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Old 30-09-20, 06:42 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 3rd, ’20

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October 3rd, 2020




YouTube Celebrates Deaf Awareness Week by Killing Crowd-Sourced Captions

500,000 signatures aren't stopping YouTube from shutting down accessibility feature.
Ron Amadeo

Today's the day YouTube is killing its "Community Contributions" feature for videos, which let content creators crowdsource captions and subtitles for their videos. YouTube announced the move back in July, which triggered a community outcry from the deaf, hard of hearing, and fans of foreign media, but it does not sound like the company is relenting. In one of Google's all-time, poor-timing decisions, YouTube is killing the feature just two days after the International Week of the Deaf, which is the last full week in September.

Once enabled by a channel owner, the Community Contributions feature would let viewers caption or translate a video and submit it to the channel for approval. YouTube currently offers machine-transcribed subtitles that are often full of errors, and if you also need YouTube to take a second pass at the subtitles for machine translation, they've probably lost all meaning by the time they hit your screen. The Community Caption feature would load up those machine-written subtitles as a starting point and allow the user to make corrections and add text that the machine transcription doesn't handle well, like transcribed sound cues for the deaf and hard of hearing.

YouTube says it's killing crowd-source subtitles due to spam and low usage. "While we hoped Community Contributions would be a wide-scale, community-driven source of quality translations for Creators," the company wrote, "it's rarely used and people continue to report spam and abuse." The community does not seem to agree with this assessment, since a petition immediately popped up asking YouTube to reconsider, and so far a half-million people have signed. "Removing community captions locks so many viewers out of the experience," the petition reads. "Community captions ensured that many videos were accessible that otherwise would not be."

Instead of the free, in-house solution YouTube already built and doesn't want to keep running, the company's shutdown post pushes users to paid, third-party alternatives like Amara.org. YouTube says that because "many of you rely on community captions," (what happened to the low usage?) "YouTube will be covering the cost of a 6 month subscription of Amara.org for all creators who have used the Community Contribution feature for at least 3 videos in the last 60 days."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020...rced-captions/





Netflix Will Only Stream in 4K to Macs that have a T2 Security Chip

Only Macs released since 2018 include the co-processor.
Igor Bonifacic

When Apple releases macOS Big Sur later this year, Mac users will finally have the chance to start streaming Netflix in 4K HDR on their computer. But you’ll need more than a 4K-capable display to do so. In a support document spotted by Apple Terminal (via 9to5Mac), Netflix says you’ll also need a computer with a T2 Security chip. With that hardware requirement means is that only recent Macs have the ability to play UHD content from Netflix.

Here’s the full list of T2-equipped Macs: 2018 or later MacBook Pro, 2018 or later MacBook Air, 2018 Mac mini, 2019 Mac Pro, iMac Pro and 2020 iMac. If you’re not sure whether your Mac has the necessary hardware, you can find out by following the steps Apple details on its website.

The Verge suggests the requirement could have something to do with the T2 chip’s ability to process HEVC encoded videos. On its webpage for the iMac, Apple says the coprocessor can transcode HEVC video up to twice as fast as its previous generation T1 chip. If Netflix is encoding streams using HEVC, that could explain the requirement. Whatever the case, we’ve reached out to both Apple and Netflix for more information, and we’ll update this article when we hear back from them.

If you do have a T2-equipped Mac, you’ll need to keep a couple of other requirements in mind. Obviously, macOS Big Sur is a must, but don’t forget you also need to subscribe to Netflix’s $16 per month Premium plan. Lastly, you can only stream 4K content through Safari; other browsers will limit you to 720p on a Mac.
https://www.engadget.com/netflix-4k-...205949278.html





GOP Senators Demand Netflix Cancel The Three-Body Problem Over Author's Comments on Uighur Muslims

'Does Netflix agree that the Chinese Communist Party's internment of 1.8 to 3 million Uyghurs in internment or labor camps based on their ethnicity is unacceptable?' the senators wrote.
Graig Graziosi

A group of Republican senators have sent Netflix's chief content officer and co-CEO Ted Sarandos a letter criticising the streaming service's upcoming adaptation of The Three-Body Problem.

The series, based on Liu Cixin's science-fiction trilogy of the same name, will be led by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and DB Weiss. Rian Johnson and Rosamund Pike are producing the series and Alexander Woo is writing.

According to Decider, the senators' letter accused the streaming service of "normalising" the imprisonment of Uighur Muslims in China's Xinjiang province.

The crux of the senators' argument is rooteed in a 2019 article in The New Yorker in which Mr Liu expressed approval over the treatment of the Muslim minority group.

“Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty,” he wrote.

The article's author, Jiayang Fan, wrote that the response "duplicated government propaganda so exactly that I couldn't help asking Liu if he ever thought he might be brainwashed."

"'I know what you are thinking,' he told me with weary clarity. 'What about individual liberty and freedom of governance?' He sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head. 'But that’s not what Chinese people care about. For ordinary folks, it’s the cost of health care, real-estate prices, their children’s education. Not democracy,'" she wrote.

The letter was signed by Senators Martha McSally, Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott, Kevin Cramer and Thom Tillis. In the letter, the senators advised Netflix to rethink its relationship with Mr Liu due to his comments.

