Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 16th, ’19

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March 16th, 2019




Scottish Authors Unite Against 'Book Pirating' Website

Sara Sheridan's books are uploaded to ebook websites without her consent.
Jane Bradley

Scottish authors have added their voices to a campaign against an ebook website which they say is stealing their work.

The site, run by Vancouver entrepreneur Travis McCrea, who also led the now-defunct Pirate Party of Canada, publishes hundreds of books for readers to download for free in what he describes as a “digital library”.

But authors say that many of the books available on his site have been put up without their consent - and are depriving them of income from their work.

A sixth of ebooks read online in the UK - around four million books - in 2017 were pirated, according to a survey by the Intellectual Property Office. A recent report found that the average author earns £11,000 a year.

English writer Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, has led the calls to have the website - and those like it - taken down.

Edinburgh author Alison Belsham’s debut novel The Tattoo Thief - which has been a bestseller across Europe and has been translated into 15 languages - has been published on the site, as well as around 50 of Alexander McCall Smith’s bestselling books and six by Sara Sheridan.

Belsham warned that the practice was widespread, with multiple sites across the world regularly publishing books without authors’s consent.

She said: “I would like to think that no one I know downloads pirate ebooks, because it’s nothing less than theft - but having read recently that approximately 17 per cent of ebooks are downloaded without being paid for, it makes me wonder.

“It’s hard enough as it is for the vast majority of writers to make a living from writing - to think that people are stealing something that you’ve worked so hard to create is absolutely heart-breaking.”

Sheridan pointed to the fact that authors get paid a small amount for each book borrowed by a traditional library and warned that the practice of copyright infringement of ebooks was "incumbent in publishing".

She added: “It happens fairly frequently. When someone makes me aware of it, I contact the publisher and ask them to have it taken down. People who download from these sites are not supporting the publishing industry.”

Scottish crime writer Vanessa Robertson said that for self-published authors, such sites posed major problems. Ms Robertson discovered this week that her new novel, Death Will Find Me, had been put up on McCrea’s site within two weeks of its being published. She filed a notice to have it removed and it has since been taken down.

She said: “For independent authors like me, it’s daunting because unlike big publishing houses, we don’t have legal teams. I don’t know what impact these sites have - I don’t think my readers are downloading books there while other genres might lose more sales that way.

“What’s so upsetting though is that my book was there less than a fortnight after publication when I was still enjoying the happy glow of sales and good reviews - it takes the shine off. I’m just so angry that someone has the nerve to steal people’s work like this. I’d just never thought of that as something I’d have to deal with so soon.”

Ms Harris, who has written around 20 books since Chocolat was turned into a hit film in 2000, said: “[McCrea’s] current enterprise claims to be an online library, claims to pay authors, and also claims that authors are donating their books voluntarily. None of this is true, of course. There are many self published authors who are never going to make a living out of writing books and this site is taking away their last validation. This is not helping anybody. It means that mid-list authors who are already struggling for sales may be ditched by their publishers.”

McCrea, who runs the site, called eBook Bike, to told Radio 4’s You and Yours programme yesterday that his site had been created “by authors for authors” to share books and said that he would remove any book reported to him by an author via the site’s online form.

“Mine is a digital library which holds a collection of ebooks. The website is not dedicated to copyright infringe. The website is dedicated to helping authors.”
https://www.scotsman.com/news/odd/sc...site-1-4887419





Meet BookBot: Mountain View Library’s Newest Robot Helper

Only in Silicon Valley does a robot return your library books
Erin Baldassari

Only in Silicon Valley will a robot return your library books for you.

Residents in downtown Mountain View have gotten their first peek at the future with the debut of BookBot, the library’s newest non-human helper. A creation of Google’s Area 120 — an experimental division of the technology juggernaut — the bot is the company’s first personal delivery robot to hit the streets and begin interacting with the public, said Christian Bersch, the project’s team lead.

It’s part of a program to test the waters of what could be possible for autonomous, electric robots, he said.

“Right now, we just want to learn how this would work, how it operates and what kinds of problems we’d run into,” he said. “It’s still an active development.”

The pilot will run for nine months with a human handler following behind the BookBot for the first six months, he said. That’s just to make sure it’s operating as planned, get it out of trouble as needed and observe how people are responding. After that, a human will sit behind the controls remotely.

And, on a recent Thursday, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Children shrieked at the sight of the robot and immediately jumped in its path to see if it would stop. (It does.) Adults either pulled out their photos to snag photos or video and gawk or nonchalantly went about their way.

The Mountain View City Council approved a new permitting system last year to allow companies to try out personal delivery devices on its streets. Starship Technologies was the first with its roll-out last April of an on-demand food and package courier for Intuit employees on the company’s 4.3-acre campus.

Mary Campione, a Mountain View resident of more than 30 years, said it’s no surprise to see more robots roaming the streets of Google and other tech companies’ hometown.

“We live in the epicenter of technology,” Campione said. “There are autonomous cars driving around here all the time and robots in restaurants. So no, it’s not all that surprising.”

Campione heard about the BookBot on Facebook when it launched in late February. It only operates within a certain radius of the Mountain View Public Library, and hours are limited to Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Users must schedule the pickup time in advance, which — because the bot is fairly popular — means planning at least a week ahead. It can carry up to about 10 items, Bersch said, depending on the size of the books.

Given that she lives just a short walk away, Campione said it’s unlikely she’d order a pickup again. “It’s a novelty. I was just kind of excited because it’s fun, and it’s a good use of technology.”

Like all libraries, Mountain View finds there’s a certain percentage of scofflaws, who, for whatever reason, fail to return their books, said library Director Tracy Gray. She’s hoping the bot will give people who have limited mobility, are recovering from an injury, are ill, or have a sleeping baby at home another opportunity to continue taking advantage of the library’s services.

“It’s just a great way to give people the convenience of being able to return their books without leaving the house,” she said.

And, there are many other ways robots like these could add convenience to people’s lives, said Sriram Vangheeburam, a Fremont resident who works in Mountain View. He stopped to marvel at the BookBot passing by.

Sure, it’s collecting books right now, he said, but what about second-hand items for charities? People don’t tend to donate a lot of their stuff because they don’t have time, he said. Maybe something like this delivery bot could save a trip to the thrift store, he wondered.

“It’s totally exciting,” Vangheeburam said. “It’s about helping people, and there’s so much more you could do with this.”
https://www.siliconvalley.com/2019/0...-robot-helper/





PA, Standard, Independent and Reuters Among 200+ Organisations Urging MEPs to Pass New EU Copyright Law
Freddy Mayhew Twitter

The Press Association, Evening Standard, Independent and Reuters are among more than 200 publishing and music organisations across Europe calling on the European Parliament to adopt new copyright laws.

The copyright directive has already been agreed by all three EU political institutions, but must pass a final vote by a full meeting of the European Parliament at the end of this mont before member states will have two years to create national legislation to match.

If passed, it would mean online platforms could continue to share only “very short” news snippets before infringing the copyright of the publishers who produced the content, with provisions to stop news aggregators from abusing this.

A letter to MEPs, backed by 227 signatories, said: “This directive has been long sought to create a much-needed level playing field for all actors of the creative sector… whilst giving citizens better access to a wider array of content.

“This is a historical opportunity. We need an internet that is fair and sustainable for all. This is why we urge policymakers to adopt the directive quickly, as agreed in trilogue negotiations.”

The letter is also signed by the Professional Publishers Association, European Newspaper Publishers’ Association, Federation of European Publishers, and World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.
https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/pa-st...copyright-law/





Republicans Launch Propaganda Sites Designed to Look Like Local News Outlets

The Tennessee Star claims to be the "most reliable" online local paper in the site. In fact it's just a GOP front
Igor Derysh

An investigation by the fact-checking outlet Snopes found that several new local news websites are actually being launched by Republican consultants whose company is funded in part by the candidates the sites cover.

