P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Peer to Peer
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 17-07-19, 06:48 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 20th, ’19

Since 2002



































July 20th, 2019




YouTube Cracks Down on Stream-Ripping Sites that Pirate Music

The site's new copyright-protection measures have caught the eye of a congressional committee chairman and the recording industry.
Joan E. Solsman

YouTube has caught the attention of a high-level congressional office interested in its copyright-protection practices, an inquiry that comes as the massive video site cracks down on stream ripping, a type of music piracy. Stream ripping swipes audio tracks off YouTube videos and spits them out as MP3 downloads.

The office of the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, reached out to Google late last week about YouTube's actions on stream ripping because of his longstanding interest in quashing piracy, according to a person familiar with the matter. A second industry source said content protection organizations outside the US have been working to verify whether YouTube has been putting new measures in place to block stream ripping.

YouTube declined to comment on whether it had been contacted by Nadler's office but confirmed it has elevated its blocking of stream-ripping sites, which violate its terms of service. YouTube is the world's biggest online video source, with 2 billion logged-in visitors every month.

"As part of our ongoing efforts to enforce YouTube's terms of service, we're constantly making improvements and one of the recent changes resulted in the blocking of some MP3 stream ripping sites," YouTube said in a statement. "It's our desire to be good partners to our content licensors as our interests are aligned on thwarting violative downloads and downloader sites."

Nadler's office didn't offer a comment.

The music industry has long griped about suffering collateral damage from YouTube's massive scale and influence. Stream-ripping piracy -- which circumvents YouTube encryption to morph music from a streamed video into a download you can listen to offline for free -- has worried the music industry as it has grown. It's one of several complaints that recording companies, artists and others have about the Google-owned video giant.

Though stream ripping isn't limited to YouTube, Google's service is the biggest single source of music online. YouTube provides more music listening than Spotify, Apple Music and every other paid streaming service combined.

But to the music industry's longstanding irritation, YouTube generates a fraction of the revenue that those subscription services do. Last year in the US, paid subscription services brought the recording industry $4.66 billion in revenue. Ad-supported streaming, where the streaming occurs primarily on YouTube, was only $760 million.

The US recording industry's trade group is cheering YouTube's latest moves.

"While we do not yet know how effective these new measures are, we applaud YouTube for taking affirmative steps towards shutting down the fastest growing form of music piracy," Mitch Glazier, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, said in a statement. "Illegal stream-ripping is a threat to creative artists, licensed music services, and fans, and shutting it down at its source is one of the most effective tools to protect legitimate streaming services. It's vital that everyone in tech and music work together to stop it."

YouTube ratcheted up the blocking last week. YouTube's new measures against stream ripping were earlier reported by piracy publication Torrent Freak.

The latest enforcement measures come as regulatory scrutiny of both Google and YouTube hit new intensity. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating claims that YouTube broke laws protecting children's privacy, and the Department of Justice reportedly is building an antitrust case against Google. Congress has embarked on a parade of hearings and inquiries about anticompetitive concerns at Google, YouTube and their peers.

Nadler's outreach to YouTube came days before the House Judiciary Committee grilled Google about whether it's a monopoly. Apple, Facebook and Amazon faced the same treatment.
https://www.cnet.com/news/google-you...g-music-songs/





BT Sport Goes Greedy and its Subscribers Go Pirating
Bill Toulas

• BT Sport decides to introduce pay per view fees for UFC games, and the community turns to piracy.
• Regular subscribers decided to boycott the PPV service, while many canceled their subscription and bought pirate IPTV sets.
• BT Sport explores a new realm in streaming services that many believe will be the next trend.

BT Sport, the broadcasting rights owner for UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) events in the UK has decided that it would be a good idea to charge its subscribers an additional fee to watch big matches. BT Sport has been offering UFC content in the UK since 2013, with the regular subscribers experiencing no weird or optional limitations. However, the company decided to take a turn this Saturday with the UFC 239 match between Jon Jones and Thiago Santos. To watch the fight, subscribers were asked for an additional “pay per view” fee of £19.95.

Instead of seeing more money flowing in, BT Sport was met with rejection as its regular subscribers decided to turn to piracy and watch the match through illicit channels. In addition to this momentary failure, BT Sport experienced subscription cancellations, as many were paying for a package only to access UFC events. Obviously, this didn’t play out the way that the broadcasting platform thought it would, and it serves as an example for all live sport streaming platforms which could be processing and evaluating such moves right now.

According to TorrentFreak, who highlighted the incident, several pirate IPTV service providers told them that there was a noticeable spike in the demand for BT Sport content during the weekend, and this was only the beginning. The subscribers of BT Sport packages did what they did not only out of choice but also as part of an agreed boycott that was organized on social media platforms like Reddit. By boycotting UFC 239, the subscribers hope that they will force the broadcaster to reconsider, and take PPV charging out of their strategy in the future. This is not the case for everyone though, as some express their satisfaction with the quality of the content and the experience of consuming it on pirating platforms.

Some underlined the absence of annoying interruptions for ad breaks, while others praised the complete lack of censoring. At the end of the day, pirate IPTV subscription services that offer all BT Sport content unconditionally cost £10.00 per month, while the regular subscription to the legal service would set one back by £40.00/month, plus the PPV fees. Obviously, the difference is beyond any comparison, and content providers like BT Sport going greedy are the number one reason that pushes people to piracy.
https://www.technadu.com/bt-sport-gr...irating/72817/





First Report on Counterfeiting and Piracy in Vietnam Published by the ICC BASCAP
Schmitt & Orlov

The International Chamber of Commerce’s Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (ICC BASCAP) has released its first report on “Promoting and Protecting Intellectual Property in Vietnam”. It revealed factors that contributed to increase counterfeit and pirated products in Vietnam including the disproportionate size of Vietnam’s informal economy; corruption; weak enforcement mechanisms and lack of awareness among consumers of the risks involved.

The report focused on: 1) Studying the status of intellectual property in Vietnam; 2) Assessing the impact of counterfeiting and copyright infringement on the socio-economic development, and the Government’s efforts, in the recent years, to strengthen the protection of copyrights and trademarks. The report highlighted, unlike many other countries, the protection of intellectual property rights in Vietnam is enforced by applying administrative penalties to infringements, while civil and criminal penalties have never been applied or haven’t been considered effective. Therefore, the number of IP infringements has increased rapidly while the enforcement capacity of IPR enforcement is quite limited at central and local levels.

Hence, the report proposed a number of policy and legal recommendations, to improve the situation of enforcement of IPR in Vietnam, also to make the most of the IPR systems, in the most effective way to improve competitiveness, to attract foreign investment, additionally to boost socio-economic development during the integration period. It also recommended the Government focuses on systematically addressing the above-mentioned factors, as they hinder the process of domestic law enforcement. Ms. P Surya Prabha – Representative of ICC – BASCAP emphasized that, in order to progress, the Government should, at first, convey a clear and solid message to infringers that are trading counterfeits and pirating, and enhance enforcement law on IP as well as apply heavier penalties.

With the local support of VCCI, BASCAP will work with Vietnamese stakeholders to implement recommendations outlined in the report, in line with BASCAP’s commitment to make the fight against counterfeiting and piracy a public policy priority.
https://www.lexology.com/library/det...a-8550462b5458





Pirating Copyrighted Adult Videos Will Cost Midstate Man $7.5K

A federal judge has ordered a central Pennsylvania man to pay $7,500 for downloading copyrighted adult videos without paying.
Matt Miller

A central Pennsylvania man accused of illegally downloading copyrighted adult videos must pay their owner $7,500 in damages, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. Middle District Senior Judge Yvette Kane imposed that penalty after Wei Ho of Chambersburg failed to respond to a copyright infringement lawsuit Malibu Media LLC filed against him last year.

Malibu Media, which is based in California, has filed multiple lawsuits against people it claims have pirated its videos. It claimed Ho downloaded and distributed 10 such videos without permission and without paying.

The titles of those videos included “Pussy Cat Burglar,” “Your Luckiest Night,” “Rock Me All Night Long” and others that are considerably more suggestive.

Malibu Media sought $15,000 in damages from Ho. The default judgment Kane entered is only half that, but still represents $750 for each illegally downloaded video.

The judge also ordered Ho to pay nearly $750 in legal fees.

Malibu Media isn’t the only adult video firm that has gone to federal court to aggressively protect its copyrights. Last year, Strike 3 Holdings, a Delaware-based firm, filed suit seeking similar damages in U.S. Middle District Court.
https://www.pennlive.com/news/2019/0...e-man-75k.html





YTS Pirate Movies Website Discussing Settlement With Copyright Holders
Bill Toulas

• YTS took the legal action taken against them by filmmakers seriously and responded to them.
• The piracy movies platform has taken down the infringing titles and asks for a settlement agreement.
• For now, the legal action continues, as the rightsholders have submitted a motion for reconsideration for a rejected subpoena.

The YTS saga continues, as the platform is reportedly discussing a settlement agreement with filmmakers who have been trying to close it down for years now. The particular movies platform is the most popular and most visited pirating website, surpassing even the legendary Pirate Bay, featuring an easy to use interface, thousands of high-quality torrents, and an associated portal with subtitles. The current regime is the one that took over the brand when the original YTS was brought down in 2015 due to the unbearable legal pressure that it was subjected to.

Not only did the new admins managed to continue from where the previous owners left off, but their impact for filmmakers can be considered even greater, as the user base that enjoys its services is vast. However, copyright holders are not giving up, and as we reported more than a month ago, the creators of “Hunter Killer”, “Boyka: Undisputed”, “I Feel Pretty”, “The Hitman’s Bodyguard”, “Mechanic: Resurrection”, “Singularity”, and “Once Upon a Time in Venice” have submitted a DMCA subpoena to the US District Court of Hawaii, targeting both the website operators and individual pirates.

In an unexpected move, someone with the name “Segaran” has reportedly reached out to the attorney of the filmmakers’ coalition, Kerry Culpepper, expressing his willingness to discuss a settlement and resolve the matter in an extrajudicial way. In addition to that, the pirating platform has removed the aforementioned titles from its database, so they are no longer offering the titles to the users. Culpepper has affirmed this good-willed move and noticed that the titles belonging to the plaintiffs have now been rendered inaccessible both for regular visitors and for the signed members of the YTS platform. Of course, the damage has already been incurred to the rightsholders, so this move won’t be enough on its own to stop the lawsuit.

The DMCA subpoena that was submitted in May was not signed off by the court, though, as the connection of YTS to the US is not a definitive one. That said, the court cannot determine if it has the jurisdiction to proceed or not. The fact that YTS responded to the plaintiffs, however, shows that the fear about what the continuation of a legal battle would entail for them. For now, Culpepper has submitted a motion for reconsideration, and the case continues on the trodden road of the legal halls.
https://www.technadu.com/yts-pirate-...holders/73860/





U.S. Consumers to Spend $26 Billion on Music, Video Subscriptions This Year
Janko Roettgers

U.S. consumers are expected to spend a combined $26 billion on music and video subscription services this year, according to new estimates from the Consumer Technology Association. That’s up from $20.4 billion in 2018, and nearly twice the amount spent on such services in 2017.