"Does Netflix agree that the Chinese Communist Party's internment of 1.8 to 3 million Uyghurs in internment or labor camps based on their ethnicity is unacceptable?" the senators wrote.

“Netflix’s company culture statement asserts that ‘Entertainment, like friendship, is a fundamental human need; it changes how we feel and gives us common ground,’” the letter concludes. “This statement is a beautiful summary of the value of the American entertainment industry, which possesses innovation largely unmatched in the global market. We ask Netflix to seriously reconsider the implications of providing a platform to Mr. Liu in producing this project.”

Disney also came under fire for producing media that critics argued overlooked the Chinese treatment of Uighurs.

Parts of Disney's live-adaptation of Mulan were filmed in the Xinjiang province. The movie's credits also feature a "special thanks" to the "publicity department of CPC Xinjiang Uighur Autonomy Region Committee" and to the public security bureau in the city of Turpan, where detainment centres are reported to be located.

Mr Liu became the first writer in Asia to win a Hugo Award, literature's top prize for science-fiction writing, for The Three-Body Problem. The book's narrative revolves around humans making contact with aliens during the Cultural Revolution, and the split between humans who welcome their invasion and those who want to resist.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...n-b628882.html





Publishers Worry as Ebooks Fly off Libraries' Virtual Shelves

Checkouts of digital books from a popular service are up 52 percent since March. Publishers say their easy availability hurts sales.
Aarian Marshall

Before Sarah Adler moved to Maryland last week, she used library cards from her Washington, DC, home and neighboring counties in Virginia and Maryland to read books online. The Libby app, a slick and easy-to-use service from the company OverDrive, gave her access to millions of titles. When she moved, she picked up another card, and access to another library’s e-collection, as well as a larger consortium that the library belongs to. She does almost all of her reading on her phone, through the app, catching a page or two between working on her novels and caring for her 2-year-old. With her husband also at home, she’s been reading more books, mostly historical romance and literature, during the pandemic. In 2020, she estimates, she’s read 150 books.

Adler buys books “rarely,” she says, “which I feel bad about. As someone who hopes to be published one day, I feel bad not giving money to authors.”

Borrowers like Adler are driving publishers crazy. After the pandemic closed many libraries’ physical branches this spring, checkouts of ebooks are up 52 percent from the same period last year, according to OverDrive, which partners with 50,000 libraries worldwide. Hoopla, another service that connects libraries to publishers, says 439 library systems in the US and Canada have joined since March, boosting its membership by 20 percent.

Some public libraries, new to digital collections, delight in exposing their readers to a new kind of reading. The library in Archer City, Texas, population 9,000, received a grant to join OverDrive this summer. The new ebook collection “has really been wonderful,” says library director Gretchen Abernathy-Kuck. “So much of the last few months has been stressful and negative.” The ebooks are “something positive. It was something new.”

But the surging popularity of library ebooks also has heightened longstanding tensions between publishers, who fear that digital borrowing eats into their sales, and public librarians, who are trying to serve their communities during a once-in-a-generation crisis. Since 2011, the industry’s big-five publishers—Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan—have limited library lending of ebooks, either by time—two years, for example—or number of checkouts—most often, 26 or 52 times. Readers can browse, download, join waiting lists for, and return digital library books from the comfort of their home, and the books are automatically removed from their devices at the end of the lending period.

The result: Libraries typically pay between $20 and $65 per copy—an industry average of $40, according to one recent survey—compared with the $15 an individual might pay to buy the same ebook online. Instead of owning an ebook copy forever, librarians must decide at the end of the licensing term whether to renew.

The rising demand for digital materials has prompted some librarians to shift what they buy, even as they fear shrinking budgets amid the economic downturn. A recent survey of 400 librarians in the US and Canada found that one-third are spending less on physical books, audiobooks, and DVDs, and more on digital versions since the pandemic began. Twenty-nine percent have had their budgets frozen or reduced.

But the publishers’ licensing terms make it “very difficult for libraries to be able to afford ebooks,” says Michelle Jeske, director of the Denver Public Library and president of the Public Library Association. “The pricing models don’t work well for libraries.” Between January and July, the Denver system saw 212,000 more books downloaded than the same period last year, a 17 percent increase.

Last year, Macmillan took an additional step, limiting each library system to only a single digital copy of a new title—at half its usual price—until it had been on the market for two months. Macmillan CEO John Sargent said he worried there was too little friction in library ebook lending. “To borrow a book in [the pre-digital days] days required transportation, returning the book, and paying those pesky fines when you forgot to get them back on time,” he wrote in a letter announcing the policy. “In today’s digital world there is no such friction in the market." Many librarians, arguing the Macmillan policy hurt large urban systems that already struggle to keep up with demand for new and noteworthy books, organized to boycott the publisher.

But in mid-March, days after libraries around the country began to close, Macmillan dropped the policy. “There are times in life when differences should be put aside,” Sargent wrote in a memo. A spokesperson for Macmillan declined to comment.

Librarians argue that digital lending promotes sales in the long run, by introducing readers to authors whose books they might not have bought otherwise. Research by the OverDrive-funded organization Panorama Project suggests that library book clubs, and the marketing that goes with them, boost or don’t affect sales of the same book title. This year, for example, ebook sales were up 7.6 percent through June, according to the NPD Group. The Panorama Project is conducting more thorough research on the issue.