Politico first reported last year that Tea Party-linked conservative activists Michael Patrick Leahy, Steve Gill and Christina Botteri were behind the "Tennessee Star,” a website that purported to be a local news website but mostly posted content licensed from groups linked to big Republican donors.

Snopes discovered that the trio has since launched similar sites in other battleground states ahead of the 2020 elections: the Ohio Star and the Minnesota Sun.

All three claim to be the “most reliable” local newspapers in their states and provide “unbiased updates on Investigative Reports, Thoughtful Opinion, Sports, Lifestyle.”

But the coverage is hardly by “unbiased journalists.”

Gill, who is listed as the Tennessee Star’s political editor, owns a media consulting firm that at least one candidate and one political action committee paid before they received positive coverage on the website.

Snopes reported that several of the site’s writers work or have worked for PACs or political campaigns that they cover without disclosing that information. The Tennessee Star’s “investigative journalist,” Chris Butler previously worked for a PAC affiliated with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican. Two of the site's other writers have their own PAC devoted to maintaining a Republican majority in the Tennessee state legislature. Roughly 40 percent of the other content on the sites comes from prominent conservative news sites like the Daily Caller and the Daily Signal.

In some cases, the sites are carbon copies of the Tennessee Star despite being in different states. Snopes noted that the Ohio Star recently republished a glowing “letter to the editor” titled “If You Want to Change State Politics Then Support Bill Lee for Governor.” Lee is the governor of Tennessee.

Kathleen Bartzen Culver, who heads the Center of Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told Snopes that political operatives are free to launch their own news platforms, but it's a problem if they are trying to deceive readers into believing the sites are nonpartisan local news.

“I have no problem with advocacy organizations creating content that reinforces the positions they take on public policy issues on the left, right or center. The issue comes in when they’re not transparent about that advocacy,” Culver said. “In this case, if you have a conservative take on a policy issue and you want to promote that take, go ahead. But just claim it for what it is.”

Leahy claimed in an email to Snopes that the sites “are in business to make a profit” and make their money from ads.

But Snopes found that the websites are supported by conservative mega-donors, and many of the ads on the Tennessee Star are from groups like the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity. Even the actual local business ads they have are for companies owned by prominent Tennessee conservative donors.

“Transparency is a critically important element in journalism,” Culver said. “When you are opaque about funding sources and their influence, when you don’t disclose to readers where the money is coming from and where the conflicts of interest may be, you are robbing those people of important information that they need to judge credibility.”

The group behind the sites does not appear content with just three outlets. According to Politico, Leahy has purchased domain names associated with Missouri, New England, the Dakotas, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, most of which are electoral battleground states that will be vital in 2020.

Leahy, Gill and Botteri are only a few of the players in the growing space. Politico reported last year that a campaign committee for Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was funding a local news site called the California Republican, which claimed to feature “the best of US, California, and Central Valley news, sports, and analysis.”

“The information sphere is so polluted right now that the average citizen has trouble telling what is real and what is not,” Culver told Snopes. “I find that very troubling within a democracy.”
https://www.salon.com/2019/03/05/rep...-news-outlets/





Russian Internet Trolls Are Apparently Switching Strategies for 2020 U.S. Elections
Alyza Sebenius

Russian internet trolls appear to be shifting strategy in their efforts to disrupt the 2020 U.S. elections, promoting politically divisive messages through phony social media accounts instead of creating propaganda themselves, cybersecurity experts say.

The Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency may be among those trying to circumvent protections put in place by companies including Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. to find and remove fake content that hackers created to sow division among the American electorate in the 2016 presidential campaign.

“Instead of creating content themselves, we see them amplifying content,” said John Hultquist, the director of intelligence analysis at FireEye Inc. “Then it’s not necessarily inauthentic, and that creates an opportunity for them to hide behind somebody else.”

Other hackers are breaking into computing devices and using them to open large numbers of social media accounts, according to Candid Wueest, a senior threat researcher at Symantec Corp. The hacked devices are used to create many legitimate-looking users as well as believable followers and likes for those fake users.

While covert efforts to amplify divisive content originated by others isn’t a new technique, hackers and trolls seem to be embracing it heavily in advance of the next U.S. presidential election.

Wueest said he observed a decrease in the creation of new content by fake accounts from 2017 to 2018 and a shift toward building massive followings that could be used as platforms for divisive messages in 2020.

FBI’s Concern

FBI Director Christopher Wray, speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, said social media remains a primary avenue for foreign actors to influence U.S. elections, and the bureau is working with companies on the problem.

“What has continued virtually unabated and just intensifies during the election cycles is this malign foreign influence campaign, especially using social media,” Wray said. “That continues, and we’re gearing up for it to continue and grow again for 2020.”
Yet removing foreign influence campaigns remains a slippery task for social media companies.

Nathaniel Gleicher, the head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook, said policing those efforts is “an incredibly hard balance.”

Companies must “identify ways to impose more friction on the bad actors and the behaviors that they’re using without simultaneously imposing friction on the meaningful public discussion,” Gleicher said.
http://time.com/5548544/russian-inte...020-elections/





Russia Blocks Encrypted Email Provider ProtonMail
Zack Whittaker

Russia has told internet providers to enforce a block against encrypted email provider ProtonMail, the company’s chief has confirmed.

The block was ordered by the state Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB, according to a Russian-language blog, which obtained and published the order after the agency accused the company and several other email providers of facilitating bomb threats.

Several anonymous bomb threats were sent by email to police in late January, forcing several schools and government buildings to evacuate.

In all, 26 internet addresses were blocked by the order, including several servers used to scramble the final connection for users of Tor, an anonymity network popular for circumventing censorship. Internet providers were told to implement the block “immediately,” using a technique known as BGP blackholing, a way that tells internet routers to simply throw away internet traffic rather than routing it to its destination.

But the company says while the site still loads, users cannot send or receive email.

ProtonMail chief executive Andy Yen called the block “particularly sneaky,” in an email to TechCrunch.

“ProtonMail is not blocked in the normal way, it’s actually a bit more subtle,” said Yen. “They are blocking access to ProtonMail mail servers. So Mail.ru — and most other Russian mail servers — for example, is no longer able to deliver email to ProtonMail, but a Russian user has no problem getting to their inbox,” he said.

That’s because the two ProtonMail servers listed by the order are its back-end mail delivery servers, rather than the front-end website that runs on a different system.

“The wholesale blocking of ProtonMail in a way that hurts all Russian citizens who want greater online security seems like a poor approach,” said Yen. He said his service offers superior security and encryption to other mail providing rivals in the country.

“We have also implemented technical measures to ensure continued service for our users in Russia and we have been making good progress in this regard,” he explained. “If there is indeed a legitimate legal complaint, we encourage the Russian government to reconsider their position and solve problems by following established international law and legal procedures.”

Russia’s internet regulator Roskomnadzor did not return a request for comment.

Yen says the block coincided with protests against government efforts to restrict the internet, which critics have dubbed an internet “kill switch.” The Kremlin, known for its protracted efforts to crack down and stifle freedom of speech, claimed it was to protect the country’s infrastructure in the event of a cyberattack.

Some 15,000 residents protested in Moscow on Sunday, during which users started noticing problems with ProtonMail.

It’s the latest in ongoing tensions with tech companies in the wake of the Russian-backed disinformation efforts. Russia’s crackdown on the internet intensified in 2014 when it ratified a law ordering tech companies operating in the country to store Russian data within its borders. LinkedIn was one of the fist casualties of the law, leading to the site’s nationwide ban in 2016.

