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Old 24-07-19, 06:21 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 27th, ’19

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"They’re smart lawyers. And they absolutely know what they’re talking about is a warping of Section 230." – Berin Szòka






































July 27th, 2019




Life-Altering Copyright Lawsuits Could Come to Regular Internet Users Under a New Law Moving in the Senate
Ernesto Falcon

The Senate Judiciary Committee intends to vote on the CASE Act, legislation that would create a brand new quasi-court for copyright infringement claims. We have expressed numerous concerns with the legislation, and serious problems inherent with the bill have not been remedied by Congress before moving it forward. In short, the bill would supercharge a “copyright troll” industry dedicated to filing as many “small claims” on as many Internet users as possible in order to make money through the bill’s statutory damages provisions. Every single person who uses the Internet and regularly interacts with copyrighted works (that’s everyone) should contact their Senators to oppose this bill.

Easy $5,000 Copyright Infringement Tickets Won’t Fix Copyright Law

Making it so easy to sue Internet users for allegedly infringing a copyrighted work that an infringement claim comes to resemble a traffic ticket is a terrible idea. This bill creates a situation where Internet users could easily be on the hook for multiple $5,000 copyright infringement judgments without many of the traditional legal safeguards or rights of appeal our justice system provides.

The legislation would allow the Copyright Office to create a “determination” process for claims seeking up to $5,000 in damages:

“Regulations For Smaller Claims.—The Register of Copyrights shall establish regulations to provide for the consideration and determination, by at least one Copyright Claims Officer, of any claim under this chapter in which total damages sought do not exceed $5,000 (exclusive of attorneys’ fees and costs). A determination issued under this subsection shall have the same effect as a determination issued by the entire Copyright Claims Board.”

This could be read as permission for the Copyright Office to dispense with even the meager procedural protections provided elsewhere in the bill when a rightsholder asks for $5000 or less. In essence, what this means is any Internet user who uploads a copyrighted work could find themselves subject to a largely unappealable $5,000 penalty without anything resembling a trial or evidentiary hearing. Ever share a meme, share a photo that isn’t yours, or download a photo you didn’t create? Under this legislation, you could easily find yourself stuck with a $5,000 judgment debt following the most trivial nod towards due process.

Every Internet User Could Face Life-Altering Money Judgments Thanks to Statutory Damages

Proponents of the legislation argue that the bill’s cap on statutory damages in a new “small claims” tribunal will protect accused infringers. But the limits imposed by the CASE Act of $15,000 per work are far higher than the damages caps in most state small claims courts—and they don’t require any proof of harm or illicit profit. The Register of Copyrights would be free to raise that cap at any time. And the CASE Act would also remove a vital rule that protects Internet users – the registration precondition on statutory damages.

Today, someone who is going to sue a person for copyright infringement has to register their work with the Copyright Office before the infringement began, or within three months of first publication, in order to be entitled to statutory damages. Without a timely registration, violating someone’s copyright would only put an infringer on the hook for what the violation actually cost the copyright holder (called “actual damages”), or the infringer’s profits. This is a key protection for the public because copyright is ubiquitous: it automatically covers nearly every creative work from the moment it’s set down in tangible form. But not every scribble, snapshot, or notepad is eligible for statutory damages—only the ones that U.S. authors make a small effort to protect up front by filing for registration. But if Congress passes this bill, the timely registration requirement will no longer be a requirement for no-proof statutory damages of up to $7,500 per work. In other words, nearly every photo, video, or bit of text on the Internet can suddenly carry a $7,500 price tag if uploaded, downloaded, or shared even if the actual harm from that copying is nil.

For many Americans, where the median income is $57,652 per year, this $7,500 price tag for what has become regular Internet behavior would result in life-altering lawsuits from copyright trolls that will exploit this new law. That is what happens when you eliminate the processes that tend to ensure only a truly motivated copyright holder can obtain statutory damages.

Censorship of Speech Will Become More Pervasive Under this Legislation

Another major problem with the CASE Act is how it transforms a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Notice into a long-term censorship tool. Under current law, if a copyright holder submits a takedown notice to an online platform alleging that your post infringed their copyright, you have a right to file a counter-notice if you disagree. There are many times when false takedown claims occur on the Internet and perfectly lawful speech is suppressed, and counter-notices are an important, though flawed, check on abuse. But the CASE Act would allow a party that filed a takedown notice to also bring a claim with the new “small claims” tribunal. When they do so, the Internet platform doesn’t have to honor the counter-notice by putting the posted material back online within 14 days. Already, some of the worst abuses of the DMCA occur with time-sensitive material, as even a false infringement notice can effectively censor that material for up to two weeks during a newsworthy event, for example. The CASE Act would allow unscrupulous filers to extend that period by months, for a small filing fee.

If all these outcomes sound terrible to you and you want to send a clear message to Congress not to move forward, then you need to contact your Senators right away to tell them you oppose the CASE Act (S. 1273) and want them to oppose it on your behalf.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/0...-under-new-law





Zefr Sells Its Copyright-Flagging and YouTube Channel-Management Businesses to Vobile for $90 Million
Todd Spangler

Vobile Group, a video protection and measurement company, announced a deal to acquire Zefr’s RightsID copyright-management and ChannelID YouTube channel-management businesses for about $90 million.

According to the companies, Zefr’s RightsID and ChannelID together generated over $40 million in revenue in 2018 and were profitable. The deal stands to more than triple the revenue for Vobile, which reported sales of $15.2 million and a net loss of $2.5 million for the full year 2018.

With the pact, about 100 of Zefr’s employees will join Vobile, which said it is opening a new office in L.A. to house the RightsID and ChannelID operations and serve entertainment-industry customers. Following the sale, Zefr will have a headcount of around 150.

Zefr made the sale in order to focus entirely on its core contextual-advertising platform, formerly called BrandID. That analyzes millions of YouTube videos to determine the nature of the content — and reviews them to ensure they’re “brand safe” — to let advertisers buy targeted spots on the platform.

“As we focus on capitalizing on the potential of our contextual-targeting platform, we believe we’ve found the perfect home for RightsID and ChannelID,” Zach James, Zefr’s co-founder and co-CEO, said in a statement. He added that Vobile’s acquisition “creates an unmatched content protection and measurement company for the modern digital-media market.”

Founded in 2005, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Vobile provides a software-as-a-service platform for protecting, measuring and monetizing online video content. Customers include Hollywood film studios, TV networks and other content owners. The company’s shares are listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Vobile said the deal to will let it combine existing business offerings for reducing revenue loss from copyright infringement with the Zefr platforms’ ability to measure and monetize video at a high scale. Zefr’s businesses also will give it deeper relationships with platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, Vobile said.

“The new Vobile will empower content providers to protect and maximize the value of their assets, draw upon new distribution channels and analytically assess their efforts within the marketing funnel,” Vobile CEO Yangbin Wang (pictured above) said in a statement

Vobile was advised in the transaction by LionTree; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind Wharton & Garrison; and Freshfields Bruckhaus Denger. For Zefr, Nfluence Partners acted as financial adviser and King & Spalding was legal counsel.

Investors in privately held Zefr include IVP, U.S. Venture Partners, MK Capital, Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital and Richmond Park Partners. In 2014, Zefr sold its Movieclips.com business to NBCUniversal’s Fandango.
https://variety.com/2019/digital/new...on-1203272400/





Plex Makes Piracy Just Another Streaming Service

As streaming offerings become more expensive and convoluted, people are setting up their own smaller, more intimate platforms
Bijan Stephen

Have you heard about the best new streaming platform on the internet? It’s totally customizable, works on any device, and, best of all, is basically free. The only problem — and, I mean, come on, it’s barely a problem — is that it might be illegal, depending on how you use it. (In other words, depending on how much piracy you plan to do.) I’m talking, of course, about Plex.

There’s more streamable content now than ever and even more ways to consume it; these days, we’re drowning in choices. Even so, streaming all that stuff looks a little different in practice, namely because signing up for a bunch of services can get expensive — fast. Besides, if you subscribe to more than, say, two services, it’s overwhelming to cycle through their various offerings to find something you want to watch. Having too many choices is exhausting.

Because of the convoluted nature of licensing agreements and the vagaries of corporate competition, what’s on Netflix is substantively different than what’s available on Hulu or Amazon Prime. Different still are the network-specific streamers, like the up-and-comers HBO Max and Disney+, and the more niche offerings, like Shudder, Kanopy, Mubi, and Criterion. All of them have the same aim, which is to lock up intellectual property to keep people streaming. It’s a lot!

Plex, a company that sells media server software, has found itself in the strange position of being the answer to that problem. It has two components: the piece of software that organizes media on your computer’s hard drive and the client-side program that lets you and your friends and family stream that content from wherever you are on just about any device. It’s clean. It’s beautiful. It is extraordinarily simple to use. It looks a little like Netflix. Except, all of the content is custom, tailored by the person running the server. In the company’s words, both pieces of its software are “the key to personal media bliss.”

What Plex doesn’t say, however, is how that bliss is achieved. Because what’s on Plex servers is populated by people, most of the commercial content you’d find there is probably pirated. And this is the main tension of using Plex: while the software itself is explicitly legal, the media that populates its customer-run servers is not — at least the stuff protected by copyright law. The company, of course, doesn’t condone this particular use of its software. A spokesperson provided a statement that read, in part, “Plex supports content creators and does not condone piracy,” before directing me to its terms of service page.

For what it’s worth, the company is legitimate. It started as a freeware hobby project in 2007 when developer Elan Feingold had a free weekend while his wife was out of town. In his words, he needed “something to keep [him] busy.” It so happened he’d also recently gotten into a “heated argument” with a friend about programming languages, and so he decided to try to port the Xbox Media Center to a Mac. A couple of software executives who had recently sold their company PostX to Cisco — Scott Olechowski and Cayce Ullman — got involved. Then, in 2009, the project became the commercial business that’s still around today, to carry out the mission Feingold laid out in a 2008 interview: to create “a free, *highly extensible* HD media *platform* for all.”