“I think one of the things we’ll see in the postmortem of this year is that the importance of libraries is going to stand out,” says Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, the project leader for the Panorama Project. “Any publisher that gets out of 2020 not missing their budgets too much—they’re going to owe that to libraries” (also, he says, Amazon).

Some publishers have made changes during the pandemic. Penguin Random House just extended through the end of the year a program that allows libraries to license ebooks and audiobooks for a year at half the price they usually pay. That makes it easier for a library to, say, load up on licenses for a popular bestseller and then let them go when patrons no longer demand as many copies. (A Random House spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Many publishers have also created one-off pandemic- or social-justice-related programs, freeing up titles for newly curious readers. Some smaller publishers still allow libraries to license ebooks in perpetuity. Amazon’s publishing arm does not sell digital copies of its books to public libraries.

But the tension between libraries and publishers remains. Libraries want more flexibility, and to assure that they’ll have their collections for a long time, says Michael Blackwell, the director of St. Mary’s County Library in Maryland and the program director for the advocacy group Readers First. “Whether or not [the pandemic] is going to convince the publishers to work better with us, I don’t know,” he says. “Frankly, I am skeptical.”

At the same time, Jeske and others worry about shifting too much of their collections online, because some residents don’t have access to ebook readers, laptops, or Wi-Fi. Librarians in Denver have taken their laptop and free Wi-Fi program outside, where they hope ventilation and distance will protect everyone against the virus. They wipe down borrowed laptops between uses.

The debate has attracted attention in Washington. The House Antitrust Subcommittee last year launched an investigation of competition in the digital marketplace, and subcommittee chair Representative David Cicilline (D–Rhode Island) has met with library advocates. “The whole issue of this negotiation [between libraries and publishers] over the last decade derives from a place where libraries have almost no rights in the digital age,” says Alan Inouye, the senior director of public policy and government relations at the American Library Association. “In the longer run, there needs to be a change in the environment or in the game. That means legislation or regulation.”
https://www.wired.com/story/publishe...rtual-shelves/





Google to Pay Publishers $1 Billion Over Three Years For their News
Foo Yun Chee

News publishers have long fought the world’s most popular internet search engine for compensation for using their content, with European media groups leading the charge.

CEO Sundar Pichai said the new product called Google News Showcase will launch first in Germany, where it has signed up German newspapers including Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, and in Brazil with Folha de S.Paulo, Band and Infobae.

It will be rolled out in Belgium, India, the Netherlands and other countries. About 200 publishers in Argentina, Australia, Britain, Brazil, Canada and Germany have signed up to the product.

“This financial commitment - our biggest to date - will pay publishers to create and curate high-quality content for a different kind of online news experience,” Pichai said in a blog post.

Google parent Alphabet reported a net profit of $34.3 billion on revenue of almost $162 billion last year.

The product, which allows publishers to pick and present their stories, will launch on Google News on Android devices and eventually on Apple devices.

“This approach is distinct from our other news products because it leans on the editorial choices individual publishers make about which stories to show readers and how to present them,” Pichai said.

German publisher the Spiegel Group welcomed the project.

“With News Showcase and the new integration of editorial content like from Spiegel, Google shows that they are serious about supporting quality journalism in Germany. We are happy to be part of it from the start,” said Stefan Ottlitz, managing director of the Spiegel Group.

News Corp, which has urged EU antitrust regulators to act against Google, was equally enthusiastic.

“We applaud Google’s recognition of a premium for premium journalism and the understanding that the editorial eco-system has been dysfunctional, verging on dystopian. There are complex negotiations ahead but the principle and the precedent are now established,” its CEO Robert Thomson said in a statement.

The European Publishers Council (EPC), whose members include News UK, the Guardian, Pearson, the New York Times and Schibsted, however, was critical.

“By launching a product, they (Google) can dictate terms and conditions, undermine legislation designed to create conditions for a fair negotiation, while claiming they are helping to fund news production,” said EPC Executive Director Angela Mills Wade.

Google is negotiating with French publishers, among its most vocal critics, while Australia wants to force it and Facebook to share advertising revenue with local media groups.

Google’s funding for news organisations has frustrated other internet publishers, such as weather websites and recipe tools, which say Google has hurt their revenue.

Reporting by Foo Yun Chee, additional reporting by Paresh Dave in San Francisco, Diane Bartz in Washingon DC and Klaus Lauer in Berlin; editing by Barbara Lewis
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a...-idUSKBN26M5P7






Two Members of Notorious Videogame Piracy Group “Team Xecuter” in Custody
Arrested on Indictment from Western District of Washington

Two leaders of one of the world’s most notorious videogame piracy groups, Team Xecuter, have been arrested and are in custody facing charges filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

Max Louarn, 48, a French national of Avignon, France, Yuanning Chen, 35, a Chinese national of Shenzhen, China, and Gary Bowser, 51, a Canadian national of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, were charged in a federal indictment unsealed today. The indictment alleges the defendants were leaders of a criminal enterprise that developed and sold illegal devices that hacked popular videogame consoles so they could be used to play unauthorized, or pirated, copies of videogames. The enterprise targeted popular consoles such as the Nintendo Switch, the Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Edition, the Sony PlayStation Classic, and the Microsoft Xbox.