Propelled by the continued success of Apple Music and Spotify, domestic music streaming revenue alone is expected to reach $8.4 billion this year. This represents a 33% growth over 2018 results.

Revenue from paid video streaming services on the other hand is expected to be up 25% year-over-year, to the tune of $17.7 billion for 2019. The Consumer Technology Association credits live TV services with some of the momentum for paid video streaming.

Together, music and video streaming services are projected to generate close to $32.3 billion in revenue in 2020.

However, these numbers are still dwarfed by the money consumers spend on video games. In 2019, video games are expected to generate close to $39 billion in revenue in the U.S., according to the Consumer Technology Association. By 2020, games are projected to bring in nearly $42 billion.

Altogether, U.S. consumers are expected to spend $401 billion on consumer electronics and services this year, which is 2.2% more than last year.

But not every segment of the market is performing equally: While spending on software and services is expected to grow 14% year-over-year, hardware spending is expected to decline by about 0.3% — yet another reason why companies like Apple increasingly focus on services.
https://www.newstimes.com/entertainm...c-14097294.php





Netflix Suffers First Major Loss of US Subscribers, Blames Price Hikes

CEO Reed Hastings blamed slower than expected growth on lackluster content and a subscription increase
Julia Alexander

Netflix didn’t add nearly as many subscribers as the company projected it would in the second quarter of 2019, and saw a loss in US subscribers for the first time since 2011, when the company separated its DVD mail-order system and streaming platform.

The company lost approximately 130,000 subscribers in the United States in Q2, and only gained 2.7 million global subscribers, after projecting it would add 5 million. CEO Reed Hastings blamed the stagnancy on the company’s price hikes, and a lack of original content to bring in new subscribers. The company instituted higher pricing plans in January, one of its biggest increases to date. Plan changes went into effect for both new and returning subscribers. As such, paid memberships in the United States were “essentially flat.”

“Our missed forecast was across all regions, but slightly more so in regions with price increases,” Hastings wrote in his letter to shareholders. “We don’t believe competition was a factor since there wasn’t a material change in the competitive landscape during Q2, and competitive intensity and our penetration is varied across regions.”

The news has led to an immediate stock drop for the company. Hastings’ letter to investors argues that the company’s next two quarters will see growth because of new seasons of Netflix successes like Stranger Things, La Casa de Papel (Money Heist), The Crown, and Orange is the New Black, which is getting a final season. Still, the stock drop and Disney, WarnerMedia, Apple, and NBC Universal’s race to create the first “Netflix killer” may be a sign that confidence in Netflix is waning.

Now Hastings, who once famously declared that Netflix’s biggest competitor is sleep, is trying to gain that confidence back. The CEO addressed the loss of Friends and The Office, two of its most watched shows, in his letter.

“Much of our domestic, and eventually global, Disney catalog, as well as Friends, The Office, and some other licensed content will wind down over the coming years, freeing up budget for more original content,” Hastings wrote. “From what we’ve seen in the past when we drop strong catalog content (Starz and Epix with Sony, Disney, and Paramount films, or second run series from Fox, for example) our members shift over to enjoying our other great content.”

Netflix is still the leader in the streaming industry, but Hastings and other executives know competition is looming. Disney and Apple are gearing up to launch their respective streaming platforms this year, ushering in a wave of new tentpole series. Disney, which will charge $6.99 a month, also has a large catalog of fan and family favorites, and it’s bringing some of its most popular characters from Marvel and Star Wars movies to new TV shows for its service. Apple is reportedly spending up to $15 million per episode on its series See, starring Jason Momoa — more than HBO spent on episodes of Game of Thrones.

Executives at Netflix know they have to invest in new series that can take the place of Friends and The Office, but the company is already projected to spend more than $15 billion on content this year.

“Library content won’t kill the Netflix US subscriber story, however, it will force them to continually spend on riskier, high-profile concepts, market their shows more aggressively, and allow competitors to copy Netflix’s initial approach in building out their own services,” analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in a new report ahead of Netflix’s earnings call.

While Disney, Apple, WarnerMedia, Amazon, and NBC Universal continue to flash their upcoming projects as a way to attract some of Netflix’s subscribers, Netflix is trying to show its strength. The company released some new viewership numbers in its earning report, adding to recently reported statistics for series like Stranger Things’ third season, which saw more than 40.7 million household accounts watching some part of season during its first four days of release, according to Nielsen.

When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s critically acclaimed documentary series, was watched by 25 million households in its first four weeks, according to the letter. Netflix counts a view as one account watching at least 70 percent of a title. The nature documentary Our Planet was watched by 33 million households in its first four weeks. Adam Sandler’s Murder Mystery is also one of Netflix’s most-watched original movies, with more than 73 million households watching the movie in its first month.

A big part of Netflix’s overall strategy to remain on top of the streaming food chain is continuing to excel in territories the competition isn’t targeting. The majority of Netflix’s growth over the last few quarters has come from international markets — an area Hastings has talked about expanding into for close to five years.

Netflix already has a major presence in these spaces, and it’s investing heavily in localized content for specific regions. Other companies haven’t spoken about similar investment strategies in the lead-ups to their launches. Netflix executives are planning to pump even more resources into international content development as an effort to stay ahead of the competition.

“We forecast Q3 global paid net adds of 7 million,” Hastings wrote, with 6.2 million of those accounts coming from international markets. “Our internal forecast still currently calls for annual global paid net adds to be up year over year.”
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/17/2...zon-stock-drop





Android Will have an Equivalent to Apple's AirDrop File Sharing

Fast Share would effectively replace Android Beam.
Jon Fingas

Ask iPhone users about the creature comforts they like and there's a good chance they'll mention AirDrop -- it's an easy way to share a photo with a nearby Apple device owner. Android users should soon have an equivalent, though. The 9to5Google team has managed to enable an upcoming Fast Share feature on Android that, like AirDrop, would use a combination of Bluetooth and WiFi to send files and even text snippets to nearby people. Turn it on and you can see nearby Fast Share-enabled devices, with transfers taking just a couple of taps (including a confirmation from the recipient).

There are a few key differences. It doesn't appear that you can limit transfers to your contacts, but you can specify "Preferred Visibility" so that favorites see you even when you're not using Fast Share. The sample recipients in the Fast Share screen suggest this might be available on Chromebooks, iOS devices and even Wear OS smartwatches, although we wouldn't count on all of those being available whenever the feature goes public. An iOS version would require a special app.

It's not certain when Fast Share will launch, although it's a Google Play Services feature and likely wouldn't require Android Q. Google might not wait long, though. The company has warned that it's deprecating NFC-based Android Beam transfers in Q. As such, Fast Share could be the only way to quickly send files to local users without resorting to apps (like Files by Google) that your friends won't necessarily have.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/30/...-share-reveal/





Bluetooth Exploit Can Track and Identify iOS, Microsoft Mobile Device Users

Any modern device sporting Bluetooth connectivity may be impacted with the exception of Android.
Charlie Osborne

A flaw in the Bluetooth communication protocol may expose modern device users to tracking and could leak their ID, researchers claim.

The vulnerability can be used to spy on users despite native OS protections that are in place and impacts Bluetooth devices on Windows 10, iOS, and macOS machines. This includes iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch models, MacBooks, and Microsoft tablets & laptops.

On Wednesday, researchers from Boston University David Starobinski and Johannes Becker presented the results of their research at the 19th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, taking place in Stockholm, Sweden.

According to the research paper, Tracking Anonymized Bluetooth Devices (.PDF), many Bluetooth devices will use MAC addresses when advertising their presence to prevent long-term tracking, but the team found that it is possible to circumvent the randomization of these addresses to permanently monitor a specific device.

Identifying tokens are usually in place alongside MAC addresses and a new algorithm developed by Boston University, called an address-carryover algorithm, is able to "exploit the asynchronous nature of payload and address changes to achieve tracking beyond the address randomization of a device."

"The algorithm does not require message decryption or breaking Bluetooth security in any way, as it is based entirely on public, unencrypted advertising traffic," the paper reads.

The Bluetooth low-energy specification, introduced in 2010 and used in Bluetooth 5, is the main focus of the research. During their experiments, the researchers set up a testbed of Apple and Microsoft devices to analyze BLE advertising channels and "advertising events" within standard Bluetooth proximities.

To conduct the tests, a custom version of Xianjun Jiao's BTLE software suite and sniffer was used. Over a period of time, advertising events and log files were passively collected and this information was analyzed to elicit data structures which revealed device ID tokens.

"Most computer and smartphone operating systems do implement address randomizations by default as a means to prevent long-term passive tracking, as permanent identifiers are not broadcasted," the paper reads. "However, we identified that devices running Windows 10, iOS or macOS regularly transmit advertising events containing custom data structures which are used to enable certain platform-specific interaction with other devices within BLE range."

It is these identifiers which can be incorporated into an algorithm to track devices and circumvent address randomization by giving attackers data which the researchers call "a temporary, secondary pseudo-identity."

While this technique works on Windows, iOS, and macOS systems, the Android operating system is immune as the OS does not continually send out advertising messages. Instead, the Android SDK scans for advertising nearby -- rather than advertising itself in a continuous fashion.

"Any device which regularly advertises data containing suitable advertising tokens will be vulnerable to the carry-over algorithm if it does not change all of its identifying tokens in sync with the advertising address," the researchers say. "As Bluetooth adoption is projected to grow from 4.2 to 5.2 billion devices between 2019 and 2022 [...] establishing tracking-resistant methods, especially on unencrypted communication channels, is of paramount importance."

ZDNet has reached out to Microsoft and Apple and will update if we hear back.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/blueto...-tablet-users/





Apple Preaches Privacy. Lawmakers Want the Talk to Turn to Action.

As states introduce privacy legislation, the tech giant is either absent from those efforts or backs industry groups that actively lobby against them.
Reed Albergotti and Tony Romm

When Apple CEO Tim Cook privately hosted six Democratic lawmakers at the company’s space-age headquarters this spring, he opened the conversation with a plea — for Congress to finally draft privacy legislation after years of federal inaction.

“It was the first issue he brought up,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene (Wash.), one of the lawmakers who made the trip to Cupertino, Calif. The Apple chief “really talked about the need for privacy across the board,” said DelBene, a former Microsoft executive.

But when DelBene discussed her own privacy bill, which would require companies to obtain consent before using consumers’ most sensitive information in unexpected ways, Cook didn’t specifically endorse it, she said.