Last month, Facebook was told to comply with the law or face its own ban. Twitter, too, also faces a possible blackout.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/ru...ks-protonmail/





Huawei Says it Would Never Hand Data to China's Government. Experts Say it Wouldn't Have a Choice

• Huawei would be forced to hand over 5G data to the Chinese government if it was asked for it, because of national security laws, experts told CNBC.
• China's National Intelligence Law from 2017 requires organizations and citizens to "support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work."
• A government spokesperson said that intelligence work should be done "according to the law" and urged people to "not take anything out of context."

Arjun Kharpal

Huawei would have no choice but to hand over network data to the Chinese government if Beijing asked for it, because of espionage and national security laws in the country, experts told CNBC.

Major governments including the United States, Japan and Australia have blocked the Chinese telecommunications equipment maker from providing hardware for next-generation mobile networks known as 5G. The U.S. has said Huawei equipment could provide backdoors for the Chinese government into American networks — a claim the company has repeatedly denied.

Australia did not cite specific countries or companies, but last year it gave guidance to domestic carriers saying that "the involvement of vendors who are likely to be subject to extrajudicial directions from a foreign government that conflict with Australian law, may risk failure by the carrier to adequately protect a 5G network from unauthorized access or interference."

The Australian government is highlighting a concern on the top of minds of several governments — China's wide-ranging internet laws, which require tech firms to help Beijing with vaguely-defined "intelligence work," meaning companies could be forced to hand over network data whether they want to or not.

Two pieces of legislation are of particular concern to governments — the 2017 National Intelligence Law and the 2014 Counter-Espionage Law. Article 7 of the first law states that "any organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law," adding that the the state "protects" any individual and organization that aids it.

And it appears that organizations and individuals don't have a choice when it comes to helping the government. The 2014 Counter-Espionage law says that "when the state security organ investigates and understands the situation of espionage and collects relevant evidence, the relevant organizations and individuals shall provide it truthfully and may not refuse."

Huawei: We 'will not build backdoors'

The company strenuously contends that it will not hand over customer data, and Huawei told CNBC that it has never been asked to do so.

Huawei's billionaire founder Ren Zhengfei and other senior executives "have stated unambiguously that Huawei will not build backdoors or hand over customer data. It doesn't get much clearer than that," a Huawei spokesperson said. "We have never been required to do so, they have stated. We are not going to speculate on future possible scenarios beyond repeating the reassurances of Huawei's most senior management."

In an interview last month with CBS News, Huawei's Ren said the company would never help China spy on the United States — even if required by law.

"We never participate in espionage, and we do not allow any of our employees to do any act like that. And we absolutely never install backdoors. Even if we were required by Chinese law, we would firmly reject that," Ren told the American television network.

Sources within China contacted by CNBC declined to comment. But experts from outside the country suggested it would be near-impossible for Huawei to reject a request for data from Beijing.

"There is no way Huawei can resist any order from the [People's Republic of China] Government or the Chinese Communist Party to do its bidding in any context, commercial or otherwise. Huawei would have to turn over all requested data and perform whatever other surveillance activities are required," Jerome Cohen, a New York University law professor and Council on Foreign Relations adjunct senior fellow, told CNBC by email.

"Not only is this mandated by existing legislation but, more important, also by political reality and the organizational structure and operation of the Party-State's economy. The Party is embedded in Huawei and controls it," said Cohen, who as a practicing attorney represented corporate clients in China and elsewhere in Asia.

The relationship between Huawei and the government has been questioned because of Ren's past as a former soldier in the People's Liberation Army and a current Communist Party member. In a question and answer session with international media in January, Ren said that his relationship with China's ruling party would not stop him from refusing any request from them for user data.

"I don't see close connection between my personal political belief and our business actions we are going to take as a business entity," Ren said.

In the same session, Ren said that he "would rather shut Huawei down than do anything that would damage the interests of our customers in order to seek our own gains."

The problem for Huawei is that there does not appear to be legal recourse if Beijing comes knocking.

"The idea of fighting a request of this nature in the courts is not realistic. In truth the law only confirms what has long been true — that one must submit to the Party if called upon. Added to this, a company of Huawei's size, working in what is considered a sensitive sector, simply cannot succeed in China without extensive links to the Party," Martin Thorley, an expert on international engagement with China at U.K.-based University of Nottingham, told CNBC by email.

"For anyone at Huawei to oppose a serious request from the Party would require bravery bordering on recklessness — what do you do when your adversary is the police, the media, the judiciary and the government?" he added.

China: Don't 'take anything out of context'

China's government addressed the National Intelligence Law during a press conference on Monday.

"According to China's National Intelligence Law, organizations and citizens have the obligation to support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work. At the same time it also explicitly stipulates that intelligence work should be conducted according to law and in a way that respects and protects human rights and the lawful rights of individuals and organizations," government spokesperson Zhang Yesui said, urging people to "not take anything out of context."

Zhang was responding to reporters' questions ahead of China's National People's Congress, a big annual event where Beijing formally announces major policy elements such as economic growth targets. The comments were made in Mandarin and translated into English by an official translator.

"Some U.S. government officials have been playing up the so-called security risk associated with products of certain Chinese companies and linking it with Chinese national intelligence law," Zhang said. "This kind of behavior is interference into economic activities by political means and it is against WTO (World Trade Organization) rules. And it disrupts international market order that is built on fair competition. This is a typical double standards (sic). It is neither fair nor ethical."

Many of China's largest tech companies have flourished over the last decade within the country in the absence of foreign competition. China has for years blocked some of America's largest internet giants — on claims that those U.S. companies pose national security risks.
China 5G dominance

The battle between the U.S. and Huawei is bigger than worries over national security risks, according to geopolitical analysts. It's about who has control of the critical infrastructure that runs 5G. The new network will not only support super-fast mobile internet but it will be the backbone behind other technology like driverless cars.

"Huawei involvement in the core backbone 5G infrastructure of developed western liberal democracies is a strategic game-changer because 5G is a game-changer," Nigel Inkster, a senior adviser to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told CNBC by email.

Inkster, a former senior British intelligence official, explained that China has "embarked on an ambitious strategy to reshape the planet in line with its interests" through its massive Belt and Road Initiative. Its "national telecoms champions" are a big part of that.

Because of that drive from China, Inkster said that Huawei is part of this "all-of-nation project."

"Huawei has indeed said that it would refuse any Chinese government request to facilitate espionage. But such a statement simply cannot be taken at face value," Inkster told CNBC.

"Huawei is a product and instrument of the Chinese state and has been co-opted to achievement of the state's strategic objectives," he said. "The proposition that it is just a telecommunications company has worn beyond thin."

—CNBC's Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/05/huaw...d-experts.html





Huawei Developed its Own Operating Systems in Case it’s Banned from Using Android and Windows
Cameron Faulkner

Huawei has developed its own proprietary operating systems, and it’s ready to implement them in case its US legal battle leads to a ban on the export of US-made products and services like Android and Windows.

“We have prepared our own operating system, if it turns out we can no longer use these systems, we will be ready and have our plan B,” Huawei executive Richard Yu shared in a recent interview with Die Welt. Huawei began working on an Android replacement as early as 2012 when the US opened an investigation into Huawei and ZTE, according to the South China Morning Post, and it was still developing the system in 2016. The announcement of its “plan B” operating system comes at a time when Huawei is ensnared in an ongoing legal battle with the US, which could result in the company being banned from receiving exports from the US. If it comes to that, Huawei says it will be ready.