A decade on, it’s clear that Plex has achieved that mission; today, you can even kill your cable subscription and get live TV through the app (after a small technical investment). What’s especially compelling about Plex is just how easy it makes consuming media.

That convenience can’t be overstated. Because even though piracy has become a lot less worth doing in the golden age of streaming, it’s making a comeback as it’s now more inconvenient to figure out how to legally stream the things you want to see. My inbox is a wasteland of free trials canceled just in the nick of time. That means if you’re technically savvy, maintaining a Plex server becomes a calculation of how much you’re willing to pay for convenience. If you’re someone who has access to one of those servers, on the other hand, the calculation is easier: why bother paying when you can just stream from your friends?

Liz called me from a train on the way to Washington, DC from the middle of nowhere, in her estimation, and the signal kept cutting out. It was as though our conversation was buffering or otherwise suffering from one of those various afflictions that plague streaming media. She said that her Plex experience had been mediated by a robust community she belonged to in the late ’90s and early 2000s whose server is updated regularly with new television shows and films. Then she grew cautious.

“Unfortunately, I’m not supposed to talk about it,” she said. I pointed out that she hadn’t given me any identifying details. She continued (albeit conspiratorially).

Her forum’s Plex contingent, which is maintained by a few people with servers in their houses, only very rarely gave out these coveted invites. To get one, you had to either know one of the people running a server or been very vocal on the forum at the time. (She described herself as an “internet old.”) “They haven’t given out any invites in like 15 years or something like that,” Liz said. “I once saw somebody try to sell their account for like, $1,000 on some Yahoo Quora thread,” and they were immediately banned. She estimates that there are “thousands” of users, although there’s no way to know for sure. Even so, it’s reliable, safe, and clean.

“You’re not, like, going into the Pirate Bay and taking a risk on some random tracker,” she said. “It’s people that you know and trust. And we’ve been commenting on each other’s statuses for, uh, gosh, I guess, like 15 years at this point?”

To put it differently: today, piracy looks like what the futurists envisioned about streaming media. You sign up for a service, stream as much as you want, and it just works. Most of the people I spoke to for this story had the same experience. By and large, they’re internet-savvy people who needed a solution to a home media problem and stumbled across an off-label use that doesn’t necessarily feel illegal.
"“I once saw somebody try to sell their account for like, $1,000 on some Yahoo Quora thread.”"

Shawn’s story was similar: he was looking for a home streaming solution that wasn’t difficult to maintain. Plex replaced a complicated Linux setup. “I wanted to be spending more time relaxing with family instead of jumping through Linux hoops,” he wrote to me in an email.

For Shawn and his family, Plex is mostly for TV shows, the occasional movie, home videos, and music. It fills the gaps between Netflix, Amazon Prime, and the stuff he’s bought on iTunes. (Right now, Shawn and his wife are watching Schitt’s Creek, which is on Netflix, but they’re also watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which is on a broadcast network, via Plex.)

“One daughter was watching all of White Collar, which Netflix yanked halfway through with no warning, so now it’s accessible to her via Plex,” Shawn said. Otherwise, he’s sometimes streaming audio that isn’t available anywhere else, like “imported Underworld remixes from the ‘90s and unreleased Fiona Apple tracks.”

Plex gives him the option to drop any media in a library, which is organized and streamable almost instantly. If his nine-year-old wants to rewatch her performance in a school production of Les Mis, he pointed out, it’s immediately available. Shawn seemed a little embarrassed that he’d given me what was essentially a sales pitch. On the other hand, he said, “as a parent and someone who has to stare at a screen all day for work, anything that makes my digital life simpler and more organized gets a gold star.” It’s a custom streaming service built exactly to his family’s specifications.

Jon came to Plex after getting a Chromecast and wanting to stream video from his computer to his TV because it was the easiest solution for that problem. Initially, he just set it up for personal use. But now, he’s hopped onto his roommate’s friend’s server, which he says hosts maybe a dozen people. “I’ve pirated a decent number of things,” he said. “I would prefer to pay people for the content that they make and everything,” Jon continued, noting that he does still subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, and HBO (although he shares that with someone else).

For him, Plex is for the stuff that falls through the cracks, like media that isn’t on a streaming service — the Alien franchise, for one — or things that are only in theaters because he’s not a huge fan of going to the movies. (Of theaters, he says: “I hate that movie theaters have reclining seats right now. If I wanted to watch something in a recliner, I would stay at home.”) Jon says he hasn’t rented a movie since the last time he didn’t have access to Plex.

Andrew found Plex because his wife had a hard drive full of .MKV files that Roku wouldn’t play with sound. “For most of my adult life I’ve basically watched movies and TV via my laptop or desktop monitor,” he wrote in an email. “There’s been no need to set up a media server to stream to a smart TV until about two years ago when I finally got a one-bedroom apartment (and subsequently a house).”

He has Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime subscriptions, but he uses Plex for the other things: “Stuff from HBO like the recent Chernobyl miniseries or Star Trek: Discovery,” he said. “You could put needles under my fingernails and I still wouldn’t pay for CBS All Access.” Andrew calls it an essential antidote to the ongoing fragmentation of streaming media.

Patrick was part of an imageboard site that invited him to a more secret splinter site. From there, he joined the group’s Plex servers in 2015. He says there are probably 100 people who have access.

“We usually don’t buy anything,” said Patrick, who’s a very online teacher. “I would never buy TV shows on Amazon or iTunes. We just wait for it to come to streaming. And if it’s not on streaming, then we’ll wait for Plex.”

Plex servers function a little like secret societies or private clubs. They can be large (like Liz’s), small (like Shawn’s), or any size in between, but they have a single purpose: to simplify the experience of streaming media and make it feel human. Every Plex server’s media catalog is different. They go beyond licensing agreements (because piracy) and anonymous algorithmic curation (because a person is choosing what’s on there) to make the streaming experience personal.

“The Plex mission is to provide a unified media experience that allows users to bring together the media they care about into one app, available on just about anything with a screen,” a spokesperson for Plex wrote in a statement. The one thing they carefully don’t mention is why.
"For him, maintaining the server is a little like running one of the linkblogs of the early aughts"

I’ve been a Plex user for a few years now. A friend of mine who lives in the Midwest maintains it, adding things based on what people in our little online community request. (He uses a “pretty beefy” gaming computer to run it, he told me over chat.) For him, maintaining the server is a little like running one of the linkblogs of the early aughts.

“I get to sort of organize my favorite media into one place that my friends can easily see and dip into,” he said. And the requests give him some insight into media that’s outside the mainstream — stuff that isn’t Game of Thrones, Mad Men, or Breaking Bad. It’s a catalog of what we’ve been into over the years. It’s a record of different lives across the country and the world.

For me, logging into his Plex is a little like visiting a library. There are reams of stuff to watch and listen to, and most of it falls outside what’s available on American streaming platforms (read: anime). It’s far from the only way I consume most television and films, but it does have its place, which is more communal than anything.

The other day, that friend was upgrading his digital storage, which he uses to keep everything organized on the Plex server. We all pitched in a little to defray the cost, but it was also to recognize the value of what he’d done for us. Streaming from someone’s library feels categorically different than watching the same thing on Netflix. What I mean to say is that each Plex server is special because it’s made for people.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/23/2...streaming-wars





A Requiem For Audiogalaxy, The Digital Wild West's Best Outlaw Record Store
Sam Hockley-Smith

It was one of those spring New York days where the garbage breezes of summer were already gathering. You could smell it, but you couldn't yet feel it. It was 2012, and I was interviewing the rapper El-P because, after more than two decades toiling at the forefront of the East Coast underground scene, he was poised to enter a new phase in his career. El-P's studio was in the dead zone between Chinatown and Soho. Sometimes he'd go outside and smoke in the shadow of the ominous Long Lines skyscraper, a massive, windowless cult landmark owned by AT&T.

As we looked at the distinctly dystopian building, he told me he'd forgotten to bring an external hard drive to the studio, but thanks to the magic of the cloud, he'd been able to access what he needed remotely, saving himself a train trip home to Brooklyn. It was, he felt, a gift and a curse. I remember him telling me he could envision a future where, if you did something illegal, maybe your access to the cloud — all your files, all your data — would be denied, and you'd be cast adrift. At the time, I wrote it off as futurist paranoia.

It's 2019, and most music is consumed via one of a few streaming services, which means the average listener doesn't actually own any of their music, and the terms of the relationship are endlessly mutable. Canons are rewritten based on availability, songs are removed from playlists based on controversy. As much as we might wish, there's no right answer here: Artists need to make money, and companies need to be responsible for what they put into the world — that these ideas are in conflict with each other is not especially new. Art and commerce and responsibility have always been mired in a whirlwind of corporate ethics and personal agency. Nobody ever really wins, everyone is just losing to varying degrees.

Which is exactly what happened in 2000, when Metallica became villains. After a demo of their song "I Disappear" was leaked onto Napster, the band went on an anti-piracy campaign that was noble in theory (artists should not have their work stolen!) but ended up going poorly in practice. When they sued Napster and their fans — who'd been gouged for years by obscenely (and seemingly illegal) inflated compact disc prices — it felt like those fans were getting attacked for being excited about their favorite band. Soon, downloading anything could mean that the RIAA was going to knock on your door with a lawsuit demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. Was a 96kbps file labeled, like, Kottonmouth-Kings-Deftones_Bjork-EMINEM-live.mp3 — that was actually a staticky, 90-second recording of Rahzel beatboxing — really worth the risk?

