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Old 11-09-19, 07:09 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 14th, ’19

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September 14th, 2019




Nintendo is Seeking Millions in Damages from a Website that Allegedly Charged $30/Year for Fast, Unlimited Downloads of Video Games
Kevin Webb

• Nintendo just filed a lawsuit against RomUniverse.com, alleging that the site hosted free downloads of more than 3,200 different Nintendo games to as many as 400,000 visitors each month.
• According to a copy of the lawsuit obtained by Polygon, Nintendo of America is seeking $150,000 in damages for each infringement of its copyrighted works, and $2 million for each infringement of a Nintendo trademark.
• Along with offering free downloads for thousands of pirated games, RomUniverse allegedly sold a $30 annual membership that would give visitors access to an unlimited number of downloads.
• Last year Nintendo reached a $12.2 million settlement with an Arizona couple that ran similar websites LoveROMs.com and LoveRETRO.co.

Nintendo filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the owners of RomUniverse.com, a video game emulation website that advertises itself as boasting downloads of more than 60,000 different games.

In a copy of the lawsuit obtained by Polygon's Nicole Carpenter, Nintendo claims that RomUniverse violated its copyrighted work and trademarks by providing free copies of Nintendo games. These sorts of copies, called "ROMs," can be played on a PC or other device using emulation software, circumventing the need for Nintendo's popular video game consoles.

Nintendo says in the lawsuit it identified at least 3,200 of its own titles among the ROM collection on RomUniverse.com. The available games ranged spanned years worth of releases, from Nintendo's earliest titles to its latest hits, the company said, and at least 200 of the games were for the Nintendo Switch, a console released in 2017.

RomUniverse has been online for more than a decade and had nearly 400,000 visitors in March 2019, according to Nintendo's lawsuit. The lawsuit says that RomUniverse.com has offered a $30/year premium membership since 2013, which gives subscribers access to unlimited game downloads at higher speeds than non-subscribers.

With RomUniverse allegedly offering thousands of Nintendo games, the website's owners could be liable for millions in damages. Nintendo of America is seeking $150,000 in damages for each infringement of its copyrighted works, and $2 million for each infringement of a Nintendo trademark.

We've reached out to RomUniverse for a comment, though a represenative of the site declined to speak with Polygon. Nintendo was not immediately available for comment.

Nintendo is known for taking a hard stance against piracy and other forms of copyright infringement to protect the company's precious intellectual properties. In November 2018 Nintendo was awarded a $12.23 million judgement against a married Arizona couple in a similar case. The couple operated the websites LoveROMs.com and LoveRETRO.co, and offered free downloads to more than 17 million visitors each month.

Eurogamer reports that Nintendo also won a court case on September 10 in the United Kingdom that will require five of the country's internet service providers to block access to websites that share information on Nintendo Switch piracy.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nint...-claims-2019-9





Who Will Win: Internet Pirates or Streaming Stocks?
Samuel Taube

Remember that 10-ish-year period when cable was the only way to watch stuff at home?

Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, video rental companies like Blockbuster were going extinct, but streaming companies like Netflix weren’t quite household names yet.

During this gap between the “Blockbuster era” and the “Netflix era,” consumers lacked an affordable way to watch movies and off-air TV shows at home.

Some dealt with this problem by paying the cable company for expensive on-demand services. Some recorded their favorite shows and movies from cable using a VCR or DVR.

But others — especially young and tech-savvy movie and TV buffs — turned to black-market downloads from internet pirates.

The Other Golden Age of Piracy

When people refer to a “golden age of piracy,” they’re usually talking about the 17th and 18th centuries — a period of time that saw a substantial increase in the number of ship hijackers who drank a lot of rum and said things like “shiver me timbers!”

But the turn of the 21st century was a golden age for a different type of pirate: the file uploader.

During this time, internet pirates used file-sharing services like BitTorrent to illegally redistribute their personal collections of movies, TV shows, video games, and music across the internet.

In the process, they dominated web traffic. BitTorrent alone accounted for more than 52% of North America’s internet activity in 2011, the approximate peak of the golden age of internet piracy.

Governments and media conglomerates tried to crack down on this unauthorized flow of media across the internet, but they couldn’t. Piracy was just too popular; it allowed anyone to access just about any piece of media at any time, for free.

But by 2015, piracy accounted for less than 30% of American internet traffic. There was a one-word explanation for this drop-off: Netflix.

Swashbuckling Streaming Stocks

At its zenith, Netflix was charging just $8 a month for access to a massive library that included original shows like House of Cards, smash-hit NBC sitcoms like The Office, and thousands of movies.

In other words, it was offering much more content than cable for much less money. Cable companies couldn’t compete with it. Even pirates struggled to compete with it.

After all, pirated media doesn’t cost money, but it isn’t risk free. Every year, copyright-holding media companies like Funimation and Century Media like to “make an example” of a few unlucky pirates by serving them massive lawsuits. And pirates who avoid legal trouble still risk catching malware in the often-seedy corners of the internet where media is illegally shared.

You can’t get sued for watching Netflix, and you can’t catch a computer virus from it. Back when Netflix was effectively a streaming monopoly with a massive library of content from multiple studios, that safety was worth $8 a month.

By 2015, BitTorrent usage had fallen by about 50% from 2010 levels — and the number of U.S. piracy lawsuits had plunged more than 80%.

Many people believed the golden age of internet piracy was over.

What they didn’t see coming, however, was the loss of Netflix’s monopoly.

Are Pirates Making a Comeback?

Needless to say, Netflix is no longer the only game in town. It now competes with Hulu, Amazon Prime, and HBO Now, just to name a few other subscription services — and about half a dozen other streaming platforms are launching in the next year.

They include Disney+, Apple TV+, and an unnamed streaming service from NBCUniversal.

This fragmentation of the streaming ecosystem might not sound like a big deal. After all, more competition is good for consumers, right?

Usually, yes. But not if the consumers are looking for centralization.

You see, the problem with all these new streaming services is that they’re encouraging content producers like Disney and NBC to pull their movies and shows from third-party platforms in favor of exclusively releasing them on their own.

You can already see this happening in the form of a sharp uptick in exclusive content.

Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black is only available on Netflix. Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is only available on Amazon Prime. Disney is likely to pull all of its content from both of these platforms when it launches Disney+ in the fall, and NBC has already started to do this — hits like 30 Rock have disappeared from Netflix, and The Office will be clawed back in 2020.