A number of privacy advocates and U.S. lawmakers — who did not attend the meeting — say Apple has not put enough muscle behind any federal effort to tighten privacy laws. And state lawmakers, who are closest to passing rules to limit data sharing, say Apple is an ally in name only — and in fact has contributed to lobbying efforts that might undermine some new data-protection legislation.

While Apple formally supports the notion of a federal privacy law, the company has yet to formally back any bills proposed on the Hill — unlike Microsoft. “I would argue there’s a need for Apple to be a more vocal part of this debate,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), a fierce critic of tech companies for their privacy violations.

And in California, Washington and Illinois, home to the most significant state privacy bills, the iPhone giant has sought to battle back or soften local legislators’ proposed bills, often through its trade associations. That has frustrated lawmakers such as California Assemblyman Marc Levine (D), who has introduced two privacy bills in his state’s legislature this year. He and others argue that states represent the best hope for privacy legislation given the lack of federal progress.

“While the headlines from Tim Cook have him being really forward on advancing the idea that policy can help control how data is used and mismanaged and abused, that hasn’t played out in policymaking,” he said. “I would welcome a stronger presence by Apple and I would also welcome their advocacy on what best practices should be.”

Apple indirectly opposed the legislation, via trade groups it funded. On the other hand, Levine noted that Apple had approached him directly to discuss California’s plastic bag ban. “They lobby in all these other areas. They’re just not face forward on privacy.”

”We believe privacy is a fundamental human right and is at the core of what it means to be an American. To that end, we advocate for strong federal legislation that protects everyone regardless of which state they may live,” said Apple spokesman Fred Sainz. “We understand the frustration at the state level — we are frustrated too — but this topic is so important we need to be united across America.”

The states’ privacy protections could influence federal lawmakers as they try to craft a national standard, experts say. Politicians and aides said they hoped Apple would counterbalance the more active Google and Facebook — businesses highly reliant on data sharing.

Still, by focusing any support purely behind a potential federal law, Apple’s position for now allows it to function in an economy in which there is very little privacy regulation.

Apple and other tech giants are scheduled to testify Tuesday on Capitol Hill in front of a House Judiciary subcommittee focused on antitrust issues, the latest blockbuster hearing to highlight one of Washington’s most pressing questions: How to regulate large technology companies that have come to sway markets, influence elections and impact the social fabric of society.

On the issue of privacy, Apple itself has helped create sky-high expectations with its public pronouncements. For months, it has been running advertisements touting its privacy bona fides, including one plastered to the side of a hotel during a major tech conference that promised, “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.”

Last year, Apple chief executive Cook sharply attacked Facebook for its practice of collecting personal information on users in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Months later, he made a rare appearance before the European Parliament, calling for a U.S. version of Europe’s tough data-protection rules, known by the acronym GDPR.

In a recent commencement speech at Stanford University, Cook painted a frightening picture of a world in which the collection of consumer data continues unabated. “Even if you have done nothing wrong other than think differently, you begin to censor yourself. Not entirely at first. Just a little, bit by bit. To risk less, to hope less, to imagine less, to dare less, to create less, to try less, to talk less, to think less. The chilling effect of digital surveillance is profound, and it touches everything,” he said.

Despite Apple’s public stance on privacy, a Washington Post investigation earlier this year found Apple allows iPhone apps to include tracking software that surreptitiously sends the personal data of Apple customers to outside companies. Apple said it requires its app developers to have a clear privacy policy. Apple announced in June that it will prohibit that form of tracking in apps for children later this year.

“If you are going to use the value of privacy in your marketing, I think you have an obligation to your consumers to tell us what that means,” said India McKinney, a legislative analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization that advocates for Internet privacy and security.

McKinney noted that Apple hasn’t signed on to privacy legislation that other companies, such as search engine DuckDuckGo, have supported, including an amendment to the new California law that prevents consumer data collection by default and gives citizens the right to sue tech companies for violations. If Apple were to throw its weight behind strong privacy protections even at the state level, it would help counter pressure from other large tech companies to water down the legislation, she said. “That would make headlines. That would be really useful,” she said.

In many cases, though, Apple finds itself aligned with the companies it criticizes in seeking to ward off state legislative proposals, often through lobbying organizations in which they share membership, such as TechNet and CompTIA.

While Apple sat on the sidelines, other tech companies, such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, have been actively opposing laws in states including California, Illinois and Washington that would protect consumers, and pushing for amendments that would roll back some of the provisions in the California Consumer Privacy Act, the landmark state law, according to lawmakers in those states. Silicon Valley companies such as Facebook opted not to stand in the way of that law passing, according to people involved in getting the legislation passed, only after calculating that the alternative — putting privacy legislation in front of voters as a ballot measure — was less attractive.

Facebook, Google and Amazon declined to comment for this report. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Apple’s business model stands in stark contrast to its rivals such as Google and Facebook because its bottom line doesn’t depend on collecting user data for the purpose of advertising.

In recent weeks, Cook and other Apple executives have been making the rounds in Washington to meet with members of Congress and the Federal Trade Commission, touting the company’s privacy practices in what many see as an attempt to draw contrast with tech giants such as Facebook, according to people who have attended the meetings. The FTC is expected to play a stepped-up role policing the privacy practices of tech giants if lawmakers pass legislation. On antitrust issues, meanwhile, the Justice Department plans to scrutinize Apple for its business practices, The Post previously reported.

Cook took his privacy pitch directly to lawmakers in May, on the heels of Apple’s unveiling of its new D.C. flagship store, meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who leads his chamber’s top tech-focused committee. Apple spokesman Sainz said the company has discussed its views on privacy in more than 100 meetings with lawmakers around the country.

But Apple hasn’t given its explicit stamp of approval to any federal bills that have been introduced, which would set a national privacy standard — something tech companies, including Apple, say they would prefer over a patchwork of state laws. A collection of Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate have said they plan to offer a national privacy proposal in the coming months.

Warner offered an example of Apple’s absence: a bill that would essentially outlaw “dark patterns” that trick users into surrendering their personal information when they sign up for a service. The senator said the bill he introduced in April had garnered early support from Microsoft and Mozilla, a nonprofit known for its privacy-focused Firefox Internet browser. Not Apple.

“We would be the first to say we can do more and constantly challenge ourselves to do so,” Sainz said in the statement. “We have offered to help write the legislation and reiterate this offer.”

DelBene, who also visited other tech companies during the Democratic lawmakers’ tour of Silicon Valley, said she “didn’t think of it as a negative” that Cook didn’t publicly endorse her legislation because most companies have backed concepts rather than specific bills so far in the privacy debate.

Apple’s history with lawmakers is complicated. Steve Jobs, Apple’s late co-founder, openly disdained lobbying. Under Cook, though, Apple has stepped up its presence in Washington, D.C., particularly around privacy and government surveillance. It engaged in a legal battle with the FBI in 2015 when law enforcement officials sought to force it to crack a password-protected iPhone at the heart of a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif.

Cook has embraced his powerful role as Apple’s chief political spokesman. In private meetings spanning from Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, N.J., to the Oval Office, the Apple chief executive has persuaded the president to spare his company’s iPhones, iPads and other products from the stiff tariffs that have affected other goods coming from China. Apple also lobbies for issues that would further its interests, such as lowering corporate taxes and reforming the U.S. patent system.

Politically, though, Apple lags far behind competitors. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, spent $22 million on federal lobbying efforts in 2018, and Facebook spent $13 million. That’s compared to Apple’s $7 million. And unlike its competitors, Apple doesn’t donate directly to political candidates.

On privacy legislation, most of the action is taking place outside Washington. Over the past year, policymakers have considered at least 24 bills targeting data privacy, according to a tally by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many raced to act in the months after California adopted toughest-in-America rules last year that provide Web users with more information about what happens to their data — and more ability to prevent it from being sold.

Alastair Mactaggart, a real estate developer who championed California’s privacy bill, for months couldn’t snag sufficient support from tech companies, including Apple. One sticking point was a provision in his original proposal that gave Californians the right to sue companies caught violating their privacy.

After several trips to Cupertino to meet with Jane Horvath, a former Google lawyer who now heads Apple’s privacy efforts, Apple offered an olive branch: Mactaggart could tell lawmakers that if the bill narrowed citizens’ right to sue to cases where consumer data was leaked because of a company’s negligence, Apple would “dislike the bill less,” he said. “It allowed me to go to legislators and say the biggest company in the world is willing to live with this.”

Mactaggart said Apple’s stance was instrumental in getting the bill passed, but Apple was far from a privacy champion. “I don’t think Apple was super thrilled about it. They weren’t going rah-rah-rah.”

Apple supports the idea of a single federal law that would override state laws. That stance is unpopular with privacy advocates. “Any company that says they are for strong privacy protections should not try to use federal legislation to wipe out the ability of states to put in place higher privacy standards,” said Neema Singh Guliani, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. Another unpopular stance Apple has taken is its opposition to a citizen’s right to sue for privacy violations. Companies “should also be in favor of strong enforcement,” Guliani said, which includes the ability to sue.

For tech giants, the stakes in the states are high. “The states will influence privacy legislation,” said University of California at Berkeley law professor Paul Schwartz, who has studied the interplay between state and federal privacy legislation.

California state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D) described a lack of support from Apple after she introduced legislation in February that would have expanded the ability of Californians to sue tech companies for violations of their privacy rights. Instead of directly weighing in on the legislation, Apple deferred to the industry associations it belongs to with Facebook, Amazon and Google, she said, which have been effective in stalling privacy legislation in California. TechNet, like many other business groups, actively opposed the measure. “It was all the different tech associations comprised of all the different companies. Nobody had to take responsibility,” Jackson said.

In a statement, TechNet said its agenda is a “collaborative effort” from its 80 corporate members. “At both the federal level and in 24 states this year, TechNet has promoted consumer privacy legislation that strikes the appropriate balance of these priorities,” said spokeswoman Natalie McLaughlin. “America needs to continue its leadership to protect consumers while not discouraging companies from delivering new and innovative products and services,” said Alexi Madon, CompTIA’s vice president for state government affairs.

In the state of Washington, meanwhile, Rep. Zack Hudgins (D) said he also lacked Apple’s help earlier this year in battling large tech companies over provisions in a privacy bill that ultimately failed in part because of industry opposition. “Apple could be doing a lot more than they did in Washington state,” he said. “They could have put forth stronger legislation, and they could have advocated for some of the legislation that was stronger on artificial intelligence.”

Hudgins, after speaking directly with Microsoft president Brad Smith and meeting directly with representatives from PayPal, Twitter, Google, IBM and Facebook, said he asked an Apple lobbyist to put him in touch with Apple’s Cook. Apple did not make anyone from the company available, he said.

