neighborhoods were consistently rated better than less-white neighborhoods, which were shaded in red. Echoes of these maps still reverberate today in things like rates of home ownership and prenatal mortality.

Notes on the historical map explaining why one part of Kansas City, Missouri, was redlined cited “Negro encroachment from the north.” In that same area, AT&T offered only slow service to every single address The Markup examined.

Across Kansas City, AT&T offered the worst deals to 68% of addresses in redlined areas, compared to just 12% of addresses in areas that had been rated “best” or “desirable.”

Redlining maps frequently tracked neatly with the disparities The Markup found.

Addresses in redlined areas of 15 cities from Portland to Atlanta were offered the worst deals at least twice as often as areas rated “best” or “desirable.” Minneapolis, which is served by CenturyLink, displayed one of the most striking disparities: Formerly redlined addresses were offered the worst deals almost eight times as often as formerly better-rated areas.

Pamela Jackson-Walters, a 68-year-old longtime resident of Detroit’s Hope Village, said she needs the internet to work on her dissertation in organizational leadership at University of Phoenix online and to virtually attend church services. The slow speeds AT&T offered were a constant annoyance.

“They still haven’t installed the high-speed internet over here,” she said. “How do we get it? Are we too poor of a neighborhood to have the better service?”

Hope Village has a per capita income of just over $11,000 and is almost entirely Black.

To add insult to injury, last fall, AT&T internet service across Hope Village went down for 45 days before being restored. This summer, Jackson-Walters’s internet went down again, this time for four weeks, she said.

Jeff Jones, another longtime Hope Village resident, noted a bitter irony amid all the service problems. “To add to the insult, I can look out my bedroom window literally, maybe 150 yards, is the AT&T service facility,” he said with a weary laugh. “I’m like, please help me! You’re right there! How can you ignore this problem that is just right in front of your face?”

Until The Markup told Hope Village residents its findings about AT&T’s pricing practices in Detroit, they didn’t know that lower-income areas were more often asked to pay the same price for slower internet.

“That’s the big piece,” said Angela Siefer, the executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, which advocates for broadband access. “Folks don’t know that they’re being screwed.”

___

This story was reported by The Markup and the story and data were distributed by The Associated Press.
https://apnews.com/article/broadband...cc54595aecdafa





Comcast Wanted $210,000 for Internet—so this Man Helped Expand a Co-Op Fiber ISP

Fed up with Comcast and AT&T, Silicon Valley residents started their own network.
Jon Brodkin

Sasha Zbrozek lives in Los Altos Hills, California, which he describes as "a wealthy Silicon Valley town," in a house about five miles from Google's headquarters. But after moving in December 2019, Zbrozek says he learned that Comcast never wired his house—despite previously telling him it could offer Internet service at the address.

Today, Zbrozek is on the board of a co-op ISP called Los Altos Hills Community Fiber (LAHCF), which provides multi-gigabit fiber Internet to dozens of homes and has a plan to serve hundreds more. Town residents were able to form the ISP with the help of Next Level Networks, which isn't a traditional consumer broadband provider but a company that builds and manages networks for local groups.

Zbrozek's experience with Comcast led to him getting involved with LAHCF and organizing an expansion that brought 10Gbps symmetrical fiber to his house and others on nearby roads. Zbrozek described his experience to Ars in a phone interview and in emails.

"Before I bought my home, I checked with Comcast—by phone—to see if service was available at the address. They said yes. After moving in, I called to buy service. The technician came out and left a note saying that service was not available," he told us.

Want Comcast? That’ll be $210,000

There are five parcels that neighbor Zbrozek's property, and three of them have Comcast service, he said. Comcast's online availability checker indicated—correctly, as it turned out—that the house he was buying didn't have service. But it was clear that Comcast was serving the neighborhood, so he called the cable company to find out if he could get Internet access.

Zbrozek recalled a Comcast agent telling him the previous residents of the house he was buying never signed up for service and that "we might need to add a drop from the pole to your house, but, you know, otherwise it's no big deal."

Instead of it being no big deal, Zbrozek said it took over a year to get Comcast to tell him how much it would charge for a line extension to his house. Zbrozek eventually had to reach out to the Los Altos Hills town government to get a price quote from Comcast.

The answer was $210,000. Comcast wanted Zbrozek to pay $300 per foot to trench cable across about 700 feet, according to a February 2021 email from Los Altos Hills' public works director that Zbrozek shared with Ars.

While Zbrozek had calculated a distance of 167 feet from his property to the nearest pole with Comcast wires, he said Comcast told him the house was too far from the pole to legally provide above-ground service. Los Altos Hills requires underground installation in most cases.