There’s no “one-stop shop” for legal media consumption anymore. In order to access all the content they want, consumers are realizing they’ll have to pay several monthly bills to several different streaming platforms. Legal streaming is becoming just as costly and annoying as paying for cable.

And wouldn’t you know it — the pirates are capitalizing on these trends.

Last year, BitTorrent usage increased for the first time after years of steady declines. And streaming piracy — that is, watching illegal bootlegs on YouTube or other online platforms instead of downloading them — is a new form of media theft that is also on the increase.

This internet pirate comeback could be very bad news for streaming stocks. Disney, with its diversified revenue streams and hegemonic control of our pop culture, should be OK. Netflix might not be.

But there’s another coming shift in our internet usage that will be even more disruptive than the breakup of the streaming ecosystem or a return to pirating.

This shift will affect how we connect to the internet, how fast it runs, which devices we use, how much we pay for access, and more. It’s called 5G, and my colleague Jason Stutman has been tracking a set of stocks that are positioned for massive 5G gains. Click here to learn more.
https://www.wealthdaily.com/articles...-stocks-/93451





Netflix Loses Title as No. 1 Bandwidth-Eating Application
Todd Spangler

For years, Netflix has ranked as the biggest application in terms of bandwidth consumption on internet networks, particularly during peak-period hours.

But now Netflix has dropped to second place globally behind web-based media streaming apps, as video consumption overall continues to climb, according to the 2019 Global Internet Phenomena Report from Sandvine, a vendor of bandwidth-management systems.

For the first half of 2019, HTTP media streaming represented 12.8% of downstream internet traffic worldwide. Netflix accounted for 12.6% of total downstream volume of traffic across the entire internet, per the report.

“This year, the aggregate volume of the long tail is actually greater than the largest of the short-tail providers,” Sandvine said in the report.

The rise in usage of HTTP media streaming from content owners (including cable or broadcast TV channels) also comes amid growing popularity of piracy services, according to Sandvine. The company said it has measured anywhere from 4%-25% of subscribers accessing at least one illegal video stream on a weekly basis on ISP networks in North America, Europe and the Middle East.

In the Americas, Netflix’s share of downstream traffic for the first six months of 2019 was 12.9% — dropping from last year’s 19.1% share — putting it in third place behind HTTP media streaming and operator-delivered video. That reflects the growing consumption of other streaming options, both paid and free, with the biggest growth coming from operators’ own internet-delivered TV and video services (which accounted for 15% of downstream traffic in the region), per Sandvine.

Here’s the share of downstream traffic for the Americas by application for the first half of 2019, as measured by Sandvine: HTTP media stream (17.3%); operator IPTV (15.0%); Netflix (12.9%); YouTube (6.3%); HTTP download (4.5%); HTTP Transport Layer Security (4.4%); HTTP (3.2%); PlayStation download (2.6%); Xbox Live download (2.6%); and Facebook (2.2%).

Note that Netflix’s decline in share of bandwidth consumption doesn’t suggest people are streaming less video from the company. Sandvine doesn’t report actual bandwidth usage; rather, its studies compare relative share of traffic delivered over internet networks. Moreover, as Sandvine pointed out, Netflix is “generally the most efficient video-streaming service on the market,” meaning it typically eats up less bandwidth per stream than others.

According to Sandvine, U.S. internet pay-TV services aimed at cord-cutters — including AT&T’s DirecTV Now, Sony’s PlayStation Vue, Hulu With Live TV, and YouTube TV — are “still a drop in the bucket” compared with bandwidth consumed by other streaming services.

All told, video was 60.6% of total downstream volume of traffic on the internet, up 2.9 percentage points from 2018, per Sandvine’s latest report. Web traffic was the next biggest category, with 13.1% share of downstream bits consumed globally (down 3.8 points year over year) followed by gaming at 8.0%, social media at 6.1% and file sharing at 4.2%.

Worldwide, these are the top 10 applications by downstream bandwidth consumption: HTTP media stream (12.8%); Netflix (12.6%); YouTube (8.7%); operator IPTV (7.2%); HTTP download (4.5%); HTTP TLS (4.4%); HTTP (3.0%); Facebook (3.0%); PlayStation download (2.8%); BitTorrent (2.4%).

Other findings from the report:

• Google represents 12% of overall internet traffic, driven by YouTube, as well as search and Android devices.
• BitTorrent, the file-sharing application widely used to download pirated content, is over 27% of total upstream volume of traffic globally and over 44% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) alone.
• Facebook apps comprise 17% of downstream internet traffic in the Asia-Pacific region, versus 3% worldwide.
• Video app TikTok ranked 11th worldwide in on mobile and 34th worldwide overall (just behind Snapchat); in 2018, it was not in the top 50.

Sandvine says the Q3 2019 Global Internet Phenomena Report is based on a statistically representative sample of usage data from the first six months of 2019 compiled from the vendor’s 160 internet service provider customers. The report does not include significant data from China or India, according to the company.
https://variety.com/2019/digital/new...on-1203330313/





Apple Prices TV+ Video Service at $4.99 a Month, Hitting Netflix
Mark Gurman

• Service undercuts pricing from Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime
• New device purchases will include one year of TV+ for free

Apple Inc. said its TV+ original video subscription service will launch Nov. 1 for $4.99 a month, undercutting the price of rival offerings.

The Cupertino, California-based technology giant made the announcement at a Tuesday event focused on new versions of the iPhone. The service will be free for one year with purchases of new Apple devices, Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said on stage.

The TV+ service is entering a crowded field that already includes Netflix Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Hulu and AT&T Inc.’s HBO. In November, Walt Disney Co. plans to launch a Disney+ streaming service, with a giant catalog of titles, for $6.99 a month. Netflix’s entry-level subscription is $8.99 a month in the U.S.

Netflix and Disney shares fell after the announcement on Tuesday, while Apple stock climbed.

Apple is pushing into services to generate extra revenue from its large base of iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch users. Consumers have been slower to replace hardware recently due to higher prices, market saturation, economic headwinds and a lack of new, breakthrough features.

Apple’s TV+ service, first previewed in March with Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Aniston and other stars, will lack a large back catalog and instead focus on original movies and TV shows. Still, some analysts have suggested Apple TV+ could top 100 million subscribers in the next half-decade, which would make it a major challenger to Netflix and Amazon.

Apple’s pricing undercuts the cost of its other digital services, such as Apple Music and Apple News+.

Apple TV+ will launch with a slew of titles, Apple said, including Dickinson and The Morning Show. At its event, Apple showed a trailer for See with Jason Momoa.

