Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 28th, ’18

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"So sad and unfair that the FCC wouldn't approve the Sinclair Broadcast merger with Tribune." – Pres. Donald J. Trump, R-US






































July 28th, 2018




The MPAA Seeks Stronger Actions to Fight Streaming Video Piracy

Keeping premium content from being freely distributed online will take a mix of criminal and civil charges, as well as a coordinated response.
Troy Dreier

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is stepping into the online video piracy debate and calling for criminal charges against violators, as well as strong coordination between a broad range of online service providers.

The association's recommendations came in response to a call from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's (NTIA) call for comments regarding internet policy concerns. On July 17, the MPAA issued a 40-page document advocating a modernization of online policies in response to rampant illicit activity.

While a range of commercial offerings help studios and sports leagues battle online piracy, anyone who has a friend with a Kodi box knows that unrestricted access to popular shows and movies is only a few taps away. The MPAA notes that 6.5 million homes in North America are equipped with a Kodi box, and the North American piracy ecosystem generates $840 million per year.

Angling for tougher measures to fight that activity, the MPAA calls for "civil and criminal actions against creators of pirate add-on software and the repository web sites that host them, against distributors of the preloaded devices, and against the entities streaming the content." A group of studios including Netflix, Amazon, 20thCentury Fox, and others has been battling pirate device-makers in the courts, but those have been civil complaints. The MPAA wants to see stronger charges against a broader range of infringing organizations.

The MPAA also wants to see broader efforts to combat the problem, calling for cooperation between "on-line marketplaces, payment processors, advertisers, domain name providers, website and file hosting providers, and search and social media services" with the goal of ending all distribution options and monetization tools for pirates.

The current system, the MPAA says, shields online platform for liability from the illegal activity of their customers (thanks to the Communications Decency Act) and allows piracy to flourish.
http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articl...cy-126515.aspx





BitTorrent Confirms It’s Been Acquired by Blockchain Startup Tron
Janko Roettgers

File sharing veteran BitTorrent has finally confirmed that it has a new owner: “We are excited to announce that Tron has officially closed its acquisition of BitTorrent,” the company said in a blog post Tuesday.

“BitTorrent will continue operating from Tron’s new San Francisco location, which is now the center of operations for the company’s global market expansion,” the post continues. “The division will provide robust support for Tron’s global business development and partnerships, while pursuing its vision for the world’s largest decentralized ecosystem.”

Tron is a Blockchain startup founded by the Chinese entrepreneur Justin Jun. The company has issued it own crypto-currency, dubbed TRX, which had a market cap of $2.4 billion at the time of writing.

Little is known about Sun’s plans for BitTorrent, but the file sharing company did put out an assurance to its users in June that it wouldn’t sneak any code to do Blockchain calculations into its apps. “BitTorrent has no plans to change what we do or charge for the services we provide,” that statement read. “We have no plans to enable mining of cryptocurrency now or in the future.”

BitTorrent and Tron didn’t release any further details about the acquisition Tuesday, but documents filed with the California Secretary of State suggest that Sun paid close to $126 million in cash for the company.

Variety was first to confirm the acquisition of BitTorrent in early June.
https://variety.com/2018/digital/new...ed-1202882451/





Facebook Confirms It's Working on a New Internet Satellite
Louise Matsakis

Fiber optic cables are the gold standard of a good internet connection, but laying them can be expensive, and in some parts of the world, a physically daunting task. So in remote corners of the globe, people often connect to the internet instead via massive geostationary satellites. These school bus-size instruments are especially far away, producing significantly slower connections. A host of companies believe the better way to connect the estimated half of Earth’s population that’s still offline is to launch “constellations” of smaller satellites into low Earth orbit, around 100 to 1,250 miles above our planet.

According to emails obtained from the Federal Communications Commission in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by WIRED, and confirmation from the company itself, Facebook is officially one of them.

The emails show that the social network wants to launch Athena, its very own internet satellite, in early 2019. The new device is designed to “efficiently provide broadband access to unserved and underserved areas throughout the world,” according to an application the social network appears to have filed with the FCC under the name PointView Tech LLC.

With the filing, Facebook joins Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Softbank-backed OneWeb, two well-funded organizations working on similar projects. In fact, SpaceX launched the first two of what it hopes will be thousands of its Starlink satellites just this past February.

The emails, which date back to July 2016, and subsequent confirmation from Facebook, confirm a story published in May by IEEE Spectrum, which used public records to speculate that Facebook had started a satellite internet project.

The new emails detail meetings between FCC officials and lawyers from a firm Facebook appears to have hired, which specializes in representing clients before government agencies. In one exchange from 2016, a lawyer from the firm requests to meet with FCC officials in the Office of Engineering & Technology and the International Bureau Satellite Division to discuss applying for an experimental license to construct and operate a “small LEO [low Earth orbit] satellite system with a limited duration mission.” The emails indicate that Facebook also set up subsequent meetings with the FCC in June and December of 2017.

In another exchange from late April of this year, the same lawyer asks to arrange another meeting to discuss his client’s “small satellite experimental application.” That application was publicly filed with the FCC the next day under the name PointView Tech LLC. In many of the exchanges, nothing directly connects PointView to Facebook. The lawyer mostly refers to his client using that name, rather than the social network’s. But some of the emails contain evidence that PointView is a subsidiary of the tech giant.

In one email from 2016, for example, the same lawyer uses a different company name to refer to his client, FCL Tech, which has been previously identified as a Facebook company. In a separate December 2017 email, the lawyer refers to “FCL Tech/PointView LLC” as though they are the same entity.

Then, in an email from May of this year, the lawyer directly refers to Facebook. In an exchange coordinating a meeting that apparently took place on May 10, the lawyer says four representatives “from Facebook” would be attending. According to their LinkedIn profiles, the individuals named are all employed at the social network as lawyers, policy leads, or engineering heads.

When contacted by WIRED, Facebook confirmed that Athena is their project. “While we have nothing to share about specific projects at this time, we believe satellite technology will be an important enabler of the next generation of broadband infrastructure, making it possible to bring broadband connectivity to rural regions where internet connectivity is lacking or non-existent,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

Facebook’s plan to launch a new internet satellite may sound ambitious, but it’s not out of character. The company has long expressed an interest in connecting the billions of people around the world who lack access to an affordable, quality internet connection, though not always without controversy.

In 2013, the social network announced Internet.org, a grand, multipart initiative designed to connect those without internet access. Its best-known—and most contested—program, Free Basics, offers people in over 60 countries free access to some websites, including Facebook. Critics complained that Free Basics created a two-tiered internet, further exacerbating the digital divide between developed and developing nations. India eventually outlawed the program in 2016.

Another part of Internet.org is the Connectivity Lab, a research group for developing new technology to facilitate internet access, including satellites. The lab launched a satellite designed to provide internet in Africa on a SpaceX rocket in 2016, but the instrument was destroyed when the rocket blew up. That satellite, however, was set to be launched into geosynchronous transfer orbit—much higher than the lower-orbit Athena satellite Facebook is now developing.

Facebook has also spent years working on Aquila, its solar-powered drone designed to beam internet down to Earth. Last month, however, Facebook announced it would no longer build aircraft as part of the project, though continues to develop related tech, like software.

For now, Athena represents just a single research project. But if Facebook were to try building an entire network of satellites in the future, it will likely face numerous challenges. Unlike larger satellites that fly some 22,000 miles above Earth, lower orbit satellites necessitate networks of hundreds or thousands of satellites in order to be effective, which ratchets up the cost.

“The challenge with satellite internet today is really affordability—being cost-competitive with cable or other fiber distribution,” says Kerri Cahoy, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT who studies nanosatellites. She received a research grant from Facebook’s connectivity lab in 2015. “The satellites are one thing that drives the cost, they’re pretty expensive to build.”

Facebook, SpaceX, and others are also far from the first crop of companies to take interest in launching fleets of low Earth orbit internet satellites. In the 1990s, Bill Gates-funded Teledesic attempted the same, but faced setbacks and eventually filed for bankruptcy. Other companies that pursued similar projects, like Iridium and Globalstar, largely faced the same fate.

Another challenge for Facebook and other companies interested in satellite internet will be determining whether the people they’re trying to serve even want to pay for the internet service they’re working to provide. Satellite technology alone won’t help foster digital literacy, or convince people that getting online—or on Facebook—is even a good idea. But it’s certainly a start.
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook...net-satellite/





Full-Fibre Broadband Pledge for New Homes
BBC

Full-fibre broadband should be fitted as standard in all new homes, the government has said.

The proposal comes as part of a new national telecoms strategy drawn up by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

Under its targets, all of the UK will have full-fibre broadband coverage by 2033, replacing the copper wire network that currently delivers the service.

It proposes legislation to encourage more private infrastructure investment.

Earlier this month, research was published indicating that the UK has slipped from 31st to 35th place in the global broadband league tables, behind 25 other European countries.

The data was collected by M-Lab, a partnership between Google Open Source Research and Princeton University's PlantLab, and the results compiled by UK broadband comparison site Cable.

Government statistics suggest only 4% of UK premises have a full-fibre link - compared to 79% in Spain and 95% in Portugal.

'Radical blueprint'

"We want everyone in the UK to benefit from world-class connectivity, no matter where they live, work or travel," said DCMS Secretary Jeremy Wright.

"This radical new blueprint for the future of telecommunications in this country will increase competition and investment in full-fibre broadband, create more commercial opportunities and make it easier and cheaper to roll out infrastructure for 5G."

The DCMS said its plans would "drive competition and commercial investment in full-fibre networks across as much of the UK as possible".

However, it acknowledged that in some parts of the country, it was unlikely that the market could deliver by itself.

As a result, the government would support investment in the most difficult-to-reach areas.

"We have already identified around £200m within the existing Superfast broadband programme that can further the delivery of full-fibre networks immediately," it added.

The chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, Sir John Armitt, welcomed the government's review, which he said echoed his commission's own recommendations.

"As well as broadband, this plan will also leave the UK well-placed to introduce the latest 5G mobile technology," he added

Andrew Ferguson, editor of the Think Broadband site, said the strategy turned visions of full-fibre coverage into "slightly firmer targets".

However, he added, there was one "very important caveat" to the strategy which might slow the take up of full-fibre in the UK.

In nations such as Spain, he said, full-fibre was the first decent broadband people were offered which meant people enthusiastically signed up.

"Getting the UK to upgrade to full-fibre if they are getting decent speeds from a VDSL2 or cable broadband connection may be harder," he said, adding that how the packages were priced would be a factor in adoption.

Future use

Dana Tobak, head of full-fibre ISP Hyperoptic, said "education" would be an important part of the conversion process as installing the technology in homes and business typically involved more work than existing methods that rely on both copper and fibre.

"We do have to appreciate the physical and work element of full-fibre and we have found that consumers do not yet quite understand that," she said.

However, she added, the opportunities for novel uses that full-fibre offered would make it an easier sell to many people.

"It's not just about how fast we can download a movie," said Ms Tobak. "That's just a function of how we use it today.

"This commitment from the government will get people building the applications of tomorrow," she said. "It will fundamentally change lives as we get used to it."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44921764





Massachusetts Just The Latest State To Embrace Net Neutrality
Karl Bode

In the wake of the FCC's historically unpopular decision to gut net neutrality, more than half of the states in the nation are now exploring their own, state-level net neutrality rules. In some instances (Montana) states are signing executive orders that ban state agencies from doing business with ISPs that behave anti-competitively. Elsewhere (Oregon and Washington) states are passing new laws that largely mirror the FCC's discarded 2015 rules, and in some instances (California) are a bit tougher than the FCC on things like usage caps or "zero rating."

This week, Massachusetts began finalizing approval of S2610, which initially proposed doing many of the things other such bills do (banning ISP blocking, throttling, or crippling of competitor services and websites). But the bill has since been notably reworked to instead create a state-wide registry that ranks ISPs based on how terrible their service, pricing, privacy and other behaviors are:

"There shall be an internet service provider registry to make broadband internet access service quality and network management practices readily available to customers in the commonwealth. The department shall compile for the registry information disclosed by internet service providers in the commonwealth pursuant to this section and from the verification tests conducted pursuant to this section. The department shall organize the registry in a format that is conducive to review and comparison by customers and prospective customers of internet service. The registry shall be available on the department’s website and shall include net neutrality and consumer privacy grades under subsection (f) in comparison chart for fixed line internet service providers and 1 comparison chart for wireless internet service providers. The department shall provide the information in the registry upon request."

ISPs that behave would be able to display a Massachusetts seal of approval to, purportedly, clearly advertise that they're not terrible and anti-competitive. Efforts to actually include language preventing things like the blocking and throttling of competitors were supposed to be added via amendment, but were thwarted at the behest of telecom lobbying organizations according to regional news outlets. In conversations with state lawmakers, I've also been told that leaders wanted to tightly restrict the language in the bill to avoid ISP lawsuits, since the FCC's "Restoring Internet Freedom" repeal ironically tries to ban states from protecting consumers (you know, state rights and all that).

Since large ISPs convinced the Trump FCC to neuter not only FCC authority but many of the transparency requirements, having a registry that clearly illustrates what kind of connection you're buying isn't a terrible idea. That said, without any hard restrictions on bad behavior, relying solely on naming and shaming bad policy actors can only go so far. A lack of competition means that users can't switch ISPs anyway, so while transparency is great and all, it alone isn't going to force monopoly last mile broadband providers to magically behave.