“These defendants were allegedly leaders of a notorious international criminal group that reaped illegal profits for years by pirating video game technology of U.S. companies,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “These arrests show that the department will hold accountable hackers who seek to commandeer and exploit the intellectual property of American companies for financial gain, no matter where they may be located.”

“These defendants lined their pockets by stealing and selling the work of other video-game developers – even going so far as to make customers pay a licensing fee to play stolen games,” said U.S. Attorney Brian Moran for the Western District of Washington. “This conduct doesn’t just harm billion dollar companies, it hijacks the hard work of individuals working to advance in the video-game industry.”

“Theft of intellectual property hurts U.S. industry, game developers and exploits legitimate gaming customers, all of which threaten the legitimacy of the commercial video game industry,” said Acting Special Agent in Charge Eben Roberts of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Seattle. “We are committed to working with our international partners to find criminals like these who steal copyrighted material and bring cyber criminals to justice.”

“Imagine if something you invented was stolen from you and then marketed and sold to customers around the world. That is exactly what Team Xecuter was doing,” said Special Agent in Charge Raymond Duda of the FBI’s Seattle Field Office. “This is a perfect example of why the FBI has made the prevention of the theft of intellectual property a priority. These arrests should send a message to would-be pirates that the FBI does not consider these crimes to be a game.”

According to court documents, the Team Xecuter criminal enterprise is comprised of over a dozen individual members located around the world. These members include developers who exploit vulnerabilities in videogame consoles and design circumvention devices; website designers who create the various websites that promote the enterprise’s devices; suppliers who manufacture the devices; and resellers around the world who sell and distribute the devices.

The indictment alleges that due to the illegal nature of its business, Team Xecuter continuously sought to evade enforcement efforts by victim companies, financial institutions, and law enforcement. Notably, Team Xecuter attempted to protect its overall business by using a wide variety of brands, websites, and distribution channels, according to the indictment. From approximately June 2013 through August 2020, Team Xecuter used a variety of product names for its devices, such as the Gateway 3DS, the Stargate, the TrueBlue Mini, the Classic2Magic, and the SX line of devices that included the SX OS, the SX Pro, the SX Lite, and the SX Core.

According to the indictment, Team Xecuter at times cloaked its illegal activity with a purported desire to support gaming enthusiasts who wanted to design their own videogames for noncommercial use. However, the overwhelming demand and use for the enterprise’s devices was to play pirated videogames. To support this illegal activity, Team Xecuter allegedly helped create and support online libraries of pirated videogames for its customers, and several of the enterprise’s devices came preloaded with numerous pirated videogames. According to the indictment, Team Xecuter was so brazen that it even required customers to purchase a “license” to unlock the full features of its custom firmware, the SX OS, in order to enable the ability to play pirated videogames.

In September 2020, Louarn and Bowser were arrested abroad in connection with the charges in this case. The United States will seek Louarn’s extradition to stand trial in the United States. Bowser was arrested and deported from the Dominican Republic, and appeared today in federal court, in New Jersey.

Each defendant is charged with 11 felony counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to circumvent technological measures and to traffic in circumvention devices, trafficking in circumvention devices, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The charges in the indictment are merely allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

This case is being investigated jointly by the FBI and HSI.

This case is being prosecuted by Senior Counsel Frank Lin of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section Assistant U.S. Attorneys Francis Franze-Nakamura and Brian Werner of the Western District of Washington, with significant and ongoing assistance from the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs. The department appreciates the significant cooperation and assistance provided by its foreign government counterparts and the Government of the Dominican Republic, and Interpol Dominicana.

The year 2020 marks the 150th anniversary of the Department of Justice. Learn more about the history of our agency at www.Justice.gov/Celebrating150Years.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-m...ecuter-custody





Ransomware Attacks Take On New Urgency Ahead of Vote

Attacks against small towns, big cities and the contractors who run their voting systems have federal officials fearing that hackers will try to sow chaos around the election.
Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger

A Texas company that sells software that cities and states use to display results on election night was hit by ransomware last week, the latest of nearly a thousand such attacks over the past year against small towns, big cities and the contractors who run their voting systems.

Many of the attacks are conducted by Russian criminal groups, some with shady ties to President Vladimir V. Putin’s intelligence services. But the attack on Tyler Technologies, which continued on Friday night with efforts by outsiders to log into its clients’ systems around the country, was particularly rattling less than 40 days before the election.

While Tyler does not actually tally votes, it is used by election officials to aggregate and report them in at least 20 places around the country — making it exactly the kind of soft target that the Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I. and United States Cyber Command worry could be struck by anyone trying to sow chaos and uncertainty on election night.

Tyler would not describe the attack in detail. It initially appeared to be an ordinary ransomware attack, in which data is made inaccessible unless the victim pays the ransom, usually in harder-to-trace cryptocurrencies. But then some of Tyler’s clients — the company would not say which ones — saw outsiders trying to gain access to their systems on Friday night, raising fears that the attackers might be out for something more than just a quick profit.