I was a paranoid, nervous teenager with a limited understanding of the legal system, so using Napster felt not unlike trying to buy drugs in front of a police station. Unfortunately I had limited income, no credit card and a voracious appetite for music. The allure was just too compelling. The only way to hear everything I was reading about was to download it illegally. So, while an exodus from Napster to the buggy, virus-plagued Limewire happened in millions of bedrooms across the United States, I happened upon something else entirely: Audiogalaxy.

Audiogalaxy was a no-frills program that I found by searching "new Napster better" on whatever non-Google search engine was popular at the time. It was built in 1998 by a man named Michael Merhej, with the specific intention of music filesharing, and it initially seemed like it would circumvent the legal troubles Napster was plagued by because it was, effectively, an FTP search engine that worked by offering peer to peer downloads on a more boutique, specialized, and niche level than Napster. It seemed designed to be overlooked. Satellite, the app that was used to interface with Audiogalaxy, allowed you to access your downloaded files on any computer. It was called "place-shifting," and it worked much like the cloud works today. At the time, though, it was more or less non-functional for a kid like me, who had one shared family computer and an obsession with burning CDs. Still, Audiogalaxy was appealing for two very specific reasons: The app itself was uncluttered and targeted at hardcore music fans; logging on felt less like stepping into a creepy black market and more like communing with a bunch of music obsessives for a few hours each day. Where Limewire and Napster were great decaying skyscrapers, Audiogalaxy was a sturdy shack in the woods, with just enough space for everyone to feel safe.

It also had everything.

I primarily used Audiogalaxy to find music I could not find anywhere else: awkward rap from Newfoundland, lo-fi freestyles by underground rappers, grainy rips of out-of-print, cassette-only bonus tracks, poorly recorded albums that were only sold out of the trunk of a single car in a city I didn't live in... this was stuff I could read about on a message board, but would never be able to get on my own. Like so much of the early Internet, it was, through access and connection, solving a problem of communication and archiving we were only just realizing we had. Audiogalaxy's users were amassing musical archives in tandem, diverging based on affections and enthusiasm, following music rabbit holes into uncharted territory and developing personal taste without being overtly marketed to. The research was part of the experience, the hunt the satisfying payoff. It felt like a miracle.

In later years, Audiogalaxy, like Napster, would be plagued by lawsuits and a series of identity crises. By the time it tried to go legit, I'd abandoned it. When it was acquired by Dropbox, in 2012, it was a digital artifact, occasionally trotted out in conversation as a way of identifying people who were like me.

The day that I interviewed El-P turned into an evening. We went to Winnie's, a dingy, karaoke bar in Chinatown. El-P was surprised by my embarrassingly deep knowledge of underground rap and wanted to keep talking. I can't remember if I mentioned that the reason I knew so much was because of the music I'd been able to track down on Audiogalaxy. I don't think I did. My relationship to the program felt too personal. It was a private way of indulging in obsessive collecting and cataloguing. A weirdly solitary experience shared by everyone who used it. For a little while, it was the purest form of Internet-based music fandom that could have existed. Of course it couldn't last forever.
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/24/74446...w-record-store





The Success Of Streaming Has Been Great For Some, But Is There A Better Way?
Paula Mejia

It's tough to recall a time when listening to music — and making it — wasn't completely synonymous with streaming. The idea of filling an iPod up with carefully selected digital files almost feels like a distant memory, though it wasn't that long ago that these kinds of players, and the digital library of songs you built through them, embodied the future of music. (For what it's worth, Apple still sells one.) These days, streaming services offer music fans a tantalizing premise: Instant, limitless access to music from all over the world and across history, for a small monthly fee. Or for free, as long as you're cool with advertisements cutting into the experience.

These days, part of being an artist — from Top 40 superstars to independent bedroom songwriters, the Bad Bunnys and Nobunnys alike — entails throwing oneself professionally and promotionally into these services. "Professionally, streaming has become crucial for the artists I work with, and it's become such a big part of what we do in terms of marketing our campaign and making sure that people know that it's on these streaming platforms," says Katie Garcia, who owns Bayonet Records and does A&R for Secretly Group. "It's crucial nowadays; it's a necessity."

The tantalizing premise of streaming has been a success story in many ways. Industry strategy firm MIDiA Research notes that recorded music revenues ballooned to $18.8 billion last year, a $2.2 billion uptick from 2017 — within that, streaming was up 30% year on year, and climbed to $9.6 billion, in what they describe as "the engine room of growth" for the industry. In a 2018 year-end report, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) touted the fact that "for the third year in a row, double-digit growth was driven primarily by increased revenues from paid subscription services including Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon and others." The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's (IFPI) most recent Global Music Report revealed that in the United States, streaming revenues steadily rose by 33.5% last year. (In 2017, that number was even higher: 50%.)

But, while streaming continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, the system through which artists are paid for the music being listened to hasn't evolved in tandem — meaning that, as dissenters note, many artists are still paid little, after services and labels take their respective cuts. Streaming payouts to artists vary wildly however, depending on whether they are signed to a major or independent label, and whether or not they're songwriters of an individual tune, as well as the performers. And within these situations, the terms of these contracts can make one artist's pay stub unrecognizable to another's.

But beyond these contractual idiosyncrasies, the bedrock structure for streaming services' royalty payouts tilts the entire system towards those who, in some ways, need it least. Spotify and Apple Music's model for determining who gets what from their services is known as "pro rata," which means that rights-holders are paid according to market share; how their streams stack up against the most popular songs in a given time period. The people who hold the rights to the most listened-to tracks, then, stand to make the most. "The 'pro rata' model is perceived as being inherently objective and fair, however, it doesn't take into account different user behaviors," says Will Page, Spotify's Chief Economist. "Arguably, it does produce an efficient outcome in that every stream is worth the same and it is relatively cost-efficient to manage."

That cost efficiency is outlined well in a 2017 study from Digital Media Finland, which found that pro rata streaming models tend to benefit the services themselves, who keep about 30% of a subscriber's fee. The rights holders of the recordings, which include record labels, producers, and performers, split about 55 to 60% of the fee. Meanwhile, the rights holders of the song itself (the composition) — which at once includes composers, arrangers, music publishing companies and lyricists — see about 10 to 15% of that pie. As David Turner, a critic who writes the weekly streaming newsletter Penny Fractions and now consults for SoundCloud, said in an interview with Slate last year: "So if you're signed to a major label, for every stream you get you're probably getting maybe 12 or 15% from that if you're an artist." It varies, of course, but Turner notes that while independent artists may not have to pay out to labels, they also don't have access to the same kinds of resources — managing the nuts and bolts of an artistic career — as an artist who signed to one.

Critics say the pro rata model disproportionately privileges top artists and labels, and leaves little chance for even midsize artists, such as a band like Khruangbin — whose most-listened-to songs have tens of millions of listens on Spotify — to get a fair shake. Also and importantly, fans have no say in the direction of where their subscription dollars head. In parallel to the promise of "music for everyone" (as Spotify's tagline goes), a harsh truth has emerged: Countless working artists in the United States can't feasibly make a decent living in this new world.

While streaming is the music industry's most visible economic driver these days, its problems are historical in proportion. "Capitalism has a role in this problem," says Henderson Cole, an entertainment attorney based in New York. "But I think also how our legal system is built is that instead of usually rewriting something, they'll just build on it. And we've been putting Band-Aids on this for I don't know, 100 years? So none of [the royalty system] makes sense... if a song is played on the radio, 100% of the royalties go to the songwriter. But if the same song is played on a streaming service, only about 20% of the royalties go to the songwriter. Where does that come from?"

Artists confirm that these numbers can be murky. "You cannot get at actual data, especially financial data [from Spotify]," says the musician Damon Krukowski, who plays in the projects Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi. "No matter what they tell us about our quantities of plays — which seem to be approximations, not down to the single ones — they do not tell you exactly what you're making. You can look back through your royalty statements, but it's hard to do."

It gets particularly nebulous, too, considering the digital blind spots. Crossed wires and bad metadata have contributed to a "royalty black box" of unpaid money, thought to be somewhere at least in the millions. Some speculate that even those reported streaming numbers themselves might not even be entirely correct, either. Earlier this year, news broke that a criminal investigation is underway against Jay Z's high-fidelity streaming service, Tidal, following accusations from the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv that the platform had exaggerated listener streaming numbers for Kanye West's The Life of Pablo and Beyoncé's Lemonade "to the tune of several hundred million false plays... which has generated massive royalty payouts at the expense of other artists," as they wrote in their report. Under the pro rata system, those allegedly false plays would affect the kinds of royalties other artists are making.

As streaming has become a dominant part of being an artist and a listener alike, musicians, activists and critics have also increasingly and vocally criticized the dominant streaming economy, and the purported inequalities that arise therein.

Money (for artists) aside, naysayers also point to the shift towards mood and purpose-driven playlisting instead of full-length albums or EPs as both an advertising tool and not working for every single artist. Nor does it benefit every kind of listener. "Their product is more valuable if people just listen more," says Liz Pelly, a contributing editor for The Baffler and journalist who covers streaming. "If people just don't stop streaming. So in some ways, it seems to me that a result has been this situation where music that is being surfaced by the platform is music people won't turn off: This background experience, where music isn't really as intentional of a thing, and it's more music that people could just stream for hours and really not think about."

As a consequence, streaming isn't just changing consumption habits, but how people write music altogether — with songs becoming shorter and shorter, for instance. The independent distributor CD Baby's DIY Musician blog suggests that if musicians want to optimize their music for the streaming age, they might want to explore changing the structure of their song to have the chorus hit listener's ears first, in the vein of Post Malone's "Better Now."