Zbrozek also proposed connecting to Comcast by running a line to a neighbor's property that had Comcast service. "The closest point between my property and a (now former) neighbor with Comcast who would've let me do some private trenching is about 40 feet," Zbrozek told Ars. However, Comcast doesn't allow that type of property-to-property connection.

"The spirit of the franchise agreement [between Comcast and Los Altos Hills] is that I'm supposed to be able to get service because I'm on a public road, but in practice that just wasn't the case," he said. Before getting fiber service, Zbrozek and his wife, Stella, made do by "tethering to a cell phone. I just got an unlimited plan and plugged my cell phone into a home router and called it a day," he said.

Comcast blames complicated construction

Comcast told Ars there were several complications in serving Zbrozek's house. Those included the town's requirement for underground construction, the presence of "diamond rock asphalt" that necessitates special equipment to cut through, and the need to restore a recently paved road after installing cable. Comcast described this as "a very heavy asphalt grade that through time and sedimentary processes forms a diamond-type rock which requires a specialized bore tip or diamond blade to successfully penetrate through," especially at a depth of at least 24 inches. Comcast also said this type of asphalt is "often used on highways for a harder compaction durability and integrity."

Comcast and other cable companies don't allow the kind of property-to-property connection that Zbrozek proposed for a few reasons, Comcast told us. Sharing a connection between two or more homes can degrade service, the company said.

"There are also concerns with safety," Comcast said. "There are safety measures we take and implement to protect customers and their homes/property (in addition to our own employees) as a part of our installation that we can't guarantee if we don't do the work."

Comcast further cited the need to comply with regulations, pointing to a California law that governs the installation of underground cables. With cables installed by a homeowner, Comcast said it couldn't ensure that proper duct materials are used or that the trench is deep enough.

"This area was very complex, and we did review all angles thoroughly to find a less expensive solution," Comcast told Ars. Comcast also said it doesn't make a profit on the construction fees charged to residents who request line extensions—though anyone who pays for an extension ends up paying monthly service fees afterward.

"We serve the majority of homes in the Los Altos area, and the remaining homes that aren't connected are completed on a case-by-case basis," Comcast told us.

Getting involved in community ISP

Zbrozek, who is an electrical engineer for a company that makes self-driving boats, did not sit idly by while waiting for Comcast to determine how much it would cost to wire up his house. Though most of his immediate neighbors had Comcast service, other nearby roads weren't wired up, and Zbrozek spearheaded a fiber expansion.

"There's a street on the other side of my house that I don't live on but that butts up against my property... all of the folks who live on that road and an adjacent road were stuck basically with no broadband at all," Zbrozek told Ars.

This other street, a private road, was getting repaved. Zbrozek saw an opportunity to bury fiber conduits during the repaving and reached out to residents. "I was like, hey guys... I have this proposal. Why don't we bury some conduit in a few key locations" and "in parallel, reach out to this little fiber co-op that's forming in town and see if they can hook us into their network," Zbrozek said.

The plan worked, and Zbrozek got his fiber service connected in January 2021. The expansion brought fiber past 22 homes, and the people in about 17 of those signed up for service, he said.

Everyone hooked up during the expansion paid about $12,000 up front, and members are now paying a service fee of $155 a month, he said. Construction costs for burying conduit and fiber ended up being about $50 a foot, he said. "This is a little grassroots, co-op ISP that is happening basically because the incumbent ISP is not serving the area," Zbrozek said.

The neighborhood also got a price quote from AT&T before joining LAHCF. AT&T's offer was to install fiber "through conduits that we would have to install at our own cost," Zbrozek said. The conduits that AT&T required were larger and more expensive than what the neighborhood needed, he said. All told, it would have cost somewhere between $28,000 and $44,000 per home to go with AT&T.

"To AT&T's credit, they were quite responsive and easy to deal with, just expensive," Zbrozek said. AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.

The LAHCF network currently consists of fiber lines and point-to-point radio links to fill the gaps where no fiber has been installed yet. The community ISP plans to fill in the gaps with fiber as much as possible, making the radio links unnecessary in places, but "there will always be some radio link somewhere, since that jumpstarts growth," Zbrozek said.

“We can build you a network”

In a phone interview, Los Altos Hills Community Fiber Board President Scott Vanderlip told Ars about how the ISP was formed a few years ago. Vanderlip was part of an ad hoc technology committee for the town government, "and one of the projects we wanted to do was to bring better broadband to Los Altos Hills," he said. The committee sent "requests for proposals to almost every Internet provider we could think of: AT&T, Comcast, Sonic, and others," asking if they could provide gigabit Internet service, he said.

The group got a response from Next Level Networks. "They said, 'We can build you a localized, community-owned and operated fiber optic network, and we're willing to work with you," Vanderlip told Ars.