The service is available in the TV app that is pre-installed on iPhones, iPads, iPod touches, Apple TVs, and soon Macs. It will integrate with the Apple TV Channels service, which lets users subscribe to other providers like HBO, STARZ, and Showtime individually.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...nov-1-for-4-99





Comcast Sues Maine to Stop Law Requiring Sale of Individual TV Channels

Industry suit says Maine law violates First Amendment and Communications Act.
Jon Brodkin

Comcast and several TV network owners have sued the state of Maine to stop a law that requires cable companies to offer ŕ la carte access to TV channels. The complaint in US District Court in Maine was filed Friday by Comcast, Comcast subsidiary NBCUniversal, A&E Television Networks, C-Span, CBS Corp., Discovery, Disney, Fox Cable Network Services, New England Sports Network, and Viacom.

The companies claim the Maine law—titled "An Act To Expand Options for Consumers of Cable Television in Purchasing Individual Channels and Programs"—is preempted by the First Amendment and federal law. The Maine law is scheduled to take effect on September 19 and says that "a cable system operator shall offer subscribers the option of purchasing access to cable channels, or programs on cable channels, individually." The lawsuit seeks an injunction to prevent the law from being enforced.

Many cable TV customers want the ability to pay for channels individually instead of in large bundles, in hopes of getting only the channels they want and saving money in the process. But cable TV operators and the programmers that license their content to cable TV operators have resisted changes to the bundle system.

"I submitted this bill on behalf of Maine's hundreds of thousands of cable television subscribers," Representative Jeffrey Evangelos, an independent, said in testimony when the bill was being debated in March. "For far too long, consumers have been forced to purchase cable TV packages which include dozens of channels the consumer has no interest in watching."

Comcast cites First Amendment rights

But the current system involving service tiers and bundling "reflect[s] the exercise of First Amendment rights—both by the programmers who decide how to license their programming to cable operators, and by the cable operators who decide how to provide that programming to the public," the industry lawsuit said.

Besides the First Amendment, the lawsuit says that "an array of federal statutory provisions precludes Maine from dictating how cable programming is presented to consumers." The state law "is expressly preempted by several provisions of the Communications Act," including a section that "prohibits state and local authorities from regulating the 'provision or content of cable services, except as expressly provided in' Title VI of the Communications Act," the lawsuit said.

The Maine law is also preempted by Communication Act sections that prohibit local franchising authorities "from regulating 'the services, facilities, and equipment provided by a cable operator except to the extent consistent with [Title VI],' or from 'establish[ing] requirements for video programming,' except in very limited respects not applicable here," the industry argued.

Moreover, Comcast and the programming companies argue that forced ŕ la carte pricing would end up costing consumers more.

"Programmers often negotiate license fees with cable operators based on tiered carriage, and eliminating such carriage would force programmers to charge higher license fees to cable operators, which ultimately would be passed on to subscribers," the complaint said.

“Thin legislative record”

Evangelos argued in his legislative testimony that Maine can take action because of a Federal Communications Commission statement that "There is no law that requires (or prohibits) cable companies to offer channels or programs on an ŕ la carte basis."

"Therefore, since there is no federal regulation prohibiting ŕ la carte pricing, it is within a state's authority to add this option for Maine's local franchising authorities," he said.

But the industry complained that the "thin legislative record" generated by lawmakers didn't meet the state's legal burden. The industry also complained that the Maine law applies only to cable companies and not to competitors such as satellite TV operators and online streaming providers.

We contacted Maine Governor Janet Mills' office about the lawsuit and will update this story if we get a response.

Defendants named in the lawsuit are Mills, Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey, and the municipalities of Bath, Berwick, Bowdoin, Bowdoinham, Brunswick, Durham, Eliot, Freeport, Harpswell, Kittery, Phippsburg, South Berwick, Topsham, West Bath, and Woolwich. The lawsuit was filed against municipalities because they would have the authority to enforce the state law. That list covers Maine municipalities where Comcast has franchise agreements.

The cable company Charter also opposed the Maine law but isn't involved in the lawsuit.

In a statement provided to Ars, Comcast and the TV networks said that "Maine's ŕ la carte mandate is prohibited under federal law and is unconstitutional... the law is not only unnecessary, but also likely to suppress competition and result in higher consumer prices and less program diversity."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...arte-channels/





AT&T to Lose 1.1 Million TV Subscribers as DirecTV Continues Nosedive

AT&T forecasts subscriber loss as big shareholder says DirecTV buy was a mistake.
Jon Brodkin

AT&T expects to lose about 1.1 million TV customers in the third quarter as it faces pressure from an investment group that says AT&T's increased focus on the TV business was a giant mistake.

In an update to shareholders yesterday, AT&T CFO John Stephens "said the company expects an incremental 300,000 to 350,000 premium video losses above the previous quarter's premium video results," according to AT&T. Since that's an incremental increase over the previous quarter's loss, that will amount to a three-month loss of more than 1 million TV customers.

In Q2 2019, AT&T reported a net loss of 778,000 subscribers in the "Premium TV" category, which includes its DirecTV satellite and U-verse wireline TV services. With AT&T expecting to lose that amount of subscribers plus another 300,000 to 350,000, the update to shareholders suggests the Q3 loss in the category will be between 1,078,000 and 1,128,000 subscribers. (An AT&T spokesperson confirmed to Ars that a projected loss of 1,078,000 and 1,128,000 subscribers in Q3 is accurate.)

AT&T's update to shareholders attributed the expected loss to "aggressively managing costs with retransmission negotiations, some of which resulted in content provider blackouts; and from limiting promotional pricing." AT&T said it has been "holding a hard line in negotiations" with programmers to control costs, but the resulting blackouts of channels is driving TV subscribers away.

The projected loss apparently does not include AT&T TV Now (formerly known as DirecTV Now), an online service that AT&T hasn't included in the Premium TV category in its earnings reports. AT&T also lost 168,000 subscribers of DirecTV Now/AT&T TV Now in the second quarter, but it didn't say how that service will fare in the third quarter.

Including both premium TV and the streaming service, AT&T's total number of video subscribers dropped from 25.4 million in Q2 2018 to 22.9 million in Q2 2019. The total would drop to about 21.8 million after the third quarter if AT&T TV Now remains steady.

AT&T bet on declining TV business

The pay-TV business has been struggling in the face of competition from online streaming. Despite that, AT&T made a huge bet on video in recent years, buying DirecTV in 2015 and Time Warner Inc. in 2018.