"I really do feel like the flattening and watering down of the experience of musical community and fandom is one of the biggest issues [of streaming]," says Pelly. "We're in this moment where artists on every level are expected to think this way that, in the past, would have been a way of thinking about artists that are gonna be on the Top 40 radio. And now all artists are expected to be beholden to the mechanisms of pop music in a sense... the idea that one platform could ever serve all artists is something to really be scrutinized."

"That's another thing about streaming I find so frustrating," Krukowski adds. "We're not developing as a community — as digital producers and listeners — through these companies."

Alternatives have emerged that can, perhaps, offer a more equitable path to those whose livelihoods depend on it. "As listeners, we have agency, and I think platforms like Spotify and other streaming services are really banking on people's requirement of everything being super convenient," Pelly says. "But being fans of independent music has not, historically, been a super convenient thing, and if we can forgo a little bit of convenience to support economies that are a little bit more equitable for independent artists and artists in general, that's something that we should keep in mind." In recent years, other modes, including user-centric and stream-to-own models, have become a bigger part of the conversation.

"One-size-fits-all is a very crude, barbaric approach to music," says Mat Dryhurst, an artist and a teacher at NYU's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in Berlin. "And actually, the internet and music might be a whole bunch more exciting if artists were given the tools to make the experience of consuming their work as unique as, arguably, the work is in itself."

One alternative streaming service that's emerged in recent years, Resonate, functions on a "stream-to-own" model with transparency in mind. Unimpressed by his experience trying to use other services as an artist, musician Peter Harris started the Berlin-based company in 2015. It works by splitting the cost of a digital download into several streams; after listening to a song nine times, paying a small amount that slightly increases with each listen, the person then owns it. The company is a co-op, so everyone, from listeners to artists, has a say in profits and decision-making; according to their website, Resonate says they "will share any and all profits with consumers (listeners) and workers (musicians, labels, staff and volunteer contributors). Members will be able to trade their profits for more streams and downloads and/or withdraw as cash."

Resonate notes that they pay $0.006 per stream, falling on the high end of what current streaming services reportedly pay out. (There's also a sliding scale, where you can see the estimated profit you might make as an artist through it.) The service, which includes the likes of highly regarded electronic artists and DJs such as Fatima Al Qadiri, Burial, and Kyle Hall, relaunched earlier this year.

Advocates also point to Bandcamp as an alternative model that's beloved by the people who use it. On it, artists and their labels can directly upload their songs, and fans directly support artists they love, follow their work, and post gushing odes about their favorite tracks. Unlike Spotify and Apple Music, the service not only enables listeners to stream songs, but also allows both artists to set the price for their work and listeners to name a price to own the songs. It has an editorial arm, Bandcamp Daily, where music fanatics dish about under-the-radar artists and scenes (on Bandcamp) flourishing around the world, and newsletters that keep you abreast about what your favorite label's just released, and digital tracks and vinyl records that your friends have been into lately.

Compared to a behemoth like Spotify, Bandcamp is not unlike a city's independent record store compared to a Best Buy (at least, back when it even stocked music) — a place that attracts a more engaged listener. "I think if you're a fan, knowing that your money is going directly to the artist and supporting them, there's something really awesome about that, and that's probably what inspires people to pay more for something online," says Garcia. But realistically, Bandcamp doesn't do the numbers that Spotify does, in both subscribers and revenue. "Bandcamp, you can see each and every single penny where it came from and where it went," Krukowski says. "So financially there's absolutely no mystery at all. Of course, the numbers are radically different. Spotify at this point is an important part of our music income, and Bandcamp is not yet."

And while many independent musicians, artists, and critics have positive things to say about Bandcamp, and how its model allows for more equity than anywhere else right now, they're hesitant to hinge the future of streaming on it. "My great optimism would be that more people who have engagement with the archive, for example, or more of an emphasis on the kind of deep cultural aspects of music would think like that, rather than trying to pin their hopes on something like Bandcamp. Which I completely like," says Dryhurst. "But long-term, I don't see it as being viable, it feels like... retiring into your fantasies or something, to think that will ever compete at the level of a venture monster like Spotify."

The user-centric model, an alternative to the pro rata model, also focuses on a listener's money going directly to the artists they listened to, and not to the entire pool of musicians whose songs were streamed in a given month. For example, if Megan Thee Stallion was your most-listened to artist in June, that means that your money would go to Megan — and not to, say, Lil Nas X, whose "Old Town Road" is the most-streamed song of 2019 so far (by far). Spotify's Will Page argues that the complexity of the user-centric model "would arguably come at an increased cost — and the value of a stream would be more volatile, and less predictable, as well." Others see it as perhaps a more ethical way to stream music, and the idea has picked up steam as of late: The French streaming service Deezer has been said to be exploring user-centric licensing. It also exists in platforms such as Patreon, where fans give their money to support a specific artist and might periodically receive music, a podcast, or another creative output through their subscription.

The downside of Patreon-esque ventures, as Krukowski points out, is that it only works for specific kinds of artists, particularly those who are hands-on and have preexisting fanbases. Not to mention the fact that sometimes relying on these solutions-oriented tech endeavors doesn't always end up shaking out: The crowdfunding service PledgeMusic announced its bankruptcy back in May, and it still owes scores of artists and labels, many of them independent, hundreds of thousands of dollars. "There's no single model, in other words, that's going to fit for everybody," he says. "And I think that's part of the problem also with streaming right now, is that we're allowing this narrowing of possibilities of how many models we have to choose from."

Krukowski has one radical idea for a potential future alternative streaming economy: Doing away with the royalty system altogether. "I think it sounds kind of kooky to people, but I seriously wonder: if we just gave up the idea of owning digital streams at all, of trying to attach them to copyright, if we'd be better off as musicians and as listeners," he says. "Now it would mean, obviously, a loss of income streams insofar as we're getting any from digital music right now, but what I would suggest to people is, we don't know how that digital realm is going to pay us yet. It's still not working. It's working for a tiny little handful of creators right now. That's not a solution. That's a problem."

Cole instead wonders if bringing music streaming fully into the hands of the government—which would also mean building a different kind of royalty system altogether—might make it a more equitable system for everyone involved. For years, he's been working on a proposal called the American Music Library, a taxpayer-funded streaming service that at once would act as a repository for all recorded music and also would guarantee free access to all listeners across the United States, not unlike the public library system. That would entail establishing a new royalty system that would give artists and songwriters a "stipend royalty" paid out directly. In his proposal, Cole estimates that "the American Music Library would be able to offer somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.01 per Artist master stream and $0.0075 per Songwriter composition stream," which is considerably higher than any payouts currently offered by major streaming services.

"If you did a program like this that helped more artists and more songwriters to have a sustainable form of life, that would be a huge boost for ... the economy," Cole says. "Also it's a huge job creation mechanism: If there were a lot more artists that were working full-time doing that, they'd hire more managers, they'd hire more music video people." Since this service would be managed through the government, it poses several steep challenges — one of them being that anything deemed "obscene" wouldn't qualify, which would disqualify a massive contingent of important, innovative music. Given that the service would function as an archive, that at once means a step forward for preservation efforts. But as Cole notes, that would also potentially allow for music that's considered hateful, or made by abusive people, to exist on the platform as well.

Others advocate for moving offline and looking more holistically at culture cultivation writ large. Along with Holly Herndon, his partner in life and creative endeavors, Dryhurst is involved in a handful of different projects that challenge the paradigms of music consumption in the streaming economy. One of his ideas involves moving away from platform participation, and towards exploring group equity in real-life spaces, fostering both artists and fans who converge together, make music, perform and build communities around shared creative endeavors — which would also stimulate local economies. "You could try and each individually sell your record, or you could instead gather together and try and get everybody in the world who cares about [say] ballroom music to own, or at the very least crowdfund, the space that makes all of this possible," Dryhurst says. "That takes the focus kind of away from trying to sell files and trying to scrimp point-one cent per play on some s****y streaming platform and more looking at: 'What is the fundamental infrastructure necessary to keep a culture going?' And, often time, space is pretty much the answer to that — space to record, space to play." The idea is an echo of the self-reliant approach that touring punk and hardcore bands took throughout much of the 1980s — making a concerted point to play at spaces that welcomed fans of all ages in their hometowns and beyond, and creating communities around fanzines and booking local shows themselves.

Pelly sees a way forward in offering resources for artists to have the tools to continue creating into their own hands, in the way that the nonprofit Cash Music allowed for open-source coding, as well as supporting online as well as off. "I would love to see artists and independent labels and communities take the work of establishing those relationships more into their own hands, and to build websites on their own," she says. "Where those types of recurring, subscription-based support systems could be more on their own terms instead of having these platforms being in the middle of this relationship... Also buying stuff from artists directly at the merch table, supporting independent record stores, mail ordering from labels that you're a fan, that kind of stuff is also important. And it's these things that seem really little that do add up to comprising a more meaningful relationship with music and art."

Ultimately, having more models out there means more options, and further room to experiment with possibilities that don't yet exist yet — a critical part of an ecosystem that allows for mainstream sounds to flourish alongside more experimental avenues. "The perpetuating of the logic of one-size-fits-all ultimately is damaging to the very thing that makes music or culture on the margins powerful: That it presents an actual alternative," Dryhurst says. "While I'm not optimistic that such small initiatives will topple Spotify, I am optimistic that it might create something else entirely." Krukowski adds: "My own personal sense of what works, what would be helpful and to music listeners, is the more platforms the better. The more possibilities the better... If you just keep going down this road, and you just don't allow for any other models to develop, or alternative models to develop, then that's all we're going to get. We're just going to keep going down this same trajectory. And this trajectory, it's not hard to see, is really bad. It's harmful to both the creative side and the listening side."
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/22/74377...e-a-better-way





Young People in UK Abandon TV News 'Almost Entirely'

Over-65s watch 33 minutes a day, but those aged 16-24 watch two on average, says Ofcom
Jim Waterson

Young people in Britain have almost entirely abandoned television news broadcasts, according to Ofcom, while half of the country now gets its news from social media.