Apple did step in when Illinois lawmakers proposed legislation that would have criminalized the unauthorized collection of audio by devices such as Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s HomePod — but only to ensure the wording of the law would not open Apple up to lawsuits, according to Abe Scarr, state director for the Illinois Public Interest Research Group. He said Apple wanted to make sure the language was sufficiently “tight,” so that Apple wasn’t liable for apps in the iOS ecosystem that might violate the law. The bill, in its final form, was significantly weakened.

Apple was “opposed and remained opposed after we made lots of concessions,” he said. When it came to that particular privacy bill, Apple wasn’t an advocate for consumer privacy protections, he said. “They were an obstacle.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...k-turn-action/





Google and Facebook Are Quietly Tracking You on Sex Websites

A new study scanned 22,484 pornography sites and found them riddled with trackers from major technology companies.
Charlie Warzel

Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are always watching you — even when you’re browsing pornography websites in incognito mode.

Trackers from tech companies like Google and Facebook are logging your most personal browsing details, according to a forthcoming New Media & Society paper, which scanned 22,484 pornography websites. Where that data ultimately goes is not always clear.

“These porn sites need to think more about the data that they hold and how it’s just as sensitive as something like health information,” said Elena Maris, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft and the study’s lead author. “Protecting this data is crucial to the safety of its visitors. And what we’ve seen suggests that these websites and platforms might not have thought all of this through like they should have.”

The study’s other authors — Jennifer Henrichsen, doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, and Tim Libert, a Carnegie Mellon computer science instructor — found that 93 percent of the pornography websites they scanned sent data to an average of seven third-party domains. The authors used webXray, an open-source software tool, which detects and matches third-party data requests to scan sites. Most of that information (79 percent of websites that transmitted user data) was sent via tracking cookies from outside companies.

Web tracking varies around the web. Frequently users are tracked via cookies, which are bits of text downloaded by your web browser when you visit a site. Other times trackers come in the form of invisible embedded pixels on your screen. In most cases, these trackers help sites identify and classify repeat visitors. They can help you stay logged onto a site, record your preferences and help manage your advertising profiles.

The study found that Google (or one of its subsidiary companies like the advertising platform DoubleClick) had trackers on 74 percent of the pornography sites. Trackers from the software company Oracle showed up on 24 percent of sites, and Facebook, which does not permit pornographic content or nudity on any of its platforms, had trackers on 10 percent of the sex websites scanned by the study.

“The fact that the mechanism for adult site tracking is so similar to, say, online retail should be a huge red flag,” Dr. Maris said. “This isn’t picking out a sweater and seeing it follow you across the web. This is so much more specific and deeply personal.”

The study found that only 17 percent of the 22,484 sites scanned were encrypted, suggesting that troves of user data could be vulnerable to hacking or breaches.

Why are the trackers there in the first place? Most of the third-party code embedded in these websites is currently standard practice in the publishing industry. The New York Times embeds similar trackers and collects, uses and shares data about readers as part of its business practices. Some trackers, like those for Google Analytics, provide mundane traffic data to the site. DoubleClick and others provide the infrastructure to run advertising.

In exchange, these third-party companies receive data from the website’s visitors. Advertisers and platforms argue that this data is anonymous. And while some of it is basic (device type), other information (your I.P. address or your phone’s advertising identification number) could be used to reverse engineer your identity and match you with already existing marketing profiles.

What these companies might be doing with pornography-site browsing data is a mystery. Oracle, which owns a number of large data brokers and has been called a “privacy deathstar,” could, for example add data collected by trackers with its current profiles. In the cases of Google and Facebook, which refuse to host pornographic sexual content on a number of their platforms, it’s not always clear why they are collecting such sensitive information, even if unintentionally.

Facebook and Google denied that potential information collected by their trackers on pornography websites was used for creating marketing profiles intended to advertise to individuals.

“We don’t allow Google Ads on websites with adult content and we prohibit personalized advertising and advertising profiles based on a user’s sexual interests or related activities online,” a Google spokeswoman wrote in a statement. “Additionally, tags for our ad services are never allowed to transmit personally identifiable information to Google.”

A Facebook spokesman offered a similar explanation, noting that the company’s community guidelines forbid sex websites to use the company’s tracking tools for business purposes like advertising. Though Facebook’s pixel tracker is open for any third party to install on its website — you don’t need permission to embed it — the company suggested it blocks pornography sites and, in those cases, does not collect information from those properties. The spokesman suggested that when alerted to new sex websites using the tools, the company will enforce against them.

Oracle did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

But even if the data is technically anonymous and not used for targeted ads, some browsing information may still end up in the company logs. And when it comes to pornography websites, the most basic browsing data is intensely personal because it is revealing. As Dr. Libert and Dr. Maris note in the study, nearly 45 percent of pornography site URLs “expose or strongly suggest the site content” and in doing so might reveal a visitor’s sexual identity or orientation, or lead third parties to assume a visitor’s sexual interests. “It can be very sensitive,” Dr. Maris said, citing URLs for specific interests like bestiality, and teenage and incest content.

The researchers found that visitors to most sex sites have almost no way of knowing if a major tech company has cookies or trackers embedded in its sites, and they were able to locate privacy policies for only 17 percent of the scanned sites.

Dr. Maris argues that this lack of disclosure is similar to the issue of sexual consent. “As in any sexual interaction, silence must not be mistaken for consent,” she said. “Individuals should have a clear understanding of the power dynamics of the sexual exchange they are entering when visiting porn sites.” Those power dynamics, according to Dr. Maris, are deeply unbalanced. “You have some of the world’s most powerful companies here,” she said, noting that there’s very little redress for the consumer should the data end up in the wrong hands.

Affirmative consent is at the heart of digital privacy. Nearly all tracking is by default and governed by impossible-to-read privacy policies. And in an era that privileges and prioritizes mass collection of personal information, that means gathering information that is not only invasive but also superfluous. The leaky user data of pornographic websites is merely an extreme example of what has become standard practice online.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/o...-websites.html





EFF Hits AT&T With Class Action Lawsuit for Selling Customers’ Location to Bounty Hunters

The lawsuit, which comes after multiple Motherboard investigations into phone location data selling, is seeking an injunction against AT&T which would try to enforce the deletion of any sold data.
Joseph Cox

Tuesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class action lawsuit against AT&T and two data brokers over their sale of AT&T customers' real-time location data. The lawsuit seeks an injunction against AT&T, which would ban the company from selling any more customer location data and ensure that any already sold data is destroyed.

The move comes after multiple Motherboard investigations found AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon sold their customers' data to so-called location aggregators, which then ended up in the hands of bounty hunters and bail bondsman.

“To sell this information without any notification to users is deceptive, extraordinarily invasive of their privacy, and illegal,” Thomas D. Warren, a lawyer at Pierce Bainbridge, which is working on the suit with the EFF, said in a statement.

The lawsuit, focused on those impacted in California, represents three Californian AT&T customers. Katherine Scott, Carolyn Jewel, and George Pontis are all AT&T customers who were unaware the company sold access to their location. The class action complaint says the three didn't consent to the sale of their location data.

"Plaintiffs were emotionally distressed by the discovery that their location data was sold to the Aggregator Defendants and additional unknown third parties without their consent," the class action complaint, which also seeks monetary damages, reads.

"Had Plaintiffs known about the real-time location practices complained of herein, they would not have signed up for AT&T wireless cell phone service or would have paid less for its services," the complaint adds.

The complaint alleges that AT&T violated the Federal Communications Act by not properly protecting customers' real-time location data; and the California Unfair Competition Law and the California Consumers Legal Remedies Act for misleading its customers around the sale of such data. It also alleges AT&T and the location aggregators it sold data through violated the California Constitutional Right to Privacy.

The lawsuit points to several instances of abuse of AT&T data. In May 2018, The New York Times reported AT&T sold its data through a location aggregator to Securus. Low level law enforcement then used Securus' tool to look up phone location information without a warrant or other legal authority. Motherboard then reported that a company called Captira was selling real-time location data of all major phone carriers to bail bondsman for $7.50 each. Then earlier this year, Motherboard bought the location data of a phone in Queens, New York, showing AT&T and others were still selling their customers' data, despite promises to stop. Finally, a cache of leaked documents from a secret company called CerCareOne showed hundreds of bounty hunters had access to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint data for years. The lawsuit also points to Motherboard's reporting which showed telecoms companies were selling access not just to cell phone tower data, but highly precise A-GPS location information.

As the lawsuit highlights, AT&T's Privacy Policy says "We will not sell your personal information to anyone, for any purpose. Period."

Do you know any other cases of the sale of personal information? You can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

Destroying any sold data may be difficult. When AT&T and other telecom data trickled down to bounty hunters, those individuals were largely free to retain the data as they pleased. Location data Motherboard obtained came in the form of screenshots of the phone's location on a Google Maps interface, or PDF files.

An AT&T spokesperson said in a statement "While we haven’t seen this complaint, based on our understanding of what it alleges we will fight it. Location-based services like roadside assistance, fraud protection, and medical device alerts have clear and even life-saving benefits. We only share location data with customer consent. We stopped sharing location data with aggregators after reports of misuse."

This isn't the first class action lawsuit to be filed related to telecom companies' sale of customers' location data. In May, a firm filed a suit on behalf of AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon customers.

In response to that lawsuit, on Friday AT&T argued customers have no right to sue over the sale of location data because of a forced arbitration clause in its contract. Earlier this month, T-Mobile made a similar case in a court filing.

“AT&T and data aggregators have systematically violated the location privacy rights of tens of millions of AT&T customers,” EFF Staff Attorney Aaron Mackey said in a statement. “Consumers must stand up to protect their privacy and shut down this illegal market. That’s why we filed this lawsuit today.”
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3...-location-data





How U.S. Tech Giants Are Helping to Build China’s Surveillance State
Ryan Gallagher

An American organization founded by tech giants Google and IBM is working with a company that is helping China’s authoritarian government conduct mass surveillance against its citizens, The Intercept can reveal.

The OpenPower Foundation — a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to “drive innovation” — has set up a collaboration between IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.

Shenzhen-based Semptian is using the devices to enhance the capabilities of internet surveillance and censorship technology it provides to human rights-abusing security agencies in China, according to sources and documents. A company employee said that its technology is being used to covertly monitor the internet activity of 200 million people.

Semptian, Google, and Xilinx did not respond to requests for comment. The OpenPower Foundation said in a statement that it “does not become involved, or seek to be informed, about the individual business strategies, goals or activities of its members,” due to antitrust and competition laws. An IBM spokesperson said that his company “has not worked with Semptian on joint technology development,” but declined to answer further questions. A source familiar with Semptian’s operations said that Semptian had worked with IBM through a collaborative cloud platform called SuperVessel, which is maintained by an IBM research unit in China.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told The Intercept that he was alarmed by the revelations. “It’s disturbing to see that China has successfully recruited Western companies and researchers to assist them in their information control efforts,” Warner said.