Next Level Networks takes care of network management and the hiring of construction crews to install fiber, Vanderlip said. Next Level also handles customer service. "Part of your monthly service cost goes to paying for your monthly support," he said.

The first few homes to get service were connected in April 2019. Los Altos Hills served as a test case for the Next Level Networks model, in which "the community owns the last-mile infrastructure" and "members own drops to their homes," Next Level Founder Darrell Gentry said in a 2020 interview with Broadband Breakfast. Volunteers who run each community network, like Vanderlip and Zbrozek, take the lead on finding areas for expansion and attracting users.

"Once a community has sufficient participation, we take care of the rest: finalizing the network design, securing permits, and providing construction oversight," Next Level Networks explains. "After construction is completed, Next Level professionally manages the network's operations on behalf of the community... The network design is 'open access,' which means that multiple ISPs can provide service across the fiber infrastructure."

4.5 miles of fiber so far

Vanderlip said LAHCF has about 4.5 miles of fiber installed in Los Altos Hills so far, and construction work for another two miles of fiber just started a couple weeks ago. For its backhaul connection to the Internet, the community group leased two fiber lines from two middle-mile providers, Crown Castle and Zayo.

Vanderlip said it was fortunate that those fiber lines for backhaul were available nearby and that they lead back "to Fremont, where we peer with Hurricane Electric and we can get sort of unlimited capacity and very affordable pricing."

Jay Snable, an LAHCF user who helped organize an expansion in his neighborhood, told Ars that he "really appreciated the community approach—owning the infrastructure ourselves and being able to choose different service providers if we are not satisfied."

Snable previously used AT&T fiber-to-the-node service, which was resold by Sonic. He then got his fiber-to-the-home hookup from LAHCF in June. Snable could have bought Comcast service but said he wanted to avoid "the Comcast world of contracts, less than stellar service reputation, etc."

The AT&T service often slowed down or stalled while streaming video or using video conferencing, he said. Those problems are gone now that he's on the co-op ISP's network.

"I blamed my internal network and Wi-Fi but now find it was virtually all the Internet connection," Snable told us. With LAHCF, "I can stream true HD on multiple devices with no issue now, and file transfer back to work is lightning quick." While there was one lengthy outage due to a fiber cut, "that sort of issue will be resolved over time with redundant circuits," he said. "It's still early, but the experience has exceeded my expectations to this point."

Jan Clayton, who organized the neighborhood expansion with Snable, told Ars that the community fiber connection "is more than an order of magnitude better than the service we had with AT&T. The AT&T upload speed was horrendously slow (3Mbps) and the entire service was unreliable, especially in the late afternoon and early evening. The LAHCF option is an incredible solution, and I believe that a few years from now, we will think that the investment was more than well worth it." Clayton said she and her husband "also wanted to support the adoption of the technology throughout our neighborhood, so we were happy to be early adopters."

The LAHCF model is quite different from another resident-built ISP we've written about a couple of times. Michigan resident Jared Mauch built his own ISP after being unable to get good broadband service from AT&T or Comcast and is now expanding to hundreds of homes with government funding. Mauch's ISP is essentially a one-man business—he relies on contractors for some construction work but handles the network management and much of the fiber installation himself.

Sizable expansions expected

About 50 households are subscribed to LAHCF so far, Vanderlip said. With recent expansions, the network is "installed on streets that can access potentially hundreds of homes, so the capacity is built up to really serve a lot more homes," he said. Vanderlip said he expects the ISP to have 300 subscribers within a year.

LAHCF has mostly expanded into areas "that were just grossly underserved, and where the only option was either AT&T DSL or a boutique point-to-point wireless provider," Zbrozek said. But the demand isn't just from people without Comcast service.

"There are enough people with enough money who are unhappy enough with even functional Comcast service that we are seeing enough demand to expand into areas where we are [competing] head on" against established ISPs, Zbrozek said.

Crews recently extended the network "another mile and a half up the street next to me, mostly because there is a very wealthy CEO who is also fed up with Comcast who's paying for that network extension and allowing people along the way to join in," he said. (Zbrozek said he couldn't reveal the CEO's identity.)

Zbrozek said the $155 monthly fee is higher than he'd like, but "on the bright side, I have really good service now. Whereas by contrast, I would have paid Comcast $210,000 and then a $90 monthly fee, and I don't think I'm going to live long enough to make up that difference."

Vanderlip also got high quote from Comcast

Vanderlip started thinking about building an ISP after having an experience similar to Zbrozek's. Vanderlip told us that Comcast wouldn't provide him service without a hefty fee, even though "the guy across the street" has a Comcast connection.