To get back on track, AT&T is banking on its new AT&T TV streaming service, which is different from AT&T TV Now despite having a nearly identical name. Unlike AT&T TV Now, AT&T TV has two-year contracts, prices that rise automatically after a year, fees for activation and early termination of service, a Regional Sports Fee, and "certain other additional fees and charges."

It's not clear to us why customers who ditched DirecTV or U-verse would be tempted by a streaming service that recreates the annoyances and pricing structure of traditional cable and satellite TV services. But AT&T said that in 2020, it "expects premium TV subscriber trends to improve due to far fewer customers on promotional pricing and the nationwide launch of AT&T TV, which delivers a premium streaming experience."

AT&T said its 2020 performance should also be helped by higher per-customer revenue because it's limiting the discounts available to subscribers.

That's not saying much, though. At its current pace, AT&T could improve the subscriber trend significantly and still lose hundreds of thousands of TV customers each quarter.

Investor blasts AT&T TV strategy

AT&T's TV strategy was criticized this week in an open letter by activist investor Elliott Management Corp., which has a $3.2 billion stake in AT&T.

"Notwithstanding AT&T leadership's assertions that 'Pay TV is a very good, durable business' when the [DirecTV] transaction was announced, the pay-TV ecosystem has been under immense pressure since the deal closed," the investor firm said. "In fact, trends are continuing to erode, with AT&T's premium TV subscribers in rapid decline as the industry, particularly satellite, struggles mightily. Unfortunately, it has become clear that AT&T acquired DirecTV at the absolute peak of the linear TV market."

Elliott Management is also skeptical of the Time Warner buy. "[D]espite nearly 600 days passing between signing and closing (and more than a year passing since), AT&T has yet to articulate a clear strategic rationale for why AT&T needs to own Time Warner," the open letter said.

Including debt, buying DirecTV cost $67 billion and Time Warner cost $109 billion.

The open letter said that AT&T is moving too far away from its core telecom business, and it criticized the company for not performing as well in the wireless industry as Verizon. Elliott Management called for "significant operational improvements" and for the board to evaluate whether AT&T has "the right mix of leadership at the company." AT&T should consider divesting DirecTV and other non-core businesses, the open letter also said.

AT&T issued a short response, saying its management team and board of directors "will review Elliott Management's perspectives in the context of the company's business strategy." However, AT&T defended its strategy of assembling a "unique portfolio of valuable businesses... across communications networks and media and entertainment."

"AT&T's Board and management team firmly believe that the focused and successful execution of our strategy is the best path forward to create value for shareholders," the company said.

Separately, AT&T is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging that it lied to investors in order to hide the failure of its DirecTV Now streaming TV service.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...-this-quarter/





Victory! California's Legislature Pulls AT&T and Comcast Bill That Protected Their Monopolies
Ernesto Falcon

AT&T and Comcast lobbyists fought hard this year to pass A.B. 1366, a bill that would have protected their broadband monopolies. Thanks to your support, that bill will not move forward this year.

The California legislature in 2012 decided to eliminate the authority of its own telecom regulator, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) through the end of 2019—on the promise that such a move would produce an affordable, widely available, high-speed broadband network. What happened instead: over the past several years, California’s broadband market has been heading into a high-speed monopoly. For many, that’s led to more expensive and slower service than many other markets. In fact, all this law has done is protect broadband monopolies. As a result, the major ISPs were working hard to get it renewed through a new bill introduced this session, A.B. 1366.

EFF has opposed A.B. 1366 from the beginning, making clear that extending this law would leave the majority of Californians with only one option for high-speed broadband—if they had any at all. There was nothing good about the bill and nothing in it for Internet users. It exempted VoIP calls from privacy protections, it deregulated the prison telecom industry to allow for charging inmates' families insane rates, it hindered state public safety efforts, and it prevented the state from addressing its broadband monopoly problem.

Yet our opposition alone was not enough to stop this bill. It also took California residents all across the state contacting their legislators in Sacramento by phone and email to tell them to vote no. When the public speaks out clearly, all the money and influence loses.
With a Very Bad Law Expiring, We Now Must Fight for a Better Future

With A.B. 1366 defeated—and the law restraining state authority over broadband set to expire at the end of this year—it is critical the state of California use its power to implement a plan to connect all Californians to affordable high-speed fiber access to the Internet. Such an effort is more important now than ever, as companies like AT&T and Verizon have abandoned fiber to the home, allowing cable companies like Comcast to remain unchallenged on high-speed access. Policymakers must do the hard work of identifying why the largest telecoms with billions in capital have willfully decided not to invest in future-proof networks. They must also promote policies that will accelerate the work of the small ISPs and local governments that shoulder the burden of building fiber networks.

As the fifth-largest economy in the world, and home to some of America’s largest cities, California can be just as connected as South Korea or Japan. Our rural markets can be connected to a 21st century infrastructure. Every major economy that is roughly the size of California has already adopted universal fiber plans. There is no reason this state can’t follow that example, or even step into a leadership role. In fact, it was historical efforts by California to inject competition in the telecom market in the 90s that lead to the 1996 Telecommunications Act’s foundational competition policies. Many of those federal laws inspired by California’s past efforts are what empower the handful of small fiber providers that exist today. As the FCC and Congress continue to fail to produce the national fiber policy this country desperately needs, California should move forward with its own plan to connect its residents.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/0...rotected-their





SpaceX Says it Will Deploy Satellite Broadband Across US Faster than Expected

SpaceX will reorganize orbits to cover more of the US in initial deployment.
Jon Brodkin

SpaceX says it plans to change its satellite launch strategy in a way that will speed up deployment of its Starlink broadband service and has set a new goal of providing broadband in the Southern United States late next year.

In a filing on August 30, SpaceX asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to "adjust the orbital spacing of its satellites." With this change, each SpaceX launch would deploy satellites in "three different orbital planes" instead of just one, "accelerating the process of deploying satellites covering a wider service area."

"This adjustment will accelerate coverage to southern states and US territories, potentially expediting coverage to the southern continental United States by the end of the next hurricane season and reaching other US territories by the following hurricane season," SpaceX told the FCC. The Atlantic and Pacific hurricane seasons each begin in the spring and run to November 30 each year.

SpaceX said it already planned to "provide continual coverage over northern states after as few as six more launches," but said it needs a license modification to speed up deployment in the Southern US. SpaceX's filing stresses the importance of quickly getting service to parts of the US where broadband coverage is limited.

"With this straightforward adjustment, SpaceX can broaden its geographic coverage in the early stages of the constellation's deployment and enable service initiation to serve customers earlier in the middle latitudes and southern-most states, and critically, those often underserved Americans in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands," the company told the FCC.