That has been the fear haunting federal officials for a year now: that in the days leading up to the election, or in its aftermath, ransomware groups will try to freeze voter registration data, election poll books or the computer systems of the secretaries of the state who certify election results.

With only 37 days before the election, federal investigators still do not have a clear picture of whether the ransomware attacks clobbering American networks are purely criminal acts, seeking a quick payday, or Trojan horses for more nefarious Russian interference. But they have not had much success in stopping them. In just the first two weeks of September, another seven American government entities have been hit with ransomware and their data stolen.

“The chance of a local government not being hit while attempting to manage the upcoming and already ridiculously messy election would seem to be very slim,” said Brett Callow, a threat analyst at Emsisoft, a security firm.

The proliferation of ransomware attacks that result in data theft is an evolution in Russian tactics, beyond the kind of “hack and leak” events engineered against the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, in 2016. By design, whether the attacks are criminal or state sponsored is not clear, and the attacker does not always have to be successful everywhere. Just a few well-placed ransomware attacks, in key battleground states, could create the impression that voters everywhere would not be able to cast their ballots or that the ballots could not be accurately counted — what the cybersecurity world calls a “perception hack.”

“We have been hardening these systems since last summer,” Christopher Krebs, who runs the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for the Department of Homeland Security, said this month. He noted that the agency was trying to make sure local election officials printed out their electronic poll books, which are used to check in voters, so that they had a backup.

The United States has made “tremendous progress” in the effort, Mr. Krebs added, by “getting on this problem early.”

Still, some officials worry that President Trump’s repeated assertion about the election that “we’re not going to lose this except if they cheat” may be the 2020 equivalent of “Russia, if you’re listening” — seen as a signal to hackers to create just enough incidents to bolster his unfounded claims of widespread fraud.

So far Mr. Trump has focused on mail-in ballots and new balloting systems, but on election night there would be no faster way to create turmoil than altering the reporting of the vote — even if the vote itself was free of fraud.

That would be a classic perception hack: If Mr. Trump was erroneously declared a winner, for example, and then the vote totals appeared to change, it would be easy to claim someone was fiddling with the numbers.

The Russians tried this, and almost got away with it, in Ukraine’s presidential election six years ago. That is one reason the F.B.I. warned last week that the days after the election could result in “disinformation that includes reports of voter suppression, cyberattacks targeting election infrastructure, voter or ballot fraud, and other problems intended to convince the public of the elections’ illegitimacy.”

The F.B.I. warning made no mention of Mr. Trump’s own declarations that if Mr. Biden wins, the election must be illegitimate, or his baseless attacks on the use of mail-in ballots. But on Saturday night at a rally in Pennsylvania, the president openly speculated how an uncertain outcome could throw the election into the courts or Congress, both places where he believes he has an advantage.

That is why the surge in ransomware has become such a rising concern. Should an attack be well-timed enough to make it difficult to count votes or certify tallies, it would add to the uncertainty — just what the Russians, and perhaps Mr. Trump himself, are seeking.

Part of the problem is that the full scale of ransomware attacks is not always disclosed.

It was three years after the 2016 election that the Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I. and even Florida state officials learned that Palm Beach County — which played a critical role in deciding the 2000 election — had its election offices seized by ransomware just weeks before the election.

Over the past 18 months, cybercriminals — primarily based in Russia and Eastern Europe — have hit the American public sector with more ransomware attacks than in any other period on record, according to Emsisoft, which tracks the incursions. A record 966 ransomware attacks hit the American public sector last year — two-thirds of them targeting state or local governments.

Among them: A Texas county that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 as well as counties that helped determine the 2016 election in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Georgia, and other cities and counties that will most likely play a critical role in deciding close Senate races in South Carolina, Kentucky, Colorado and Maine in November.

The F.B.I. concluded that ransomware “will likely threaten the availability of data on interconnected election servers” in November, according to a bureau analysis leaked this summer. The agency cited two recent examples: a ransomware attack in Oregon that locked up county computers and crippled backup data, and another in Louisiana in which cybercriminals hacked the secretary of state’s offices, then waited three months to detonate their ransomware the week of Louisiana’s statewide elections for governor and legislative seats last November.

The Louisiana election proceeded unscathed because officials had the foresight to separate voter rolls from internal networks. Still, some analysts feared the attack was a dry run for Nov. 3.

Sometimes victims pay — as a small town in Florida did. Sometimes they refuse, as Atlanta did — though it ended up spending more than the ransom demand reconstructing its systems.

The latest victim, Tyler Technologies, has been vague about the details of its attack. Citing a continuing investigation, the company declined to elaborate on the ransom demands, say whether it paid or offer any details about the attackers. And while the company claimed that none of its products “support voting or election systems,” its Socrata dashboard software is used by some election officials to aggregate and share election results.

That display software is precisely the kind of soft target that intelligence agencies warned could be subject to foreign manipulation on Election Day. In the Ukraine case in 2014, Russian hackers got into the software that reported the country’s election results to the media, altering it to falsely claim victory for a far-right candidate. Ukrainians caught the hack just in time and reported the correct results on television that night. Tellingly, Russian state media still reported that the far-right candidate had won the presidency.