"I can see it on the pole, basically about three poles away from me is a Comcast connection," Vanderlip said. But Comcast told him about five or six years ago that he'd have to pay $17,000 for a connection, before any monthly fees for Internet service, he said.

"To connect me for $17,000 just seemed outrageous considering it's literally right there on the pole, but that's sort of what they can get away with," he said. "That was one of the motivations since I'm the one who helped found the whole community project."

Vanderlip said he previously had AT&T U-verse Internet, getting about 17Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds. "What I got from AT&T was satisfactory, but I wanted to go faster," he said.

Monthly fee should drop as more users join

To access the network, most residents pay $5,000 to $10,000 upfront, depending on how much work is needed to wire up the home, Vanderlip said. The monthly service fee of $155 provides download and upload speeds of as high as 10Gbps.

"Once we have 100 subscribers, that should go down to $100 a month, and once we have 300 subscribers, that should go down to about $60 a month," Vanderlip said. The ISP has fixed costs, and "there's no profit here. We're a mutual benefit, not-for-profit organization," he said.

While the network connection is 10Gbps, the default in-home equipment provided to each subscriber tops out at 1Gbps. "Residents have the option to connect to our network at 10 gigabit capacity for the same monthly service price but must provide their own on premise equipment," a technical FAQ says.

When Los Altos Hills Community Fiber began, "we had five or six people put in the initial funding," Vanderlip said. "And then at my house, I was hosting the radios and all the routers and everything, so we didn't need any seed funding to get it started."

As the ISP grows, "each project is sort of independently funded," he said. "We only build in neighborhoods where they want us. With all the projects, before we lift a shovel, we give them project quotes." If the residents agree to the price and write the checks, "we go ahead and do the project," he said.

The co-op ISP uses what Vanderlip called a neighborhood champion program. Someone in a neighborhood that needs Internet service will "go out and talk to neighbors, and they do a lot of the footwork trying to organize projects. Then they come to us and say, 'OK, look, we want to connect; we've got 15 neighbors who are interested. Can you get us a quote for connecting us to your network?'"

Fiber islands

The co-op started providing service to a few homes by laying fiber in backyards and using point-to-point 10Gbps radios to fill in the gaps where there's no fiber. It took almost two years for the group to obtain a master access agreement with the town, which lets them install fiber underground in public rights of way, Vanderlip said.

They didn't finalize that agreement until September 2021, after the ISP was already operating. Fiber installation has accelerated since they gained access to public rights of way, Vanderlip said.

The 10Gbps radios will remain a critical part of the network until all the gaps are filled with fiber. In some neighborhoods, "they're not close to where we have fiber right now, but they really want it. So to speed them up, we came up with this concept called a fiber island," Vanderlip said.

The houses in each fiber-island neighborhood "are connected on a high-speed fiber optic network, and the backhaul component is—temporarily, until we get the true fiber connection to that neighborhood—is actually done with point-to-point 10-gigabit radios. So they're still getting a 10-gigabit connection," he said.

Radio links not a problem—power outages are

Zbrozek said he expects his area of the network to be on an all-fiber connection by late 2023, making the radio link unnecessary. But the wireless portion of the network hasn't been a problem.

"Honestly, that point-to-point radio has been completely fine. The thing most important to us for reliability would be power," Zbrozek said, noting struggles with power company PG&E. "I don't know how familiar you are with our power utilities, but they're not the most robust... they're just not very good at actually keeping the power on."

The co-op ISP also needs upgrades in its own power backup, he said. "We've got battery backup in the network closets, but it's frankly just insufficient. We need to juice that up a bit," he said.

LAHCF designed the system to handle downtime of 12 hours or so, but "the hardware we chose for battery backup is grossly underperforming relative to its specification and, in practice, we get like two hours," he said.

Zbrozek told us about the battery problems when we first spoke in July. Since then, "we've swapped out some UPS hardware with better hardware in a couple of cabinets but are still not yet satisfied with overall power-outage tolerance, especially in the face of extremely dodgy PG&E uptime," he told us on October 1.

Fiber is better than Comcast, anyway

While Los Altos Hills Fiber might not exist if Comcast had extended cable to every home in the town, Vanderlip pointed out that a fiber connection is better than cable. Comcast is finally getting close to a major upgrade in upload speeds after years of planning, but fiber provides symmetrical service today.

"When they designed the original cable TV network back in the '70s, they never really designed it to be bidirectional," Vanderlip said. It was created as a "one-way type of a service and the whole technology is not a good delivery mechanism for Internet as we know it," Vanderlip said.