Anna Bacciarelli, a researcher at Amnesty International, said that the OpenPower Foundation’s decision to work with Semptian raises questions about its adherence to international human rights standards. “All companies have a responsibility to conduct human rights due diligence throughout their operations and supply chains,” Bacciarelli said, “including through partnerships and collaborations.”

Semptian presents itself publicly as a “big data” analysis company that works with internet providers and educational institutes. However, a substantial portion of the Chinese firm’s business is in fact generated through a front company named iNext, which sells the internet surveillance and censorship tools to governments.

iNext operates out of the same offices in China as Semptian, with both companies on the eighth floor of a tower in Shenzhen’s busy Nanshan District. Semptian and iNext also share the same 200 employees and the same founder, Chen Longsen.

After receiving tips from confidential sources about Semptian’s role in mass surveillance, a reporter contacted the company using an assumed name and posing as a potential customer. In response, a Semptian employee sent documents showing that the company — under the guise of iNext — has developed a mass surveillance system named Aegis, which it says can “store and analyze unlimited data.”

Aegis can provide “a full view to the virtual world,” the company claims in the documents, allowing government spies to see “the connections of everyone,” including “location information for everyone in the country.”

The system can also “block certain information [on the] internet from being visited,” censoring content that the government does not want citizens to see, the documents show.

Aegis equipment has been placed within China’s phone and internet networks, enabling the country’s government to secretly collect people’s email records, phone calls, text messages, cellphone locations, and web browsing histories, according to two sources familiar with Semptian’s work.

Chinese state security agencies are likely using the technology to target human rights activists, pro-democracy advocates, and critics of President Xi Jinping’s regime, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisals.

In emails, a Semptian representative stated that the company’s Aegis mass surveillance system was processing huge amounts of personal data across China.

“Aegis is unlimited, we are dealing with thousands Tbps [terabits per second] in China more than 200 million population,” Zhu Wenying, a Semptian employee, wrote in an April message.

There are an estimated 800 million internet users in China, meaning that if Zhu’s figure is accurate, Semptian’s technology is monitoring a quarter of the country’s total online population. The volume of data the company claims its systems are handling — thousands of terabits per second — is staggering: An internet connection that is 1,000 terabits per second could transfer 3.75 million hours of high-definition video every minute.

“There can’t be many systems in the world with that kind of reach and access,” said Joss Wright, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute. It is possible that Semptian inflated its figures, Wright said. However, he added, a system with the capacity to tap into such large quantities of data is technologically feasible. “There are questions about how much processing [of people’s data] goes on,” Wright said, “but by any meaningful definition, this is a vast surveillance effort.”

The two sources familiar with Semptian’s work in China said that the company’s equipment does not vacuum up and store millions of people’s data on a random basis. Instead, the sources said, the equipment has visibility into communications as they pass across phone and internet networks, and it can filter out information associated with particular words, phrases, or people.

In response to a request for a video containing further details about how Aegis works, Zhu agreed to send one, provided that the undercover reporter signed a nondisclosure agreement. The Intercept is publishing a short excerpt of the 16-minute video because of the overwhelming public importance of its content, which shows how millions of people in China are subject to government surveillance. The Intercept removed information that could infringe on individual privacy.

The Semptian video demonstration shows how the Aegis system tracks people’s movements. If a government operative enters a person’s cellphone number, Aegis can show where the device has been over a given period of time: the last three days, the last week, the last month, or longer.

The video displays a map of mainland China and zooms in to electronically follow a person in Shenzhen as they travel through the city, from an airport, through parks and gardens, to a conference center, to a hotel, and past the offices of a pharmaceutical company.

The technology can also allow government users to run searches for a particular instant messenger name, email address, social media account, forum user, blog commenter, or other identifier, like a cellphone IMSI code or a computer MAC address, a unique series of numbers associated with each device.

In many cases, it appears that the system can collect the full content of a communication, such as recorded audio of a phone call or the written body of a text message, not just the metadata, which shows the sender and the recipient of an email, or the phone numbers someone called and when. Whether the system can access the full content of a message likely depends on whether it has been protected with strong encryption.

Zhu, the Semptian employee, wrote in emails that the company could provide governments an Aegis installation with the capacity to monitor the internet activity of 5 million people for a cost of between $1.5 million and $2.5 million. To eavesdrop on other communications, the cost would increase.

“If we add phone calls, SMS, locations,” according to Zhu, “2 to 5 million USD will be added depending on the network.”

In Sept. 2015, Semptian joined the OpenPower Foundation, the U.S.-based nonprofit founded by tech giants Google and IBM. The foundation’s current president is IBM’s Michelle Rankin and its director is Google’s Chris Johnson.

Registered in New Jersey as a “community improvement” organization, the foundation says its aim is to share advances in networking, server, data storage, and processing technology. According to its website, it wants to “enable today’s data centers to rethink their approach to technology,” as well as “drive innovation and offer more choice in the industry.”

Semptian has benefited from the collaboration with American companies, gaining access to specialized knowledge and new technologies. The Chinese firm boasts on its website that it is “actively working with world-class companies such as IBM and Xilinx”; it claims that it is the only company in the Asia-Pacific region that can provide its customers with new data-processing devices that were developed with the help of these U.S. companies.

Last year, the OpenPower Foundation stated on its website that it was “delighted” that Semptian was working with IBM, Xilinx and other American corporations. The foundation said it was also “working with some great universities and research institutions in China.” In December, OpenPower’s executives organized a summit in Beijing, at the five-star Sheraton Grand Hotel in the city’s Dongcheng District. Semptian representatives were invited to attend and demonstrated to their American counterparts new video analysis technology they have been developing for purposes including “public opinion monitoring,” one source told The Intercept.

It is unclear why the U.S. tech giants have chosen to work with Semptian; the decision may have been taken as part of a broader strategy to establish closer ties with China and gain greater access to the East Asian country’s lucrative marketplace. A spokesperson for the OpenPower Foundation declined to answer questions about the organization’s work with Semptian, saying only that “technology available through the Foundation is general purpose, commercially available worldwide, and does not require a U.S. export license.”

Elsa Kania, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a policy think tank, said that in some cases, business partnerships and academic collaborations between U.S. and Chinese companies are important and valuable, “but when it is a company known to be so closely tied to censorship or surveillance, and is deeply complicit in abuses of human rights, then it is very concerning.”

“I would hope that American companies have rigorous processes for ethical review before engaging,” Kania said. “But sometimes it seems like there’s a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ policy — it’s profit over ethics.”

Semptian, which was founded in 2003, has been a trusted partner of China’s government for years. The regime has awarded the company “National High-Tech Enterprise” status, meaning that it passed various reviews and audits conducted by the Ministry of Science and Technology. Companies that receive this special status are rewarded with preferential treatment from the government in the form of tax breaks and other support.

In 2011, German newsmagazine Der Spiegel published an article highlighting Semptian’s close relationship with the Chinese state. The company had helped establish aspects of China’s so-called Great Firewall, an internet censorship system that blocks websites the Communist Party deems undesirable, such as those about human rights and democracy. Semptian’s “network control technology is in use in some major Chinese cities,” Spiegel reported at the time.

By 2013, Semptian had begun promoting its products across the world. The company’s representatives traveled to Europe, where they appeared at a security trade fair that was held in a conference hall in the northeast of Paris. At that event, documents show, Semptian offered international government officials in attendance the chance to copy the Chinese internet model by purchasing a “National Firewall,” which the company said could “block undesirable information from [the] internet.”

Just two years later, Semptian’s membership in the OpenPower Foundation was approved, and the company began using American technology to make its surveillance and censorship systems more powerful.
https://theintercept.com/2019/07/11/...-ibm-semptian/





Florida DMV Sells Your Personal Information to Private Companies, Marketing Firms
Adam Walser

A Florida woman is blaming the state government for an onslaught of robocalls and direct mail offers –- accusations that come as the Scripps station WFTS in Tampa uncovered that the DMV makes millions by selling Florida drivers' personal information to outside companies, including marketing firms.

WFTS I-Team Investigator Adam Walser obtained records showing the state sold information on Florida drivers and ID cardholders to more than 30 private companies, including marketing firms, bill collectors, insurance companies and data brokers in the business of reselling information.

The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles raked in more than $77 million for driver and ID cardholder information sales in fiscal 2017.

WFTS wanted to know how much of that money came from marketing firms, but the agency in charge of driver information estimated it would take 154 hours of research and cost nearly $3,000 for the state to give taxpayers an answer.

A Lakeland woman and her sister said they blame DMV sales for an onslaught of recent robocalls and direct mail offers.

Tonia Batson moved from Idaho to Florida last year to live with her twin sister Sonia Arvin, who is now her legal guardian because Batson has an intellectual disability.

“We take her to get an ID because she’s a Medicaid patient,” said Arvin.

Days later, Arvin said Batson started receiving direct mail offers for lawn service, credit cards, cell phones and insurance. She also now receives constant robocalls and salespeople have even started showing up at her door.

She had no digital footprint – until she got an ID

“I really don’t understand about credit cards or checkbooks or nothing,” said Batson.

In Idaho, Batson lived in a group home where someone else handled her finances, daily living and healthcare arrangements. She had no digital footprint because she can’t read or write.

That’s why Arvin wanted to know how marketers got Batson’s personal information.

“The only one that had it was the DMV,” said Arvin. “Even if it’s a public record in Florida – if we tell them we want it private, it should be kept private.”

The state opened an investigation into Batson’s case after the I-Team alerted FHSMV officials.

That’s because Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles said companies buying data on Floridians are not allowed to use that information for marketing.

But not every company plays by the rules.

Companies caught abusing the system

The state told the I-Team it has banned data sales to three companies since 2017 for misusing driver and ID cardholder information.

The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles said under the law, it must provide driver information but said federal privacy laws and its own rules limit how outside companies can access Floridian’s personal information.

Read the state’s privacy statement by clicking here.

One of the data brokers accessing Florida DMV information is Arkansas-based marketing firm Acxiom, which has an agreement with the state to buy driver and ID cardholder data for a penny a record.

On its website, Acxiom claims it has collected information from almost every adult in the United States.

“Acxiom provides clients with access to 2.5 billion customers and two-thirds of the world’s population,” states a promotional video on Acxiom’s website, which claims the company has a client list that includes banks, automakers and department stores.

The I-Team contacted Acxiom to find out how they are using information on Florida drivers and ID card holders.

A company spokesperson declined an on-camera interview but emailed a statement:

“Acxiom acquires information from a variety of sources to inform its marketing and commercial products, including Acxiom’s identity verification and fraud prevention products. We maintain all information in strict compliance with state and federal laws. But because sound data governance, including ethical and responsible use of information, is foundational to our business, we go beyond legal compliance to ensure additional transparency and clarity for consumers. To learn more about Acxiom’s products, and the choices consumers have regarding use of their information, please visit Acxiom.com ."