It was a classic perception hack because even if the actual ballots are untouched, an attack that delayed the vote or cast doubt on the ultimate results could create enough uncertainty in voters’ minds that somehow the election was illegitimate.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee report into the 2016 election even warned against the kind of proclamations Mr. Trump is making about “rigged” elections from the White House press room and at rallies.

“Sitting officials and candidates should use the absolute greatest amount of restraint and caution if they are considering publicly calling the validity of an upcoming election into question,” the report said, noting that doing so would only be “exacerbating the already damaging messaging efforts of foreign intelligence services.”

Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, countered the president’s claims on Thursday, telling lawmakers that his agency had “not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.” He was immediately attacked by the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows. “With all due respect to Director Wray, he has a hard time finding emails in his own F.B.I.,” Mr. Meadows said on Fox News.

Still, American officials are walking a thin line. They are trying not to ramp up too many fears about ransomware for fear of amplifying the uncertainty.

But at the same time, security researchers have noted with growing alarm that the ransomware attacks hitting American systems are evolving in disturbing ways. Attackers are not just locking up data, they are stealing it, dumping it online in some cases, and selling access to victims’ data on the dark web and privately to nation-state groups. Researchers at Intel471, a threat intelligence firm, recently discovered that Russian cybercriminals had been selling access to victims’ data to North Korean hackers, and Russian cybercriminals have a long track record of working hand in hand with the Kremlin.

When the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on members of an elite Russian cybercrime group last December, they outed the group’s leader as a member of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., a successor to the K.G.B.

Three years ago, the Justice Department accused two F.S.B. agents of working closely with two cybercriminals to hack 500 million Yahoo accounts. Russian agents allowed cybercriminals to profit from the attack, while mining their access to spy on journalists, dissidents and American officials.

“There is a pax mafiosa between the Russian regime and its cybercartels,” said Tom Kellermann, the head of cybersecurity strategy at VMWare, who sits on the Secret Service’s cyberinvestigations advisory board. “Russia’s cybercriminals are treated as a national asset who provide the regime free access to victims of ransomware and financial crime. And in exchange, they get untouchable status.”

“It’s a protection racket,” Mr. Kellermann said. “And it works both ways.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/27/t...y-threats.html





Washington Emergency Responders First to Use SpaceX's Starlink Internet in the Field: 'It's Amazing'
Michael Sheetz

• Washington's state military, which includes its emergency response division, began using Starlink user terminals in early August to bring internet service to areas devastated by wildfires.
• "I have spent the better part of four or five hours with some satellite equipment trying to get a good [connection]. So, to me, it's amazing," Washington state's emergency telecommunications leader Richard Hall told CNBC.
• Washington has used Starlink to get regions "zero day communications," Hall said.

Washington Emergency Management Division

The Starlink satellite internet network that SpaceX is developing has been used in the field by Washington state emergency responders in recent weeks, the first early application of the company's service to be disclosed.

Washington's state military, which includes its emergency response division, began employing Starlink user terminals in early August to bring internet service to areas devastated by wildfires. User terminals are the small devices on the ground that connect to the satellites. The emergency division has seven Starlink user terminals, which it is deploying with early success.

"I have never set up any tactical satellite equipment that has been as quick to set up, and anywhere near as reliable" as Starlink, Richard Hall, the emergency telecommunications leader of the Washington State Military Department's IT division, told CNBC in an interview Monday.

How Washington's using Starlink

Starlink is the name for SpaceX's ambitious plan to build an interconnected internet satellite network, also known as a "constellation," to deliver high-speed internet to anywhere on the planet.

The full Starlink network is planned to have about 12,000 satellites flying in what is known as low Earth orbit, much closer to the surface than traditional broadband satellites. Hall, whose division has used other satellite broadband services, said "there's really no comparison" between Starlink and traditional networks, where the satellites are farther away from the Earth in Geosynchronous or medium earth orbits.

"Starlink easily doubles the bandwidth" in comparison, Hall said, noting that he's seen more than 150% decreases in latency. "I've seen lower than 30 millisecond latency consistently," he said.

Hall said that, with other traditional services, it typically takes between 30 minutes to an hour to set up a satellite connection, "with a lot less speed and bandwidth and a lot higher latency in a much larger package."

By comparison, Hall emphasized that it took him between five and 10 minutes to set up and connect a Starlink terminal. And a single person can set up one of the devices: "It doesn't require a truck and a trailer and a whole lot of other additional equipment," Hall said.

"I have spent the better part of four or five hours with some satellite equipment trying to get a good [connection]. So, to me, it's amazing," Hall added.

SpaceX's Starlink development facility and factory is in Redmond, Washington, just outside of Seattle. Hall's division had some early discussions with SpaceX, he said, as the state was working "to provide some rural coverage to some of our tribal areas that were not going to get broadband at all for awhile."

To date SpaceX has launched more than 700 Starlink satellites – a fraction of the total needed for global coverage but enough to begin providing services in some regions, including in the northwest U.S.

The company has confirmed that it's been conducting a private beta test of Starlink with employees, but Hall said Washington's emergency division use case "grew organically out of previously unrelated talks." When Washington's wildfires became increasingly severe in August, with catastrophic damage, Hall saw Starlink as a new solution for areas where the damage meant "there is no other available data connection."