Recently, Huawei sued the US in response to a ban that prevents its tech from being used in “federal networks, effectively also preventing major government contractors from using Huawei equipment,” according to a report from The Verge’s Colin Lecher. Huawei’s suit states that the US “unconstitutionally singled out Huawei for punishment” and that a ban on Huawei would put America behind other regions in the race to build out 5G networks.

Yu shared that Huawei would “prefer to work with the ecosystems of Google and Microsoft,” but that it’s ready to switch over to its in-house operating system should the legal climate worsen. Since Huawei makes the Kirin processors found in most of its smartphones, it would be in a much better position to weather a ban than ZTE, which suffered a three-month ban in 2018. That prevented ZTE from using Google’s Android operating system and from receiving exports from US companies to develop its smartphones.

Even though it says it’s ready with an OS replacement for its computers, Huawei would need to find new hardware partners since it relies on Intel processors in its Windows laptops. With Intel and Qualcomm off the table and MediaTek processors generally reserved for cheaper, low-performance devices like Chromebooks, Huawei may need to start developing its own laptop-grade processors.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/14/1...id-windows-ban





The Other Smartphone Business

How Jolla's Sailfish OS ecosystem builders are charting a course to profitability in the shadow of Android
Natasha Lomas

With the smartphone operating system market sewn up by Google’s Android platform, which has a close to 90% share globally, leaving Apple’s iOS a slender (but lucrative) premium top-slice, a little company called Jolla and its Linux-based Sailfish OS is a rare sight indeed: A self-styled ‘independent alternative’ that’s still somehow in business.

The Finnish startup’s b2b licensing sales pitch is intended to appeal to corporates and governments that want to be able to control their own destiny where device software is concerned.

And in a world increasingly riven with geopolitical tensions that pitch is starting to look rather prescient.

Political uncertainties around trade, high tech espionage risks and data privacy are translating into “opportunities” for the independent platform player — and helping to put wind in Jolla’s sails long after the plucky Sailfish team quit their day jobs for startup life.
Building an alternative to Google Android

Jolla was founded back in 2011 by a band of Nokia staffers who left the company determined to carry on development of mobile Linux as the European tech giant abandoned its own experiments in favor of pivoting to Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. (Fatally, as it would turn out.)

Nokia exited mobile entirely in 2013, selling the division to Microsoft. It only returned to the smartphone market in 2017, via a brand-licensing arrangement, offering made-in-China handsets running — you guessed it — Google’s Android OS.

If the lesson of the Jolla founders’ former employer is ‘resistance to Google is futile’ they weren’t about to swallow that. The Finns had other ideas.

Indeed, Jolla’s indie vision for Sailfish OS is to support a whole shoal of differently branded, regionally flavored and independently minded (non-Google-led) ecosystems all swimming around in parallel. Though getting there means not just surviving but thriving — and doing so in spite of the market being so thoroughly dominated by the U.S. tech giant.

TechCrunch spoke to Jolla ahead of this year’s Mobile World Congress tradeshow where co-founder and CEO, Sami Pienimäki, was taking meetings on the sidelines. He told us his hope is for Jolla to have a partner booth of its own next year — touting, in truly modest Finnish fashion, an MWC calendar “maybe fuller than ever” with meetings with “all sorts of entities and governmental representatives”.

Even a modestly upbeat tone signals major progress here because an alternative smartphone platform licensing business is — to put it equally mildly — an incredibly difficult tech business furrow to plough.

Jolla almost died at the end of 2015 when the company hit a funding crisis. But the plucky Finns kept paddling, jettisoning their early pursuit of consumer hardware (Pienimäki describes attempting to openly compete with Google in the consumer smartphone space as essentially “suicidal” at this point) to narrow their focus to a b2b licensing play.

The early b2b salespitch targeted BRIC markets, with Jolla hitting the road to seek buy in for a platform it said could be moulded to corporate or government needs while still retaining the option of Android app compatibility.

Then in late 2016 signs of a breakthrough: Sailfish gained certification in Russia for government and corporate use.

Its licensing partner in the Russian market was soon touting the ability to go “absolutely Google-free!“.

Buy in from Russia

Since then the platform has gained the backing of Russian telco Rostelecom, which acquired Jolla’s local licensing customer last year (as well as becoming a strategic investor in Jolla itself in March 2018 — “to ensure there is a mutual interest to drive the global Sailfish OS agenda”, as Pienimäki puts it).

Rostelecom is using the brand name ‘Aurora OS‘ for Sailfish in the market which Pienimäki says is “exactly our strategy” — likening it to how Google’s Android has been skinned with different user experiences by major OEMs such as Samsung and Huawei.

“What we offer for our customers is a fully independent, regional licence and a tool chain so that they can develop exactly this kind of solution,” he tells TechCrunch. “We have come to a maturity point together with Rostelecom in the Russia market, and it was natural move plan together, that they will take a local identity and proudly carry forward the Sailfish OS ecosystem development in Russia under their local identity.”

“It’s fully compatible with Sailfish operating system, it’s based on Sailfish OS and it’s our joint interest, of course, to make it fly,” he adds. “So that as we, hopefully, are able to extend this and come out to public with other similar set-ups in different countries those of course — eventually, if they come to such a fruition and maturity — will then likely as well have their own identities but still remain compatible with the global Sailfish OS.”

Telecoms trade press has reported that the Russian government plans to switch all circa 8M state officials to the platform by the end of 2021 — under a project expected to cost RUB 160.2 billion (~$2.4BN). (A cut of which would go to Jolla in licensing fees.)

Sailfish-powered smartphones are also reported to be “recommended to municipal administrations of various levels,” with the Russian state planning to allocate a further RUB 71.3 billion (~$1.1BN) from the federal budget for that. So there’s scope for deepening the state’s Sailfish uptake.

Russian Post is one early customer for Jolla’s locally licensed Sailfish flavor. Having piloted devices last year, Pienimäki says it’s now moving to a full commercial deployment across the whole organization — which has around 300,000 employees (to give a sense of how many Sailfish powered devices could end up in the hands of state postal workers in Russia).

A rugged Sailfish-powered device piloted by Russian post

Jolla is not yet breaking out end users for Sailfish OS per market but Pienimäki says that overall the company is now “clearly above” 100k (and below 500k) devices globally.

That’s still of course a fantastically tiny number if you compare it to the consumer devices market — top ranked Android smartphone maker Samsung sold around 70M handsets in last year’s holiday quarter, for instance — but Jolla is in the b2b OS licensing business, not the handset making business. So it doesn’t need hundreds of millions of Sailfish devices to ship annually to turn a profit.

Scaling a royalty licensing business to hundreds of thousands of users is sums to “good business”, , says Pienimäki, describing Jolla’s business model for Sailfish as “practically a royalty per device”.

“The success we have had in the Russian market has populated us a lot of interesting new opening elsewhere around the world,” he continues. “This experience and all the technology we have built together with Open Mobile Platform [Jolla’s Sailfish licensing partner in Russia which was acquired by Rostelecom] to enable that case — that enables a number of other cases. The deployment plan that Rostelecom has for this is very big. And this is now really happening and we are happy about it.”

Jolla’s “Russia operation” is now beginning “a mass deployment phase”, he adds, predicting it will “quickly ramp up the volume to very sizeable”. So Sailfish is poised to scale.

Step 3… profit?

While Jolla is still yet to turn a full-year profit Pienimäki says several standalone months of 2018 were profitable, and he’s no longer worried whether the business is sustainable — asserting: “We don’t have any more financial obstacles or threats anymore.”

It’s quite the turnaround of fortunes, given Jolla’s near-death experience a few years ago when it almost ran out of money, after failing to close a $10.6M Series C round, and had to let go of half its staff.