As is usually the case, local broadband and TV providers tried to claim that rules actually preventing them from being anti-competitive bullies would hurt jobs, puppies, and innovation:

"Our members support and adhere to the principles of net neutrality every day while employing thousands of Massachusetts residents and investing over a billion dollars annually in the Commonwealth’s economy,” Tim Wilkerson, vice president of the New England Cable & Telecommunications Association, said. “The measure being considered in the Massachusetts Senate will do little to protect consumers while hurting innovation and economic growth."

Even if these claims could be taken seriously, perhaps that's something ISPs should have considered before they lobbied to dismantle popular and relatively modest (by international standards) net neutrality protections on the federal level. ISPs have promised to sue states that try and protect consumers in the wake of federal apathy, but they've yet to actually do so -- in part because they're nervous about looming legal challenges of the FCC repeal.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...utrality.shtml





NY Orders Charter Out of State, Says it Must Sell Time Warner Cable System

After broadband failures, NY gives Charter 60 days to plan for exit from state.
Jon Brodkin

The New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) today voted to revoke its approval of Charter Communications' 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable (TWC). The PSC said it is ordering Charter to sell the former TWC system that it purchased in New York, and it's "bring[ing] an enforcement action in State Supreme Court to seek additional penalties for Charter's past failures and ongoing non-compliance."

Charter has repeatedly failed to meet deadlines for broadband expansions that were required in exchange for merger approval, state officials said. The PSC has steadily increased the pressure on Charter with fines and threats, but Charter never agreed to changes demanded by state officials.

As a result of today's vote, "Charter is ordered to file within 60 days a plan with the Commission to ensure an orderly transition to a successor provider(s)," the PSC's announcement said. "During the transition process, Charter must continue to comply with all local franchises it holds in New York State and all obligations under the Public Service Law and the Commission regulations. Charter must ensure no interruption in service is experienced by customers, and, in the event that Charter does not do so, the Commission will take further steps, including seeking injunctive relief in Supreme Court in order to protect New York consumers."

The commission cited five types of misconduct to support its decision:

• The company's repeated failures to meet deadlines;
• Charter's attempts to skirt obligations to serve rural communities;
• Unsafe practices in the field;
• Its failure to fully commit to its obligations under the 2016 merger agreement; and
• The company's purposeful obfuscation of its performance and compliance obligations to the Commission and its customers.

Charter provides cable TV, Internet, and VoIP phone service to more than two million subscribers in the state. Nationwide, Charter has 26 million customers, and the company would continue to own former Time Warner Cable systems in states besides New York.
The PSC said it concluded that Charter is "not interested in being a good corporate citizen."

“Charter's repeated failures to serve New Yorkers and honor its commitments are well documented and are only getting worse," PSC Chair John Rhodes said. "After more than a year of administrative enforcement efforts to bring Charter into compliance with the Commission’s merger order, the time has come for stronger actions to protect New Yorkers and the public interest."

NY: Charter is lying about deployment

Charter has denied failing to meet obligations to expand broadband service. But as we've previously written, state officials say that Charter is trying to count locations that it was already required to serve as part of franchise agreements toward its merger commitments.

"Despite missing every network expansion target since the merger was approved in 2016, Charter has falsely claimed in advertisements it is exceeding its commitments to the State and is on track to deliver its network expansion," the PSC said today.

Charter also previously disputed the legal force of the merger conditions, saying that the state's powers are limited by federal law and that the state is asking for more than what Charter agreed to.

Charter provided this statement to several media outlets today:

In the weeks leading up to an election, rhetoric often becomes politically charged. But the fact is that Spectrum has extended the reach of our advanced broadband network to more than 86,000 New York homes and businesses since our merger agreement with the PSC. Our 11,000 diverse and locally based workers, who serve millions of customers in the state every day, remain focused on delivering faster and better broadband to more New Yorkers, as we promised.

Charter's statement did not say whether it will appeal the PSC decision, or whether it will comply with the PSC's order to sell the former Time Warner Cable system in New York. We asked Charter those questions today and will update this story if we get a response.

UPDATE: Charter told Ars that it plans to fight the PSC's order to sell the former Time Warner Cable system.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-cable-merger/





AT&T Falls after Missing on Revenue in First Results Since Time Warner Deal Close

• AT&T shares fell more than 2 percent after the telecom company reported mixed second quarter earnings and revenue.
• On the call, Stephenson and fellow executives discussed their strategic vision for combining AT&T and Time Warner, including increased investment in premium programming and direct to consumer products.

Chloe Aiello

AT&T shares fell more than 2 percent, before paring some of those losses, after the telecom company reported mixed second quarter earnings and revenue.

Here’s how the company did compared with what Wall Street expected:

• Earnings: 91 cents per share vs. 85 cents per share expected by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters
• Revenue: $38.99 billion vs. $39.39 billion expected in the Thomson Reuters survey
• Postpaid subscriber net additions were 73,000 in the U.S.
• Linear video subscribers declined 262,000 in the quarter, while AT&T added 342,000 subscribers to its streaming service DirecTV NOW.

Taking into account new assets from the Time Warner acquisition, AT&T raised its full year earnings guidance to the "high end of $3.50 range" versus the $3.40 analysts had estimated.

Despite that AT&T's earnings and full year guidance raise, analysts remained unimpressed. Jonathan Chaplin of New Street Research said the numbers impressed because expectations were low going in.

"There's not one piece of this business that you can look at and say it's doing really well," Chaplin said on CNBC's "Closing Bell."

AT&T has been losing subscribers to its traditional television packages as more consumers cut the cord and opt for cheaper streaming services. Subscriber growth for its DirecTV Now streaming service has continued to help offset declines in satellite subscribers and legacy service revenues. In wireless, both AT&T and Verizon have been losing shares of postpaid subscribers, or customers who pay a monthly bill, to cheaper rivals.

This quarter marks the first financial report since a district judge approved AT&T's highly contested $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner in June. The companies moved quickly to close the deal and begin combining operations but the Justice Department appealed the court's decision, to the surprise of AT&T executives, who expressed their commitment to defending the court's decision and the landmark merger.

AT&T included WarnerMedia, formerly Time Warner, as a separate segment on its second quarter earnings report, noting it contributed revenues of $1.3 billion and operating expenses of $824 million in the 16-day period ending June 30. WarnerMedia includes cable channels, such as CNN and HBO and Warner Bros. film studio.

“We’ve now assembled the key elements of a modern media company. And it all begins with owning a wide array of premium content, because we are absolutely convinced that there is nothing that drives customer engagement like high quality premium content," CEO Randall Stephenson said on a call with investors.

On the call, Stephenson and fellow executives discussed their strategic vision for combining AT&T and Time Warner, a process that began immediately following the deal's closure.

HBO devotees panicked over the fate of their beloved network after the New York Times published some quotes from John Stankey, CEO of AT&T's new WarnerMedia division, from an internal town hall meeting. The quotes suggested the new executive was looking to make HBO more like Netflix in terms of the variety and scope of its content, but on the call, Stankey argued the story didn't "effectively characterize what we are about."

"We have a tremendous amount of great projects already in the funnel that, as the HBO team and Richard would describe it, they have not been in the position to say 'yes' to because of constraints on certain resources. What we are attempting to do is open up those constraints on very high, top quality projects that we think will balance out the schedule so we have a more engaging experience with HBO throughout the course of the year," Stankey said on a call with investors.

Stankey would not reveal exactly how much AT&T would invest into HBO for those purposes, but said the company looks forward to investing some of the efficiencies generated by the merger into direct to consumer products and premium programming.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/23/att-...s-q2-2018.html





Verizon Loses 37,000 Pay TV Subs, Takes Big Charge for Go90 Shutdown
Georg Szalai

The telecom giant takes a pre-tax charge for product realignment of $658 million, "mainly related to the discontinuation of Verizon’s go90 platform and associated content."

Telecom giant Verizon on Tuesday said it lost 37,000 net pay TV subscribers for its Fios video service in the second quarter, compared with a loss of 15,000 in the year-ago period.

The company cited "pressures from cord-cutting of video bundles." Fios competes with cable and satellite TV services.

Its FiOS broadband service added 43,000 subscribers in the latest quarter, compared with 49,000 in the year-ago period.

Verizon late last month said it would shut down its go90 video app less than three years after its launch. The telecom giant will end support of the free, ad-supported app on July 30. "Verizon will focus on building its digital-first brands at scale in sports, finance, news and entertainment for today’s mobile consumers and tomorrow's 5G applications,” the company said at the time.

Verizon on Tuesday took a charge for the go90 closure. Its second-quarter earnings per share came in at $1.00, compared with $1.07 in second-quarter 2017. That included an impact of 21 cents per share from tax reform and accounting changes.

On an adjusted basis, second-quarter earnings reached $1.20, compared with 96 cents in the year-ago period. The adjusted second-quarter earnings included "a pre-tax charge for product realignment of $658 million, mainly related to the discontinuation of Verizon’s go90 platform and associated content, severance charges of $339 million, and acquisition and integration-related charges of $120 million, primarily pertaining to Oath." The net impact of these items, after tax, was approximately $900 million, or 20 cents per share.

The company invested millions to license for go90 live-sports rights and content from dozens of shortform video producers, including AwesomenessTV (which is minority owned by Verizon), NewForm Digital and Funny or Die. But the app was slow to take off with the young audiences it was designed to reach, especially as deep-pocketed players like Netflix and YouTube began to invest more heavily into premium young adult programming. Only a handful of shows broke out, including T@gged from AwesomenessTV and competition series The Runner from executive producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

Partners also became frustrated by the lack of promotional push behind their shows, and talent complained that the app-only experience didn't give them a way to share their work with their large fan bases.Verizon, looking to keep pace with a new wireless generation of cord cutters, has for some time planned to launch a live TV streaming service, but it has seen a series of delays. "We're not looking to launch a me-too product, but certainly expect to have an overall product offering...that will be compelling and meet their needs," CFO Matt Ellis said during an earnings conference call a year ago.

Verizon's Lowell McAdam, who is stepping down from his role as CEO next month to be succeeded by chief technology officer Hans Vestberg and is leaving his post of chairman at the end of the year, said his appearance on Tuesday's call would be his last.

Vestberg on Tuesday mentioned Oath and the broader media business briefly, but focused most of his time discussing the opportunities of 5G, which is the latest, and faster, mobile networks technology.

Management has reiterated several times that Verizon isn't eyeing any major acquisitions of media and content companies to increase its scale.

Ellis earlier this year also touted deals like streaming video agreements for NFL and NBA matches to maintain and grow Verizon's digital distribution partnerships while remaining an independent player without pursuing a major takeover like AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner.

Through Oath, the unit created by merging Yahoo with AOL, Verizon remains in the content business. The division is investing in live-sports mobile rights, reupping its deal with the NFL to stream games across its platforms including Yahoo! Sports.

Oath revenue in the second quarter, excluding the impact of the new revenue recognition standard, came in at $1.9 billion, little changed from the first quarter.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...utdown-1129431





Cord-Cutting Keeps Churning: U.S. Pay-TV Cancelers to Hit 33 Million in 2018 (Study)
Todd Spangler

Have you recently pulled the plug on cable or satellite TV? You’re not alone: Millions of Americans have already scrapped traditional pay-TV service, and the exodus is expected to continue apace in 2018.

This year, the number of cord-cutters in the U.S. — consumers who have ever cancelled traditional pay-TV service and do not resubscribe — will climb 32.8%, to 33.0 million adults, according to new estimates from research firm eMarketer. That’s compared with a total of 24.9 million cord-cutters as of the end of 2017, which was up 43.6% year over year (and an upward revision from eMarketer’s previous 22 million estimate).

That said, even as the traditional pay-TV universe shrinks, the number of viewers accessing over-the-top, internet-delivered video services keeps growing. About 147.5 million people in the U.S. watch Netflix at least once per month, according to eMarketer’s July 2018 estimates. That’s followed by Amazon Prime Video (88.7 million), Hulu (55 million), HBO Now (17.1 million) and Dish’s Sling TV (6.8 million).

Other OTT services have been on the rise, too — including AT&T’s DirecTV Now, Google’s YouTube TV and Sony’s PlayStation Vue — but eMarketer didn’t provide estimates for those.

One of the issues in how eMarketer tracks the pay-TV market is that it’s estimating total number of individual viewers and cord-cutters, rather than households (which is how cable, satellite and telco TV companies report their subscriber figures).

But no matter how you slice it, traditional cable and satellite TV is in decline. Traditional U.S. pay-TV providers saw a record 3.7% drop in 2017, to 94 million households, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Kagan. Overall, 186.7 million U.S. adults will watch traditional pay TV in 2018, down 3.8% from last year, according to eMarketer’s estimates.

The main factor driving away pay-TV customers? The chief culprit continues to be price. The average pay-TV bill in 2017 totaled $100.98 per month, which represents a 5.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2000-17, according to Kagan.

That’s an opportunity for the lower-cost “virtual” pay-TV entrants. Kagan estimates virtual multichannel services will hit nearly $2.82 billion in overall revenue in 2018, rising to more than $7.77 billion by 2022. Among OTT TV services, average revenue per subscriber is roughly one-third of traditional cable TV but Kagan expects virtual pay-TV services to increase average monthly revenue to $37 in 2018 for a 19% year-over-year increase.