Washington Emergency Management Division

Washington has used Starlink to get regions "zero day communications," Hall said. He has set up terminals in areas that were burned severely to provide evacuated families with wireless calling and internet access to file insurance claims.

"I even did setup to allow kids to do some of their initial schooling too, because they were pressing forward with some limited presence slowly. We covered a whole lot of bases," Hall said. "Starlink changes the game as far as what's available."

The U.S. Air Force has also notably conducted early tests of Starlink, but Washington's use represents the first application of the service over several weeks. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Monday responded to Washington state's thanks for the support from Starlink.

"Glad SpaceX could help! We are prioritizing emergency responders & locations with no Internet connectivity at all," Musk tweeted.

SpaceX has sent Hall both beta and the first commercial Starlink user terminals. He said the user terminals are all "great quality," with the commercial ones being "just a bit more of a slicker, more finished product."

The base of the terminal was originally a solid round weight but changed to a tripod, which Hall said allowed for a more flexible set up experience. While SpaceX told Hall that the terminal "required a clear North-facing shot," some places he set them up were "slightly obscured but it still worked like a charm, with great speeds."

No service fees yet

Musk's company is allowing Washington state to use the Starlink terminals for free, with Hall saying there has been "no fee structure quoted yet."

"The idea is that if we want them long term then we will have come back to table and talk about that," Hall said. "Myself and other folks at my agency want to begin to hash that out because these, at least as far as we're concerned, are here to stay for us. We want to get as many spun out to as many places as we can, so knowing what the cost is going to be is better sooner rather than later."

Hall added that he's aware of interest in Starlink from other organizations, such as from Washington's Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"There's a lot of interest. The only problem is that there we're still kind of limited on where we can deploy it outside of Pacific Northwest," Hall said.

SpaceX plans to continue to expand Starlink's coverage area as it launches more satellites, with the company in July saying that it is building 120 satellites per month, as well as thousands of the small terminals that consumers will use to connect to the network.

SpaceX plans to begin a public beta test of Starlink once the private beta test concludes, with the goal of offering commercial Starlink service in the northern U.S. and southern Canada by the end of this year.

"SpaceX is being very cautious right now in what they promise us, but it's been nothing but good things," Hall said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/29/wash...-internet.html





Report Notes Musk's Starlink Won't Have The Capacity To Truly Disrupt U.S. Telecom
Karl Bode

We've noted a few times that while Space X's Starlink will be a very good thing for a limited number of rural customers out of the range of traditional broadband options, it's not going to truly disrupt the busted U.S. telecom market in any revolutionary way. The service should be a step up from traditionally expensive, capped, and sluggish old-school satellite broadband, since new low-orbit satellites can provide lower latency service at a price point Elon Musk insists will be competitive.

That said, the financial analysts at Cowen came out last week to note that even at its current maximum of 12,000 such satellites, Starlink will never have enough capacity to truly service more than 485,000 subscribers at full capacity:

"While Starlink has the ability to provide a practical satellite-based broadband solution for the underserved, the capacity has limitations in most of the US especially considering the growing demand for bandwidth driven by in-home data-rich applications and devices," the firm wrote in a research note first spotted by Light Reading.

Starlink currently has 650 satellites in orbit, with 12,000 planned by 2026. But even at full capacity the researchers estimate the service won’t be able to service any more than 485,000 simultaneous data streams at speeds of 100 Mbps.”

Granted most ISPs operate under the "oversubscription" model, which correctly assumes that not all customers will be using the full throughput of their connection all day, every day. So Starlink can certainly offer slower speeds to notably more people. Especially if (with no net neutrality and a Trump FCC that couldn't care less about it) Starlink utilizes strange throttling technology that limits what users can do with those connections. But even that would barely dent the estimated 42 million Americans that lack access to any broadband, or the 83 million currently stuck under a broadband monopoly (usually Comcast).

Musk himself has acknowledged this limited capacity means Starlink won't be a major player in any major urban or suburban U.S. markets. That brings us to the other problem Cowen raises, namely that low orbit satellite will never really be able to scale with consumer demand the way traditional fiber optic broadband can. Especially not in the cloud computing, 4K game streaming era:

"US broadband consumption, and the speeds that users demand, is continuously growing," Cowen wrote. "Thus, as satellite throughput and technology continues to progress, so too will demand for faster speeds. As such, our analysis shows that LEO satellites will continuously be a step behind wireline telco/cable operators in meeting US consumer demand for broadband."

So yes, Starlink will be a good thing for a limited number of folks out of range of decent broadband or somewhere on a boat. But anybody framing this as a massive disruption to the status quo (something the press tends to enjoy doing when Musk is involved) is misrepresenting what the service will actually accomplish. As Starlink lobbies the FCC for up to $16 billion in subsidies, it's also worth remembering that U.S. taxpayers have thrown countless billions at existing monopolies for fiber optic networks that routinely wind up only half deployed.