It did manage to claw in a little funding at the end of 2015 to keep going, albeit as much leaner fish. But bagging Russia as an early adopter of its ‘independent’ mobile Linux ecosystem looks to have been the key tipping point for Jolla to be able to deliver on the hard-graft ecosystem-building work it’s been doing all along the way. And Pienimäki now expresses easy confidence that profitability will flow “fairly quickly” from here on in.

“It’s not an easy road. It takes time,” he says of the ecosystem-building company Jolla hard-pivoted to at its point of acute financial distress. “The development of this kind of business — it requires patience and negotiation times, and setting up the ecosystem and ecosystem partners. It really requires patience and takes a lot of time. And now we have come to this point where actually there starts to be an ecosystem which will then extend and start to carry its own identity as well.”

In further signs of Jolla’s growing confidence he says it hired more than ten people last year and moved to new and slightly more spacious offices — a reflection of the business expanding.

“It’s looking very good and nice for us,” Pienimäki continues. “Let’s say we are not taking too much pressure, with our investors and board, that what is the day that we are profitable. It’s not so important anymore… It’s clear that that is soon coming — that very day. But at the same time the most important is that the business case behind is proven and it is under aggressive deployment by our customers.”

The main focus for the moment is on supporting deployments to ramp up in Russia, he says, emphasizing: “That’s where we have to focus.” (Literally he says “not screwing up” — and with so much at stake you can see why nailing the Russia case is Jolla’s top priority.)

While the Russian state has been the entity most keen to embrace an alternative (non-U.S.-led) mobile OS — perhaps unsurprisingly — it’s not the only place in the world where Jolla has irons in the fire.

Another licensing partner, Bolivian IT services company Jalasoft, has co-developed a Sailfish-powered smartphone called Accione.

Jalasoft’s ‘liberty’-touting Accione Sailfish smartphone

It slates the handset on its website as being “designed for Latinos by Latinos”. “The digitalization of the economy is inevitable and, if we do not control the foundation of this digitalization, we have no future,” it adds.

Jalasoft founder and CEO Jorge Lopez says the company’s decision to invest effort in kicking the tyres of Jolla’s alternative mobile ecosystem is about gaining control — or seeking “technological libration” as the website blurb puts it.

“With Sailfish OS we have control of the implementation, while with Android it is the opposite,” Lopez tells TechCrunch. “We are working on developing smart buildings and we need a private OS that is not Android or iOS. This is mainly because our product will allow the end user to control the whole building and doing this with Android or iOS a hackable OS will bring concerns on security.”

Lopez says Jalasoft is using Accione as its development platform — “to gather customer feedback and to further develop our solution” — so the project clearly remains in an early phase, and he says that no more devices are likely to be announced this year.
But Jolla can point to more seeds being sewn with the potential, with work, determination and patience, to sprout into another sizeable crop of Sailfish-powered devices down the line.

Complexity in China

Even more ambitiously Jolla is also targeting China, where investment has been taken in to form a local consortium to develop a Chinese Sailfish ecosystem.

Although Pienimäki cautions there’s still much work to be done to bring Sailfish to market in China.

“We completed a major pilot with our licensing customer, Sailfish China Consortium, in 2017-18,” he says, giving an update on progress to date. “The public in market solution is not there yet. That is something that we are working together with the customer — hopefully we can see it later this year on the market. But these things take time. And let’s say that we’ve been somewhat surprised at how complex this kind of decision-making can be.”

“It wasn’t easy in Russia — it took three years of tight collaboration together with our Russian partners to find a way. But somehow it feels that it’s going to take even more in China. And I’m not necessarily talking about calendar time — but complexity,” he adds.

While there’s no guarantee of success for Jolla in China, the potential win is so big given the size of the market that even if they can only carve out a tiny slice, such as a business or corporate sector, it’s still worth going after. And he points to the existence of a couple of native mobile Linux operating systems he reckons could make “very lucrative partners”.

That said, the get-to-market challenge for Jolla in China is clearly distinctly different vs the rest of the world. This is because Android has developed into an independent (i.e. rather than Google-led) ecosystem in China as a result of state restrictions on the Internet and Internet companies. So the question is what could Sailfish offer that forked Android doesn’t already?

An Oppo Android powered smartphone on show at MWC 2017

Again, Jolla is taking the long view that ultimately there will be appetite — and perhaps also state-led push — for a technology platform bolster against political uncertainty in U.S.-China relations.

“What has happened now, in particular last year, is — because of the open trade war between the nations — many of the technology vendors, and also I would say the Chinese government, has started to gradually tighten their perspective on the fact that ‘hey simply it cannot be a long term strategy to just keep forking Android’. Because in the end of the day it’s somebody else’s asset. So this is something that truly creates us the opportunity,” he suggests.

“Openly competing with the fact that there are very successful Android forks in China, that’s going to be extremely difficult. But — let’s say — tapping into the fact that there are powers in that nation that wish that there would be something else than forking Android, combined with the fact that there is already something homegrown in China which is not forking Android — I think that’s the recipe that can be successful.”

Not all Jolla’s Sailfish bets have paid off, of course. An earlier foray by an Indian licensing partner into the consumer handset market petered out. Albeit, it does reinforce their decision to zero in on government and corporate licensing.

“We got excellent business connections,” says Pienimäki of India, suggesting also that it’s still a ‘watch this space’ for Jolla. The company has a “second move” in train in the market that he’s hopeful to be talking about publicly later this year.

It’s also pitching Sailfish in Africa. And in markets where target customers might not have their own extensive in-house IT capability to plug into Sailfish co-development work Pienimäki says it’s offering a full solution — “a ready made package”, together with partners, including device management, VPN, secure messaging and secure email — which he argues “can be still very lucrative business cases”.

Looking ahead and beyond mobile, Pienimäki suggests the automotive industry could be an interesting target for Sailfish in the future — though not literally plugging the platform into cars; but rather licensing its technologies where appropriate — arguing car makers are also keen to control the tech that’s going into their cars.

“They really want to make sure that they own the cockpit. It’s their property, it’s their brand and they want to own it — and for a reason,” he suggests, pointing to the clutch of major investments from car companies in startups and technologies in recent years.

“This is definitely an interesting area. We are not directly there ourself — and we are not capable to extend ourself there but we are discussing with partners who are in that very business whether they could utilize our technologies there. That would then be more or less like a technology licensing arrangement.”

A trust balancing model

While Jolla looks to be approaching a tipping point as a business, in terms of being able to profit off of licensing an alternative mobile platform, it remains a tiny and some might say inconsequential player on the global mobile stage.

Yet its focus on building and maintaining trusted management and technology architectures also looks timely — again, given how geopolitical spats are intervening to disrupt technology business as usual.

Chinese giant Huawei used an MWC keynote speech last month to reject U.S.-led allegations that its 5G networking technology could be repurposed as a spying tool by the Chinese state. And just this week it opened a cybersecurity transparency center in Brussels, to try to bolster trust in its kit and services — urging industry players to work together on agreeing standards and structures that everyone can trust.

In recent years U.S.-led suspicions attached to Russia have also caused major headaches for security veteran Kaspersky — leading the company to announce its own trust and transparency program and decentralize some of its infrastructure, including by spinning up servers in Europe last year.

Businesses finding ways to maintain and deepen the digital economy in spite of a little — or even a lot — of cross-border mistrust may well prove to be the biggest technology challenge of all moving forward.

Especially as next-gen 5G networks get rolled out — and their touted ‘intelligent connectivity’ reaches out to transform many more types of industries, bringing new risks and regulatory complexity.