About 70% of pay-TV subscribers feel they get too little value for their money, according to Deloitte’s 2018 Digital Media Trends Survey. In addition, about 56% of pay-TV customers say they keep their subscription because it’s bundled with their home broadband internet, per the Deloitte survey.

In other words: Expect the erosion in the legacy pay-television sector to continue, as people flock to cheaper OTT services.

New York-based eMarketer, a division of Axel Springer, bases its forecasts on an aggregation of third-party sources. For the pay-TV/OTT forecast, the sources include data provided by companies directly as well as surveys and studies from more than two dozen sources, including Nielsen, Deloitte, Kagan, GfK, Parks Associates, and MoffettNathanson.
https://variety.com/2018/digital/new...dy-1202881488/





Despite Digital Revolution, Distance Still Matters

Studying more than 51 million tweets of users, researchers found that physical distance still very much matters for human interactions despite the rise of the Internet and digital technologies
San Diego State University

Even when people have well-connected social networks beyond their home cities and across state lines, they are still most frequently interacting with people who are very geographically near.

That is one of the major outcomes of an expansive, 16-month study of more than 51 million geo-tagged tweets generated by more than 1.7 million Twitter users across the U.S. The study was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

San Diego State University professor Ming-Hsiang Tsou and alumnae Su Yeon Han led the collaborative study, also adopt mapping techniques which allowed for visual analysis of the information.

This type of foundational research is part of a growing body of literature and computational modeling efforts using social media and big data to improve measurements and predictions of human behavior.

"You can Skype and Zoom with anyone. People can buy anything they want from Amazon. It doesn't matter the location," said Tsou, founding director of SDSU's Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age.

With the rise of the Internet and the new era of globalization, some have argued that the world is flat - geography is dead.

"But we disagree with that," Tsou said, noting that even with shipments, regional supply still influences availability and expedience of a delivery. "The concept of distance is not dissolved, but it has shifted. Now it is more about probability: What is the likelihood, because of distance, that your followers will be your friends in real life?"

If they do not live very close, highly unlikely, Tsou said.

Collaborating with Keith C. Clarke, a geography professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Han and Tsou published their findings in an article, "Revisiting the Death of Geography in the Era of Big Data: The Friction of Distance in Cyberspace and Real Space." The article recently appeared in the online issue of the International Journal of Digital Earth.

The team collected tweets via the Twitter Streaming API (application programming interface) between November 2015 and January 2016. Identifiable data, such as a person's user name, age, gender and occupation, were not included in the dataset.

The team focused on the online and real space interactions of users in four major cities: Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and New York. Spatial interactions generally include trips, telephone calls and emails, and the team broadened the definition to include any type of connection between places, including people viewing social media messages of those living in other places and "following" others online.

"When we are analyzing social media, or big data, while also handling the geospatial information, we can more precisely analyze data from a regional perspective," Tsou said.

Studying geo-tagged tweets was essential, as social media data became a proxy for human connection and mobility, said Han, the lead author, now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). Han was involved in the study during her time as a post-doctoral researcher at SDSU.

With the massive database of tweets prepared for analysis, the team considered three main issues: how people followed one another, the awareness they had of the cities of their followers and whether they traveled to cities where their followers were located. To compare interactions online versus those in real space, the team studied origins and travel destinations of Twitter users, producing detailed data maps to easily visualize findings.

Of note, the team found that Twitter users averaged 90 percent of their tweets in a single city during the 16-month study period -- most often their home city.

In real space, and despite some variation, the team also found that users in all states tended to follow others and have followers well beyond their immediate geographic region - often nationwide. However, according to the study, people are far less likely to have strong awareness of or even give mention to the cities of their faraway followers.

Regional Interaction

A sizable number of New York, Chicago and Houston users had online connections that were densely consolidated in regions just beyond their own cities, but seldom had real space interactions with people who lived beyond 5 or 6 hours away. For users in those cities, very immediate geographic proximity determined real space interactions with followers; making an hours-long drive to maintain a connection less likely.

"We know that people are communicating much more frequently with nearby people than those who are far away," Han said. "Even in cyberspace, the same thing is very likely to happen because, in many cases, people get to know each other in real space and also communicate with the same people online."

Los Angeles: The Exception

Users in Los Angeles generally had an expanded network of friends nearby while being well-traveled regionally and nationally. However, they did not enjoy the same level of real life interactions with followers in their very immediate vicinity. The researchers attribute that partially to the entertainment industry, where individuals generally follow well-known celebrities and organizations that never follow them in return.

Based on the findings, the team offered an addendum to the Tobler's First Law of Geography advanced by UCSB Professor Emeritus Waldo R. Tobler, who passed in February 2018. Tobler explained that everything is relational, but nearer things are more closely related. The team noted instead: "In both real space and cyberspace, everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related in real space than in cyberspace."

The team's research, Han said, could more readily help determine ways to use social media to identify and address social issues and concerns.

"If you are a public health official who wants to spread information about disease prevention, you will be interested in looking at how far and quickly the information spread among people through social media," Han said. "Also, if you are a political campaigner who wants to spread an election pledge through social media, you will want to see how far and quickly the information spread through people in the social media."
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea...-ddr071718.php





Meet the 11% of Americans Who Don’t Use the Internet

The offline population is bigger than you think it is — and most are getting along just fine without the web
Zachary Crockett

Every morning, Minnie Simpson wakes up at 7:15AM, reads the Houston Chronicle, eats 3 French prunes, and takes a stroll around the neighborhood.

On her route, the 76-year-old Texan passes by the local elementary school just as parents drop off their children for the day, Across the street, Simpson swishes by in a green nylon windbreaker, shaking her head.

“Everyone’s on phones,” she bemoans. “The kids get out of the cars without looking up, no goodbyes. Their eyes are just glued on the phones, watching internet videos — and the parents don’t notice because they’re online too. They’re all plugged in…”

It’s a world Simpson doesn’t understand, and never will: she’s among America’s fading genus of internet non-users.

The offline population

For most of us, it’s hard to imagine life without the internet.

For better or worse, we’ve become hyper-dependent on the digital universe housed in our screens. We use it on a daily basis to communicate with friends, book flights, shop, skim the news, watch movies and television shows, and stay up-to-date on Kim Kardashian’s derrière.

As access to the internet has improved in the past two decades, the offline population has steeply declined: today, only 11% of Americans don’t use the internet, down from 48% in 2000.

According to data compiled by Pew research Center, these folks skew older, more rural, less educated, and lower-income — but they vary widely in their rationale for not adopting the technology.

We spoke to number of them via telephone. Below is a selected of their stories.

* Note: “Mark” (name changed) was concerned about privacy issues, and to interview him, I had to relay questions through his good friend (and email user), Penny Kalgren.

Mark started working on his parent’s West Central Pennsylvania farm at the age of 5. At 18, he finished high school and began his lifelong career as a bulldozer operator.

In his own words, he’s “quite the old fashioned character.” For the duration of his life, he’s lived on the same “hill,” where he’s enjoyed a rustic lifestyle of farming, hunting, and walks in the woods. He’s never used the internet, and never will.

“When the internet came out, my first thought was, ‘This is going to be the ruination of our society,’” he says. “I didn’t want a thing to do with it then, and those same ideas still hold true today. I believe it makes people lazy and they became dependent on everything except actually using their own mind.”

Part of this stems from several exceptionally bad experiences with technology: His first wife used the internet to “find other men to occupy her time;” his second wife used it to open a credit card online, electronically sign his name, and rack up $10k in debt — all unbeknownst to him, since he didn’t have a computer.

But aside from these bad experiences, Mark simply isn’t interested in being exposed to a digital world he perceives to be morally corrupt.

“The internet probably isn’t bad by itself,” he admits. “But people ruin the internet. When you put evil people on the same platform as the rest of society, they take over… that’s why we have children with access to porn, and why identity theft is an out of control epidemic.”

He uses his 11-year-old flip phone to stay in touch with close friends.

“He’s innocent, honest,” says one such friend, Penny Kalgren. “He knows only what his co-workers and neighbors share with him… he doesn’t have the world’s opinions at his fingertips like the rest of us.”

“I have no idea what happens on the internet — no idea what the hell ya’ll do,” Evans tells me over the phone. “And frankly, I don’t give a damn. How’s that?”

Evans, the grandmother of our esteemed intern, Kyle, has not once used the internet in her 80 years, and offers a variety of reasons for her decision:

“I’m too old to get involved in something new.”
“It’s an invasion of privacy.”
“It’s too impersonal… It’s a machine that doesn’t involve human to human contact.”
“I like to stick with my old ways. Not because I’m stubborn — I just like it that way.”

Despite the constant lampooning of family members spread across 4 states, Evans has refused to adapt to the internet. But it hasn’t stopped her from communicating: she regularly calls her loved ones on a landline, and sends them letters in the mail.

Evans comes from a lineage of proud non-adopters of tech, and fancies keeping things that way. “My parents were the last on the block to get a TV,” she says, “and it was only because my mother had a crush on President Eisenhower and needed to see him.”

“If if doesn’t involve man-to-man communications, or something physical — a cocktail, a pen, a piece of paper — I don’t want any part of it,” she reasons. “Sitting around and pushing a bunch of buttons is not a very personal relationship, in my opinion.”

Nothing pushes her buttons more than going out to dinner and seeing couples hunched over their screens. “Young people — my stars!” she adds. “What’s the point in going out with your friend, if you’re on a machine the whole time?”

Still, Evans cedes that there is probably more to the internet than she wants to admit.

“I know that i’m cheating myself by not availing myself of the knowledge of that machine,” she says. “But I’m also very satisfied with the way I do things.”

Before ending our call, Evans makes me promise to tell her grandson to print out a hard copy of this article and mail it to her in physical form.

Minnie Simpson (76 years old; Northern Texas)

Born in Arkansas 2 weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Simpson later embarked on a 30-year career in secretarial work.

Despite being around some of the earliest computers, and continually adapting to technological changes in her early age, she was weary by the time the internet came around.

“We bought the first family computer in 1998, and the kids would sit around all day, tinkering on the internet,” she says. “I watched them go from playing outside with friends, riding bikes, talking to each other, to being obsessed with the machine. It was like a switch flipped in their heads.”

While her children and husband became accustomed to the internet, Simpson brushed it off as an “unnecessary evil.” Aside from an unfruitful and frustrating attempt to find a local plumber using Ask Jeeves 19 years ago, she’s completely refrained from logging online.

How does she get by?

“It’s really not that difficult,” she says. “I don’t need to see a picture of my brother’s parakeet on Facebook. I don’t need to buy a shirt on ‘the Google,’ or whatnot. I don’t need to be aware of things instantly… I have no need for the internet in my life.”

For some, staying offline is a lifestyle choice — but for 6% of non-users, it isn’t.

Nationally, 11% of Americans don’t use the internet — but this figure jumps to 19% for those making under $30k per year, and as high as 35% for those with less than a high school degree.

In the Bronx, New York, residents line up every morning to make use of the public library’s free Wi-Fi. With broadband rates averaging $55 per month, the internet isn’t a luxury everyone can afford: some 25% of the city’s households don’t have access.

Rafael Santos, a construction worker and father of a newborn, has been online a handful of times in the past decade, but the internet remains a foreign world to him.

“Friends use the internet to practice English, look for jobs, and say hello to family members,” he tells me, in Spanish. “I could use the internet to learn and be better, but I don’t have time.”

More often than not, Santos’s work hours don’t align with the library’s, and home access is a financial burden he can’t justify. Recently, he considered purchasing his first smartphone (equipped with internet and a data plan), but decided against it.

“Diapers are more important than internet,” he says.

The last of the digital detractors

The stories here represent only a small sample of Americans who don’t use the internet, and the reasons why.

Data tells us that the majority of non-users are elderly, but this shouldn’t endorse the trope that old people are technologically challenged. There is certainly no dearth of octogenarian techies, like my grandfather, who was the first in line to buy a PalmPilot in 1997 and has been at least 3 steps ahead of me on the gadget front ever since.

In fact, 51% of of 65+ citizens have broadband internet at home, and 34% are active on social media. In case you need an uplifting anecdotal addition to this, two of the world’s oldest men — Walter Breuning (114), and Alexander Imich (111) — were reportedly frequent and adept internet users until they died.

And though some of the rationales the folks we interviewed seem a bit like stubborn rants, they do have merit: the internet has negatively effects on face-to-face communication, creativity, attention span, social anxiety, and depression — and in light of recent scandals like Cambridge Analytica, data and privacy concerns are certainly valid.

Regardless, it is projected that more than 95% of America — and more than half the world’s population — will be online by 2030.

And someday, in the distant future, when the world is a digital, hyper-connected cosm, a cyborg historian will look back fondly at folks like Anne Evans and conclude, with computed certainty, that they were the last of the digital detractors.
https://thehustle.co/meet-the-11-of-...-the-internet/





A Teen Allegedly Broke Into a Couple’s Home. He Asked them for the WiFi Password, Police Say.
Lindsey Bever

A 17-year-old has been accused of breaking into a couple’s home in Northern California and asking for their WiFi password, hours after he had asked nearby neighbors for theirs, authorities said.