While the average person aged 65 and over watches 33 minutes of TV news a day, this falls to just two minutes among people aged 16-24, according the media regulator’s annual news consumption report.

The decline has been driven by audiences moving away from traditional live broadcast channels, where they might watch a popular drama and leave the channel on during the evening news bulletin, towards watching catchup content from streaming services.

The shift could have major implications for British politics, given services such as Netflix do not provide any news. Political parties have traditionally considered the BBC’s 10pm news bulletin to be their most important outlet for getting their message across to large swaths of the public, which in turn can shape policies being proposed and how they are presented.

TV news is still the main way that the British public learn about current affairs, however, in part because older viewers have remained loyal to traditional services.

Ofcom’s research also suggests that people are increasingly willing to wade into online arguments about news. “There is evidence that UK adults are consuming news more actively via social media. For example, those who access news shared by news organisations, trending news or news stories from friends and family or other people they follow via Facebook or Twitter are more likely to make comments on the new posts they see compared to the previous year.”

The most popular news source in Britain remains BBC One – consulted by 58% of the public – followed by ITV on 40% and Facebook on 35%. The increase in people turning to social media for news is being driven by the growing popularity of WhatsApp and Instagram as information sources.

The Ofcom report also highlights that annual sales of national print newspapers have halved from 22m in 2010 to 10.4m in 2018. Some news media, particularly MailOnline and the Guardian, have managed to build their overall audience by attracting new readers online.

The findings provide further evidence that the British media is splitting along generational and ethnic lines. Older people and white Britons are largely sticking with television and print newspaper outlets, while younger people and those from minority ethnic backgrounds are following a largely separate news agenda on social media.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...entirely-ofcom





Cord-Cutters Beware: Amazon's TV Antenna Listings are Rife with Dubious Claims

Shoppers shouldn't take all the marketing promises vendors make at face value.
Jared Newman

Early last week, during Amazon’s Prime Days, I decided to see if the e-tailer had any good deals on over-the-air TV antennas. I was appalled by what I found.

Searching for “antenna” on Amazon.com revealed listing upon listing for products with dubious performance claims. In Amazon’s most popular and sponsored results, antenna makers were advertising unrealistic reception ranges, nonexistent over-the-air channels, and picture quality that current U.S. broadcast standards don’t support.

These misleading claims aren’t just bad for cord-cutters. They also could harm respectable antenna makers that refuse to get in the muck with less scrupulous brands. Unless Amazon—or a government watchdog—intervene, this type of advertising is unlikely to stop anytime soon.

When I reached out to Amazon for a comment on my findings, an Amazon spokesperson said “Selling partners are required to provide accurate information about their products to Amazon, and we take action against those that violate our policies and threaten our customer experience. We are investigating these listings now and will take prompt action against any that violate our policies.”

Indeed, the company quickly removed many of the offending listings cited in this story prior to publication. Still, many other offenders remain available, promising unrealistic reception or unavailable channels.

Unrealistic mile ranges

In a search for “antenna” on Amazon, the top result early last week was a sponsored listing from a vendor called “TO BE #1.” It’s an indoor flat-panel antenna that claims to “pick up TV signals up to 120 miles away.”

If that sounds like an incredible range for an indoor antenna, it’s because it defies the accepted laws of physics.

Founder and president of Antennas Direct, Richard Schneider, said he doesn’t promise coverage beyond 70 miles even for the company’s outdoor antennas, and that’s assuming “a Kansas farmer living in a two-story house on a flat prairie.” Beyond that distance, the earth’s curvature prevents antennas from consistently picking up even the strongest broadcast signals.

Getting the same reception from an indoor antenna is even harder, Schneider said, because it must contend with building materials, lower elevation, and possibly more obstructions outside the house. Indoor antennas also tend to be smaller, so they have less room for additional antenna arrays, reflectors, and other signal-improving features.

“It’s almost getting ridiculous what some of these range claims are,” Schneider said. “Even under the best circumstances, you would almost never see an 80-mile range out of an indoor antenna. It would be highly unlikely, and if you did it would be inconsistent.”

John Crabill, the chief marketing officer for Mohu, noted that the size and placement of an antenna matter more than any other factor. For indoor antennas, he said, 60 to 70 miles is the best-case scenario, but metallic interference, lower elevation, outdoor obstacles, and noise from other wireless signals can all drive reception range down.

“A claim that a small antenna can suddenly perform twice as well is simply not supported by data and testing,” Crabill said.

On Amazon, antenna makers appear undeterred. Beneath the retailer’s sponsored results, the “Best Seller” listing is an indoor antenna from 1byOne that advertises “high performance UHF and VHF reception from up to 80 miles away.” There was a time when 1byOne made more accurate claims about its antenna performance—I bought one of its indoor antennas with an advertised 35-mile range in 2016, and it’s worked well—but it seems that puffing up mile-range claims is better for business. (The company, which did not answer a request for comment, also sells an antenna that advertises 100 miles of coverage.)

Outdoor antennas aren’t exempt from this type of advertising either. One of the top search results on Amazon is an outdoor antenna from Five Star that promises “up to 200 miles long range,” and Amazon’s “Top Seller” outdoor antenna from Vansky promises a range of 150 miles. Even the RCA brand is now jumping on the 150-mile-claim bandwagon (RCA also did not respond to a request for comment).

“It has seriously gotten out of control, especially with all of the flat indoor antennas and cheaply-built outdoor antennas that have flooded the market,” said Joe Bingochea, the president of antenna maker Channel Master. “The fact of the matter is that consumers do not know any better and most times they will buy what is rated to have the best range and features regardless of what is reality.”

Is there any oversight?

How are these mile ranges not clear-cut cases of false advertising? For one thing, determining mile range isn’t an exact science given the variables involved in picking up a signal. Even reputable brands like Channel Master and Antennas Direct are just estimating based on factors such as antenna gain and customer feedback, and Schneider acknowledges some unusual cases in which a customer has picked up stations more than 100 miles away. Other brands ,however, appear to have no qualms about advertising that kind of extreme edge case on the box.

“There are some very bad actors, mostly coming out of China, and they don’t seem constrained with the need to tell the truth,” Schneider says.

Mohu’s Crabill also suspects that some antenna makers are basing their claims on whether stations appear in a channel scan, regardless of whether they come through clearly.

“We think getting 50 channels but most are pixelated is just fluff, nothing more,” Crabill says. “It’s one of the reasons so many antennas are returned.”

Some antenna makers might be skating by on semantics as well. RCA, for instance, notes that by “150 mile total range,” it means “up to 70+ miles from the broadcast towers.” In other words, if you point the antenna at a tower 70 miles east, and then point the antenna at another tower 70 miles west, then voila! You have 140 miles of coverage (let alone that the antenna only faces one way after installation, or that 140 miles is still 10 miles short of what RCA is advertising).

Even if you give these antenna makers the benefit of the doubt on range claims, they are arguably stretching the truth about their products in other ways.

While an over-the-air antenna can pick up broadcast channels such as ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox for free in high definition (defined as 720p or 1080i), it will not provide basic cable channels. Even so, Vansky has an image on its product page with logos for HGTV, Showtime, and Bravo, all of which are cable channels. A company called Signum-Max has images of Nickelodeon, Discovery, ESPN, and Discovery, none of which are available over the air. TO BE #1, which has a sponsored listing on Amazon, also shows CNN, ESPN, and Fox Business in its marketing images.

Some antenna makers also advertise 4K Ultra HD picture quality, even though the current ATSC 1.0 broadcast standard maxes out at 720p or 1080i resolution. The next-gen ATSC 3.0 standard will support 4K, and a subset of these antenna makers accurately split hairs by saying their products are “4K Ready,” but consumers who aren’t following industry broadcast standards might not understand the distinction either way.

While these seemingly inaccurate antenna scams have been around for a while, retailers and regulators have shown little interest in keeping inflated marketing claims in check, even as antenna use explodes. Neither Channel Master’s Joe Bingochea nor Antennas Direct’s Richard Schneider said they were aware of any efforts by Amazon or the Federal Trade Commission to verify what antenna makers are promising. Neither Amazon nor the FTC responded to requests for comment.

In the meantime, reputable antenna makers say they’re losing business to brands that invest little in research and development, yet reap the rewards of inflated marketing. And those effects could be spreading beyond Amazon. Schneider says that one big-box retailer, which he won’t name, has pressured him to revise Antennas Direct’s packaging to better compete with products that advertise longer mile ranges.

“As a manufacturer, you have a decision to make: How badly do I want to stay on the shelf?” he says.
What you can do

In lieu of stronger protections for consumers, you can take a few steps to avoid misleading antenna marketing:

• Most importantly, ignore any claim of more than 70-mile range, even for outdoor antennas, and don’t expect 60 miles of reception indoors if you have any amount of obstruction or interference in the area. Antennas that promise more might still work at shorter ranges, but they likely won’t get anywhere close to what they advertise.
• If you’re unsure about which channels broadcast over the air and which require a cable, satellite, or streaming TV bundle, the website TVFool will tell you which channels are available in your area and how far away their broadcast towers are.
• If you want to reward companies for honest marketing, buy an antenna from a reputable brand, such as Antennas Direct, Channel Master, Mohu, or Winegard. In addition to avoiding the trend of mile-range inflation, they also offer 1-800 numbers to help sort through your antenna issues.
• You can also shop for antennas from retailers that actually take a stand against bogus marketing. Grant Hall, the CEO of networked tuner maker Tablo, suggested shopping at Solid Signal, and I’ve noticed that Best Buy avoids carrying products with unrealistic mile ranges. (Its antenna page points out that 75 miles is the maximum range you can expect from a traditional antenna.)
• Finally, you can take a more activist stance by complaining to the FTC.