Lawyer: Companies looking for cheap data on you

Miami attorney Al Saikali, who advises his clients how to legally and ethically use public data for commercial purposes, said his clients are increasingly using public records laws to obtain information for a cheap price.”

“We’re only going to see this continue over time. Companies are going to continue to seek more data about you,” said Saikali. “Companies are essentially paying for information, for leads, for lead generation.”

Saikali said consumers can limit the number of marketers contacting them by setting up a secondary email account to give government agencies – which is only checked periodically for renewal notices and other important information – and only giving a telephone number to government agencies when it’s absolutely necessary.

A state spokesperson said there’s no way for drivers to opt out if they don’t want their personal information sold, saying in an emailed statement:

“The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles provides public records as legally required, in accordance with federal and state law, and as a necessary function in order for customers to efficiently conduct everyday business. The department has successfully instituted proactive security measures to ensure customer information is protected and any misuse of customer information will be pursued to the fullest extent of the law.”

But the I-Team uncovered Acxiom does provide a way for anyone to request personal information be excluded from the company’s marketing data.

To opt out click here.
https://www.wptv.com/news/state/flor...arketing-firms





Galileo Service Degraded On All Satellites Until Further Notice
Inside GNSS

The EU’s Galileo program posted an official notice on 11 July advising users that Galileo service is degraded on all satellites until further notice.

Our source inside the European GNSS Agency (GSA), which is the EU agency responsible for Galileo services, has told us “They are working on it. Teams from industry and the Agencies are working 24/7 to restore the Galileo services as soon as possible to their nominal levels. The current estimation is that the services should be restored within 48 hours. In any case, we expect the service to be again nominal before the end of the weekend [13-14 July 2019],” our source said.

Another source close to the program told us, “As far as I know, it is a problem of the PTF [Precise Timing Facility] in Italy – time has an impact on the whole constellation!”

The Precise Timing Facility is a ground station that generates the Galileo System Time, or GST. The GST is uploaded to the Galileo satellites to make the user localization possible, and it is also disseminated to every user as an accurate time reference. The Precise Timing Facility hosts several Cesium clocks and a Hydrogen Maser clock.

At the time of this writing, Galileo appears to have been down for about 70 hours.

We’ll let the notice speak for itself – the message below currently appears on the GSA’s European GNSS Service Centre website (our emphasis).

Users will be hoping for the rapidest possible resumption of services along with a detailed explanation of what caused the crash. And it will be in the European Commission’s best interest to provide those answers ASAP.

NOTICE ADVISORY TO GALILEO USERS (NAGU) 2019025

DATE GENERATED (UTC): 2019-07-11 14:45

NAGU TYPE: GENERAL

NAGU NUMBER: 2019025

NAGU SUBJECT: SERVICE DEGRADATION

NAGU REFERENCED TO: N/A

START DATE EVENT (UTC): 2019-07-11 01:00

END DATE EVENT (UTC): N/A

SATELLITE AFFECTED: ALL

EVENT DESCRIPTION:

UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, USERS MAY EXPERIENCE SERVICE DEGRADATION ON ALL GALILEO SATELLITES. THIS MEANS THAT THE SIGNALS MAY NOT BE AVAILABLE NOR MEET THE MINIMUM PERFORMANCE LEVELS DEFINED IN THE SERVICE DEFINITION DOCUMENTS AND SHOULD BE EMPLOYED AT USERS’ OWN RISK.

THE NOMINAL SERVICE WILL BE RESUMED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
https://insidegnss.com/update-galile...roblems-cited/





The 5G Health Hazard That Isn’t

How one scientist and his inaccurate chart led to unwarranted fears of wireless technology.
William J. Broad

In 2000, the Broward County Public Schools in Florida received an alarming report. Like many affluent school districts at the time, Broward was considering laptops and wireless networks for its classrooms and 250,000 students. Were there any health risks to worry about?

The district asked Bill P. Curry, a consultant and physicist, to study the matter. The technology, he reported back, was “likely to be a serious health hazard.” He summarized his most troubling evidence in a large graph labeled “Microwave Absorption in Brain Tissue (Grey Matter).”

The chart showed the dose of radiation received by the brain as rising from left to right, with the increasing frequency of the wireless signal. The slope was gentle at first, but when the line reached the wireless frequencies associated with computer networking, it shot straight up, indicating a dangerous level of exposure.

“This graph shows why I am concerned,” Dr. Curry wrote. The body of his report detailed how the radio waves could sow brain cancer, a terrifying disease that kills most of its victims.

We’ll bring you stories that capture the wonders of the human body, nature and the cosmos.

Over the years, Dr. Curry’s warning spread far, resonating with educators, consumers and entire cities as the frequencies of cellphones, cell towers and wireless local networks rose. To no small degree, the blossoming anxiety over the professed health risks of 5G technology can be traced to a single scientist and a single chart.

Except that Dr. Curry and his graph got it wrong.

According to experts on the biological effects of electromagnetic radiation, radio waves become safer at higher frequencies, not more dangerous. (Extremely high-frequency energies, such as X-rays, behave differently and do pose a health risk.)

In his research, Dr. Curry looked at studies on how radio waves affect tissues isolated in the lab, and misinterpreted the results as applying to cells deep inside the human body. His analysis failed to recognize the protective effect of human skin. At higher radio frequencies, the skin acts as a barrier, shielding the internal organs, including the brain, from exposure. Human skin blocks the even higher frequencies of sunlight.

“It doesn’t penetrate,” said Christopher M. Collins, a professor of radiology at New York University who studies the effect of high-frequency electromagnetic waves on humans. Dr. Curry’s graph, he added, failed to take into account “the shielding effect.”

Dr. Marvin C. Ziskin, an emeritus professor of medical physics at Temple University School of Medicine, agreed. For decades, Dr. Ziskin explored whether such high frequencies could sow illness. Many experiments, he said, support the safety of high-frequency waves.

Despite the benign assessment of the medical establishment, Dr. Curry’s flawed reports were amplified by alarmist websites, prompted articles linking cellphones to brain cancer and served as evidence in lawsuits urging the removal of wireless classroom technology. In time, echoes of his reports fed Russian news sites noted for stoking misinformation about 5G technology. What began as a simple graph became a case study in how bad science can take root and flourish.

“I still think there are health effects,” Dr. Curry said in an interview. “The federal government needs to look at it more closely.”

An authoritative mistake

Dr. Curry was not the first to endorse the idea that advances in wireless technology could harbor unforeseen risks. In 1978, Paul Brodeur, an investigative journalist, published “The Zapping of America,” which drew on suggestive but often ambiguous evidence to argue that the growing use of high frequencies could endanger human health.

In contrast, Dr. Curry’s voice was authoritative. He became a private consultant in the 1990s after federal budget cuts brought his research career to an end. He had degrees in physics (1959 and 1965) and electrical engineering (1990). His credentials and decades of experience at federal and industrial laboratories, including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, seemed to make him a very strong candidate to conduct the Broward study.

“He was a very bright guy,” recalled Gary Brown, an expert in the district’s technology unit who worked with Dr. Curry to prepare the reports. But Dr. Curry lacked biological expertise. He could solve atomic and electromagnetic puzzles with ease, but he had little or no formal training in the intricacies of biomedical research.

In 2000, Dr. Curry, writing on letterhead from his home office in the Chicago suburbs, sent the Broward district two reports, the first in February 2000 and the second in September of that year. The latter study went to the superintendent, the school board and the district’s head of safety and risk management.

The frequency graph in the second report was far more detailed. Its rising line bore annotations noting the precise locations for the wireless-network dose and, far lower down, for radio, television and cellphone signals.

5G’s Place in the Spectrum

The newest generation of cellphones, 5G, will operate near the highest frequencies of the radio wave spectrum. Lower down in the spectrum are wireless networks used in homes and schools.

Electromagnetic spectrum

FREQUENCY

300 GHz

GAMMA RAYS

Novel EHF therapies

X-RAYS

ULTRAVIOLET

VISIBLE LIGHT

30 GHz

INFRARED

Airport scanners

300 GHz

5G

RADIO WAVE SPECTRUM

5 GHz

BANDS USED FOR WIRELESS NETWORKS

2.4 GHz

3 KHz

ULTRA LOW FREQUENCY

Existing cellphones

Broadcast television (UHF)

300 MHz

By The New York Times | Sources: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Academies of Sciences, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Congressional Research Service, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Over all, Dr. Curry’s reports cast the emerging topic as crucial for public health. He warned that children were especially vulnerable to the cancer risk of wireless technology. “Their brains are developing,” he noted in his first report.

Dr. Curry belonged to a national group of wireless critics, and his two reports for the Broward district soon began to circulate widely among industry foes. One reached Dr. David O. Carpenter, who for decades had clashed with the science establishment on the health risks of radio waves.

Dr. Carpenter’s credentials were impressive. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1959 and cum laude from its medical school in 1964. From 1985 to 1997, he served as dean of the School of Public Health at the State University of New York in Albany, and in 2001 became director of its Institute for Health and the Environment, where he still works. His resumé lists hundreds of journal reports, jobs, grants, awards, advisory boards, books and legal declarations.

Dr. Carpenter stirred global controversy in the 1980s by asserting that high-voltage power lines could cause leukemia in nearby children. He appeared as an authority in Mr. Brodeur’s 1989 book, “Currents of Death.” But federal researchers failed to find solid evidence to support the warnings.

In late 2011, Dr. Carpenter introduced Dr. Curry’s graph in a lawsuit that sought to force the Portland, Ore., public schools to abandon their wireless computer networks. The suit had been filed by a worried parent.

As an expert witness, Dr. Carpenter said in a legal declaration on Dec. 20, 2011, that the graph showed how the brain’s absorption of radio-wave energy “increases exponentially” as wireless frequencies rise, calling it evidence of grave student danger. The graph “illustrates the problem with the drive of the wireless industry toward ever higher frequencies,” he said.

In response to such arguments, the industry noted that it obeys government safety rules. The judge in the Portland case said the court had no jurisdiction over federal regulatory matters, and dismissed the lawsuit.

Despite the setback, Dr. Carpenter’s 2011 declaration, which included Dr. Curry’s graph, kept drawing attention. In 2012, he introduced it as part of his testimony to a Michigan state board assessing wireless dangers, and it soon began circulating online among wireless critics.

And he saw a new danger. Between 2010 and 2012, the frequencies of the newest generation of cellphones, 4G, rose past those typical of the day’s wireless networks. Dr. Carpenter now had a much larger and seemingly more urgent target, especially since cellphones were often held snugly against the head.

“There is now much more evidence of risks to health, affecting billions of people,” he said in introducing a 1,400-page report on wireless dangers that he edited with an aide. “The status quo is not acceptable.”