Police in Palo Alto said the teen, whose name has not been released, went to a home in Silicon Valley late Saturday and asked to use the residents’ WiFi network “because he was out of data,” before stealing their bicycle.

Then just after midnight Sunday, police said, he broke into a nearby home, woke up a sleeping couple and asked them for their password. The male resident “pushed him down the hallway and out the front door of the house before calling police,” police said in a statement.

Palo Alto Police Sgt. Dan Pojanamat told The Washington Post on Friday that it’s unclear whether the juvenile suspect was really seeking WiFi access or whether it was simply an excuse, saying that “the real issue is the fact that he entered a house that was occupied.”

The suspect was arrested on charges of residential burglary, prowling and providing false information to an officer, according to the police statement. (Authorities said the teen had lied to officers about his identity during the arrest). A spokesman with the district attorney’s office said he could not comment on the case because it involves a juvenile.

Police responded to a call early Sunday from the couple, who are in their 60s, reporting that “they had just awakened to a stranger in the bedroom of their home,” police said in the statement. Police said the suspect broke into the home by slicing through a window screen. Officers arrested the teenager not far from the house on East Charleston Road.

“He had a black T-shirt wrapped around the back of his neck under his sweatshirt,” police said. “Officers believe that was what had been covering his face during the burglary.”

Later Sunday afternoon, police received a call from the residents who said the suspect had asked for their WiFi on Saturday night and then stolen the bicycle. Police said in the statement that a woman who lived in the home had seen the teen outside her bedroom window, “motioning that he wanted to talk to her.” Police said surveillance video showed that he had moved the bicycle from their backyard to their front yard before asking for their password. When the residents told him to leave, police said, he rode away on it.

Fun fact: The city of Palo Alto offers free WiFi to residents and visitors.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...rd-police-say/





A New Digital Divide: Young People Who Can’t Use Keyboards
Toshihiko Katsuda

“How do I double click?” “What is a cell in a spreadsheet?”

Mashiko Ishii often hears that her fellow lecturers at Uchida Human Resources Development Center become confused when they are asked such basic questions during training for new employees of IT companies.

Pressing the button of a computer mouse twice and knowing the basic unit for data input in spreadsheets are some of the fundamentals of using a computer, but it is not uncommon for even would-be system engineers to ask such questions.

The reason is clear. As smartphones have become extremely convenient, a growing number of students have never laid their hands on a personal computer.

Lecturers who work with Ishii often start training by teaching students how to use a keyboard.

“We need to teach them the basics before we start classes,” Ishii says.

Younger generations often become underdogs in offices if they are unable to handle the technical requirements for their jobs.

Yoshiaki Hashimoto, a professor of information socio-psychology at the University of Tokyo’s graduate school, is worried that “a new digital divide is being born.”

According to analysis by Hashimoto and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the Internet usage rate with smartphones and mobile devices was more than 80 percent among the demographic aged 10-19 from 2012 to 2016, but the proportion of those who used personal computers plummeted from 76 percent to 56 percent over the same period.

Given that they can write and submit their school reports with smartphones, they are not outsiders to the world of the Internet. However, much of this does not align with the knowledge necessary to work in their future jobs.

The digital divide often refers to elderly people who are unfamiliar with IT equipment, but it seems that this phenomenon is also beginning to affect Japan’s youth.

The digital divide has not been resolved for the aging population. According to Hashimoto, although the Internet usage rate rose to 88 percent in 2016 among those in their 60s, the ratio of those visiting websites was only 60 percent.

It seems that there are many elderly people who cannot gather information they need, even though they can send e-mails on cellphones.

I covered a Japan-Germany symposium on digital society in Berlin in February.

Lena-Sophie Mueller, of the German nonprofit Initiative D21, pointed out: “Timetables (for railways) are no longer available in paper form. More and more services are based on the Internet and without access, those on the other side of the Internet are excluded from social participation.”

While the digitization of society makes our lives more convenient, it shows that there are still weaknesses in our system and that the benefits do not extend to everyone.

It’s a good reminder to think again that we need to keep our eye on technology’s limits and to consider what we can do to fix them.
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201803290068.html





The Tech Industry’s Psychological War on Kids
Adam Curry

“ W e called the police because she wrecked her room and hit her mom… all because we took her phone,” Kelly’s father explained. He said that when the police arrived that evening, Kelly was distraught and told an officer that she wanted to kill herself. So an ambulance was called, and the 15-year-old was strapped to a gurney, taken to a psychiatric hospital, and monitored for safety before being released. Days after being hospitalized, Kelly was brought to my office by her parents who wanted to get help for their troubled girl.

Kelly’s parents spoke first. They said that their daughter’s hospitalization was the culmination of a yearlong downward spiral spurred by her phone obsession. Kelly had been refusing to spend time with her family or focus on school. Instead, she favored living her life on social media. A previously happy girl and strong student, Kelly had grown angry, sullen, and was now bringing home report cards with sinking grades. Kelly’s parents had tried many times in prior months to set limits on their daughter’s phone use, but she had become increasingly defiant and deceitful, even sneaking on her phone at all hours of the night.

When Kelly’s latest report card revealed a number of failing grades, her parents felt compelled to act. They told Kelly early in the afternoon on the day the police were called that she would need to turn in her phone by 9 p.m. But when the time came, Kelly refused, and a pushing match ensued between her and her parents, concluding in the violent tantrum that led the girl to be hospitalized.

I asked Kelly, who was sitting in a corner, to help me understand her perspective on that evening. She didn’t respond and instead glared at her parents. But then, surprising everyone in the room, she cried, “They took my f***ing phone!” Attempting to engage Kelly in conversation, I asked her what she liked about her phone and social media. “They make me happy,” she replied.

The Undoing of Families

As Kelly and her family continued their appointments with me in the coming months, two concerns dominated our meetings. The first was that Kelly’s unhealthy attachment to her phone continued, causing almost constant tension at home. The second concern emerged during my meetings with Kelly’s parents alone. Even though they were loving and involved parents, Kelly’s mom couldn’t help feeling that they’d failed their daughter and must have done something terribly wrong that led to her problems.

My practice as a child and adolescent psychologist is filled with families like Kelly’s. These parents say their kids’ extreme overuse of phones, video games, and social media is the most difficult parenting issue they face — and, in many cases, is tearing the family apart. Preteen and teen girls refuse to get off their phones, even though it’s remarkably clear that the devices are making them miserable. I also see far too many boys whose gaming obsessions lead them to forgo interest in school, extracurricular activities, and anything else productive. Some of these boys, as they reach their later teens, use their large bodies to terrorize parents who attempt to set gaming limits. A common thread running through many of these cases is parent guilt, as so many are certain they did something to put their kids on a destructive path.

What none of these parents understand is that their children’s and teens’ destructive obsession with technology is the predictable consequence of a virtually unrecognized merger between the tech industry and psychology. This alliance pairs the consumer tech industry’s immense wealth with the most sophisticated psychological research, making it possible to develop social media, video games, and phones with drug-like power to seduce young users.

These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit. What these parents and most of the world have yet to grasp is that psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.

“Machines Designed to Change Humans”

Nestled in an unremarkable building on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California, is the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, founded in 1998. The lab’s creator, Dr. B.J. Fogg, is a psychologist and the father of persuasive technology, a discipline in which digital machines and apps — including smartphones, social media, and video games — are configured to alter human thoughts and behaviors. As the lab’s website boldly proclaims: “Machines designed to change humans.”

Fogg speaks openly of the ability to use smartphones and other digital devices to change our ideas and actions: “We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do, and the machines can do that autonomously.” Called “the millionaire maker,” Fogg has groomed former students who have used his methods to develop technologies that now consume kids’ lives. As he recently touted on his personal website, “My students often do groundbreaking projects, and they continue having impact in the real world after they leave Stanford… For example, Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people. The co-founder was a student of mine.”

Intriguingly, there are signs that Fogg is feeling the heat from recent scrutiny of the use of digital devices to alter behavior. His boast about Instagram, which was present on his website as late as January of 2018, has been removed. Fogg’s website also has lately undergone a substantial makeover, as he now seems to go out of his way to suggest his work has benevolent aims, commenting, “I teach good people how behavior works so they can create products & services that benefit everyday people around the world.” Likewise, the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab website optimistically claims, “Persuasive technologies can bring about positive changes in many domains, including health, business, safety, and education. We also believe that new advances in technology can help promote world peace in 30 years.”

While Fogg emphasizes persuasive design’s sunny future, he is quite indifferent to the disturbing reality now: that hidden influence techniques are being used by the tech industry to hook and exploit users for profit. His enthusiastic vision also conveniently neglects to include how this generation of children and teens, with their highly malleable minds, is being manipulated and hurt by forces unseen.

Weaponizing Persuasion

If you haven’t heard of persuasive technology, that’s no accident — tech corporations would prefer it to remain in the shadows, as most of us don’t want to be controlled and have a special aversion to kids being manipulated for profit. Persuasive technology (also called persuasive design) works by deliberately creating digital environments that users feel fulfill their basic human drives — to be social or obtain goals — better than real-world alternatives. Kids spend countless hours in social media and video game environments in pursuit of likes, “friends,” game points, and levels — because it’s stimulating, they believe that this makes them happy and successful, and they find it easier than doing the difficult but developmentally important activities of childhood.

While persuasion techniques work well on adults, they are particularly effective at influencing the still-maturing child and teen brain. “Video games, better than anything else in our culture, deliver rewards to people, especially teenage boys,” says Fogg. “Teenage boys are wired to seek competency. To master our world and get better at stuff. Video games, in dishing out rewards, can convey to people that their competency is growing, you can get better at something second by second.” And it’s persuasive design that’s helped convince this generation of boys they are gaining “competency” by spending countless hours on game sites, when the sad reality is they are locked away in their rooms gaming, ignoring school, and not developing the real-world competencies that colleges and employers demand.

Likewise, social media companies use persuasive design to prey on the age-appropriate desire for preteen and teen kids, especially girls, to be socially successful. This drive is built into our DNA, since real-world relational skills have fostered human evolution. The Huffington Postarticle, “What Really Happens On a Teen Girl’s iPhone” describes the life of 14-year-old Casey from Millburn, New Jersey. With 580 friends on Instagram and 1,110 on Facebook, she’s preoccupied with the number of “likes” her Facebook profile picture receives compared with her peers. As she says, “If you don’t get 100 ‘likes,’ you make other people share it so you get 100…. Or else you just get upset. Everyone wants to get the most ‘likes.’ It’s like a popularity contest.”

Article author Bianca Bosker says that there are costs to Casey’s phone obsession, noting that the “girl’s phone, be it Facebook, Instagram or iMessage, is constantly pulling her away from her homework, sleep, or conversations with her family.” Casey says she wishes she could put her phone down. But she can’t. “I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just… because,” she says. “It’s not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life.”
Important Questions Are Simply Not Asked

B.J. Fogg may not be a household name, but Fortune Magazine calls him a “New Guru You Should Know,” and his research is driving a worldwide legion of user experience (UX) designers who utilize and expand upon his models of persuasive design. As Forbes Magazine writer Anthony Wing Kosner notes, “No one has perhaps been as influential on the current generation of user experience (UX) designers as Stanford researcher B.J. Fogg.”

UX designers come from many disciplines, including psychology as well as brain and computer sciences. However, the core of UX research is about using psychology to take advantage of our human vulnerabilities. That’s particularly pernicious when the targets are children. As Fogg is quoted in Kosner’s Forbes article, “Facebook, Twitter, Google, you name it, these companies have been using computers to influence our behavior.” However, the driving force behind behavior change isn’t computers. “The missing link isn’t the technology, it’s psychology,” says Fogg.

UX researchers not only follow Fogg’s design model, but also his apparent tendency to overlook the broader implications of persuasive design. They focus on the task at hand, building digital machines and apps that better demand users’ attention, compel users to return again and again, and grow businesses’ bottom line. Less considered is how the world’s children are affected by thousands of UX designers working simultaneously to pull them onto a multitude of digital devices and products at the expense of real life.

According to B.J. Fogg, the “Fogg Behavior Model” is a well-tested method to change behavior and, in its simplified form, involves three primary factors: motivation, ability, and triggers. Describing how his formula is effective at getting people to use a social network, the psychologist says in an academic paper that a key motivator is users’ desire for “social acceptance,” although he says an even more powerful motivator is the desire “to avoid being socially rejected.” Regarding ability, Fogg suggests that digital products should be made so that users don’t have to “think hard.” Hence, social networks are designed for ease of use. Finally, Fogg says that potential users need to be triggered to use a site. This is accomplished by a myriad of digital tricks, including the sending of incessant notifications urging users to view friends’ pictures, telling them they are missing out while not on the social network, or suggesting that they check — yet again — to see if anyone liked their post or photo.

Fogg’s formula is the blueprint for building multibillion dollar social media and gaming companies. However, moral questions about the impact of turning persuasive techniques on children and teens are not being asked. For example, should the fear of social rejection be used to compel kids to compulsively use social media? Is it okay to lure kids away from school tasks that demand a strong mental effort so they can spend their lives on social networks or playing video games that don’t make them think much at all? And is it okay to incessantly trigger kids to use revenue-producing digital products at the expense of engaging with family and other important real-life activities?