Which is to say we could focus on state and federal corruption, and the decades of fraud and cronyism that have gifted entrenched telecom giants like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon massive geographical monopolies. Then finally just deploy the coast to coast fiber networks American taxpayers have likely already paid for several times over with the help of pissed off communities. Or we could do nothing about that problem, over-hype half-measure efforts to re-invent the wheel, then grumble in a few years about the fact we never seem to quite fix America's stubborn "digital divide."
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...-telecom.shtml





Verizon, AT&T Reach $116 Million California Settlement
Don Thompson

The nation’s largest cellphone providers will pay a combined $116 million under a settlement approved Thursday in a California lawsuit alleging that they overcharged government customers for wireless services over more than a decade.

Verizon will pay $68 million and AT&T Mobility $48 million to settle claims that they violated cost-saving agreements included in wireless contracts with state and local governments. Sprint and T-Mobile previously agreed to pay a combined $9.6 million.

Attorneys who filed the suit said it is the second-largest California False Claims Act settlement outside of the health care industry.

The California Attorney General’s Office decided not to sue after its own investigation of the government contracts in California and Nevada, said Verizon spokesman Rich Young, so a whistleblower sued in 2012 using a provision of the act that allows for such independent lawsuits on the state’s behalf.

Young said Verizon “settled these meritless claims to avoid a protracted legal battle.” AT&T spokesman Jim Greer similarly said his company “complied with our contracts and the law” and denied wrongdoing, but settled to avoid costly litigation.

The suit says the companies failed to live up to their agreements to charge nearly 300 state and local governments the lowest available cost and tailor their dozens of frequently changing rate plans accordingly based on actual usage patterns.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys said the largest users recovering money under the settlement are the state of California, the California State University and University of California systems, Los Angeles County, and Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, and Riverside city and county governments.

The whistleblower plaintiff, OnTheGo Wireless LLC, was formed by Jeffrey Smith after his firm used software applications to compare rate plans and concluded the companies did not offer the governments the lowest possible prices. His firm will get about 40% of the settlement, he and the attorneys said in a statement.

“It may be a rounding error to Verizon and AT&T, but this is real money to California’s schools, local governments and state agencies who spent years scraping through their budget to pay what we now know were over-inflated bills,” said Wayne Lamprey of the Constantine Cannon law firm, who filed the lawsuit and was lead counsel.
https://apnews.com/article/technolog...1f793efae7452a





Broadband Help Passes on S. Carolina Legislature’s Final Day
Jeffrey Collins

The South Carolina General Assembly wrapped up a most unusual 2020 session by passing a bill supporters said will help get high speed internet to hundreds of thousands of people in rural areas.

The gap between cities and richer areas with good internet access and poorer, less populated areas without broadband access became even more stark over the past six months as COVID-19 pushed schools into the virtual world and made online meetings the way businesses and governments often communicate.

“I’m on more Zoom meetings than ever,” Rep. Brian White said. “We’ve got to get this technology.”

The House unanimously passed the bill Thursday, a day after the Senate suddenly revived the bill, approving it and requiring the House to come back for one extra day.

The bill allows and gives incentives to smaller power companies and cooperatives to let internet providers provide their service alongside electric lines.

“Everybody has electricity,” said White, a Republican from Anderson who led the effort.

Next session, supporters hope to get federal grants and set other money aside for more incentives to get companies to provide internet service on those newly opened lines, White said.

The proposal will allow the state to use federal COVID-19 aid to help pay for the tax breaks and the broadband expansion, supporters said.

Some 650,000 of the 5 million people in South Carolina don’t have access to broadband internet, officials said.

When House Speaker Jay Lucas banged his gavel around 12:20 p.m. Thursday, it ended the strange 2020 session. Lawmakers met for less than three full weeks after mid-March, where there typically would be two months left in the session.

Committee meetings moved online, lawmakers spread out away from their desks, most everyone wore masks — with some face shields — and the handshake that might seal a deal became a fist bump or a elbow tap.

The pandemic killed separate massive education overhaul bills that passed the Senate and House because there was no time and eventually no motivation to work out the differences. Leaders in both chambers promise to revive education efforts next year.

The question whether to sell Santee Cooper now moves into 2021. A deal to buy the state-owned utility remains valid until May, but senators appear less interested in selling it and Santee Cooper officials are taking steps to cut rates and save money as if they will continue to be independent.

Lucas has also created several subcommittees reviewing criminal justice matters, like sentencing reform, police procedures and property forfeiture rules. A subcommittee Wednesday finished work on proposed language for a hate crimes bill. South Carolina is one of only three states without one.

During the two-week September special session to wrap things up, lawmakers passed a bill allowing no-excuse absentee voting for November’s general election similar to what happened in June’s statewide primaries and approved a plan on how to spend nearly $700 million in remaining federal aid money for COVID-19 expenses.

They did not pass a budget, instead copying and pasting last year’s $9 billion spending plan with members worried the economic problems with COVID-19 have not been accurately forecast and the state could end up collecting a lot less in fees and taxes.

The state has saved about $775 million over the past two budgets. Senators did pass a proposal spending $40 million on small, annual teacher raises that had been frozen and $20 million on COVID-19 hazard pay bonuses for low-paid state employees. The House refused to take it up, saying they didn’t want to spend any extra money until at least Janauary.
https://apnews.com/article/virus-out...ca210e7e30cfc7

















Until next week,

- js.



















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