SpaceX has been somewhat vague about launch dates for its broadband service. In October 2017, SpaceX told a Congressional committee that it would launch at least 800 satellites before offering commercial service and said the commercial service would likely become available in 2020 or 2021, as SpaceNews reported at the time. Last year, Reuters reported that SpaceX's goal of a 2020 launch was "pretty much on target." SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had fired some of Starlink's senior managers in order to stay on schedule.

In its new FCC application, SpaceX said the adjustment in orbital spacing means it would need "fewer launches of satellites—perhaps as few as half—to initiate service to the entire contiguous United States (as well as Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands)." In the rest of the world, "the modification would enable more rapid coverage of all longitudes to grow toward the Equator, as well as bolstering capacity in areas of greater population density," SpaceX said.

Unlike traditional satellite broadband, SpaceX's low-Earth orbit satellites would be able to provide latency as low as 25ms and gigabit speeds. In order to cover any given region, SpaceX said it must "deploy a sufficient number of nodes to ensure continuous coverage," and "have enough antennas in the right physical configurations to hand off signals."

No change to altitude or inclination

The orbital-spacing adjustment will not change "the overall number of satellites, their altitude or inclination, their operational characteristics, or their orbital debris implications," SpaceX said.

If the change is approved, SpaceX satellites would travel in 72 orbital planes instead of the previously approved 24, and there would be 22 satellites in each plane instead of the previously approved 66 in each. This would affect 1,584 out of the 11,943 satellites that SpaceX has FCC authorization to launch. The altitude and inclination would remain unchanged at 550km and 53°, respectively.

An orbital plane is defined by two parameters: the orbiting object's inclination, and the longitude of its ascending node. I wasn't sure how to describe this in layman's terms, so I consulted with our science editor, John Timmer. He explained it this way:
Imagine a spacecraft that orbits so that it's constantly over the equator. The plane defined by that orbit would cut the earth in half, separating the Northern and Southern Hemisphere. But it's relatively easy to tilt that plane, so a spacecraft would loop into the northern latitudes for half of its orbit, and into the southern for the other half. By putting a set of spacecraft in enough of these planes, SpaceX plans to greatly expand the areas that can be served by its fleet of satellites.

SpaceX launched 60 satellites in May this year to test the system before preparing for a wider deployment. SpaceX said its "iterative process" led to its new proposal.

"SpaceX has demonstrated the effectiveness of its revolutionary deployment process and confirmed its ability to populate three orbital planes with a single launch," the company said in its new filing. "By then reorganizing its satellites at their already authorized altitude, SpaceX can place coverage and capacity more evenly and rapidly across more of the US."

SpaceX also said it plans "to conduct several more Starlink launches before the end of 2019," and asked the FCC to rule on its application quickly.

The European Space Agency (ESA) this month had to take action to avoid a collision with a SpaceX broadband satellite because a bug in SpaceX's on-call paging system prevented the company from getting a crucial update about an increased collision risk. But SpaceX said in its FCC filing that the overall collision risk is still near zero "because SpaceX has invested in propulsion for its satellites."

Other companies planning low-Earth orbit satellites include OneWeb, Space Norway, Telesat, and Amazon. OneWeb recently said it will begin delivering broadband to the Arctic in 2020.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...than-expected/





Vinyl Set to Outsell CDs for First Time Since 1986

It comes from a new report by the Recording Industry Association of America
Will Richards

Vinyl is set to outsell CDs for the first time since 1986, a new report reveals.

The revelation comes in a mid-year report from the Recording Industry Association of America.

Last year’s RIAA report revealed that CD sales are dying three times as fast as vinyl sales are growing, and it’s more of the same in this year’s.

The new report states that vinyl records earned $224.1 million (from 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019. This figure is impressively close to the CD numbers ($247.9 million, 18.6 million units).

The Beatles sold 300,000 vinyl records in 2018

With vinyl revenue growing by 12% in the second half of 2018 and first half of this year, and CD rates barely changing at all, it could see vinyl revenue overtake that of CDs by the end of the year.

If it does happen, it’ll be the first time that vinyl has generated more revenue than CDs since 1986.

The report also reveals that, despite vinyl’s growing popularity in relation to CD sales, it still accounts for a relatively small percentage of overall music purchasing.

The RIAA report says that in the first half of 2019, vinyl record sales accounted for only 4% of overall revenues. Paid subscriptions to streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, meanwhile, accounted for 62%.
https://www.nme.com/news/music/vinyl...e-1986-2545781





Libraries and Archivists Are Scanning and Uploading Books That Are Secretly in the Public Domain

Millions of books are secretly in the public domain thanks to a copyright loophole, a new project seeks to put them on the Internet Archive.
Karl Bode

A coalition of archivists, activists, and libraries are working overtime to make it easier to identify the many books that are secretly in the public domain, digitize them, and make them freely available online to everyone. The people behind the effort are now hoping to upload these books to the Internet Archive, one of the largest digital archives on the internet.

As it currently stands, all books published in the U.S. before 1924 are in the public domain, meaning they’re publicly owned and can be freely used and copied. Books published in 1964 and after are still in copyright, and by law will be for 95 years from their publication date.

But a copyright loophole means that up to 75 percent of books published between 1923 to 1964 are secretly in the public domain, meaning they are free to read and copy. The problem is determining which books these are, due to archaic copyright registration systems and convoluted and shifting copyright law.

As such, a coalition of libraries, volunteers, and archivists have been working overtime to identify which titles are in the public domain, digitize them, then upload them to the internet. At the heart of the effort has been the New York Public Library, which recently documented why the entire process is important, but a bit of a pain.

Back in the 1970s, the Library of Congress operated a Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) indicating which books had renewed copyright. Digital copies of these notices can be found in the Internet Archive and at over at Stanford University.

Historically, it’s been fairly easy to tell whether a book published between 1923 and 1964 had its copyright renewed, because the renewal records were already digitized. But proving that a book hadn’t had its copyright renewed has historically been more difficult, New York Public Library Senior Product Manager Sean Redmond said.

“Part of the difficulty is that you're proving a negative—that it's copyright wasn't renewed—so you're looking for the lack of a record,” Redmond told Motherboard. “There was no way to make lists of public domain candidates.”

So as part of a massive undertaking, the NYPL recently converted many of these records to XML format, making it significantly easier to automate the process of determining which books might be candidates for being added to the public domain, the first step in ultimately making sure they’re freely available online.