Brain Hacking

Persuasive technologies work because of their apparent triggering of the release of dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter involved in reward, attention, and addiction. In the Venice region of Los Angeles, now dubbed “Silicon Beach,” the startup Dopamine Labs boasts about its use of persuasive techniques to increase profits: “Connect your app to our Persuasive AI [Artificial Intelligence] and lift your engagement and revenue up to 30% by giving your users our perfect bursts of dopamine,” and “A burst of Dopamine doesn’t just feel good: it’s proven to re-wire user behavior and habits.”

Ramsay Brown, the founder of Dopamine Labs, says in a KQED Science article, “We have now developed a rigorous technology of the human mind, and that is both exciting and terrifying. We have the ability to twiddle some knobs in a machine learning dashboard we build, and around the world hundreds of thousands of people are going to quietly change their behavior in ways that, unbeknownst to them, feel second-nature but are really by design.” Programmers call this “brain hacking,” as it compels users to spend more time on sites even though they mistakenly believe it’s strictly due to their own conscious choices.

Social networks and video games use the trusted brain-manipulation technique of variable reward (think slot machine). Users never know when they will get the next “like” or game reward, and it’s delivered at the perfect time to foster maximal stimulation and keep them on the site. Banks of computers employ AI to “learn” which of a countless number of persuasive design elements will keep users hooked. A persuasion profile of a particular user’s unique vulnerabilities is developed in real time and exploited to keep users on the site and make them return again and again for longer periods of time. This drives up profits for consumer internet companies whose revenue is based on how much their products are used.

Clandestine techniques that manipulate users to fulfill a profit motive are regarded by programmers as “dark design.” Why would firms resort to such tactics? As former tech executive Bill Davidow says in his Atlanticarticle “Exploiting the Neuroscience of Internet Addiction,” “The leaders of Internet companies face an interesting, if also morally questionable, imperative: either they hijack neuroscience to gain market share and make large profits, or they let competitors do that and run away with the market.”

There are few industries as cutthroat and unregulated as Silicon Valley. Social media and video game companies believe they are compelled to use persuasive technology in the arms race for attention, profits, and survival. Children’s well-being is not part of the decision calculus.

A Peek Behind the Curtain

While social media and video game companies have been surprisingly successful at hiding their use of persuasive design from the public, one breakthrough occurred in 2017 when Facebook documents were leaked to The Australian. The internal report crafted by Facebook executives showed the social network boasting to advertisers that by monitoring posts, interactions, and photos in real time, the network is able to track when teens feel “insecure,” “worthless,” “stressed,” “useless” and a “failure.” Why would the social network do this? The report also bragged about Facebook’s ability to micro-target ads down to “moments when young people need a confidence boost.”

Persuasive technology’s use of digital media to target children, deploying the weapon of psychological manipulation at just the right moment, is what makes it so powerful. These design techniques provide tech corporations a window into kids’ hearts and minds to measure their particular vulnerabilities, which can then be used to control their behavior as consumers. This isn’t some strange future… this is now. Facebook claimed the leaked report was misrepresented in the press. But when child advocates called on the social network to release it, the company refused to do so, preferring to keep the techniques it uses to influence kids shrouded in secrecy.

Digital Pied Pipers

The official tech industry line is that persuasive technologies are used to make products more engaging and enjoyable. But the revelations of industry insiders can reveal darker motives. Video game developer John Hopson, who has a Ph.D. in behavioral and brain science, wrote the paper “Behavioral Game Design.” He describes the use of design features to alter video game player behavior, sounding much like an experimenter running lab animals through their paces, answering questions such as: “How do we make players maintain a high, consistent rate of activity?” and “How to make players play forever.”

Revealing the hard science behind persuasive technology, Hopson says, “This is not to say that players are the same as rats, but that there are general rules of learning which apply equally to both.” After penning the paper, Hopson was hired by Microsoft, where he helped lead the development of the Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming system. He also assisted in the development of Xbox games popular with kids, including those in the Halo series. The parents I work with simply have no idea about the immense amount of financial and psychological firepower aimed at their children to keep them playing video games “forever.”

Another persuasive technology expert is Bill Fulton, a game designer who trained in cognitive and quantitative psychology. He started Microsoft’s Games User-Research group before founding his own consulting agency. Fulton is transparent about the power of persuasive design and the intent of the gaming industry, disclosing in Big Four Accounting Firm PwC’s tech business journal: “If game designers are going to pull a person away from every other voluntary social activity or hobby or pastime, they’re going to have to engage that person at a very deep level in every possible way they can.”

This is the dominant effect of persuasive design today: building video games and social media products so compelling that they pull users away from the real world to spend their lives in for-profit domains. But to engage in a pursuit at the expense of important real-world activities is a core element of addiction. And there is increasing evidence that persuasive design has now become so potent that it is capable of contributing to video game and internet addictions — diagnoses that are officially recognized in China, South Korea, and Japan, and which are under consideration in the U.S.

Not only does persuasive design appear to drive kids’ addictions to devices, but knowledge of addiction is used to make persuasive design more effective at hijacking the mind. As Dopamine Labs’ Ramsay Brown acknowledges in an episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes, “Since we’ve figured to some extent how these pieces of the brain that handle addiction are working, people have figured out how to juice them further and how to bake that information into apps.”

Stealing from Childhood

The creation of digital products with drug-like effects that are able to “pull a person away” from engaging in real-life activities is the reason why persuasive technology is profoundly destructive. Today, persuasive design is likely distracting adults from driving safely, productive work, and engaging with their own children — all matters which need urgent attention. Still, because the child and adolescent brain is more easily controlled than the adult mind, the use of persuasive design is having a much more hurtful impact on kids.

Persuasive technologies are reshaping childhood, luring kids away from family and schoolwork to spend more and more of their lives sitting before screens and phones. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation report, younger U.S. children now spend 5 ½ hours each day with entertainment technologies, including video games, social media, and online videos. Even more, the average teen now spends an incredible 8 hours each day playing with screens and phones. Productive uses of technology — where persuasive design is much less a factor — are almost an afterthought, as U.S. kids only spend 16 minutes each day using the computer at home for school.

Quietly, using screens and phones for entertainment has become the dominant activity of childhood. Younger kids spend more time engaging with entertainment screens than they do in school, and teens spend even more time playing with screens and phones than they do sleeping. The result is apparent in restaurants, the car sitting next to you at the stoplight, and even many classrooms: Attesting to the success of persuasive technology, kids are so taken with their phones and other devices that they have turned their backs to the world around them. Hiding in bedrooms on devices, or consumed by their phones in the presence of family, many children are missing out on real-life engagement with family and school — the two cornerstones of childhood that lead them to grow up happy and successful. Even during the few moments kids have away from their devices, they are often preoccupied with one thought: getting back on them.

In addition to the displacement of healthy childhood activities, persuasive technologies are pulling kids into often toxic digital environments. A too frequent experience for many is being cyberbullied, which increases their risk of skipping school and considering suicide. And there is growing recognition of the negative impact of FOMO, or the fear of missing out, as kids spend their social media lives watching a parade of peers who look to be having a great time without them, feeding their feelings of loneliness and being less than.

A Wired Generation Falling Apart

The combined effects of the displacement of vital childhood activities and exposure to unhealthy online environments is wrecking a generation. In her recent Atlanticarticle, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?,” Dr. Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, describes how long hours spent on smartphones and social media are driving teen girls in the U.S. to experience high rates of depression and suicidal behaviors.

And as the typical age when kids get their first smartphone has fallen to 10, it’s no surprise to see serious psychiatric problems — once the domain of teens — now enveloping young kids. Self-inflicted injuries, such as cutting, that are serious enough to require treatment in an emergency room, have increased dramatically in 10- to 14-year-old girls, up 19% per year since 2009.

While girls are pulled onto smartphones and social media, boys are more likely to be seduced into the world of video gaming, often at the expense of a focus on school. High amounts of gaming are linked to lower grades, so with boys gaming more than girls, it’s no surprise to see this generation of boys struggling to make it to college: a full 57% of college admissions are granted to young women compared with only 43% to young men. And, as boys transition to manhood, they can’t shake their gaming habits. Economists working with the National Bureau of Economic Research recently demonstrated how many young U.S. men are choosing to play video games rather than join the workforce.

As a child and adolescent psychologist myself, the inevitable conclusion is both embarrassing and heartbreaking. The destructive forces of psychology deployed by the tech industry are making a greater impact on kids than the positive uses of psychology by mental health providers and child advocates. Put plainly, the science of psychology is hurting kids more than helping them.

The Awakening

Hope for this wired generation has seemed dim until recently, when a surprising group has come forward to criticize the tech industry’s use of psychological manipulation: tech executives. Tristan Harris, formerly a design ethicist at Google, has led the way by unmasking the industry’s use of persuasive design. Interviewed in The Economist’s 1843 magazine, he says, “The job of these companies is to hook people, and they do that by hijacking our psychological vulnerabilities.”

Another tech exec raising red flags about his tech industry’s use of mind manipulation is former Facebook president Sean Parker. Interviewed in Axios, he discloses: “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them… was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” He also said that Facebook exploits “vulnerability in human psychology” and remarked, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

A theme advanced by these tech execs is that the industry is unfairly using persuasive technology to gain a profit advantage. “Consumer internet businesses are about exploiting psychology,” Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook VP says in a talk ironically given at B.J. Fogg’s Stanford University. “We want to psychologically figure out how to manipulate you as fast as possible and then give you back that dopamine hit.”

Having children of their own can change tech execs’ perspective. Tony Fadell, formerly at Apple, is considered the father of the iPad and also of much of the iPhone. He is also the founder and current CEO of Nest. “A lot of the designers and coders who were in their 20s when we were creating these things didn’t have kids. Now they have kids,” Fadell remarks, while speaking at the Design Museum in London. “And they see what’s going on, and they say, ‘Wait a second.’ And they start to rethink their design decisions.”

Marc Benioff, CEO of the cloud computing company Salesforce, is one of the voices calling for the regulation of social media companies because of their potential to addict children. He says that just as the cigarette industry has been regulated, so too should social media companies. “I think that, for sure, technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and that product designers are working to make those products more addictive, and we need to rein that back as much as possible,” Benioff told CNBC in January, 2018, while in Davos, Switzerland, site of the World Economic Forum.

Benioff says that parents should do their part to limit their kids’ devices, yet expressed, “If there’s an unfair advantage or things that are out there that are not understood by parents, then the government’s got to come forward and illuminate that.” Since millions of parents, for example the parents of my patient Kelly, have absolutely no idea that devices are used to hijack their children’s minds and lives, regulation of such practices is the right thing to do.

Another improbable group to speak out on behalf of children is tech investors. Major Apple stockholders — the hedge fund Jana Partners and California State Teachers’ Retirement System, which collectively own $2 billion in the firm’s stock — have recently raised concerns that persuasive design is contributing to kids’ suffering. In an open letter to Apple, the investors, teaming up with leading child technology experts, detailed evidence that kids’ overuse of phones and devices is leading to their increased risk of depression and suicide risk factors. Specifically calling out the destructive impact of persuasive technology, the letter reads: “It is also no secret that social media sites and applications for which the iPhone and iPad are a primary gateway are usually designed to be as addictive and time-consuming as possible.”

Going Lower

How has the consumer tech industry responded to these calls for change? By going even lower. Facebook recently launched Messenger Kids, a social media app that will reach kids as young as five years old. Suggestive that harmful persuasive design is now honing in on very young children is the declaration of Messenger Kids Art Director, Shiu Pei Luu, “We want to help foster communication [on Facebook] and make that the most exciting thing you want to be doing.”

Facebook’s narrow-minded vision of childhood is reflective of how out of touch the social network and other consumer tech companies are with the needs of an increasingly troubled generation. The most “exciting thing” for young children should be spending time with family, playing outside, engaging in creative play, and other vital developmental experiences — not being drawn into the social media vortex on phones or tablets. Moreover, Facebook Messenger Kids is giving an early start to the wired life on social media that we know poses risks of depression and suicide-related behavior for older children.

In response to the release of Facebook’s Messenger Kids, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) sent Facebook a letter signed by numerous health advocates calling on the company to pull the plug on the app. Facebook has yet to respond to the letter and instead continues to aggressively market Messenger Kids for young children.

The Silence of a Profession

While tech execs and investors are speaking out against the tech industry’s psychological manipulation of children, the American Psychological Association (APA) — which is tasked with protecting children and families from harmful psychological practices — has been essentially silent on the matter. This is not suggestive of malice; instead, the APA leadership — much like parents — is likely unaware of the tech industry’s distorted use of psychology. Nonetheless, there is irony, as psychologists and their powerful tools are guided by ethics, while tech execs and investors are not.

The Ethics Code of the APA, U.S psychology’s chief professional organization, is quite clear: “Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.” Moreover, APA Ethical Standards require the profession to make efforts to correct the “misuse” of the work of psychologists, which would include the application of B.J. Fogg’s persuasive technologies to influence children against their best interests. The code even provides special protection to kids because their developmental “vulnerabilities impair autonomous decision making.”