Despite what he’s experienced, Schneider hopes that given enough time, reputable brands will come out ahead. He’s already gotten word that one retailer has started asking antenna makers to explain their mile-range methodology, suggesting that retailers might be getting blowback from consumers over antennas with dubious marketing. And he doesn’t rule out complaining to the FTC himself.

“Karma’s gonna bite these guys in the ass,” he says. “They’re going to get smacked down at some point, because one of these guys is going to go too far.”
https://www.techhive.com/article/340...us-claims.html





AT&T Loses Nearly 1 Million TV Customers After Raising DirecTV Prices

Price increases helped drive 946,000 customers away from AT&T.
Jon Brodkin

AT&T lost 946,000 TV subscribers in Q2 2019, a loss that the company attributed to price increases, competition, and other factors.

AT&T reported a net loss of 778,000 subscribers in the "Premium TV" category, which includes its DirecTV satellite and U-verse wireline TV services. AT&T attributed this loss to "an increase in customers rolling off promotional discounts, competition, and lower gross adds due to a focus on the long-term value customer base."

AT&T also lost 168,000 subscribers of DirecTV Now, an online service with linear channels that's similar to traditional satellite and cable TV. AT&T said the DirecTV Now customer loss was "due to higher prices and less promotional activity," meaning that customers have balked at price increases and a refusal to extend discounts.

The Premium TV loss brought AT&T down to 21.6 million customers in that category, while the DirecTV Now loss brought that service down to 1.3 million customers. Including both, AT&T's total number of video subscribers dropped from 25.4 million in Q2 2108 to 22.9 million in Q2 2019.

The loss of 946,000 TV subscribers easily outstripped last quarter's AT&T net loss of 627,000 subscribers. "AT&T said it expects a similar level of video losses to continue in the current quarter," according to Reuters.

AT&T's quarterly video revenue fell 1.7% year over year, dropping to $8 billion.

Losses follow DirecTV and Time Warner buys

AT&T made a huge bet on video in recent years, buying DirecTV in 2015 and Time Warner Inc. in 2018.

When the Department of Justice tried to stop the merger with Time Warner, AT&T told a judge in a May 2018 court filing that the merger "will enable the merged company to reduce prices." Instead, AT&T raised prices for DirecTV Now multiple times. DirecTV Now currently offers two plans that cost $50 or $70 a month, and the service charges extra for premium networks. AT&T also raised prices for its DirecTV satellite and U-verse TV services in January while simultaneously making it more expensive for customers to cancel TV or Internet service.

AT&T's TV losses were much higher than Comcast's, which lost 209,000 residential video customers in the quarter to bring that company's total down to 20.6 million.

AT&T is facing a class-action complaint accusing it of lying to investors in order to hide the failure of its DirecTV Now streaming TV service. AT&T told investors that DirecTV Now was succeeding even as its subscriber base fell due to price increases and the discontinuance of promotional discounts, the lawsuit alleges.

AT&T is trying to prop up its streaming business with a new service called HBO Max, which will debut in spring 2020. AT&T is taking some Time Warner shows off Netflix in order to give exclusives to HBO Max.

AT&T also lost 34,000 residential broadband subscribers this past quarter, lowering the total to 14.4 million. The losses came from slower-speed broadband services, and they were offset by AT&T raising its fiber subscriber base from 3.1 million to 3.4 million. IP broadband revenue rose 6.5% year over year, hitting $2.1 billion in Q2 2019, "due to the continued shift of subscribers to higher-speed services, including AT&T Fiber, which was partially offset by declines in slower speed subscribers," AT&T said.

The AT&T Entertainment Group, which includes video, broadband, and wireline phone service, reported $11.4 billion in quarterly revenue and $1.5 billion in operating income. Respectively, those numbers were down 1% and up 2.6% year over year.

The company's total revenue—including its lucrative mobile business—was $35.5 billion, up 0.3% year over year. Operating income was $8.7 billion, up 3.8% year over year. The mobile business accounted for nearly half of AT&T's revenue and two-thirds of its operating income.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...irectv-prices/





DOJ to Approve T-Mobile/Sprint Merger Despite 13 States Trying to Block it

DOJ could announce merger approval and related spinoff to Dish this week.
Jon Brodkin

The Justice Department plans to approve the T-Mobile/Sprint merger as part of a settlement involving the sale of spectrum licenses, wholesale access, and a prepaid wireless business to Dish Network, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

"The companies have spent weeks negotiating with antitrust enforcers and each other over the sale of assets to Dish to satisfy concerns that the more than $26 billion merger of the No. 3 and No. 4 wireless carriers by subscribers would hurt competition," the Journal wrote, citing people familiar with the matter.

As a result of those negotiations, the DOJ is "poised to approve" the merger and could announce a settlement with T-Mobile and Sprint "as soon as this week, but the timing remains uncertain," the Journal wrote.

Even if the DOJ approves the merger, T-Mobile and Sprint will still have to defend it in court because of a lawsuit filed against them by 13 states and the District of Columbia.

Dish, the second-biggest satellite TV provider after AT&T's DirecTV, has been buying spectrum for years without ever launching cellular phone and data service. Previous reports about a settlement involving Dish said that Dish would get wholesale access to the T-Mobile/Sprint network, spectrum, and prepaid wireless carrier Boost Mobile. Boost is owned by Sprint and is a network reseller.

Today's Journal report said the pending settlement "provides for Dish to acquire prepaid subscribers" but didn't say whether those will come from Boost. Boost's involvement seems likely, given that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's approval of the T-Mobile/Sprint merger is contingent on the divestiture of Boost Mobile and a guarantee that Boost will have access to the T-Mobile/Sprint network.

"Dish would also get a multiyear agreement to use the wireless companies' network while it builds dedicated infrastructure," the Journal wrote. The report didn't say how much spectrum Dish will get.

Dish to pay $5 billion

Bloomberg reported last night that Dish "agreed to pay $5 billion for wireless assets" in its deal with T-Mobile and Sprint. The deal includes $1.5 billion for prepaid mobile assets and $3.5 billion for spectrum licenses.

"Under the terms of the deal, Dish can't sell the assets or hand over control of the agreement to a third party for three years," Bloomberg wrote.

Dish becoming a major carrier could solve the problem caused by the T-Mobile/Sprint merger, that it would reduce the number of major nationwide competitors from four to three. But Dish has famously dragged its feet in using its assets to build a wireless network, with T-Mobile CEO John Legere calling Dish a spectrum hoarder in February of this year. Even under a best-case scenario presented by the settlement with the government, it sounds like it could take Dish several years to build its own network and become a major threat to AT&T, Verizon, and the combined T-Mobile/Sprint.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...g-to-block-it/





A TV Maverick Is Going All-In on a New Wireless Bet

Charlie Ergen, the poker-playing billionaire who co-founded Dish Network, has been hoarding airwaves for years. Now the U.S. government is handing him the cards he needs to make his play.
Drew FitzGerald

Charlie Ergen has long tried to muscle his way into the U.S. wireless business. When his rivals had no other choice, the billionaire behind Dish Network Corp. finally got his way.

John Legere, the chief executive of T-Mobile US Inc., called Mr. Ergen in late May after it became clear T-Mobile’s proposed takeover of Sprint Corp. was in trouble.

Mr. Ergen had been the most outspoken corporate critic of the proposed $26 billion deal—a merger that would leave the U.S. with three giant cellular companies. But the Colorado maverick also ran one of the few firms with the airwaves and know-how to create a new wireless provider that would satisfy the Justice Department’s antitrust concerns.

Two serious attempts to combine T-Mobile and Sprint in the last five years had already failed. Its third try was already a year old.

Mr. Legere, a foul-mouthed executive known for tweets poking fun at his rivals, was all business on the phone. “Justice has said that we need a fourth carrier. We should talk if you are interested,” Mr. Ergen recalled.

For years, Mr. Ergen had irked telecom rivals and federal regulators by spending more than $20 billion amassing wireless licenses but never using them. Time and again Mr. Ergen had explored various deals, including buying Sprint himself, only to frustrate the other side. Now, he was the only buyer that could build a credible fourth nationwide cellphone operator.

“With four, there’s always somebody that will be a rabble rouser,” Mr. Ergen said in an interview this week in his office south of Denver. “Somebody will say I don’t have enough market share. I’ve only got 9 million subs and want 10 million. That person is going to be more aggressive. The guy who’s got 100 million, he’s just going to hope he holds onto them.”

Whether Dish can become a formidable force in the mature U.S. cellphone market will be a key test of the landmark antitrust agreement announced Friday between the Justice Department and the companies. The carefully crafted deal gives Dish 9 million of Sprint’s prepaid customers—its Boost Mobile business and then some—plus the right to buy licenses to more airwaves that can blanket rural areas. It will let Dish operate on T-Mobile’s existing network for seven years while Dish builds its own nationwide service.

A former professional poker player and card-counting blackjack whiz who was banned by some Las Vegas casinos, Mr. Ergen co-founded Dish in 1980 after starting his career as an analyst at Frito Lay where he calculated how many Doritos should fill a bag. He and his partners bet their savings, pooling together $60,000 on selling 10-foot-wide satellite dishes from a Denver storefront.

He has said his experience gambling helped hone his business acumen—knowing how to “win with bad hands.” More than once, Mr. Ergen has compared his business plans to an “Indiana Jones” movie in which the hero narrowly dodges a never ending string of lethal threats.

He switched to hubcap-size dishes and took on cable-TV monopolies by slashing prices. His service now has 12 million customers across the country and his controlling stake in Dish is worth about $9 billion. (He is also the chairman and biggest shareholder in sister company EchoStar Corp. , which operates satellites.)