“It's like a shoe store going from estimating shoe sales from returns and exchanges only, to having the actual sales receipts,” Redmond said. “The public domain exists, it's just been hard to see and this project is about shining a light on it.”

Leonard Richardson, a software developer and science fiction author whose Python matching scripts are helping expedite the process, tells Motherboard that the hard work is only just beginning.

“It's now easy to make a list of books whose registration wasn't renewed, but that list just makes a big to-do list for someone else,” Richardson said. “The next bit is going to be slow. For any given book, we need to convince someone who has a scan of the book that they're allowed to make it public.”

Richardson notes that much of that heavy lifting is being done by volunteers at organizations like Project Gutenberg, a nonprofit effort to digitize and archive cultural works. These volunteers are tasked with locating a copy of the book in question, scanning it, proofing it, then putting out HTML and plain-text editions.

Gutenberg has been engaged in this process for years, though it tends to work on one book at a time. Other organizations, like the Hathi Trust Research Center, didn't bother, because there was no way of uploading public domain works at any real scale until folks like Richardson and Redmond began streamlining and automating the process accurately.

“We need to convince Hathi and the Internet Archive that this is worth their time—that if we give them a list of 10,000 books, they won't find 1,000 errors during the verification process,” Richardson said.

For the volunteers working on this project, the biggest development in recent weeks has been the announcement that Jason Scott of the Internet Archive will also be lending a hand in getting these public domain works online. Scott recently put out a call for volunteers on Twitter. Libraries around the country are scanning these books and uploading them to the archive.

Richardson says he’s written a matching script to point out which books in the Internet Archive collection seem like they weren't renewed, but added that actually clearing them is also going to take significant, manual work. But it’s work, he says, that will have a much broader and lasting impact than just making millions of historical works available online for free.

“The public domain is incredibly important to the preservation of culture and to the creation of new culture,” he said.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a...-public-domain





51 Tech CEOs Send Open Letter to Congress Asking for a Federal Data Privacy Law

CEOs who signed: Amazon, AT&T, Dell, IBM, SAP, Salesforce, Visa, Mastercard, and JP Morgan Chase.
Catalin Cimpanu

The chief executive officers (CEOs) of 51 tech companies have signed and sent an open letter to Congress leaders today, asking for a federal law on user data privacy to supersede the rising number of privacy laws that are cropping up at the state level.

The open-letter was sent on behalf of Business Roundtable, an association made up of the CEOs of America's largest companies.

The CEOs of Amazon, AT&T, Dell, IBM, Qualcomm, SAP, Salesforce, Visa, Mastercard, JP Morgan Chase, State Farm, and Walmart, are just some of the execs who put their name on the dotted line.

Problems at the state level

CEOs blamed a patchwork of differing privacy regulations that are currently being passed in multiple US states, and by several US agencies, as one of the reasons why consumer privacy is a mess in the US.

This patchwork of privacy regulations is creating problems for their companies, which have to comply with an ever-increasing number of laws across different states and jurisdictions.

Instead, the 51 CEOs would like one law that governs all user privacy and data protection across the US, which would simplify product design, compliance, and data management.

"There is now widespread agreement among companies across all sectors of the economy, policymakers and consumer groups about the need for a comprehensive federal consumer data privacy law that provides strong, consistent protections for American consumers," the open letter said.

Criticism

However, many privacy advocates (and even some tech CEOs) believe tech companies aren't really looking after users' interests, but their own. There's a belief that companies are trying to aggregate any privacy lawmaking under one roof, where lobby groups can water-down any meaningful user protections that may impact bottom lines.

Many companies make money by selling customers' personal or device-usage data to online advertisers. A privacy framework with too many teeth could prevent companies from selling certain types of data.

To help speed up the legislative process, the Business Roundtable group released their own consumer privacy framework [more here] that they'd like Congress to analyze and use as a base for any future law. This proposal includes many of the same provisions of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); however, in very broad terms.

GAO go-ahead for a GDPR-like clone

Earlier this year, in February, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), a US government auditing agency, gave Congress the go-ahead for passing a federal internet data privacy legislation to enhance consumer protections, similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

GAO recommended that the FTC be placed in charge of enforcing any future user data privacy legislation across the US.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/51-tec...a-privacy-law/





Automatic Listening Exploitation Act Would Fine a Company $40K for Each Recording their Smart Home Device Makes Without a User’s Permission

Amid reports of smart home devices recording couples having sex, what recourse should consumers have under federal law for such privacy violations?
Jesse Rifkin

Context

Recent years have seen an explosion of “smart” or voice-activated home devices, most prominently the Amazon Echo and Google Nest. 21% of adults now own such a device. The rate of ownership is still surging, with 14 million people getting their first such device last year.

However, reports have detailed devices going rogue and occasionally recording audio of what users say or do without their permission or knowledge. For example, an Amazon Echo device accidentally recorded a couple’s private in-home conversations and sent the audio to random people in the owner’s contact list.

What the bill does

The Automatic Listening Exploitation Act would fine a company up to $40,000 for each recording made without a user’s permission. It would also allow a customer to demand the recording be deleted from the company’s archives.

Exceptions would be made for service improvements, such as to “improve the speech recognition and natural language understanding of the voice-user interface” or “help the voice-user interface to adapt to speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences.” Considering that almost anything could conceivably be claimed by a company like Amazon or Google as a service improvement, it’s unclear how effective this bill would be.

It was introduced in the House on July 25 as bill number H.R. 4048, by Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA6).

What supporters say

Supporters argue that this very recent innovation in technology necessitates a corresponding update in federal law to combat its potential misuse.

“Smart speakers and doorbells are great, but consumers should have a way to fight back when tech companies collect more data than Americans have agreed to give up,” Rep. Moulton said in a press release. “More broadly, Congress should give Americans a bigger say in the data that companies collect. It’s time for a next generation of digital privacy laws, and it can start by holding corporations to their own privacy commitments.”

Odds of passage

Although GovTrack Insider was unable to locate any explicit statements of opposition, the bill has not yet attracted any cosponsors. It awaits a potential vote in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Surely producers of some of the most prominent smart home devices, such as Amazon and Google, will exercise their lobbying might to kill this legislation. Google’s parent company Alphabet spent $21.7 million on lobbying last year, while Amazon spent $14.4 million.
https://govtrackinsider.com/automati...i=fec9b40c7998





ICE Has a New $30M Contract With Israeli Phone Cracking Company Cellebrite

The agency's previous contract with Cellebrite was worth $2.2 million.
Blake Montgomery

ICE wants to hack more phones. A lot more.