Manipulating children for profit without their own or parents’ consent, and driving kids to spend more time on devices that contribute to emotional and academic problems is the embodiment of unethical psychological practice. Silicon Valley corporations and the investment firms that support them are heavily populated by highly privileged white men who use concealed mind-bending techniques to control the lives of defenseless kids. Addressing this inequity is Tristan Harris, who says, “Never before in history have basically 50 mostly men, mostly 20–35, mostly white engineer designer types within 50 miles of where we are right now [Silicon Valley], had control of what a billion people think and do.” Harris was recounting an excerpt of a presentation he made while at Google during an interview with journalist Kara Swisher for Recode Decode in February of 2017.

Some may argue that it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect their children from tech industry deception. However, parents have no idea of the powerful forces aligned against them, nor do they know how technologies are developed with drug-like effects to capture kids’ minds. Parents simply can’t protect their children or teens from something that’s concealed and unknown to them.

Others will claim that nothing should be done because the intention behind persuasive design is to build better products, not manipulate kids. In fact, for those working in the user experience and persuasion fields, I’m sure there is no intent to harm children. The negative consequences of persuasive technology have been for the most part accidental, an unfortunate byproduct of an exceptionally competitive design process. However, similar circumstances exist in the cigarette industry, as tobacco companies have as their intention profiting from the sale of their product, not hurting children. Nonetheless, because cigarettes and persuasive design predictably harm children, actions should be taken to protect kids from their effects.
A Conscience in an Age of Machines

Since its inception, the field of persuasive technology has operated in a moral vacuum. The resulting tragedy is not surprising.

In truth, the harmful potential of using persuasive design has long been recognized. Fogg, himself, says in a 1999 journal article, “Persuasive computers can also be used for destructive purposes; the dark side of changing attitudes and behaviors leads toward manipulation and coercion.” And in a 1998 academic paper, Fogg describes what should happen if things go wrong, saying, if persuasive technologies are “deemed harmful or questionable in some regard, a researcher should then either take social action or advocate that others do so.”

More recently, Fogg has actually acknowledged the ill effects of persuasive design. Interviewed by Ian Leslie in 2016 for The Economist’s 1843 Magazine, Fogg says, “I look at some of my former students and I wonder if they’re really trying to make the world better, or just make money.” And in 2017 when Fogg was interviewed by 032c Magazine, he acknowledged, “You look around the restaurants and pretty much everyone has their phone on the table and they’re just being constantly drawn away from the live face-to-face interaction — I do think that’s a bad thing.” Nonetheless, Fogg hasn’t taken meaningful action to help those hurt by the field he fathered. Nor have those in positions of power, with the recent exception of tech execs coming forward, done anything to limit the manipulative and coercive use of digital machines against children and teens.

So, how can children be protected from the tech industry’s use of persuasive design? I suggest turning to President John F. Kennedy’s prescient guidance: He said that technology “has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man.” I believe that the psychology profession, with its understanding of the mind and ethics code as guidance, can step forward to become a conscience guiding how tech corporations interact with children and teens.

The APA should begin by demanding that the tech industry’s behavioral manipulation techniques be brought out of the shadows and exposed to the light of public awareness. Changes should be made in the APA’s Ethics Code to specifically prevent psychologists from manipulating children using digital machines, especially if such influence is known to pose risks to their well-being. Moreover, the APA should follow its Ethical Standards by making strong efforts to correct the misuse of psychological persuasion by the tech industry and by user experience designers outside the field of psychology.

There is more the psychology profession can and should do to protect children and rectify the harm being done to kids. It should join with tech executives who are demanding that persuasive design in kids’ tech products be regulated. The APA also should make its powerful voice heard amongst the growing chorus calling out tech companies that intentionally exploit children’s vulnerabilities. And the APA must make stronger and bolder efforts to educate parents, schools, and fellow child advocates about the harms of kids’ overuse of digital devices.

With each passing day, new and more influential persuasive technologies are being deployed to better take advantage of children’s and teens’ inherent limitations. The psychology profession must insist in this new age that its tools be used to improve rather than hinder children’s health and well-being. By making a strong statement against the exploitive use of persuasive design, the APA and the psychology profession can help provide the conscience needed to guide us in this age of dangerously powerful digital machines.
https://medium.com/s/story/the-tech-...s-c452870464ce





Mobile Phone Radiation May Affect Memory Performance in Adolescents, Study Finds

Date:
July 19, 2018
Source:
Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute
Summary:
Radiofrequency electromagnetic fields may have adverse effects on the development of memory performance of specific brain regions exposed during mobile phone use, suggests a recent study involving nearly 700 adolescents in Switzerland.
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Radiofrequency electromagnetic fields may have adverse effects on the development of memory performance of specific brain regions exposed during mobile phone use. These are the findings of a study involving nearly 700 adolescents in Switzerland. The investigation, led by the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH), will be published on Monday, 23 July 2018 in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

The rapid evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT) goes along with an increase in exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) in our daily life. The most relevant exposure source to the brain is the use of a mobile phone close to the head. Several studies have been conducted to identify potential health effects related to RF-EMF, though results have remained inconclusive.

The research conducted by scientists at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) looked at the relationship between exposure to RF-EMF from wireless communication devices and memory performance in adolescents. The study follows up a report published in the scientific journal Environment International in 2015 with twice the sample size and more recent information on the absorption of RF-EMF in adolescent brains during different types of wireless communication device use. These are the world's first epidemiological studies to estimate cumulative RF-EMF brain dose in adolescents.

Media usage and brain exposure in young adults

The study to be published on 23 July 2018 found that cumulative RF-EMF brain exposure from mobile phone use over one year may have a negative effect on the development of figural memory performance in adolescents, confirming prior results published in 2015. Figural memory is mainly located in the right brain hemisphere and association with RF-EMF was more pronounced in adolescents using the mobile phone on the right side of the head. "This may suggest that indeed RF-EMF absorbed by the brain is responsible for the observed associations." said Martin Röösli, Head of Environmental Exposures and Health at Swiss TPH.

The rapid evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT) goes along with an increase in exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) in our daily life. The most relevant exposure source to the brain is the use of a mobile phone close to the head. Several studies have been conducted to identify potential health effects related to RF-EMF, though results have remained inconclusive.

The research conducted by scientists at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) looked at the relationship between exposure to RF-EMF from wireless communication devices and memory performance in adolescents. The study follows up a report published in the scientific journal Environment International in 2015 with twice the sample size and more recent information on the absorption of RF-EMF in adolescent brains during different types of wireless communication device use. These are the world's first epidemiological studies to estimate cumulative RF-EMF brain dose in adolescents.

Media usage and brain exposure in young adults

The study to be published on 23 July 2018 found that cumulative RF-EMF brain exposure from mobile phone use over one year may have a negative effect on the development of figural memory performance in adolescents, confirming prior results published in 2015. Figural memory is mainly located in the right brain hemisphere and association with RF-EMF was more pronounced in adolescents using the mobile phone on the right side of the head. "This may suggest that indeed RF-EMF absorbed by the brain is responsible for the observed associations." said Martin Röösli, Head of Environmental Exposures and Health at Swiss TPH.

Other aspects of wireless communication use, such as sending text messages, playing games or browsing the Internet cause only marginal RF-EMF exposure to the brain and were not associated with the development of memory performance. "A unique feature of this study is the use of objectively collected mobile phone user data from mobile phone operators." said Röösli. He emphasised that further research is needed to rule out the influence of other factors. "For instance, the study results could have been affected by puberty, which affects both mobile phone use and the participant's cognitive and behavioural state."

The data gathered from the Health Effects Related to Mobile phone usE in adolescentS (HERMES) cohort looked at the relationship between exposure to RF-EMF and development of memory performance of almost 700 adolescents over the course of one year. Participants, aged 12 to 17 years, were recruited from 7th to 9th public school grades in urban and rural areas of Swiss-German speaking Switzerland.

Minimising the risk of RF-EMF exposure

The potential effect of RF-EMF exposure to the brain is a relatively new field of scientific inquiry. "It is not yet clear how RF-EMF could potentially affect brain processes or how relevant our findings are in the long-term." said Röösli. "Potential risks to the brain can be minimised by using headphones or the loud speaker while calling, in particular when network quality is low and the mobile phone is functioning at maximum power."

About the publication

The study was conducted by Swiss TPH in collaboration with the European Union project GERoNiMO, which aims to improve the knowledge of whether and to what extent RF-EMF affects health. The work on dose calculations was conducted in collaboration with Belgian scientists. The project was funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0719121803.htm





Want to Charge Your iPhone Instantly? A World-First 'Super Battery' Could Make it Possible
Camron Slessor

The new technology could potentially charge an iPhone instantly. Unsplash: Gilles Lambert

Are you sick of waiting an hour or two for your phone to charge? Don't want to leave it on charge overnight? Well, an Adelaide scientist is researching new technology which could change the shape of the energy industry worldwide.

Dr James Quach from the University of Adelaide has planned to use his experience with quantum mechanics to build the world's first quantum battery— a super battery with the potential for instantaneous charging.

The university's newest Ramsay Fellow, Dr Quach is an expert in quantum physics and has been lured to Adelaide to take the technology from theory to practice.

He has been given the green light to research and build a quantum battery which could replace conventional batteries used in small electronic devices, such as iPhones.

Dr Quach said the battery could also be used in small electronic devices such as a watch, iPad or computer or any other product that relies on stored energy.

Battery could charge 'devices instantly'

The concept of the battery will be developed at Adelaide University and could allow electronic devices to be fully charged instantly.

Dr James Quach said that once developed, the battery could be charged in less than a second.

"So for example your mobile phone at the moment will take, I don't know, thirty minutes or an hour to charge with the quantum battery and if we are successful it would have instantons charging so it would revolutionize the energy storage industry," he said.

"…what I mean is, the more batteries that you have, the quicker the charging rate."

Dr Quach said eventually the hope would be to produce large quantum batteries which could provide opportunities for the renewable energy sector.

He said that unlike ordinary batteries — which take the same amount of time to charge no matter how many you have — the theory is that quantum batteries would charge faster, the more you have of them.

"If one quantum battery takes one hour to charge, then two would take 30 minutes, three would take 20 minutes, and so on, he said.

"If you had 10,000 batteries, they would all charge in less than a second."

So how is this technology possible?

Dr Quach said this technology would be possible thanks to a feature of quantum mechanics known as entanglement.

"Quantum mechanics deals with interactions at the very smallest of scales, at the levels of atoms and molecules — at this level you get very special properties that violate the conventional laws of physics," he said.

"One of those properties is entanglement. When two objects are entangled it means that their individual properties are always shared — they somehow lose their sense of individuality.

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"It's because of entanglement that it becomes possible to speed up the battery charging process."

He said the idea for a quantum battery was first discussed in a 2013 research paper, and since then only theoretical research had been done on the topic.

Dr Quach said he would "take the theory from the blackboard to the lab".

"Entanglement is incredibly delicate, it requires very specific conditions — low temperatures and an isolated system — and when those conditions change the entanglement disappears," he said.

"In terms of time frames, I'm hoping to demonstrate this over the next six months and then after that try and take it further by scaling it up and making it more robust.

"For me, and I think most physicists would agree, that a quantum battery is one of the lower hanging fruits which I think we can develop quite quickly and get to a stage that it can be used in one form or another.

"The long-term aim is to scale up, to build bigger batteries which will support renewable energy technologies by making it possible for continuous energy supply no matter the weather conditions — rain, hail or shine."

The Ramsay Fellowship was established in 2008 and is open to Australian citizens with a PhD or equivalent qualification in the natural sciences.
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-0...antly/10021086





Massachusetts Senate Passes Resolution to Do In-Depth Study on Right-to-Repair

A resolution in Massachusetts’ Senate will study the impact of forcing tech companies to make it easier for third parties to repair devices.
Matthew Gault

We live in a world where everyone uses technology and manufacturers don’t want anyone to repair their own stuff. Companies such as Apple maintain strict control of the tools and methods it uses to service broken devices. Farmers across America are hacking their tractors because manufacturer John Deere doesn’t want them to fix them themselves. The right-to-repair movement has been fighting against big tech’s repair monopoly for years and, in Massachusetts, it just took an important step towards busting that monopoly.

On July 25, the Massachusetts Senate approved a Resolution that would create a special commission that would research the feasibility of forcing device manufacturers to treat customers and independent repair shops the same as officially licensed repair outlets. According to the proposed study, that means providing customers and independent repair shops with “repair technical updates, diagnostic software, service access passwords, updates and corrections to firmware, and related documentation.”

The right-to-repair movement has a long and positive history in Massachusetts. In 2012, it passed a law that forced automotive manufacturers to provide diagnostic information on its cars. The car companies, having lost in one state, began sharing info with independent mechanics nationwide.

Gay Gordon Byrne, executive director of The Repair Organization, helped push the bill in 2012 and has been working to extend the law to tech companies ever since. “This is just one step in a series of steps that will end Repair Monopolies for technology products. I’m thrilled,” Byrne told me in an email about the pending study..

The Resolution to create the study group still needs to pass the Massachusetts House, but the session ends July 31 so right-to-repair watch dogs won’t have to wait long to see if it goes forward. The proposed makeup of the study commission shows that the legislature is serious about the issue and also reveals how big tech’s repair monopoly is about much more than just being able to open up your iPhone without voiding the warranty.