The geopolitical problem linked to all this boils down to how to trust increasing complex technologies without any one entity being able to own and control all the pieces. And Jolla’s business looks interesting in light of that because it’s selling the promise of neutral independence to all its customers, wherever they hail from — be it Russia, LatAm, China, Africa or elsewhere — which makes its ability to secure customer trust not just important but vital to its success.

Indeed, you could argue its customers are likely to rank above average on the ‘paranoid’ scale, given their dedicated search for an alternative (non-U.S.-led) mobile OS in the first place.

“It’s one of the number one questions we get,” admits Pienimäki, discussing Jolla’s trust balancing act — aka how it manages and maintains confidence in Sailfish’s independence, even as it takes business backing and code contributions from a state like Russia.

“We tell about our reference case in Russia and people quickly ask ‘hey okay, how can I trust that there is no blackbox inside’,” he continues, adding: “This is exactly the core question and this is exactly the problem we have been able to build a solution for.”

Jolla’s solution sums to one line: “We create a transparent platform and on top of fully transparent platform you can create secure solutions,” as Pienimäki puts it.

“The way it goes is that Jolla with Sailfish OS is always offering the transparent Sailfish operating system core, on source code level, all the time live, available for all the customers. So all the customers constantly, in real-time, have access to our source code. Most of it’s in public open source, and the proprietary parts are also constantly available from our internal infrastructure. For all the customers, at the same time in real-time,” he says, fleshing out how it keeps customers on board with a continually co-developing software platform.

“The contributions we take from these customers are always on source code level only. We don’t take any binary blobs inside our software. We take only source code level contributions which we ourselves authorize, integrate and then we make available for all the customers at the very same moment. So that loopback in a way creates us the transparency.

“So if you want to be suspicion of the contributions of the other guys, so to say, you can always read it on the source code. It’s real-time. Always available for all the customers at the same time. That’s the model we have created.”

“It’s honestly quite a unique model,” he adds. “Nobody is really offering such a co-development model in the operating system business.

“Practically how Android works is that Google, who’s leading the Android development, makes the next release of Android software, then releases it under Android Open Source and then people start to backboard it — so that’s like ‘source, open’ in a way, not ‘open source’.”

Sailfish’s community of users also have real-time access to and visibility of all the contributions — which he dubs “real democracy”.

“People can actually follow it from the code-line all the time,” he argues. “This is really the core of our existence and how we can offer it to Russia and other countries without creating like suspicion elements each side. And that is very important.

“That is the only way we can continue and extend this regional licensing and we can offer it independently from Finland and from our own company.”

With global trade and technology both looking increasingly vulnerable to cross-border mistrust, Jolla’s approach to collaborative transparency may offer something of a model if other businesses and industries find they need to adapt themselves in order for trade and innovation to keep moving forward in uncertain political times.

Antitrust and privacy uplift

Last but not least there’s regulatory intervention to consider.

A European Commission antitrust decision against Google’s Android platform last year caused headlines around the world when the company was slapped with a $5BN fine.

More importantly for Android rivals Google was also ordered to change its practices — leading to amended licensing terms for the platform in Europe last fall. And Pienimäki says Jolla was a “key contributor” to the Commission case against Android.

European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, on April 15, 2015 in Brussels, as the Commission said it would open an antitrust investigation into Google’s Android operating system. (Photo credit: JOHN THYS/AFP/Getty Images)

The new Android licensing terms make it (at least theoretically) possible for new types of less-heavily-Google-flavored Android devices to be developed for Europe. Though there have been complaints the licensing tweaks don’t go far enough to reset Google’s competitive Android advantage.

Asked whether Jolla has seen any positive impacts on its business following the Commission’s antitrust decision, Pienimäki responds positively, recounting how — “one or two weeks after the ruling” — Jolla received an inbound enquiry from a company in France that had felt hamstrung by Google requiring its services to be bundled with Android but was now hoping “to realize a project in a special sector”.

The company, which he isn’t disclosing at this stage, is interested in “using Sailfish and then having selected Android applications running in Sailfish but no connection with the Google services”.

“We’ve been there for five years helping the European Union authorities [to build the case] and explain how difficult it is to create competitive solutions in the smartphone market in general,” he continues. “Be it consumer or be it anything else. That’s definitely important for us and I don’t see this at all limited to the consumer sector. The very same thing has been a problem for corporate clients, for companies who provide specialized mobile device solutions for different kind of corporations and even governments.”

While he couches the Android ruling as a “very important” moment for Jolla’s business last year, he also says he hopes the Commission will intervene further to level the smartphone playing field.

“What I’m after here, and what I would really love to see, is that within the European Union we utilize Linux-based, open platform solution which is made in Europe,” he says. “That’s why we’ve been pushing this [antitrust action]. This is part of that. But in bigger scheme this is very good.”

He is also very happy with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which came into force last May, plugging in a long overdue update to the bloc’s privacy rules with a much beefed up enforcement regime.

GDPR has been good for Jolla’s business, according to Pienimäki, who says interest is flowing its way from customers who now perceive a risk to using Android if customer data flows outside Europe and they cannot guarantee adequate privacy protections are in place.

“Already last spring… we have had plenty of different customer discussions with European companies who are really afraid that ‘hey I cannot offer this solution to my government or to my corporate customer in my country because I cannot guarantee if I use Android that this data doesn’t go outside the European Union’,” he says.

“You can’t indemnify in a way that. And that’s been really good for us as well.”
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/09/th...hone-business/





ISPs Strike Deal with Vermont to Suspend State Net Neutrality Law

Vermont and ISPs agree to delay law until judges rule on FCC repeal.
Jon Brodkin

The state of Vermont has agreed to suspend enforcement of its net neutrality law pending the outcome of a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission.

In October, the nation's largest broadband industry lobby groups sued Vermont in a US District Court to stop a state law that requires ISPs to follow net neutrality principles in order to qualify for government contracts. But the lobby groups and state agreed to delay litigation and enforcement of the Vermont law in a deal that they detailed in a joint court filing yesterday. The lawsuit against Vermont was filed by mobile industry lobby CTIA, cable industry lobby NCTA, telco lobby USTelecom, the New England Cable & Telecommunications Association, and the American Cable Association (ACA).

The delay will remain in place until after a final decision in the lawsuit seeking to reverse the FCC's net neutrality repeal and the FCC's preemption of state net neutrality laws. Vermont is one of 22 states that sued the FCC in that case in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Tech companies and consumer advocacy groups are also opposing the FCC in the same case. Oral arguments were held last month, and DC Circuit judges will likely issue a decision in the coming months.

An FCC loss in that case could entirely restore federal net neutrality rules, potentially making the Vermont law redundant. But a partial loss for the FCC could leave the federal repeal in place while allowing states to enforce their own net neutrality laws.

The Vermont delay would remain in place until after all appeals are exhausted in the FCC case, which could potentially reach the US Supreme Court.
California also delayed rules

The Vermont delay is similar to one previously agreed upon in California, where the state government issued a stricter net neutrality law than Vermont's.

Vermont's law creates a process in which ISPs can certify that they comply with net neutrality guidelines, and it says that state agencies may only buy Internet service from ISPs that obtain those certifications. To get the certification, ISPs must not engage in paid prioritization and must not block or throttle lawful Internet traffic on any mass-market retail broadband service in Vermont.

However, ISPs could choose not to get the certification and forego the opportunity to sell broadband to state agencies. That limitation could help Vermont's law survive a legal challenge even if the FCC preemption remains in place.