There are also Comcast's notorious customer service problems. "Comcast does have a fairly good penetration in Los Altos Hills—maybe 70 or 80 percent of the town is wired with Comcast—but Comcast has its own issues and, you know, lousy customer support," Vanderlip said.

Some Los Altos Hills residents still have no access to broadband, not even DSL. "There's some parts of town where they've never had any cable, never had any AT&T DSL or U-verse or anything. It's like the Internet never arrived for them," Vanderlip said. "A lot of people now in Los Altos Hills, they're not underserved, they're unserved."

People are "really excited to go from basically nothing to 10-gigabit service, and that's sort of what happened with Sasha's area," Vanderlip said.

Local ISPs band together in fiber league

Vanderlip also formed a League of Community Fiber Organizations to consult with other community-based ISPs. In addition to LAHCF, three other California-based community ISPs are members. All of the League members are using Next Level Networks, Vanderlip said.

"Residents just get tired of having to deal with telcos, and they just want to take this into their own hands," Vanderlip said. In addition to sharing information, League members "actually will be utilizing shared backhaul and redundancy and resilience so we can share some of our resources to get lower prices and better connectivity."

"There's a lot of communities in America that are thinking about this model to help bring better broadband into their community rather than waiting for telcos to install something better," Vanderlip said.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-op-fiber-isp/





Comcast is Boosting the Speed of its Internet in Connecticut
Alexander Soule

As Frontier Communications continues to roll out fiber optic cable in Connecticut, Comcast announced it is expanding a new service to its Connecticut territories that will eventually allow for comparable broadband speeds, after back-end upgrades to its existing coaxial cable and fiber network.

Comcast provides service in portions of the New Haven, Hartford, Waterbury, Danbury, Middletown and Thames River Valley regions.

The Philadelphia-based company is the largest broadband provider in the nation with more than 32 million subscribers as of June, about 1.9 million more than Charter Communications based in Stamford via its Spectrum service. Comcast also owns NBC Sports headquarters in Stamford.

Both Frontier and Altice USA have focused on stringing fiber optic cable to customer homes, as mobile carriers encroach into their territories nationally with 5G networks that can provide broadband speeds to home devices like laptops and TVs. Frontier told CTInsider this month that it has run fiber to 500,000 locations in Connecticut with the goal of adding 300,000 more in the coming three years, at a total investment of $800 million.

While Comcast is also introducing fiber-to-the-home in a small number of markets nationally, the company says its newest upgrade provides more than sufficient bandwidth for the vast majority of users.

"Whether its coaxial or fiber, who cares?" said Elad Nafshi, chief network officer for Comcast at the company's Philadelphia headquarters, in a Tuesday interview with CTInsider. "We're able to deliver multiple-gigabit, symmetrical services ... across the footprint."

The new service will initially allow for download speeds of up to two gigabits a second, and upload speeds at lower broadband speeds which will improve with additional network upgrades. In tests this year, Comcast reported upstream and downstream speeds above four gigabits per second, with plans to roll that out as a "10G" service in unspecified markets starting next year.

"We've competed against fiber for many years," said Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, speaking in September during an investment conference hosted by Goldman Sachs. "We've been able to go through the cycle — the first time it shows up, people buy it. Then they've got to do a good job to service you, and you win some customers back. There's a well-heeled playbook for how we compete."

Includes prior reporting by Paul Schott and Luther Turmelle.
https://www.newstimes.com/business/a...src=nthpdesecp





French Police Probe Multiple Cuts of Major Internet Cables
John Leicester

French police said Friday they’re investigating multiple cuts to fiber-optic cables in France’s second-largest city. Operators said the cables link Marseille to other cities in France and Europe and that internet and phone services were severely disrupted.

The disruptions in Marseille were a taste of what analysts warn could be far larger problems in other cases if cables are systematically attacked. The vulnerability of fiber-optic cables, especially those underwater, and other key infrastructure was highlighted by the sabotage last month in the Baltic Sea of natural gas pipelines from Russia.

The damage in the city in southern France also appeared to resemble suspected acts of sabotage to other cables in the country earlier this year.

French cable operator and internet service provider Free said its repair teams were mobilized before dawn Wednesday to deal with “an act of vandalism on our fiber infrastructure.”

It said the attacks were simultaneous and on multiple spots of its fiber network near Marseille. Photos that Free published on Twitter showed multiple cables completely severed in their concrete housings buried in the ground. It said the cuts led to major disruptions to its network and phone services in the Marseille area.

A spokeswoman for Marseille police said Friday that the judicial police were investigating multiple breakages to cables on the city’s outskirts.

Cybersecurity company Zscaler said the severed cables link Marseille to Milan, Barcelona and the French city of Lyon. It said the cuts “impacted major cables with connectivity to Asia, Europe, (the) U.S. and potentially other parts of the world.”