His BioInitiative Report, released in late 2012, gained worldwide notice. But mainstream science rejected its conclusions. Two Oxford University researchers described it as “scientifically discredited.”

A ‘fact’ is born

Unbowed, Dr. Carpenter worked hard to revise established science. In 2012, he became editor in chief of Reviews on Environmental Health, a quarterly journal. He published several authors who filed alarmist reports, as well as his own.

“The rapid increase in the use of cellphones increases risk of cancer, male infertility, and neurobehavioral abnormalities,” Dr. Carpenter wrote in 2013.

In subsequent years, as the frequencies of wireless devices continued to rise, an associated risk of brain cancer was repeated uncritically, often without attribution to Dr. Curry or Dr. Carpenter. Instead, it came to be regarded by activists as an established fact of modern science.

“The higher the frequency, the more dangerous,” according to Radiation Health Risks, a website, in reference to signals from 5G towers. The idea was echoed by a similar website, 5G Exposed — “Higher frequencies are more dangerous to health” — on a page entitled “Scientific Discussion.” Over all, the site bristled with brain-cancer warnings.

Recently, Dr. Carpenter told RT America, a Russian television network, that the newest cellphones represented a dire health threat. “The rollout of 5G is very frightening,” he said. “Nobody is going to be able to escape the radiation.”

In recent months, the network has run a series of segments critical of 5G technology. “The higher the frequency, the more dangerous it is to living organisms,” a RT reporter told viewers in March. The show described children as particularly vulnerable.

The new cellphones are to employ a range of radio frequencies up to dozens of times higher than those Dr. Curry identified two decades ago as endangering student health. But mainstream scientists continue to see no evidence of harm from cellphone radio waves.

“If phones are linked to cancer, we’d expect to see a marked uptick,” David Robert Grimes, a cancer researcher at the University of Oxford, wrote recently in The Guardian. “Yet we do not.”

In a recent interview, Dr. Carpenter defended his high-frequency view. “You have all this evidence that cellphone radiation penetrates the brain,” he said. But he conceded after some discussion that the increasingly high frequencies could in fact have a difficult time entering the human body: “There’s some legitimacy to that point of view.”

He noted that, in cities, 5G service requires the placement of many antenna towers, because walls, buildings, rain, leaves and other objects can block the high-frequency signals. “That’s why they put the towers so close together,” he said. “The waves don’t penetrate.” If human skin also blocks 5G signals, Dr. Carpenter acknowledged, “maybe it’s not that big a deal.”

Dr. Curry, now 82, was less forthcoming. In an interview, he said he no longer follows the wireless industry and disavowed any knowledge of having made a scientific error.

“They can say whatever they want,” Dr. Curry said of his detractors. “I’ll leave it to the young in the business and let them figure it out.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/s...ss-cancer.html





Justice John Paul Stevens, Dead at 99, Promoted the Internet Revolution

He was one of the most pragmatic and tech-savvy justices in court history.
Timothy B. Lee

Former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens died Tuesday at the age of 99. During Stevens' tenure on the high court, which stretched from 1975 to 2010, Stevens had a huge impact on legal issues affecting the technology sector. Tonight we're republishing a lightly edited version of our 2010 story that originally marked his retirement from the Supreme Court.

In April 2010, the Supreme Court's most senior justice, John Paul Stevens, announced his retirement. In the weeks that followed, hundreds of articles were written about his career and his legacy. While most articles focus on "hot button" issues such as flag burning, terrorism, and affirmative action, Stevens' tech policy record has largely been ignored.

When Justice Stevens joined the court, many of the technologies we now take for granted—the PC, packet-switched networks, home video recording—were in their infancy. During his 35-year tenure on the bench, Stevens penned decisions that laid the foundation for the tremendous innovations that followed in each of these areas.

For example, Stevens penned the 1978 decision that shielded the software industry from the patent system in its formative years. In 1984, Hollywood's effort to ban the VCR failed by just one Supreme Court vote; Stevens wrote the majority opinion. And in 1997, he wrote the majority opinion striking down the worst provisions of the Communications Decency Act and ensuring that the Internet would have robust First Amendment protections.

Indeed, Justice Stevens probably deserves more credit than any other justice for the innovations that occurred under his watch. And given how central those technologies have become to the American economy, Stevens' tech policy work may prove one of his most enduring legacies. In this feature, we review Justice Stevens' tech policy decisions and salute the justice who helped make possible DRM-free media devices, uncensored Internet connections, free software, and much more.

The Supreme Court’s cryptographer

John Paul Stevens was born in 1920 to a wealthy Chicago family. Stevens attended the University of Chicago, graduating in 1941. On December 6—the day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor—Stevens enrolled in the Navy's correspondence course on cryptography. Stevens spent the war in a Navy bunker in Hawaii, doing traffic analysis in an effort to determine the location of Japanese ships. He was an English major, not a mathematician, but he proved to have a knack for cryptographic work.

After the war, Stevens enrolled at Northwestern University Law School, graduating at the top of his class and earning a clerkship with Justice Wiley Rutledge. He then returned to his native Chicago and built a successful law practice. His high-profile prosecution of a corruption case involving the Illinois Supreme Court attracted the attention of President Richard Nixon, who appointed him to a federal appeals court in 1970. Five years later, President Ford named Stevens as his first and only Supreme Court nominee.

Early in his tenure, Stevens was regularly described as a centrist—a "wild card" whose votes rarely fell along ideological lines. But as the court became increasingly conservative, Justice Stevens drifted to the left. By the late 1990s, hardly anyone was describing him as a centrist. Instead, he was being described as the leader of the court's "liberal wing"; his seniority meant that he got to decide who would write the opinion for his side when he found himself opposite the chief justice, which was often.
Fighting software patents

The court's ideologically polarized 5-4 decisions get a lot of press, but there are many areas of law that don't break down along predictable partisan lines. Tech policy is one of them. Technology issues tend to be so new that the debate hasn't yet gelled into a familiar left-right split. Justice Stevens, who always resisted voting along strict ideological lines, emerged as a leading voice in the court's tech policy decisions.

One question the Supreme Court first tackled in the 1970s was whether software could be eligible for patent protection. The Supreme Court considered three different cases about the patentability of software during the period. Stevens was not yet on the Supreme Court when it rejected its first software patent in 1972, but he took an active interest in the subject when the issue reached the court a second time in 1978.

In that case, he penned the court's strongest statement against software patents. Writing for a six-member majority, Stevens ruled that appending a trivial "post-solution activity"—in this case, updating the "alarm limit" of a chemical process—does not render an otherwise-unpatentable software algorithm eligible for patent protection.

Stevens warned that the majority opinion would emasculate the court's software patent jurisprudence and create confusion about what was eligible for patent protection. And indeed, that's exactly what happened.

The court considered software patents once again in 1981, and this time Justice Stevens found himself on the losing side of a 5-4 vote. The majority's opinion didn't formally endorse software patents, but it did allow a patent on a software-controlled rubber-curing process. In a strongly worded dissent, Stevens warned that the majority opinion would emasculate the court's software patent jurisprudence and create confusion about what was eligible for patent protection.

And indeed, that's exactly what happened. As we documented in our 2009 feature on software patents, the appeals court in charge of patent issues gradually dismantled the traditional limits on patents in the software industry during the 1980s and 1990s.

Justice Stevens wasn't able to save us from software patents, but he gave the early software industry much-needed breathing room. Software patents were still relatively rare when Richard Stallman began his work on the GNU system in 1984. Similarly, Tim Berners-Lee was able to make the World Wide Web an open standard relatively unencumbered by patents in 1991. Of course, the Web would eventually face a slew of patent lawsuits, but the relatively restrictive rules on patents that prevailed until the mid-1990s gave the Web time to mature (and attract major corporate backers) before it encountered serious legal problems.

Similarly, Apple's famous "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft in the early 1990s might have gone very differently if Apple had had a large arsenal of software patents to go along with its shaky "interface copyright" claims. The relatively free market that prevailed in the PC industry during the 1980s stands in contrast to the explosion of patent litigation that has occurred in the cell phone market in recent years, with virtually every smart phone vendor involved in multiple patent lawsuits.

The high court took a renewed interest in patent issues when John Roberts was elevated to Chief Justice, but the court hasn't squarely addressed the software patent issue. The closest they came was in the 2010 Bilski decision, in which the majority handed down a narrow ruling that invalidated the specific patent at issue in the case but declined to articulate a clear standard for patent eligibility.

Justice Stevens declined to join the majority decision and instead filed a separate concurrence that argued for stricter limits on patentability. He was joined by three other justices, suggesting that despite the court's unanimity on the narrow issue of Bilski's patent, the court remained sharply divided on the broader question of what is eligible for patent protection. The Supreme Court would take a tougher line against software patents in the years after Stevens retired.

Saving private recording

A consistent theme of Justice Stevens' technology policy work is that it's up to Congress, not the courts, to extend the law to new technologies. He argued that the courts shouldn't expand patent protection to software unless Congress explicitly authorizes such an extension. And he made a similar argument about copyright law in what was arguably the most important tech policy decision of the 20th century, Sony v. Universal.

In that 1984 case, the Supreme Court came just one vote short of banning the Betamax VCR on the grounds that taping television shows off the air was an infringement of copyright. Justice Stevens wrote for a 5-4 majority that "time shifting"—the practice of recording shows for later viewing—was a fair use under copyright law. Stevens concluded that manufacturers were not liable for their customers' infringement if their devices were capable of "substantial non-infringing use." He noted that Congress was free to amend copyright law to give Hollywood control over VCR technology but concluded that the courts shouldn't do so unilaterally.

This has become a bedrock principle for the consumer electronics industry, allowing it to develop innovative new products without undue fear of copyright liability. Indeed, when the first MP3 players came on the market, the recording industry reacted much as Hollywood had two decades earlier: they sued, seeking to drive the new devices out of the market. In 1999, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals drew an analogy to Justice Stevens' arguments about "time shifting," holding that the users of MP3 players were engaging in an analogous process of "space shifting" when they ripped their CD collections to MP3 format. The market would look very different today if the courts had given the recording industry veto power over digital music players.

When the legality of peer-to-peer file sharing software reached the Supreme Court in the 2005 case of MGM v. Grokster, it was widely expected that the court would take the opportunity to adjust the "Betamax rule," as it has come to be called. However, a unanimous Supreme Court chose to sidestep that issue and instead ruled against Grokster on the grounds that it had deliberately "induced" infringement by its customers. Stevens joined the most pro-Grokster concurrence, written by Justice Breyer, which argued that Grokster did satisfy the "substantial non-infringing use" standard Stevens had articulated two decades earlier in the Sony decision.