The ACA celebrated Vermont's net neutrality delay, claiming that it "will allow continued innovation and investment while these deliberations continue." The cable industry lobby group did not explain what kind of "innovation" requires blocking, throttling, or paid prioritization.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...eutrality-law/





How the Internet Travels Across Oceans

‘People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean.’
Adam Satariano

The internet consists of tiny bits of code that move around the world, traveling along wires as thin as a strand of hair strung across the ocean floor. The data zips from New York to Sydney, from Hong Kong to London, in the time it takes you to read this word.

Nearly 750,000 miles of cable already connect the continents to support our insatiable demand for communication and entertainment. Companies have typically pooled their resources to collaborate on undersea cable projects, like a freeway for them all to share.

But now Google is going its own way, in a first-of-its-kind project connecting the United States to Chile, home to the company’s largest data center in Latin America.

“People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not,” said Jayne Stowell, who oversees construction of Google’s undersea cable projects. “It’s in the ocean.”

Getting it there is an exacting and time-intensive process. A 456-foot ship named Durable will eventually deliver the cable to sea. But first, the cable is assembled inside a sprawling factory a few hundred yards away, in Newington, N.H. The factory, owned by the company SubCom, is filled with specialized machinery used to maintain tension in the wire and encase it in protective skin.

The cables begin as a cluster of strands of tiny threads of glass fibers. Lasers propel data down the threads at nearly the speed of light, using fiber-optic technology. After reaching land and connecting with an existing network, the data needed to read an email or open a web page makes its way onto a person’s device.

While most of us now largely experience the internet through Wi-Fi and phone data plans, those systems eventually link up with physical cables that swiftly carry the information across continents or across oceans.

In the manufacturing process, the cables move through high-speed mills the size of jet engines, wrapping the wire in a copper casing that carries electricity across the line to keep the data moving. Depending on where the cable will be located, plastic, steel and tar are added later to help it withstand unpredictable ocean environments. When finished, the cables will end up the size of a thick garden hose.

A year of planning goes into charting a cable route that avoids underwater hazards, but the cables still have to withstand heavy currents, rock slides, earthquakes and interference from fishing trawlers. Each cable is expected to last up to 25 years.

A conveyor that staff members call “the Cable Highway” moves the cable directly into Durable, docked in the Piscataqua River. The ship will carry over 4,000 miles of cable weighing about 3,500 metric tons when fully loaded.

Inside the ship, workers spool the cable into cavernous tanks. One person walks the cable swiftly in a circle, as if laying out a massive garden hose, while others lie down to hold it in place to ensure it doesn’t snag or knot. Even with teams working around the clock, it takes about four weeks before the ship is loaded up with enough cable to hit the open sea.

The first trans-Atlantic cable was completed in 1858 to connect the United States and Britain. Queen Victoria commemorated the occasion with a message to President James Buchanan that took 16 hours to transmit.

While new wireless and satellite technologies have been invented in the decades since, cables remain the fastest, most efficient and least expensive way to send information across the ocean. And it is still far from cheap: Google would not disclose the cost of its project to Chile, but experts say subsea projects cost up to $350 million, depending on the length of the cable.

In the modern era, telecommunications companies laid most of the cable, but over the past decade American tech giants started taking more control. Google has backed at least 14 cables globally. Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft have invested in others, connecting data centers in North America, South America, Asia, Europe and Africa, according to TeleGeography, a research firm.

Countries view the undersea cables as critical infrastructure and the projects have been flash points in geopolitical disputes. Last year, Australia stepped in to block the Chinese technology giant Huawei from building a cable connecting Australia to the Solomon Islands, for fear it would give the Chinese government an entry point into its networks.

Content providers like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon now own or lease more than half of the undersea bandwidth

Yann Durieux, a ship captain, said one of his most important responsibilities was keeping morale up among his crew during the weeks at sea. Building the infrastructure of our digital world is a labor-intensive job.

With 53 bedrooms and 60 bathrooms, the Durable can hold up to 80 crew members. The team splits into two 12-hour shifts. Signs warn to be quiet in the hallways because somebody is always sleeping.

The ship will carry enough supplies to last at least 60 days: roughly 200 loaves of bread, 100 gallons of milk, 500 cartons of a dozen eggs, 800 pounds of beef, 1,200 pounds of chicken and 1,800 pounds of rice. There’s also 300 rolls of paper towels, 500 rolls of toilet paper, 700 bars of soap and almost 600 pounds of laundry detergent. No alcohol is allowed on board.

“I still get seasick,” said Walt Oswald, a technician who has been laying cables on ships for 20 years. He sticks a small patch behind his ear to hold back the nausea. “It’s not for everybody.”

Poor weather is inevitable. Swells reach up to 20 feet, occasionally requiring the ship captain to order the subsea cable to be cut so the ship can seek safer waters. When conditions improve, the ship returns, retrieving the cut cable that has been left attached to a floating buoy, then splicing it back together before continuing on.

Work on board is slow and plodding. The ship, at sea for months at a time, moves about six miles per hour, as the cables are pulled from the giant basins out through openings at the back of the ship. Closer to shore, where there’s more risk of damage, an underwater plow is used to bury the cable in the sea floor.

The Durable crew doesn’t expect the work to slow down anytime soon.

After the Latin America project, Google plans to build a new cable running from Virginia to France, set to be done by 2020. The company has 13 data centers open around the world, with eight more under construction — all needed to power the trillions of Google searches made each year and the more than 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube each minute.

“It really is management of a very complex multidimensional chess board,” said Ms. Stowell of Google, who wears an undersea cable as a necklace.

Demand for undersea cables will only grow as more businesses rely on cloud computing services. And technology expected around the corner, like more powerful artificial intelligence and driverless cars, will all require fast data speeds as well. Areas that didn’t have internet are now getting access, with the United Nations reporting that for the first time more than half the global population is now online.

“This is a huge part of the infrastructure that’s making that happen,” said Debbie Brask, the vice president at SubCom, who is managing the Google project. “All of that data is going in the undersea cables.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...es-oceans.html





TOR Operators in Germany May Soon Face Prison

In the fight against drugs and child pornography, the Federal Council advises whether the operation of anonymous servers is punishable. This endangers secure communication and whistleblower.
Eike Kühl

Three years of investigation, four convictions, an exchange for child pornography less: Last week ended the trial of the platform Elysium with high prison sentences for the defendants. Operated from a workshop in Bad Camberg, Germany , the platform, with more than 80,000 members, was one of the world's most popular portals for pictures and videos of sexualized violence against children in the Darknet - a part of the Internet that can only be accessed through special software such as the Tor browser ,

Elysium is finished, that's a success for the police. But this is only the beginning for the German security politicians. They want to ensure that operators of platforms selling and exchanging illegal content such as child pornography, drugs and weapons are punished more severely in the future. This Friday, therefore, the Federal Council is discussing an amendment to the Criminal Code. Activists and lawyers warn against putting the Darknet under a general suspicion and thereby jeopardizing a secure communication path.

The bill, which has been initiated by the North Rhine-Westphalian Minister of Justice Peter Biesenbach (CDU), is to introduce a new criminal record . With up to three years imprisonment should be punished, "who offers an internet-based service whose access and accessibility is limited by special technical precautions, and whose purpose or activity is directed to commit or promote certain illegal acts". Anyone who operates a commercial platform should even face imprisonment of up to ten years.

The "alleviation of crime" in the Darknet should be punishable

This is what politicians are looking for above all on the administrators of Darknet platforms, where illegal content is traded. Due to the technical characteristics of the Tor network, in which the anonymous users can not be identified by individual IP addresses, the operators are difficult to locate anyway. And if they do, then they are reluctant to have even taken part in the trade: they had merely provided the infrastructure, but did not know that in their forum weapons or child pornography were sold, it says.