The legislature wants the study commission to include 23 members, including various members of the legislature but also a wealth of experts in various tech fields. They want someone from the Massachusetts Farm Bureau, a medical device manufacturer, an expert on electronic waste recycling, someone who repairs complex medical equipment, an intellectual property lawyer, a cyber security expert, a local farmer, and various other experts and citizens affected or knowledgeable about the right-to-repair.

If and when the Massachusetts passes the Resolution, the commission will have six months to file its report. Repair advocates such as Byrne are excited about the study. “It’s a huge leap forward in validating our position and far more in depth than a single hearing,” she told Motherboard.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...ight-to-repair





Between You, Me, and Google: Problems With Gmail's “Confidential Mode”
Gennie Gebhart and Cory Doctorow

With Gmail’s new design rolled out to more and more users, many have had a chance to try out its new “Confidential Mode.” While many of its features sound promising, what “Confidential Mode” provides isn’t confidentiality. At best, the new mode might create expectations that it fails to meet around security and privacy in Gmail. We fear that Confidential Mode will make it less likely for users to find and use other, more secure communication alternatives. And at worst, Confidential Mode will push users further into Google’s own walled garden while giving them what we believe are misleading assurances of privacy and security.

With its new Confidential Mode, Google purports to allow you to restrict how the emails you send can be viewed and shared: the recipient of your Confidential Mode email will not be able to forward or print it. You can also set an “expiration date” at which time the email will be deleted from your recipient’s inbox, and even require a text message code as an added layer of security before the email can be viewed.

Unfortunately, each of these “security” features comes with serious security problems for users.

DRM for Email

It’s important to note at the outset that because Confidential Mode emails are not end-to-end encrypted, Google can see the contents of your messages and has the technical capability to store them indefinitely, regardless of any “expiration date” you set. In other words, Confidential Mode provides zero confidentiality with regard to Google.

But despite its lack of end-to-end encryption, Google promises that with Confidential Mode, you’ll be able to send people unprintable, unforwardable, uncopyable emails thanks to something called “Information Rights Management” (IRM), a term coined by Microsoft more than a decade ago. (Microsoft also uses the term “Azure Information Protection.”)

Here’s how IRM works: companies make a locked-down version of a product that checks documents for flags like “don’t allow printing” or “don’t allow forwarding” and, if it finds these flags, the program disables the corresponding features. To prevent rivals from making their own interoperable products that might simply ignore these restrictions, the program encrypts the user’s documents, and hides the decryption keys where users aren’t supposed to be able to find them.

This is a very brittle sort of security: if you send someone an email or a document that they can open on their own computer, on their own premises, nothing prevents that person from taking a screenshot or a photo of their screen that can then be forwarded, printed, or otherwise copied.

But that’s only the beginning of the problems with Gmail’s new built-in IRM. Indeed, the security properties of the system depend not on the tech, but instead on a Clinton-era copyright statute. Under Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA 1201”), making a commercial product that bypasses IRM is a potential felony, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense. DMCA 1201 is so broad and sloppily drafted that just revealing defects in Google IRM could land you in court.

We think that “security” products shouldn’t have to rely on the courts to enforce their supposed guarantees, but rather on technologies such as end-to-end encryption which provide actual mathematical assurances of confidentiality. We believe that using the term “Confidential Mode” for a feature that doesn’t provide confidentiality as that term is understood in infosec is misleading.

“Expiring” Messages

Similarly, we believe that Confidential Mode’s option to set an “expiration date” for sensitive emails could lead users to believe that their messages will completely disappear or self-destruct after the date they set. But the reality is more complicated. Also sometimes called “ephemeral” or “disappearing” messages, features like Confidential Mode’s “expiring” messages are not a privacy panacea. From a technical perspective, there are plenty of ways to get around expiring messages: a recipient could screenshot the message or take a picture of it before it expires.

But Google’s implementation has a further flaw. Contrary to what the “expiring” name might suggest, these messages actually continue to hang around long after their expiration date for instance, in your Sent folder. This Google “feature” eliminates one of the key security properties of ephemeral messaging: an assurance that in the normal course of business, an expired message will be irretrievable by either party. Because messages sent with Confidential Mode are still retrievable—by the sender and by Google—after the “expiration date,” we think that calling them expired is misleading.

Exposing Phone Numbers

If you choose the “SMS passcode” option, your recipient will need a two-factor authentication-like code to read your email. Google generates and texts this code to your recipient, which means you might need to tell Google your recipient’s phone number—potentially without your recipient’s consent.

If Google doesn’t already have that information, using the SMS passcode option effectively gives Google a new way to link two pieces of potentially identifying information: an email address and a phone number.

This “privacy” feature can be harmful to users with a need for private and secure communications, and could lead to unpleasant surprises for recipients who may not want their phone number exposed.

Not So Confidential

Ultimately, for the reasons we outlined above, in EFF’s opinion calling this new Gmail mode “confidential” is misleading. There is nothing confidential about unencrypted email in general and about Gmail’s new “Confidential Mode” in particular. While the new mode might make sense in narrow enterprise or company settings, it lacks the privacy guarantees and features to be considered a reliable secure communications option for most users.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/0...fidential-mode





WhatsApp Balks at India’s Demand to Break Encryption
Manish Singh

As WhatsApp scrambles to figure out technology solutions to address some of the problems its service has inadvertently caused in developing markets, India’s government has proposed one of its own: bring traceability to the platform so false information can be traced to its source. But WhatsApp indicated to VentureBeat over the weekend that complying with that request would undermine the service’s core value of protecting user privacy.

“We remain deeply committed to people’s privacy and security, which is why we will continue to maintain end-to-end encryption for all of our users,” the company said.

The request for traceability, which came from India’s Ministry of Electronics & IT last week, was more than a suggestion. The Ministry said Facebook-owned WhatsApp would face legal actions if it failed to deliver.

“There is a need for bringing in traceability and accountability when a provocative/inflammatory message is detected and a request is made by law enforcement agencies,” the government said Friday. “When rumours and fake news get propagated by mischief mongers, the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility and accountability. If they remain mute spectators they are liable to be treated as abettors and thereafter face consequent legal action,” it added.

India is WhatsApp’s largest market, with more than 250 million users. The country is struggling to contain the spread of fake news on digital platforms. Hoax messages and videos on the platform have incited multiple riots, costing more than two dozen lives in the country this year alone.

Allowing message tracing, though, would likely undo the privacy and security that WhatsApp’s one billion users worldwide expect from the service.

Bringing traceability and accountability to WhatsApp would mean breaking end-to-end encryption on the platform, the company told VentureBeat. WhatsApp encrypts all the texts and media files that users exchange with each other. As a result, the company does not have the technical means to read the content of an exchange between two or more users.

Moreover, privacy advocates from across the globe have long expressed the need for end-to-end encryption on instant messaging services. When WhatsApp flipped the switch to provide its billion users encryption by default, it received quite a bit of praise.
The Indian government, parties of which themselves are big WhatsApp users, has remained vague on what sort of access it is looking for. Matthew Green, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, told VentureBeat the traditional investigative techniques — asking individuals on the receiving end of those communications about the sender’s identity (because often there are dozens of people, if not more, in a group) — tend to work pretty well.

“So the questions that come up from my perspective are: What exactly is law enforcement looking for here? What precisely about the current state of encryption is making this hard? Can the investigative capabilities they require be achieved without breaking encryption? Or is the goal something more powerful, like the ability to proactively filter for specific keywords? That last would be a very significant request,” Green said.

VentureBeat has asked the Ministry of Electronics & IT department to elaborate on its request and has yet to hear back.

With the violence that has resulted from the spread of fake news on the platform, however, it is clear WhatsApp needs to do more. So far the company has rolled out a feature to help users determine when a message they have received is part of a forward chain. It is now testing imposing a limit on how many times a user can forward a message.

The criticism WhatsApp is receiving comes while its parent company, Facebook, is itself in hot water in many nations for the spread of misinformation. Earlier this month, Facebook said it would soon work with fact checkers and threat intelligence agencies in India, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka to review and delete messages disseminating false information that have the potential to cause harm in real time.

Because of how WhatsApp is built, a similar high-scale approach cannot be replicated on WhatsApp. (On Facebook, people willfully share their updates with friends, friends of friends, and to the entire world.) In a statement, a WhatsApp spokesperson said the platform needs other parties to participate in helping it curb these problems.

“To tackle the challenges posed by misinformation we need action by government, civil society, and technology companies. Over the last month we’ve made several changes to WhatsApp including new controls for group admins and limits on forwarded messages,” a company spokesperson said, adding that it has also launched a digital literacy campaign to educate users.

India has over 400 million internet users and more than 300 million smartphone users, according to industry estimates. Much of these new users have come online for the first time only in the recent years. Many of these people are naive about the scope of abuse on internet services and have a tendency to believe everything they see online.

As part of its attempt to address the problems in India, WhatsApp, which is the most popular smartphone app in India, has been running newspaper ads in India (as well as several other markets) for roughly a year to advise people that they should be thoughtful about what they choose to share with their friends and family on the platform.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/23/w...ak-encryption/





The World Economy Runs on GPS. It Needs a Backup Plan

The small satellite network, which keeps global computer systems from freaking out, is shockingly vulnerable to all kinds of interference.
Paul Tullis

Duke Buckner was enjoying his breakfast at the Renaissance Tel Aviv Hotel, looking out on the city marina, on the day that time stuttered. Buckner oversees marketing and business development for Microsemi Corp., an American communications and defense contractor, and he gets a copy of emailed error reports for its equipment. It’s rare to get more than one in a given day. But on the morning of Jan. 26, 2016, they flooded his inbox. He forgot about breakfast.

The complaints had to do with Microsemi’s timing receivers for the Global Positioning System, the ubiquitous satellite navigation technology that was built for the U.S. military and has found its way into all our pockets. GPS isn’t just for maps. It’s also a kind of vast, spaceborne clock. Computers all over Earth use it to determine what time it is, down to billionths of a second. When there’s the slightest disagreement among those computers, things fall apart.

Microsemi’s timing receivers were frantically issuing error messages because of just such a discrepancy. “In normal operation, these things don’t generate alarms for years,” Buckner says. “So when one goes off a lot of times, people don’t know what to do.” Over the next 11 hours, cellphone towers lost their connections, U.S. police and fire stations reported communications errors, BBC radio signals were interrupted, and the telescope that tracks asteroids in Earth’s orbit went offline.

The root cause was a bug in the GPS network. When the U.S. Air Force, which operates the 31 satellites, decommissioned an older one and zeroed out its database values, it accidentally introduced tiny errors into the database, skewing the numbers. By the time Buckner’s inbox started blowing up, several satellites were transmitting bad timing data, running slow by 13.7 millionths of a second.

Each satellite carries several atomic clocks that are supposed to measure time by tracking how often the electrons at its core jump from one energy state to another. The satellites then transmit that data, along with their locations in orbit, toward Earth. On the ground, the GPS receiver in your phone relies on the consistency of those ultraprecise calculations to determine where you are, where the nearest decent bowl of pho is, and so on. (Yes, Einstein fans, the receiver accounts for the space clocks ticking a little slower than the ones on Earth.)

It’s tough to overstate how GPS-dependent the world economy has become since the U.S. Department of Defense started giving the service away to the public in 2000. There are 2 billion GPS receivers in use around the world, a number that Europe’s satellite navigation agency estimates will hit 7 billion by 2022. Along with the telecommunications industry, banks, airlines, electric utilities, cloud computing businesses, and TV broadcasters require constantly precise GPS timing. Emergency services do, too, as do military forces. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has designated 16 sectors of infrastructure as “critical,” and 14 of them depend on GPS.

A few other satellite-navigation systems in place are working on or have backups in place: Galileo (operated by the European Union), GLONASS (Russia), and BDS (China). Only the Russian system claims global coverage, though.

Most critical services, and financial markets, have backups—their own atomic clocks, perhaps, or connections to slightly less precise tools. But some of those backups depend on GPS timing, and might last only a few minutes. “GPS is the single point of failure for the entire modern economy,” says Representative John Garamendi, a California Democrat who’s been warning about the hazards for years as a member of the House committees on armed services and on transportation and infrastructure. “No cellphone, no ATM machine will work.”

The 11-hour run of intermittent chaos that ruined Buckner’s breakfast was just a hint of what’s possible. That was an innocent mistake, after all, not a concerted attack on the GPS network. Yet U.S. politicians have done little to safeguard the system since then.

Besides Garamendi, one of the loudest voices pleading to shore up GPS vulnerabilities is Dana Goward, who runs the nonprofit Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation. (Founded in 2013, it’s backed by defense contractors and related companies.) A former Coast Guard helicopter pilot, Goward doesn’t equivocate when asked what a widespread GPS outage would mean. It’s like ignoring warnings to reinforce airplane cockpit doors before Sept. 11, he says, or the alarms about New Orleans’s creaky levees before Hurricane Katrina: “People will die.”

Schriever Air Force Base, a few miles east of Colorado Springs, is home to the 2nd Space Operations Squadron. 2SOPS, as the squadron is known, operates the GPS network from a single room behind two passcoded doors, an armed guard, barriers that can rise from the driveway to block vehicles, and three chain-link fences topped with razor wire.