The 66-year-old tends to play by his own rules. He has made executives share hotel rooms on company trips and has done market research with what he called the “Waffle House poll,” visiting outlets around the country and asking customers how they used their phones and watched television.

His famously frugal ethos—he still drives to Dish’s Englewood, Colo., headquarters with lunch in a brown paper bag—isn’t always evident these days. The billionaire often flies in a private jet and has stopped making employees share hotel rooms on business trips, according to people familiar with the company.

Mr. Ergen, whose core satellite-TV service has been losing customers, admits he is starting from behind in the cellphone game. But he argues that gives him an advantage. “Their legacy is mishmash. Their networks are plaid,” Mr. Ergen said, pointing to his green-checked dress shirt. “We will be a solid color.”

Dish’s new network will be dwarfed by the incumbents. Verizon Communications Inc. has nearly 120 million cellphone customers. AT&T Inc. and the enlarged T-Mobile will each have more than 90 million. They are among the biggest advertisers in the country. They are holding onto their subscribers by offering unlimited data and bundling in free subscriptions to services like HBO and Netflix. All three are already rolling out faster 5G services.

“How is a company with no track record, no wireless customers and unused spectrum a more viable competitor?,” said Matt Wood, general counsel at advocacy group Free Press, which publicly opposed the T-Mobile and Sprint deal.

AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have built nationwide networks in pieces over decades as they acquired rivals or new airwaves licenses. T-Mobile itself will now spend years integrating Sprint’s network and customers. The incumbents updated the equipment hanging on cellular towers and the software behind their services as they moved from 3G connections to faster 4G technology, and now 5G.

Dish plans to lean on T-Mobile while it builds a brand-new, 5G-only network that it can roll out quickly and operate differently. It also means Dish should be able to roll it out quickly and operate differently. For example, Mr. Ergen said, Dish would be able to offer on-demand pricing, such as charging less in the middle of the night. He also plans to target businesses, such as automakers, looking for 5G connections.

“We’ll get someplace in three years that will take the other guys 10 years,” he said.
A field service specialist for Dish Network installs a satellite television system at a residence in Denver. Photo: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg News

The agreement to use T-Mobile’s stronger network will allow Dish to attract customers beyond the cities where Sprint mostly marketed its Boost service, he said. It also lets Dish build its own network first in urban areas with many customers and use the T-Mobile network to reach rural areas that have fewer customers.

Dish will need to add towers in all those less-populated and less-profitable areas under the deal it reached with the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department. Mr. Ergen estimates it will cost about $10 billion. But he will be able to compete for customers and generate cash from his nascent cellular business before he has to do that.

Mr. Ergen also argues wireless pricing is broken. He says U.S. carriers have many customers paying for unlimited data plans they don’t need, much as cable companies long forced subscribers to pay for big bundles of TV channels.

“This is deja vu all over again for us,” said Mr. Ergen. In wireless, he sees an opportunity for Dish to woo customers that use less data with lower monthly prices and those that are heavy data users with plans that don’t slow their connections.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said this week he wasn’t concerned about the prospect of Dish jumping into the wireless market. “Our strategy is pretty well baked,” he told analysts on Wednesday. “The strategy is resilient as it relates to changes in industry structure.”

Mr. Ergen has often played the role of disrupter. In 2012, Dish introduced a DVR that let consumers easily skip commercials, sparking a legal challenge from broadcasters.

He has often brawled over programming fees with channel owners, causing blackouts on Dish’s service. The company said Friday it stopped carrying 22 regional sports networks owned by the Walt Disney Co. over a contract dispute.

Dish has also gone without HBO since November, missing the final season of “Game of Thrones.” Mr. Ergen said HBO’s proposal was unaffordable, calling it “payback” for his company’s 2018 opposition to AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner. An HBO spokesman said the terms it offered Dish were consistent with those in place for large distributors.

Dish launched one of the first live-TV streaming services, Sling TV, in early 2015. With a small package of channels and lower price, it made it easy for millions of people to cut their TV bill - even many of Dish’s own satellite customers.

But with cellular service, he has vexed federal authorities and business partners with what some called broken promises. Critics said Mr. Ergen was simply hoarding the government-issued licenses while he waited for a deep-pocketed partner to buy him out. In 2015 he angered FCC officials when he won a large chunk of wireless licenses at government auction; his bid benefitted from a $3.3 billion discount designed to bring smaller players into the wireless industry. The FCC later rejected the discount, a decision that is contested. Last year, FCC officials wrote a letter that threatened to claw back some Dish licenses if it failed to launch a cellular service by March 2020.

Mr. Ergen bristles at the notion he has been squatting on valuable airwaves. He said he simply was outbid by Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. in 2013 when he tried to buy Sprint. He has been waiting for a catalyst that would allow him to compete with entrenched players. The rollout of new 5G networks is just the technology shift that makes it possible.

“Hoarding is actually a positive for our shareholders and a positive strategic move because you needed to accumulate spectrum to go and compete with these guys,’’ he said. “It didn’t make any sense to build a 4G network and tear it all down the next year.”

By early 2019, Dish still had no wireless customers to quell the government’s concerns. The forecast was also darkening for T-Mobile and Sprint. Their merger effort hit a snag in April, when staff lawyers at the Justice Department told the companies the deal was unlikely to earn their approval as it was structured.

The Justice Department pressed the companies to shed enough pieces of their business to create a new fourth cellphone carrier that could step into the void left by Sprint, which had been shedding customers and struggling to turn a profit.

The department met with representatives from potential partners including Dish and cable operators Altice USA Inc., Charter Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp. , according to people familiar with the talks. Dish emerged as an early favorite.

Mr. Ergen said his existing airwaves licenses made his pitch to build a new cellphone carrier more credible. He said he reached a broad agreement with Mr. Legere and Sprint Chairman Marcelo Claure in just four weeks of discussions in June.

But the discussions continued for three more weeks as the Justice Department pressed the merger partners for better terms. Government lawyers insisted the settlement include no restrictions on Dish’s ability to sell assets, other than to pure competitors, or find a deep-pocketed partner after the deal.

The Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Makan Delharim, was under the gun as government officials publicly split on the deal. FCC head Ajit Pai, a fellow Trump administration appointee, had already endorsed the T-Mobile and Sprint deal while a consortium of Democratic state attorneys general had filed a lawsuit seeking to block it, saying it would hurt consumers.

The Justice Department wanted to make sure the final agreement would stand up in court if challenged by the states. The companies have agreed to wait to close the deal under a federal court hears the case later this year.

Mr. Ergen will have to pay $1.4 billion for the Sprint customers and $3.6 billion in three years for the extra airwaves. T-Mobile will get the bulk of Sprint’s customers and airwaves and also have the right to buy some Dish spectrum. Sprint’s owner SoftBank gets to cash out after failing to disrupt the U.S. cellular market. The Justice Department gets to keep a fourth competitor.

“I think three years from now, this transaction will look better than it does this week,” Mr. Ergen said. “They are gonna have real competition.”

— Sarah Krouse
contributed to this article.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-tv-ma...et-11564200000





With the T-Mobile Deal Approved, it's Time We Say So Long to Sprint

Sprint gets its sweet release after T-Mobile's takeover is cleared.
Eli Blumenthal, Roger Cheng

Sprint has struggled to stay alive for more than a decade, constantly fighting for that next wireless customer. It's been an uphill battle and success never seemed in the cards. Now T-Mobile gets a chance to put Sprint out of its misery after the Department of Justice finally blessed a $26.5 billion deal Friday to combine the two nationwide wireless carriers under the un-carrier umbrella.

The deal combines the third- and fourth-largest US wireless carriers, creating a larger player better able to compete against rivals Verizon and AT&T. T-Mobile and Sprint also argue that the merger allows them to better invest in next-generation 5G networks and cover more Americans. Some of the assets will be spun off to Dish Network, which plans to create an alternative wireless service.

With T-Mobile set to absorb Sprint's business, the deal also signals the end of one of the US telecom industry's most iconic brands, cemented in the '90s with its "pin-drop" commercials featuring Murphy Brown's Candice Bergen. What followed was decades of near-comical miscalculations, from a disastrous megamerger to a bet on the wrong kind of 4G wireless technology. Throughout it all, the company continued to stave off death, finding ways to exist even as the other three national carriers pulled further away.

It's been a long, twisting road, marked more by setbacks than successes. This is the story of Sprint.

An unlikely beginning

Most of the telecom companies you see today trace their roots back to the original Ma Bell, AT&T. But Sprint sprung from Southern Pacific Company, a railroad company that owned telegraph lines. Sprint was the catchy acronym for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony. It served as Southern Pacific's entry into the long-distance calling business in 1972.

Sprint bounced around in its early years, switching owners before finally becoming its own Kansas City-based company, Sprint Corporation, in 1991. Two years later, it jumped into the wireless business with the purchase of Chicago-based Centel, then the 10th-largest carrier in the country with operations in 22 states.

Sprint rose to prominence in the mid-'90s as a scrappy competitor with its series of "pin drop" commercials, which touted the clarity of its long-distance phone calls. Its current logo, back then emblazoned in red, is a symbol of a pin dropping. The company was able to eat away at the competition with unique calling plans like lower rates for weekend calls and shared long-distance calls. On many of those commercials was Bergen, who touted those features as a reason you should switch services.

After MCI's attempt to buy Sprint for $129 billion in a massive long-distance deal was called off in 1999 over regulatory concerns, Sprint established itself as a wireless rival to Cingular and Verizon. It had 20.1 million users in 2004, a distant third behind its two competitors, which each boasted twice the number of users. In a bid to keep up, Sprint began looking for outside partners.