The damage also slowed some network traffic from Europe to India, company CEO Jay Chaudhry said.

“Since Zscaler controls the network, we were able to re-route the traffic and mitigate the issue for our global users,” he posted.

In the case earlier this year, France’s domestic intelligence agency was recruited to help with the investigation into suspected sabotage of French fiber-optic cables.

Photos posted then by Free showed damage that looked much like the latest cuts in Marseille, with multiple cables severed in their apparently pried-open concrete housings.

Internet service was disrupted in several regions around France in that case, requiring the call-out of repair teams in the middle of the night. The Paris prosecutor’s office opened a preliminary investigation and said the French internal intelligence service, known as the DGSI, was also enlisted, along with the judicial police.

The prosecutor’s office opened a preliminary investigation in that case on charges of “damaging goods of a nature of harming the fundamental interests of the nation,” as well as “obstruction of an automatic data processing system” and criminal association.
https://apnews.com/article/technolog...33a5634232031f





Damaged Cable Leaves Shetland Cut Off from Mainland
BBC

Communications to Shetland have been severely disrupted after a subsea cable was damaged.

Police have declared a major incident after the south subsea cable between the islands and the mainland was cut.

The force said some landlines and mobiles were not usable and that officers were patrolling to try to reassure residents.

Repairs to another cable connecting Shetland and Faroe are ongoing after it was damaged last week.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it was an emergency situation for the island.

The Scottish government's resilience committee had met and was working with partner agencies to ensure support was provided, she added.

She said the assumption was the damage was accidental, adding: "There is nothing to suggest otherwise, but work is continuing to assess exactly what the cause of the problem has been."

MP for Orkney and Shetlands Alastair Carmichael told the BBC he had raised the issue with the UK government, but understood it could be days before communications were restored.

He said the priority was fixing the issue but that resilience would also need to be looked at in future.

Homes and businesses are affected across the isles, which are 130 miles (210 km) from the Scottish mainland and have a population of about 23,000.

The BBC has heard reports that many shops are unable to take card payments.

Meanwhile Highlands and Islands Airports told the BBC that Sumburgh Airport was "operating as normal", but would advise passengers to contact Loganair for further updates.

Serco NorthLink Ferries confirmed they did not anticipate the problem would have any impact on sailings.

A BT Group spokesperson said: "Due to a break in a third-party subsea cable connecting Shetland with the Scottish mainland, some phone, broadband and mobile services are affected.

"Engineers are working to divert services via other routes as soon as possible and we'll provide further updates. Our external subsea provider is also looking to restore their link quickly.

"Anyone who needs to call 999 should try their landline or their mobile, even if they don't have signal from their own mobile provider. We're sorry for any inconvenience."

An outage is affecting some landlines, mobiles and internet on Shetland. In an emergency you can try calling 999 even if you don't have a signal. We have extra patrols out and about in case of an emergency More: https://t.co/GXwOmiDAX5 pic.twitter.com/vhYvW7RmNI
— Northern Police (@northernPolice) October 20, 2022

Emergency services have had to implement temporary back-up arrangements.

Police Scotland said it was working with partners including the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and HM Coastguard to bring additional emergency support to the island.

The force said an emergency hub had been set up in the Tesco car park in South Road, Lerwick.

Ch Insp Jane Mackenzie told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme that police officers would be more visible on the island in the meantime.

She said: "We're still trying to work to establish the full extent of the problem - we know there are some telephone lines working, 999 lines are believed to be working and some mobile networks are still working.

"So anyone calling 999 should be able to do so from a mobile phone. What we would ask is if you have an emergency you should first try a landline or mobile to call 999.

"If that doesn't work, you should flag down an emergency service vehicle that isn't using their blue light or attend either a police station, hospital, fire or ambulance station to report the emergency."

Two cable problems 'rare'

Ch Insp Mackenzie urged the public not to use phone lines for non-urgent calls and to check on elderly or vulnerable people more frequently as assistance alarms may not be operating effectively.

The cable that was damaged between Faroe and Shetland last week will be repaired on Saturday, according to Faroese Telecom's head of infrastructure Páll Vesturbú.

He said: "The damage is affecting most of telecom services to Shetland. There are some services still working but we will try to establish more services during the day if that's possible.

"We expect it will be fishing vessels that damaged the cable but it is very rare that we have two problems at the same time."

MP Alistair Carmichael added that the damage had caused "catastrophic impact".

He said: "Communication is critical to modern life, to business, to the emergency services and education - just about every aspect of modern life.

"It's like somebody has flipped a switch and taken us back 20 or 30 years. You live in an island community, you know sometimes these things happen and that's why we have to learn the lessons from this."