In the operations center one day in June, eight uniformed airmen and two civilian contractors are getting ready to conduct a “pre-pass,” a routine test to ensure the satellites can communicate. Each of the airmen has secret or top-secret clearance, and visitors must pass a background check. The language of 2SOPS is, unsurprisingly, heavy on acronyms.

“Pre-pass SV 15!” says the satellite system operator.

“C/L1-8 Step 4 listen up for pre-pass,” responds the mission chief.

“Active now, SV 15, CAPE A string, SSO 1, alternate visibility at DIEGO, VSOH/NAV/MOD/GBD, no applicable CIFs/TPs,” says the system operator.

2SOPS typically relays a new navigation message to each satellite once every 24 hours to make sure it’s accurate, using a network of 11 antennas around the world. In between, the unit monitors the GPS network for quirks and defects, based on precise navigation and timing signals the airmen send the satellites every 1.5 seconds. It’s repetitive work that runs the risk of becoming mindless, says Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Toth, who runs 2SOPS. “With repetition can come complacency,” he says. “You need to pay close attention to make sure it doesn’t creep in.”

Lots of things can scramble the satellites besides some stray numbers in a database. Solar flares. Space debris. And, perhaps, hostile foreign powers. The Pentagon started to regard the satellites themselves as a potential target in 2007, when China obliterated one of its own aging weather satellites using a missile. North Korea, Iran, and Russia are also said to have developed satellite-busting weaponry. In an effort to guard against hacking, 2SOPS has added the position of cyberdefense operator, and the military is expanding related training for the satellite operators.

In June, President Trump surprised a meeting of the National Space Council, a committee so new it doesn’t have a website, by announcing his intention to create a Space Force, a sixth division of the military to complement the Air Force. This was over the objections of his defense secretary, and it may have a tough time winning approval from Congress, which last year rejected just such a proposal. But the threats aren’t difficult to imagine, and the U.S. is ill-prepared for them. While there are protocols and international agreements that dictate what to do when a Russian fighter jet flies too close to an American jet over Syria or a U.S. Navy vessel runs aground in Chinese waters, there’s no rulebook for what happens when a foreign satellite’s activity appears potentially hostile.

On the receiver side, GPS signals are weak enough to be clouded by pigeon poop on cellphone towers—or jammed by miscreants using hardware that’s surprisingly easy to obtain. Although the hundreds of varieties on the market are illegal in most countries, the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency tallied roughly 50,000 incidents of deliberate jamming in the last two years, mostly truckers and ride-hailing drivers trying to hide their locations from employers during breaks. It’s assumed jamming was the cause of more than 40 airliners’ loss of GPS when nearing runways at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport in July and August of 2016. All landed safely by eyeballing their approaches, but the weather isn’t always so forgiving.

The most insidious tactic on the ground is GPS spoofing, using malicious software to broadcast phony signals and fool the receiver on, say, an aircraft into thinking it’s somewhere, or somewhen, that it isn’t. Such methods “would certainly work against Ubers, Waymo’s self-driving cars, delivery drones from Amazon,” and more, says Todd Humphreys, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

In the world of finance, subtle spoofing could foul up everything from a convenience store’s credit card reader to the entire New York Stock Exchange. “If you change the reference time dramatically, everybody’s going to notice,” says Andrew Bach, who used to oversee the NYSE’s network services. “The thing people get concerned about is, what if someone very gently drifts time ahead or back for the purpose of injecting confusion into the operations of the financial industry?” Even though most major Wall Street companies have their own atomic clocks to backstop GPS timing, introducing subtle anomalies could spook the algorithms that run the world of high-frequency trading, sparking a mass sell-off.

Spoofing by hostile foreign powers is a concern for the Pentagon, too. During a 2012 demonstration, stunned Homeland Security officials watched as Humphreys and colleagues hijacked a drone by giving it false GPS coordinates and leading it away from its intended path. Russian military forces are able to spoof drones over Syria and the Black Sea, says a person familiar with the matter.

The Air Force says spoofing isn’t really its responsibility, that 2SOPS’s job is just to maintain the signal from the GPS network, not ensure that receivers can read it accurately. Yet no other government agency is in charge of trying to mitigate the effects of jamming and spoofing. It’s been left to businesses like Microsemi to develop relevant antispoofing firewalls and keep them updated. DHS says it provides support and technical expertise to operators of critical infrastructure, but only on request. Mostly, the department says, it’s up to businesses to make sure they have backup plans.

That’s unrealistic, according to Goward, the lobbyist. “Everyone we’ve talked to in all industries sees this as a government responsibility, and none that we know of, other than core financial services, is able to withstand any significant disruption for any significant period of time,” he says. The corporate attitude seems to be one of mutually assured destruction, he adds, as in, “I’m not gonna get blamed. The Air Force or the government’s gonna get blamed. So why should I spend money on it?”

An hour north of the Air Force base, in Waterton, Colo., sprawls a Lockheed Martin Corp. facility that dates to 1955, when it was isolated enough for missile testing. Today, Denver’s suburbs edge up almost to the fence around its 5,600 acres. Among the 185 structures on-site, the company recently built a $128 million, 40,000-square-foot cleanroom. Inside, past the armed guards, a half-dozen workers in calf-length jackets, hairnets, and shoe coverings, all antistatic and lint-free, are assembling the next generation of GPS satellites.

The Air Force has approved the first GPS 3 satellite for launch, and Lockheed expects another to get the OK this summer, once it completes vacuum tests behind a three-story door just off the cleanroom. The tests mimic the conditions of outer space using pumps and cold or hot air, yielding low pressures and temperatures ranging from -238F to 302F.

The GPS 3 satellites are designed to last 15 years, 25 percent longer than the current generation, which have far exceeded their life expectancy thanks in part to careful fuel management. The GPS 3s also provide a signal eight times stronger, which makes it tougher to jam, with triple the location accuracy. But they still lack the two strongest antispoofing technologies on the market, both essentially extra layers of security to detect attacks and prove signals and navigation messages are legit. Two colonels with Air Force Space Command agreed to discuss GPS vulnerabilities in an interview but canceled the day before it was scheduled. A spokeswoman says the change was “due to the current environment and the sensitivity around some of the questions” and that one of the encryption methods “is currently being examined.”

Although it would help if the government went with the better encryption techniques, it would be safer to reduce the world economy’s dependence on GPS, says Garamendi. He’s been pushing for years for the federal government to build a backup ground-based radio network called Enhanced Long-Range Navigation (eLoran). It would deliver stronger signals than those from GPS, and Congress estimates it would cost taxpayers $200 million. South Korea says it will have eLoran coverage by 2020.

There’s been no serious effort to set up the backup system in the U.S., even though military officials briefed members of Congress on GPS vulnerability by 1997. George W. Bush’s Homeland Security team announced plans for an eLoran system in 2008, but the funding fell out of Barack Obama’s recession-strapped first budget the following year and hasn’t reappeared since. James Platt, director of the DHS position, navigation, and timing office under Trump, says his office ought to define the requirements for a backup system before it begins evaluating whether eLoran is the best option.

Garamendi, the Democratic congressman, has been left to try to fold the funding into military spending bills without DHS support. “It’s just organizational reluctance of federal agencies to pick up a new task,” he says. If they don’t, Trump’s Space Force may well be flying blind—and Duke Buckner can sell lots of atomic clocks. Not that he’s super excited about it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...-a-backup-plan





Trump Tweets Anger at FCC after Pai Blocks Sinclair/Tribune Merger

Trump: FCC should help Sinclair because it's a "much needed Conservative voice."
Jon Brodkin

President Donald Trump yesterday lashed out at the Federal Communications Commission over its vote to block Sinclair Broadcast Group's acquisition of Tribune Media Company.

"So sad and unfair that the FCC wouldn't approve the Sinclair Broadcast merger with Tribune," Trump tweeted.

A combination of Sinclair and Tribune "would have been a great and much needed Conservative voice for and of the People," Trump wrote. Trump contrasted the Sinclair/Tribune denial with the FCC's approval of Comcast's purchase of NBCUniversal, which happened in 2011.

"Liberal Fake News NBC and Comcast gets approved, much bigger, but not Sinclair. Disgraceful!" Trump wrote.

So sad and unfair that the FCC wouldn't approve the Sinclair Broadcast merger with Tribune. This would have been a great and much needed Conservative voice for and of the People. Liberal Fake News NBC and Comcast gets approved, much bigger, but not Sinclair. Disgraceful!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 25, 2018

Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC's only Democrat, offered a one-word response to Trump's tweet: "Disagree."

Trump had said during his election campaign that his administration would look into breaking up Comcast and NBC, but he hasn't acted on that threat as president.

FCC was unanimous in vote against merger

The FCC last week voted unanimously against approving the Sinclair/Tribune deal. Sinclair needed to divest some stations in order to stay under federal ownership limits, but FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said the company's proposal to divest certain stations "would allow Sinclair to control those stations in practice, even if not in name, in violation of the law."

The FCC didn't block the merger outright, but it referred the deal to an administrative law judge. Mergers usually don't survive that legal process.

If no divestitures were made, the merger would let Sinclair reach 72 percent of US television households. Sinclair owns or operates 173 broadcast TV stations in 81 markets, while Tribune has 42 stations in 33 markets.

The merger was opposed by Democratic lawmakers, consumer advocacy groups, small cable companies, and Sinclair competitors.

Sinclair is known for having a right-wing bias and for requiring its news stations to run certain political segments. In one recent case, Sinclair forced local TV news anchors to read a script that echoed President Trump's complaints about "fake" news stories. Trump loved the segment, tweeting that "Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke."

FCC independence from White House

While the FCC is an independent agency, the president nominates commissioners and appoints the chair. Since the Sinclair/Tribune merger proceeding isn't over, Trump's tweet could be an effort to change the outcome.

During the Obama administration, Congressional Republicans accused Obama of having "an improper influence" over the FCC's decision on net neutrality after Obama publicly supported imposition of net neutrality rules. An investigation by FCC's independent Inspector General's (IG) office found "no evidence" of improper influence.

While Pai and Trump have parted ways on Sinclair, Trump's White House previously supported Pai's decision to overturn the net neutrality rules.

Democratic lawmakers have also accused Pai of improperly coordinating with Sinclair on several rule changes. The FCC Inspector General agreed to investigate the allegations in February.

Despite blocking the Sinclair/Tribune deal, Pai's FCC last year relaxed TV station ownership limits in a decision that could pave the way for more media mergers. A US appeals court rejected a challenge to that FCC decision today.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ribune-merger/





Forbes Deleted a Deeply Misinformed Op-Ed Arguing Amazon Should Replace Libraries
Thu-Huong Ha

On Saturday morning Forbes published an opinion piece by LIU Post economist Panos Mourdoukoutas with the headline “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money.” It quickly received enthusiastic backlash from actual American libraries and their communities.

As of around 10am US eastern time this morning, the story had nearly 200,000 views, according to a counter on the page. As of 11am, though, the story’s URL has been down.

“Forbes advocates spirited dialogue on a range of topics, including those that often take a contrarian view,” a Forbes spokesperson says in a statement. “Libraries play an important role in our society. This article was outside of this contributor’s specific area of expertise, and has since been removed.”

In his article, Mourdoukoutas argued that local libraries are no longer useful. If libraries closed, he wrote, taxpayers would save money, and Amazon could open bookstores to provide those communities with physical books.

“[Libraries] don’t have the same value they used to,” the article argued. The functions of the library, Mourdoukoutas said, have been replaced: community and wifi are now provided by Starbucks; video rentals by Netflix and Amazon Prime; and books by Amazon.

“Technology has turned physical books into collector’s items, effectively eliminating the need for library borrowing services,” Mourdoukoutas wrote, despite the fact that print book sales from traditional publishing houses are steady. Mourdoukoutas also made the unsubstantiated claim that “some people have started using their loyalty card at Starbucks more than they use their library card.”

As critics have pointed out, the communities that would be hardest hit by libraries closing would be the underprivileged. Libraries provide free computers and internet access for students and people who can’t afford them at home. They also provide free ESL and reading classes; services for the elderly, college hopefuls, and entrepreneurs; and meals for kids at story time.

“The communities that would be affected the most would likely be low-income people, immigrants, and, really, the most marginalized among us,” says Paul Guequierre, director of communications for the Urban Libraries Council, a membership organization for North American public libraries. “[People] don’t have to buy a cup of coffee at the library,” he added.

Public benefit aside, would cutting public libraries save taxpayers a significant amount? The majority of a public library’s funding comes from state and local governments, not federal. According to a report (pdf) from the Ohio Library Council published last year, the state’s average library levy from 2013 to 2017 was 1.39 mills, a rate used in taxes that means $1.39 for every $1,000 in assessed property value. That’s around 2.5% (pdf) of Ohio’s average property tax rate, the eighth highest in the country last year. For the average homeowner in the state, that would have come to around $65 last year.

Across the country, if public libraries were to be cut and all funding were to be divided up among Americans, each person would get $36 back, says Richard Auxier, a researcher at the Tax Policy Center think tank.

On Twitter, Mourdoukoutas wrote, “Let me clarify something. Local libraries aren’t free. Home owners must pay a local library tax. My bill is $495/year.” Writer Kashana Cauley responded to Mourdoukoutas in a tweet with 14,000 likes at time of writing, “Let me clarify something. I don’t want poor and working class people to read books.”
https://qz.com/1334123/forbes-delete...ace-libraries/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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