In the 7-2 decision of Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003), the majority held that Congress could retroactively extend the terms of extant copyrights. Here again Stevens and Breyer were in the minority, arguing that the Constitution's requirement that copyrights be for "limited times" barred retroactive extensions. It's a shame that Stevens won't still be on the court when the inevitable Copyright Term Extension Act of 2018 is challenged in court.

Defending online free speech

Justice Stevens was far from a free speech ideologue. He wrote a 1976 opinion upholding local regulations of sexually explicit movie theaters against a First Amendment challenge. In 1978, he wrote the majority opinion in FCC v. Pacifica, holding that a radio broadcast of George Carlin's "Filthy Words" monologue was not protected by the First Amendment. He angrily dissented from the Supreme Court's 1989 decision that flag burning is constitutionally protected speech. And he wrote one of the majority decisions in the controversial and convoluted 2003 case that upheld the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law against a First Amendment challenge.

Yet Justice Stevens has emerged as a consistent defender of free speech online. In 1997, he wrote the court's Reno v. ACLU decision striking down key provisions of the Communications Decency Act on First Amendment grounds. In contrast to his earlier opinions, which granted only limited First Amendment protections to broadcast media, Stevens' decision in Reno provided robust constitutional protections to online speakers. He argued that none of the characteristics the court had previously cited to justify censoring the airwaves—such as scarcity and pervasiveness—applied to the Internet.

Despite this setback, Congress remained determined to censor the Internet in the name of protecting children. In 1998, it passed a watered-down version of the CDA called the Child Online Protection Act. That too was challenged in court, and wound up before the Supreme Court in 2004. Stevens voted with the majority to uphold an injunction against the enforcement of COPA. The litigation dragged on until 2008, when an appeals court finally put the last nail in COPA's coffin.

A low-tax Internet

Another decision that spurred the growth of Internet commerce wasn't about the Internet at all. In 1992, the Supreme Court heard a case that pitted Quill, a mail-order office-supply company, against the state of North Dakota. North Dakota enacted a use tax on products purchased from out of state and tried to compel Quill to collect the tax from North Dakota customers. Writing for the majority, Stevens concluded that because Quill lacked a physical presence in the state of North Dakota, it was not subject to North Dakota tax laws.

Just two years later, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com and helped kick off the e-commerce revolution. The court's holding in Quill ensured that Amazon and other fledgling e-commerce companies would not be required to navigate the tax regimes of 50 states and thousands of municipalities.

Once again, Stevens deferred to Congress. He ruled that the Constitution gives Congress the authority to regulate interstate commerce, and it can approve an interstate sales tax if one is needed.

The computer-savvy justice

Few public officials have had a bigger impact on the Internet's evolution than Justice John Paul Stevens. He wrote seminal opinions in almost every area of high-tech law. The principles he articulated in Sony, Quill, and ACLU v. Reno will continue to shape the evolution of the Internet and digital media technologies long after he leaves the bench. And while Stevens found himself on the losing end of the software patent debate of the early 1980s, subsequent events have vindicated Stevens' position. An avalanche of low-quality patents and two decades of bad press have put software patent advocates on the defensive.

It may not be a coincidence that the court's only cryptographer has been the court's most consistent friend of high-tech freedom. No one would confuse Justice Stevens for a regular in the Ars Technica forums, but Justice Stevens has always had a technophilic streak. Early in his Supreme Court tenure he sometimes piloted his own airplane from his vacation residence in Florida to Washington, DC. And according to The New York Times, he began doing his work on a computer in the early 1990s and became the nation's first telecommuting justice. Indeed, a Supreme Court clerk who served during the debate over the Communications Decency Act told USA Today that Justice Stevens was at that time an avid email user and "was at least as computer-savvy as [his clerks] were."

We're fortunate that in an institution dominated by septuagenarian lawyers, there was at least one member who took more than a passing interest in new technologies. Justice Stevens saw more clearly than any of his colleagues the far-reaching implications of the decisions they were making at the dawn of the Internet age. And he wisely urged his colleagues to take a hands-off approach.

Those of us who owe our livelihood to the digital economy owe Justice Stevens our thanks.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...cryptographer/





Locally Run ISPs Offer the Fastest Broadband in America

Six out of the 10 fastest ISPs are either community-run or public/private partnerships.
Karl Bode

A new study once again highlights how community-run internet service providers (ISPs) offer better, faster broadband than their private sector counterparts.

Using data from 356,925 broadband speed tests conducted over a year, PCMag recently compiled a list of the fastest ISPs in America. ISPs were then affixed a PCMag Speed Index score based on a combination of line performance, upload, and download speeds.

When all regional ISPs were compared side by side, the fastest ISP in America was independent California ISP Sonic, with a score of 610.6. Sonic has been working with select California communities to leverage their publicly-owned fiber networks.

All told, six of the ten fastest ISPs in the States were either directly run by a local community, or involved some form of partnership between the public and private sectors.

For example, the publicly owned fiber ISP Nextlight in Longmont, Colorado offers symmetrical gigabit connections for $70 per month. Nextlight came in third place among all ISPs nationwide with a Speed Index score of 344.7. The closest major private-sector competitor was eighth-place Verizon FiOS, with a score of 186.1.

Thanks to both corruption and limited competition, US broadband is routinely sluggish, pricey, with comically bad customer service. Frustrated by years of dysfunction, many towns and cities are either building their own broadband networks, developing local cooperatives, or striking partnerships with third party companies to build better networks than are currently available.

An estimated 750 communities (and counting) have explored some variety of public-broadband option, says Christopher Mitchell, director of community broadband networks for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit advocating for local solutions for sustainable development.

“Local networks are almost always competing against the established incumbents, which means they have multiple incentives to offer better service and lower prices,” Mitchell told Motherboard.

“They are frequently headquartered in or very near the communities they serve, so they spend more time worrying about what their customers think—while the big monopolies are first serving shareholders and less interested in customer experience.”

Other major publicly-owned ISPs of note include tenth-place Fairlawngig, an Ohio-based network that began offering residential fiber access to locals in 2017. EPB Broadband, Chattanooga, Tennessee’s publicly-owned broadband provider (rated the best ISP in the nation last year by Consumer Reports) came in sixth place.

Eighth place ALLO Communications is a private company that has struck fiber sharing partnerships with cities from Lincoln, Nebraska to Fort Morgan, Colorado in a bid to bring better, faster broadband to the public. Fifth place Hotwire has similarly struck a public a fiber partnership with officials in Salisbury, North Carolina.

Even Google-owned wireless ISP Webpass and Google Fiber, ranked second and fourth place respectively, have struck deals with local governments to utilize publicly-owned fiber.

Community-run networks may not be the answer for every community, but in areas where they’re deployed, private ISPs like Comcast often are forced to actually compete and upgrade their networks, improving service across the entire region.

“You can rapidly see that nonprofit business models have an important role to play in improving Internet access,” Mitchell said.

A study last year out of Harvard showed that community-run ISPs tend to offer faster, cheaper broadband and superior customer service to private ISPs. Community ISPs also tend to offer clearer pricing with fewer hidden surcharges, the study found.

Threatened by the specter of actual competition, the telecom lobby has convinced more than two dozen states to pass laws restricting or simply banning communities from building their own broadband networks. These laws also frequently restrict a local town or city’s ability to strike public private partnerships, even if locals have voted for the option.

After all, it’s easier to lobby the government to restrict competition—than it is to actually compete.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7...and-in-america





FCC Gives ISPs Another $563 Million to Build Rural-Broadband Networks

Tens of millions of Americans still don't have broadband Internet.
Jon Brodkin

More than 220,000 unserved rural homes and businesses in 24 states will get broadband access because of funding authorized yesterday by the Federal Communications Commission, the agency said. In all, the FCC authorized more than $563 million for distribution to ISPs over the next decade. It's the latest payout from the commission's Connect America Fund, which was created in 2011.

Under program rules, ISPs that receive funding must build out to 40 percent of the required homes and businesses within three years and an additional 20 percent each year until completing the buildout at the end of the sixth year.

The money is being distributed primarily to smaller ISPs in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia. Verizon, which is getting $18.5 million to serve 7,767 homes and businesses in New York, is the biggest home Internet provider on the list.

Funding in 23 states was described in one FCC announcement, and the New York funding was detailed in a separate announcement.

Winning bidders were chosen in a reverse auction in which ISPs bid for funding in exchange for offering service at different speeds. The ISPs are required to "offer service at rates reasonably comparable to rates in urban areas."

All the ISPs committed to provide speeds of at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, but many of the funded projects are for higher speeds of 100Mbps/20Mbps or 1Gbps/500Mbps. Speeds promised by each ISP are detailed in the two announcements.
More broadband money on the way

The funding announced yesterday is just one of several distributions resulting from last year's auction. The FCC explained:

In total, the auction last fall allocated $1.488 billion in support to expand broadband to more than 700,000 unserved rural homes and small businesses over the next 10 years. The FCC has already authorized two waves of funding in May and June, and funds from those first two waves are expanding connectivity to nearly 100,000 homes and businesses that lack service. Today's action brings total authorized funding to nearly $803 million, or over half of the $1.488 billion allocated through the auction, expanding connectivity to 305,518 homes and businesses. In the coming months, the FCC will be authorizing additional funding as it approves remaining applications of the winning bidders from the auction.

The Connect America Fund is part of the FCC's Universal Service Fund, which is paid for by Americans through fees on their phone bills.

Pai recently proposed a new budget cap on the Universal Service Fund, which could prevent expansion of Lifeline subsidies for low-income Americans. He's also proposing to replace the Connect America Fund with a similar program that would spend $20.4 billion to connect up to four million rural homes and small businesses over the next 10 years, but the replacement program would not affect any broadband projects that have already been approved.
Millions still lack broadband access

Pai has repeatedly claimed that his net neutrality repeal and other deregulatory policies are speeding up broadband deployment. But in reality, deployment has continued at about the same rate seen during the Obama administration and has been helped along by government funding and an AT&T fiber deployment that was required by the Obama-era FCC.

The FCC's latest numbers suggest that 21.3 million Americans lack access to fixed broadband with speeds of at least 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up. But the true number without broadband access may be much higher, as a Microsoft analysis found that 162.8 million Americans do not use the Internet at broadband speeds. The discrepancy is likely due to several factors, including ISPs not delivering promised speeds, ISPs charging prices too high for poor people to afford, and problems in FCC data that exaggerate deployment levels. After many complaints about FCC data, Pai has proposed a new mapping initiative that could show a more accurate picture of US broadband deployment.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...band-networks/

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

July 13th, July 6th, July 29th, June 22nd

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


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
- Hugo Black
__________________
Thanks For Sharing
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 16th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-07-11 06:43 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 9th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 06-07-11 05:36 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 30th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-01-10 07:49 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 16th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-01-10 09:02 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 5th, '09 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 02-12-09 08:32 AM






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 09:34 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)