How do subsea cables work?

Modern submarine cables use fibre optic technology and are typically as wide as a garden hose, according to telecoms market research firm TeleGeography.

It explains lasers on one end fire at extremely rapid rates down thin glass fibres to receptors at the other end of the cable.

These glass fibres are wrapped in layers of plastic - and sometimes steel wire - for protection.

Cables lie on the ocean floor, while nearer to the shore they are buried under the seabed for additional protection.

The firm said "considerable care" is taken to make sure cables avoid fault zones, fishing zones, anchoring areas and other dangers.
line

Ian Brown, a partner with Lerwick-based internet provider Shetland Broadband, said he became aware of a problem just after 00:00 on Thursday when his home broadband went off.

He said the north cable was broken on 15 October in a clean break, but the southern one was not a clean break because there are around 100 fibres in the cable - and not all had been broken.

Shetland Broadband is still operational because the fibres it uses were not damaged.

Mr Brown said the impact ranged from minor inconvenience for islanders to disruption to businesses and local NHS services that rely on their online connection.

He said Shetland Broadband was working with the NHS to try and resolve its issues.

In another example, he said a delivery of 2,000 parcels to the islands encountered problems as they could not be scanned.

Mr Brown said: "We don't know if the cable was hooked up by a ship or lifted and caught by the currents. It is a very rare event, a bit like storm damage."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland...tland-63326102





Starlink Unveils Airplane Service—Musk says it’s like Using Internet at Home

Airplane operators can reserve now for Starlink deliveries in mid-2023.
Jon Brodkin

SpaceX is now advertising Starlink Aviation, promising 350Mbps broadband with unlimited data for each airplane it's installed in.

"Starlink can deliver up to 350Mbps to each plane, enabling all passengers to access streaming-capable Internet at the same time," the company said. "With latency as low as 20 ms, passengers can engage in activities previously not functional in flight, including video calls, online gaming, virtual private networks and other high data rate activities."

Starlink said the airplane service will use a "low-profile Aero Terminal" with "an electronically steered phased array antenna, which enables new levels of reliability, redundancy and performance." It has a "simplified design" that "enables installations during minimal downtime and combines well with other routine maintenance checks," Starlink says. The service hardware also includes two wireless access points.

There's a one-time hardware cost of $150,000, not including installation. "The installation can be performed by your current maintenance organization or Starlink can recommend experienced and qualified installers," Starlink says.

Musk: It’ll be like “accessing Internet at home”

Monthly service fees are $12,500 to $25,000. There are "no long-term contracts and all plans include unlimited data. Your hardware is under warranty for as long as you subscribe to the service," the Starlink Aviation webpage says. Buyers can reserve now and deliveries will begin in mid-2023, a Starlink FAQ says.

"Internet in airplanes will feel same as if you were accessing Internet at home," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted.

Starlink Aviation will have global coverage as "there are always satellites overhead or nearby to provide a strong signal at high latitudes and in polar regions," the FAQ says. "Service will be available in-flight over land and water and on the ground during taxi, takeoff, and landing. As long as the equipment is powered on and the Starlink has an unobstructed view of the sky, connection is possible."

So far, Starlink said it is preparing to obtain supplemental type certificates for the following aircraft: ERJ-135, ERJ-145, G650, G550, Falcon 2000, G450, Challenger 300, Challenger 350, Global Express, Global 5000, Global 6000, and Global 7500. Those models are business jets and regional jets, but SpaceX said that the "Starlink engineering team will update this list as development begins on additional aircraft."

At least two airlines plan to use Starlink

Starlink recently received Federal Communications Commission approval to provide Starlink satellite Internet service on moving vehicles, ships, and airplanes. Even before getting that approval, SpaceX was negotiating with airlines to bring Starlink onto flights. In April, Hawaiian Airlines said it would offer Starlink service to passengers for no extra charge, starting next year.

Starlink Aviation could help SpaceX improve Starlink's finances, which have taken a hit with the company donating terminals and service to the Ukraine war effort. "SpaceX is losing ~$20M/month due to unpaid service & costs related to enhanced security measures for cyberwar defense, but we’ll keep doing it (sigh)," Musk wrote on Twitter yesterday.

SpaceX also lost out on $885.51 million in FCC rural broadband funding that would have been distributed over 10 years, though it's appealing that decision. The FCC doubted Starlink's ability to meet the broadband grant's speed requirements—recent speed tests show Starlink home Internet has been getting slower as more people use it.

Starlink conducted a demo last month on a JSX Air flight between Burbank and San Jose, California, reportedly hitting speeds above 100Mbps. JSX CEO Alex Wilcox said the airline will start offering Starlink service on passenger-carrying flights in October, according to an Aviation Today article published on September 9.