The change in the law would make it easier to convict the operators at least for committing an offense. In particularly serious suspicions, investigators should also be able to monitor telephone conversations, e-mails or the Internet traffic of suspects - if a judge or a judge agrees. This is necessary for an "effective prosecution of acts committed via Internet-based communication", it says in the application for the amendment.

The suggestion from NRW may be sharp, but some are not keen enough. This is the result of the amendments introduced by the Federal Council's Leading Internal and Legal Committee. Its members call for increasing the maximum prison sentence from three to five years. It should not only be punished, who Darknet services "offers" with illegal content, but who "makes it accessible". At the same time, the "facilitation of criminal offenses" should be listed as an additional fact.

Warning about malicious interpretation of the paragraphs

What sounds like peacock counting could have serious consequences in practice. Because what exactly does "lightening" actually mean in this case?

To answer the question, one must first explain the Tor network. It is like an onion of several layers, hence the name: The Onion Router . If you log in, you will end up in the outermost layer. Gradually, the additional encrypted data traffic is routed through additional layers and so-called nodes ( relays ) - thus concealing its exact origin. These nodes form the backbone of the Tor network, and the servers are made available worldwide by organizations, universities, clubs or volunteers.

If one would interpret the planned change of law "maliciously", could already make all humans punishable, who operate a Tor-knot, says the Mainz law professor Matthias Bäcker in the discussion with the south German newspaper . Because that would make it easier for them to access illegal content. Frank Rieger, spokesman for the Chaos Computer Club, told netzpolitik.org : "The bill contains mainly rubber tariffs with the clear goal of criminalizing operators and users of anonymization services." The facts are deliberately blurred. "

An "existential risk" for Tor node operators

According to Matthias Bäcker and the Berlin judge Ulf Buermeyer, there are no reasons for tightening the law. There are already sufficient criminal standards for the trade in drugs, weapons or child pornography and these are of course also for offers in the Darknet. That the prosecution works, as the recent case of Elysium has shown. "The bill involves a huge risk of criminalizing completely unproblematic behavior, creating huge risks for people who run Internet platforms," said Buermeyer, who is also the chairman of the Society for Freedom Rights, Deutschlandfunk .

The same applies to Jens Kubieziel. He is a board member of the association Onelfreunde , which works for confidential communication and the Tor network. "I've talked to several lawyers and almost everyone thinks that the change in the law could affect relays," he says in an interview with ZEIT ONLINE.

Kubieziel advises people who are thinking about setting up a Tor knot. Even now, especially the German users are uncertain about the legal situation. He always tells them that one can not exclude, be targeted by law enforcement. He speaks from personal experience; Last year, his house was searched, hard drives and telephones confiscated. The heavily criticized action had nothing to do with illegal content, but with a threadbare connection of Zwiebelfreunde to an e-mail provider. That's why he did not shut down his Tor node, says Kubieziel.

Should the proposed bill come through, this could change. "In the worst case, we're talking about several years in prison, because it's about an existential risk," says Kubieziel. Since you have to think carefully about whether you want to take this risk as a node operator. Even if, as he points out, those illegal contents that are referred to in the public as darknet, make up only a fraction of the entire Tor network .
Deterrence maneuver for Tor node operators

Kubiziel sees the attack above all a deterrent, promoted by technical incomprehension, as he has seen in recent years again and again with representatives of the police and politics. In fact, there are regular demands to do something about the Darknet. At the latest when it became known in 2016 that the assassin of Munich acquired his murder weapon in the Darknet, the rhetoric also intensified. At that time the Hessian Minister of Justice Eva Kühne-Hörmann spoke of "islands of lawlessness".

A few weeks ago Günter Krings, Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of the Interior, even demanded a complete ban on darknets in Germany at the European Police Congress: "I understand why the Darknet can have a benefit in autocratic systems," Krings said , "but in a free, In my view, there is no legitimate benefit to open democracy. "

Apart from the fact that the Darknet or the Tor network can not be simply forbidden or switched off, because it runs just over many servers world-wide, this statement is far from reality. While there are illegal platforms in the Darknet, as well as in the open internet, the Tor network is also used by whistleblowers, dissidents or simply people who want to communicate securely. One of the most popular sites in the Tor network is about the login page of Facebook .

To put all Tor users under general suspicion and to assume that they have something to hide, is from the point of view of activists like Jens Kubieziel the wrong way. Therefore, he has a clear opinion on the planned tightening of the law: "This is an attack on the freedom of communication."
https://translate.google.com/transla...icht&sandbox=1





WWWorries? Inventor of Web Laments Coming-of-Age Woes
Jamey Keaten

The inventor of the World Wide Web knows his revolutionary innovation is coming of age, and doesn't always like what he sees: state-sponsored hacking, online harassment, hate speech and misinformation among the ills of its "digital adolescence."

Tim Berners-Lee issued a cri-de-coeur letter and spoke to a few reporters Monday on the eve of the 30-year anniversary of his first paper with an outline of what would become the web — a first step toward transforming countless lives and the global economy.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, plans to host Berners-Lee and other web aficionados on Tuesday. "We're celebrating, but we're also very concerned," Berners-Lee said.

Late last year, a key threshold was crossed — roughly half the world has gotten online. Today some 2 billion websites exist.

The anniversary offers "an opportunity to reflect on how far we have yet to go," Berners-Lee said, calling the "fight" for the web "one of the most important causes of our time."

He is convinced the online population will continue to grow, but says accessibility issues continue to beset much of the world.

"Look at the 50 percent who are on the web, and it's not so pretty for them," he said. "They are all stepping back suddenly horrified after the Trump and Brexit elections realizing that this web thing that they thought was so cool has actually not necessarily been serving humanity very well."

The anniversary is also a nod to the innovative, collaborative and open-source mindset at the Geneva-based CERN, where physicists smash particles together to unlock secrets of science and the universe.

As a young English software engineer, Berners-Lee came up with the idea for hypertext-transfer protocol — the "http" that adorns web addresses — and other building blocks for the web while working at CERN in March 1989. Some trace the actual start of the web to 1990, when he released the first web browser.

Berners-Lee reminisced about how he was really out to get disparate computer systems to talk to one another, and resolve the "burning frustration" over a "lack of interoperability" of documentation from disparate computing systems used at CERN in the late 1980s.

Now, the hope of his World Wide Web Foundation is to enlist governments, companies, and citizens to take a greater role in shaping the web for good under principles laid out in its "Contract for the Web."

Under the contract's sweeping, broad ambition, governments are supposed to make sure everyone can connect to the internet, to keep it available and to respect privacy. Companies are to make the internet affordable, respect privacy and develop technology that will put people — and the "public good" — first. Citizens are to create and to cooperate and respect "civil discourse," among other things.

To Berners-Lee, the web is a "mirror of humanity" where "you will see good and bad."

"The Contract for the Web recognizes that whether humanity, in fact, is constructive or not actually depends on the way you write the code of the social network," he said.

Some tough regulation may be necessary in some places, in others not, Berners-Lee said.

On one issue, he's insistent: "Net neutrality — strong regulation," Berners-Lee said, hammering a fist on the table. He was alluding to a principle that anyone with an internet connection should have equal access to video, music, email, photos, social networks, maps and other online material.

Berners-Lee said the web has created opportunity, made lives easier and given the marginalized a voice, but "it has also created opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier to commit."

Ultimately, his "Contract" proposal is not about "quick fixes," but a process for shifting people's relationship with the online world, he said.

"It's our journey from digital adolescence to a more mature, responsible and inclusive future," he wrote.
https://www.newstimes.com/business/t...e-13680186.php

















Until next week,

- js.



















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