The contentious immigration enforcement agency has expanded its work with Cellebrite, an Israeli data extraction company best known for offering to crack the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone at the behest of the FBI in 2016. Cellebrite reportedly broke into the device for the Bureau, though the FBI disputed that story. The company’s technology can bypass most smartphones’ locks and download data from all their apps for law enforcement.

According to a recent federal filing, ICE will pay Cellebrite between $30 and $35 million for “universal forensic extraction devices” (UFED) and “accessories licenses, training and support services.” The contract, worth more than ten times the value of the $2.2 million agreement between the two agencies signed in 2017, will last between one and five years. The request originated from ICE’s Dallas office, according to a notice of intent posted June 24th. The synopsis of the contract also states that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and its Cyber Crimes Center (C3) plan to use Cellebrite’s technology. Within ICE, HSI leads investigations into child trafficking, drug smuggling, and fraud.

A single UFED retails for $5,000 to $15,000, according to Forbes, meaning ICE could be buying as many as 6,000 the devices from Cellebrite.

It’s unclear what use ICE will put Cellebrite’s technology to and where it will do so. When The Daily Beast contacted ICE Contracting Officer Tracy Riley for details, Riley said she would “absolutely” not provide more details about the contract. Cellebrite did not respond to a request for comment. ICE’s office of public affairs responded to The Daily Beast but did not yet provide a comment.

CBP officers searched the devices of more than 30,000 international travelers in 2017—10,000 more than the year prior, according to the most recently available data (ICE does not make such data available). In response to a lawsuit filed against the two agencies last year, CBP and ICE said their searches were “a crucial tool for detecting evidence relating to terrorism and other national security matters” and “can also reveal information about financial and commercial crimes.”

Privacy advocates have decried warrantless searches of electronic devices at the border for allegedly violating constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizures.

ICE has become one of the Trump administration’s most controversial agencies within the technology industry and without. Employees have called on Amazon, the data management firm Palantir, and the business software company Salesforce to end their work with the department, and protesters around the country have taken to the streets to speak against ICE’s detention of migrants and their children in camps at the border.

[i]—With additional reporting by Adam Rawnsley and Taylor Hatmaker[/b]
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-ha...any-cellebrite





Israel Accused of Planting Mysterious Spy Devices Near the White House

The likely Israeli spying efforts were uncovered during the Trump presidency, several former top U.S. officials said.
Daniel Lippman

The U.S. government concluded within the last two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cell-phone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, D.C., according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.

But unlike most other occasions when flagrant incidents of foreign spying have been discovered on American soil, the Trump administration did not rebuke the Israeli government, and there were no consequences for Israel’s behavior, one of the former officials said.

The miniature surveillance devices, colloquially known as “StingRays,” mimic regular cell towers to fool cell phones into giving them their locations and identity information. Formally called international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and data use.

The devices were likely intended to spy on President Donald Trump, one of the former officials said, as well as his top aides and closest associates -- though it’s not clear whether the Israeli efforts were successful.

President Trump is reputed to be lax in observing White House security protocols. POLITICO reported in May 2018 that the president often used an insufficiently secured cell phone to communicate with friends and confidants. The New York Times subsequently reported in October 2018 that “Chinese spies are often listening” to Trump’s cell-phone calls, prompting the president to slam the story as “so incorrect I do not have time here to correct it.” (A former official said Trump has had his cell phone hardened against intrusion.)

By then, as part of tests by the federal government, officials at the Department of Homeland Security had already discovered evidence of the surveillance devices around the nation’s capital, but weren’t able to attribute the devices to specific entities. The officials shared their findings with relevant federal agencies, according to a letter a top DHS official, Christopher Krebs, wrote in May 2018 to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

Based on a detailed forensic analysis, the FBI and other agencies working on the case felt confident that Israeli agents had placed the devices, according to the former officials, several of whom served in top intelligence and national security posts.

That analysis, one of the former officials said, is typically led by the FBI’s counterintelligence division and involves examining the devices so that they “tell you a little about their history, where the parts and pieces come from, how old are they, who had access to them, and that will help get you to what the origins are.” For these types of investigations, the bureau often leans on the National Security Agency and sometimes the Central Intelligence Agency (DHS and the Secret Service played a supporting role in this specific investigation).

“It was pretty clear that the Israelis were responsible,” said a former senior intelligence official.

An Israeli Embassy spokesperson, Elad Strohmayer, denied that Israel placed the devices and said: “These allegations are absolute nonsense. Israel doesn’t conduct espionage operations in the United States, period.”

A senior Trump administration official said the administration doesn’t “comment on matters related to security or intelligence.” The FBI declined to comment, while DHS and the Secret Service didn’t respond to requests for comment.

But former officials with deep experience dealing with intelligence matters scoff at the Israeli claim — a pro forma denial Israeli officials are also known to make in private to skeptical U.S. counterparts.

One former senior intelligence official noted that after the FBI and other agencies concluded that the Israelis were most likely responsible for the devices, the Trump administration took no action to punish or even privately scold the Israeli government.

“The reaction ... was very different than it would have been in the last administration,” this person said. “With the current administration, there are a different set of calculations in regard to addressing this.”

The former senior intelligence official criticized how the administration handled the matter, remarking on the striking difference from past administrations, which likely would have at a very minimum issued a démarche, or formal diplomatic reprimand, to the foreign government condemning its actions.

“I’m not aware of any accountability at all,” said the former official.

Beyond trying to intercept the private conversations of top officials — prized information for any intelligence service — foreign countries often will try to surveil their close associates as well. With the president, the former senior Trump administration official noted, that could include trying to listen in on the devices of the people he regularly communicates with, such as Steve Wynn, Sean Hannity and Rudy Giuliani.

“The people in that circle are heavily targeted,” said the former Trump official.

Another circle of surveillance targets includes people who regularly talk to Trump’s friends and informal advisers. Information obtained from any of these people “would be so valuable in a town that is like three degrees of separation like Kevin Bacon,” the former official added.

That’s true even for a close U.S. ally like Israel, which often seeks an edge in its diplomatic maneuvering with the United States.

“The Israelis are pretty aggressive” in their intelligence gathering operations, said a former senior intelligence official. “They’re all about protecting the security of the Israeli state and they do whatever they feel they have to to achieve that objective.”

So even though Trump has formed a warm relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and made numerous policy moves favorable to the Israeli government — such as moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, ripping up the Iran nuclear deal and heavily targeting Iran with sanctions — Israel became a prime suspect in planting the devices.