"JSX operates a fleet of 77 total Embraer 135s and 145s, and currently has Starlink antennas, modems, and wireless access points installed and testing on two of its aircraft," the Aviation Today article said. "Wilcox described the performance of Starlink on those two aircraft as working 'amazingly well.'"
https://arstechnica.com/information-...ernet-at-home/





USB-C can Hit 120Gbps with Newly Published USB4 Version 2.0 Spec

USB-IF's new USB-C spec supports up to 120Gbps across three lanes.
Scharon Harding

We've said it before, and we'll say it again: USB-C is confusing. A USB-C port or cable can support a range of speeds, power capabilities, and other features, depending on the specification used. Today, USB-C can support various data transfer rates, from 0.48Gbps (USB 2.0) all the way to 40Gbps (USB4, Thunderbolt 3, and Thunderbolt 4). Things are only about to intensify, as today the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) published the USB4 Version 2.0 spec. It adds optional support for 80Gbps bidirectional bandwidth as well as the optional ability to send or receive data at up to 120Gbps.

The USB-IF first gave us word of USB4 Version 2.0 in September, saying it would support a data transfer rate of up to 80Gbps in either direction (40Gbps per lane, four lanes total), thanks to a new physical layer architecture (PHY) based on PAM-3 signal encoding. For what it's worth, Intel also demoed Thunderbolt at 80Gbps but hasn't released an official spec yet.

USB4 Version 2.0 offers a nice potential bump over the original USB4 spec, which introduced optional support for 40Gbps operation. You just have to be sure to check the spec sheets to know what sort of performance you're getting.

Once USB4 Version 2.0 products come out, you'll be able to hit 80Gbps with USB-C passive cables that currently operate at 40Gbps, but you'll have to buy a new cable if you want a longer, active 80Gbps.

120Gbps is optional

Today, the USB-IF confirmed that USB4 Version 2.0 will take things even further by optionally supporting a data transfer rate of up to 120Gbps across three lanes.

"Optionally for certain applications, such as driving very high performance USB4-based displays, the USB Type-C signal interface can be configured asymmetrically to deliver up to 120Gbps in one direction, while retaining 40Gbps in the other direction," the USB-IF's announcement said.

Typically, a USB4 Version 2.0 port that supports 120Gbps operation will both transmit and receive data at 80Gbps. When a product connects to the port, "the USB4 discovery process managed by system software will determine if the preferred mode of operation is the 120Gbps configuration. After initially connecting at 80Gbps, the port will then transition into 120Gbps operation," Brad Saunders, USB-IF board chair and CEO, told Ars Technica.

The new spec supports both transmitting and receiving data at 120Gbps; however, Saunders said "the most likely" application will see data being sent from a computer to a high-performance monitor at 120Gbps, with a 40Gbps lane left available for sending data to the system.

The new USB-C spec will appeal to setups with extreme display needs, including resolutions beyond 4K, gamer-level refresh rates, HDR color, and multi-monitors. Bandwidth demands from the likes of creators and gamers continue to push the original spec's 40Gbps limit.

We could also see external SSDs and external GPUs also using the USB4 Version 2.0 protocol. But both remain more niche products, even among today's USB4 and Thunderbolt options.

Also included in the new USB4 Version 2.0 spec is support for USB 3.2 tunneling at 20Gbps, up from 10Gbps previously. And the new protocol supports the DisplayPort 2.1 spec that VESA announced today, plus PCIe 4.0.

With the USB4 Version 2.0 spec published today, we don't expect to see supporting products for "at least 12 to 18 months," the USB-IF said in a statement to CNET.

When those products come out, though, the USB-IF hopes they aren't introduced to consumers as "USB4 Version 2.0" or even some type of "SuperSpeed USB." After 12 years, the USB-IF no longer recommends that vendors use terms like "SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps" (for the spec called USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, for example) and instead opt for names like "USB 20Gbps."

If the USB-IF had its way, products using its new open standard will be described as "USB 80Gbps." Ultimately, though, the USB-IF has no control over this, and you'll see plenty of vendors not list USB speeds, and some use specification names, like USB4 Version 2.0. The USB-IF's recommended logos focus on speed and power delivery.

The USB-IF also updated the USB Type-C Cable and Connector and USB Power Delivery specifications today to accommodate USB4 Version 2.0.

Complaints about names and potential confusion aside, the new USB4 Version 2.0 standard offers the technology to adapt to our evolving needs as products become more bandwidth-greedy and USB-C becomes more ubiquitous and, in some places, the mandated connector.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022...sion-2-0-spec/

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

October 15th, October 8th, October 1st, September 24th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black