While the Chinese, who have been regularly caught doing intelligence operations in the U.S., were also seen as potential suspects, they were determined as unlikely to have placed the devices based on a close analysis of the devices.

“You can often, depending upon the tradecraft of the people who put them in place, figure out who’s been accessing them to pull the data off the devices,” another former senior U.S. intelligence official explained.

Washington is awash in surveillance, and efforts of foreign entities to try to spy on administration officials and other top political figures are fairly common. But not many countries have the capability — or the budget — to plant the devices found in this most recent incident, which is another reason suspicion fell on Israel.

IMSI-catchers, which are often used by local police agencies to surveil criminals, can also be made by sophisticated hobbyists or by the Harris Corporation, the manufacturer of StingRays, which cost more than $150,000 each, according to Vice News.

“The costs involved are really significant,” according to a former senior Trump administration official. “This is not an easy or ubiquitous practice.”

Among professionals, the Israeli intelligence services have an especially fearsome reputation. But they do sometimes make mistakes and are “not 10 feet tall like you see in the movies,” a former senior intelligence official noted.

In 2010, the secret covers of a Mossad hit team, some of whom had been posing as tennis players, were blown after almost 30 minutes of surveillance video was posted online of them going through a luxury Dubai hotel where they killed a top Hamas terrorist in his room.

Still, U.S. officials sometimes have been taken aback by Israel’s brazen spying. One former U.S. government official recalled his frequent concern that Israel knew about internal U.S. policy deliberations that were meant to be kept private.

“There were suspicions that they were listening in,” the former official said, based on his Israeli counterparts flaunting a level of detailed knowledge “that was hard to explain otherwise.”

“Sometimes it was sort of knowledge of our thinking. Occasionally there were some turns of phrase like language that as far as we knew had only appeared in drafts of speeches and never been actually used publicly, and then some Israeli official would repeat it back to us and say, ‘This would be really problematic if you were to say X,’” said the former official.

Back when the Obama administration was trying to jump-start negotiations with the Palestinians, for example, the Israelis were eager to get advance knowledge of the language being debated that would describe the terms of reference of the talks.

“They would have had interest in what language [President Barack] Obama or [Secretary of State John] Kerry or someone else was going to use and might indeed try to find a way to lobby for language they liked or against language that they didn’t like and so having knowledge of that could be advantageous for them,” the former official said.

“The Israelis are aggressive intelligence collectors, but they have sworn off spying on the U.S. at various points and it’s not surprising that such efforts continue,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former coordinator of counterterrorism at the State Department and now director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth.

He recalled once meeting with a head of Mossad, the premier Israeli intelligence agency. The first thing the official told Benjamin was that Israel didn’t spy on the U.S.

“I just told him our conversation was over if he had such a low estimate of my intelligence,” Benjamin said.

Israeli officials often note in conversations with their American counterparts — correctly — that the U.S. regularly gathers intelligence on Israeli leaders.

As for Israel’s recent surveillance of the White House, one of the former senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged it raised security concerns but joked, “On the other hand, guess what we do in Tel Aviv?”
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/...evices-1491351





Best Buy is Leaving Smart Home Users in the Cold, But its Wi-Fi Freezer Will Still Mostly Work

The Insignia Connect app is shutting down on November 6th
Nick Statt

Best Buy has quietly announced that the mobile app platform for controlling its Insignia brand of smart home devices will be shutting down on November 6th. The company says affected products will still function at a basic level, but any features that rely on its Insignia Connect app and platform will no longer work. The products include its Insignia smart wall plugs, Wi-Fi light switches, its smart camera, and its Wi-Fi freezer (yes, a Wi-Fi freezer). Best Buy is now running a reimbursement program for any unfortunate soul who decided to buy one of these products.

Perhaps most importantly, Best Buy confirms on its Connect FAQ page that its smart freezer “will retain all normal freezer functions.” There are also variants of the Insignia smart wall plug and light switch that are Apple HomeKit compatible, meaning those specific products will retain some mobile features even after the Connect shutdown next month.

Even if you’re on Android, the plug and switch won’t be entirely useless:

“The Insignia Connect app functionality will not work, but any of the scheduled timers that were set up previously, will continue to function. Additionally, the button on the plug will continue to function manually as an on/off switch if needed.”

Hope your timers are set right.

Best Buy is also advising any customers who use its Insignia Wi-Fi camera to download stored video clips before November 4th, two days prior to the overall Connect shutdown, or else those clips will be lost forever.

Best Buy says it’s offering reimbursement for purchasing an affected product, with e-gift cards that won’t expire, but it won’t reimburse any installation fees if, say, you paid the Geek Squad to stick some smart light switches in your walls. The company says customers can redeem up to 10 serial numbers for reimbursement through its website.

And to Best Buy’s credit, it doesn’t seem to be selling these products on its website anymore, and they show up as “Discontinued” at insigniaproducts.com. But some of them are still on sale at Amazon.

There are still some other questions. It’s not clear whether you can get fully reimbursed for having purchased a smart home Insignia product that won’t work as advertised two months from now, or just partially reimbursed. Best Buy doesn’t say on its FAQ page to what extent it's offering these refunds, and whether those refunds extend to any Insignia smart device purchase made at any point in the past, or if there is a purchase cutoff of some sort.

Either way, the situation isn’t ideal for those who’ve bought into the Insignia platform for their smart home needs. This type of quiet shutdown has become an expected and unfortunate trend in the smart home space. Running these platforms in-house can sound like a great, cost-saving idea at first, but doing so over months and years appears to be difficult and costly. Customers are then left hung out to dry when the platforms are inevitably shuttered.

We saw the same exact scenario play out like this earlier this year, when Lowe’s decided to stop supporting its Iris smart home platform and instead send its customers over to Samsung’s Smart Things instead. To placate customers, Lowe’s sent out Visa prepaid cards.

Google similarly decided to close its Works with Nest program in favor of migrating smart home integrations over to Google Assistant earlier this year. The outcome has been messy, to say the least, with Google forced to extend the integration support indefinitely until it can replicate every single one via Google Assistant. A number of other smart home companies have had to scramble after Google’s announcement back in May to ensure nothing would break suddenly when the August 31st deadline arrived.

Of course, putting your smart appliance eggs in a platform basket made by Best Buy is not exactly the savviest of consumer moves. But it shouldn’t be the norm that these software ecosystems are spun up with little thought into how long they’ll last, only to leave customers on the support line clamoring for their money back.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/6/20...own-november-6

















Until next week,

- js.



















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