Then the real problems began.

The Nextel disaster

Sprint turned to Nextel Communications, a wireless company known for its walkie-talkie-like cellphone service and, at the time, the fifth-largest wireless provider in the US. In December 2004, the two companies agreed to a $36 billion merger, rebranding the combined wireless entity as Sprint Nextel. The deal was framed as a merger of equals, which almost never ends well.

Giving the combined companies nearly 40 million users, the move was initially praised by some analysts as a "great deal for Sprint."

"This is really a matter of these companies looking around and wanting to be a big company as well, and trying to match up with Cingular and Verizon," then Gartner analyst Tole Hart told CNET at the time. "But they're really operating two very different networks, and it's going to take a while to migrate the Nextel customers over to Sprint's CDMA network."

But those two "very different networks" turned out to be the critical blow from which Sprint has never been able to fully recover.

The two networks -- Sprint ran on a technology called CDMA, while Nextel used what was known as iDEN -- were incompatible, and the reluctance of management, run by then-CEO Gary Forsee, to pull the plug on one and quickly migrate users proved near-fatal. Sprint was forced to maintain separate networks and sell both Sprint and Nextel devices.

Running two networks means you can't run any network well, leading to worsening service quality and a reputation for dropped calls and spotty coverage that it still hasn't completely escaped today.

"The original sin was the Nextel merger," said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Techsponential. "When that proved overvalued and difficult to integrate, Sprint was left with a fragmented network."

Simply Everything

Sprint Nextel was weeks away from filing for bankruptcy when Dan Hesse took over as CEO in December 2007. Hesse's trademark attempt to win back consumers was his "Simply Everything" plan, a then-unprecedented bundle of unlimited voice calls, text messages and data at a time when minutes and text messages could still rack up big bills.

Hesse became the face of the company, with a consistent presence in black-and-white commercials set in New York talking about how the network had improved. For a while, he breathed some life into the company again, and despite its reputation hit, managed to at least slow the rate of customer defections.

His preference for simplicity wasn't just limited to its cellphone plan. The company got rid of the Sprint-Nextel name, slashed jobs and focused its operations in Overland Park, Kansas, killing off its Nextel legacy HQ in Reston, Virginia. He took some of those resources and poured them into both networks, improving the service and reducing the number of customer complaints.

While Hesse made the call to kill off the Nextel network, he could never really overcome that albatross.

"From that point forward, they were playing small ball, skimping on critical investments to preserve dwindling cash," said Craig Moffett, an analyst at MoffettNathanson. "As their debt pile grew, they fell further and further behind."

It was also late to iconic mid-'00s phones like Motorola's Razr V3, and was the last US carrier to get the iPhone. Its big attempt to get into the modern smartphone business with its own exclusive, the Palm Pre, failed to capture an audience.

Then there was the company's decision to jump into 4G early.

Betting on the wrong horse

Sprint wanted to get ahead of the upcoming 4G wave by launching a next-generation network based on a technology known as WiMax. The early move gave Sprint something to crow about and, for a short time, a hit franchise in the Evo 4G, made by Taiwan-based HTC.
International CTIA Wireless Show Held In Las VegasInternational CTIA Wireless Show Held In Las Vegas

Sprint partnered with Clearwire, which received financial backing from Google and several cable companies to push WiMax to even more consumers.

But Sprint backed the wrong horse. Even as the company worked to deploy WiMax throughout the country, the cellphone industry rallied behind LTE as the 4G standard. The industry's stance meant Sprint needed to pivot its 4G plans, a costly move that would only keep it further behind.

By the time Sprint switched gears, Verizon and AT&T were already heavily invested in LTE. T-Mobile, which was also slow to jump into LTE, moved quickly once it began its deployment.

"Decisions matter," Moffett said. "From a disastrous merger with Nextel, to a misplaced bet on WiMax, to one bad network strategy after another, Sprint made just about every wrong decision that could be made."

The SoftBank savior that never arrived

Even after all of its prior failings, it appeared a savior had arrived in the form of Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japanese carrier SoftBank, who beat out Dish to purchase Sprint for $21.6 billion. Known in Japan for shaking up the local wireless industry, SoftBank was initially viewed as a deep-pocketed backer, promising to invest $8 billion into the company.

"This transaction provides an excellent opportunity for SoftBank to leverage its expertise in smartphones and next-generation high-speed networks, including LTE, to drive the mobile internet revolution in the world's largest market," Son said at the time. "Our track record of innovation, combined with Sprint's strong brand and local leadership provides a constructive beginning toward creating a more competitive American mobile market."

Son and Hesse didn't see eye to eye, and with then-smaller rival T-Mobile charging hard under firebrand CEO John Legere, Marcelo Claure joined Sprint as the new CEO. Claure previously ran wireless distributor Brightstar and was close with Son. He was also the first CEO of a major US telecom company that didn't spend time at Ma Bell. (Legere worked for Hesse in the old AT&T days.)

Claure introduced a few new concepts, including the ability to lease your phone and jaw-dropping offers like a year of free service.

While Claure stopped the bleeding, Sprint's aggressive advertising and pricing tactics could not overcome its network's shortcomings. Neither could exclusive phones such as Sharp's Aquos Crystal (one of the first phones with an edge-to-edge display) or the Essential Phone (from Android creator Andy Rubin).

"Given Sprint's network and brand troubles, it is not surprising that when unique devices found a home there, it was typically also their grave," said Greengart.

By 2015, a revitalized T-Mobile officially overtook Sprint for the title of third-largest wireless carrier.

T-Mobile never gave up the lead, sitting at 83.1 million users today, compared with Sprint's 54.5 million.

Now it's merging with Sprint, but it's not a merger of equals. The combined company won't be called T-Mobile-Sprint. It's been touted as "the New T-Mobile" and will be run by Legere, Mike Sievert and the rest of T-Mobile's team.

It's an unceremonious end, but one that is poetic given Sprint's history.

"Sprint lacked a distinct brand identity," Greengart said. "Verizon was about the network, AT&T was the home of the iPhone, and T-Mobile was the un-carrier. Sprint ended up having to compete on price and plan gimmicks."
https://www.cnet.com/news/t-mobile-d...ong-to-sprint/





The T-Mobile-Sprint Merger Could Mean the End of the Physical SIM Card

The DOJ is requiring T-Mobile and Dish to support eSIM
Dieter Bohn

The Department of Justice may have just done more to eliminate those little plastic SIM cards you have to use to get your phone to work on a wireless carrier than all of the efforts of Big Tech over the past four years. That’s because it is requiring Dish and T-Mobile to support eSIM technology as a condition of its merger approval.

What may seem like a wonky side detail or extra technical requirement in a blockbuster merger approval announcement could end up changing not just how your phone gets online, but also (eventually) the way phones are built. It’s not going to happen overnight — the process will probably take years — but this small proviso in the merger approval could affect much more than who can sell wireless service in America.

Electronic SIM (eSIM) is the technology that allows wireless devices to get activated on a network through software. In theory, it makes it much easier for consumers to switch networks because they don’t have to acquire a physical thing (the SIM card) from the network they want to switch to. They can just tap a few buttons in an app. In practice, it hasn’t quite been that easy since US carriers have dragged their feet in rolling out full support for eSIM.

The big thing the Justice Department is requiring is that “The New T-Mobile” sell a bunch of assets to Dish so that it has the tools it needs to become the fourth wireless carrier. But in a press conference announcing the approval, the US government also said it’s requiring both The New T-Mobile and Dish to support eSIM technology, which allows your phone to register itself with the carrier using only its internal chips, not a little plastic shim you have to insert into your phone. Here’s how the DOJ put it:

The remedy also facilitates consumers’ ability to easily switch between wireless providers by requiring the new T-Mobile and the new Dish service to support eSIM, electronic SIM, technology. This requirement will make it easier for Dish to attract new subscribers, help extend the competition in this market, and will provide a platform for new innovative options.

Sadly in the United States, eSIM has not been widely adopted in mobile wireless like it is in Europe and others. And that’s an area separate of this merger we have looked to. This will revolutionize the use eSIMs in hopefully all carriers, because once consumers have it, they’ll benefit from it.


This seems like a small detail, especially since the major US carriers only started officially supporting eSIM technology on new iPhones last year. But the important thing to note is that the support is mandatory.

In theory, that could mean that both companies will eventually require that phones on their networks support eSIM in order to stay in compliance with the merger approval agreement. That would mean that anybody who wants to get their phones on those networks — and that will be pretty much everybody — will need to build in support for eSIM.

If eSIM becomes the standard on T-Mobile and Dish, the DOJ is hoping consumer pressure will bring it to all carriers and also make it easier to use to easily switch between them.

You may have noticed a bunch of “in theory” and “ifs” in the preceding paragraphs. That’s because we don’t yet know the full extent of the DOJ’s eSIM requirement. It is probably unlikely that it will force these new wireless carriers to only provision phones that support eSIM. It’s more likely that it’s requiring that if a phone has it, these companies have to support it.

But even if we’re looking at that slightly weaker requirement, it’s still a very big deal. Lots of phone makers are very eager to get rid of the physical SIM card. It is one of the most aggravating parts of designing a phone because they need some kind of slot or drawer to put the SIM in, which takes up space and also is a point of ingress for water or dirt. Getting rid of the physical SIM means companies can design smaller, thinner, and more durable phones.

Again, don’t get your hopes up that any of this will happen immediately. The Justice Department is hoping that market dynamics put some pressure on these phone carriers to adopt eSIM, and market dynamics take a very long time. Even if it happens, there’s no guarantee that switching your eSIM-enabled phone will be easy. The DOJ already has an open investigation into how the US carriers are trying to undermine eSIM technology by adding locks and barriers to its use, so the road ahead for eSIM adoption is still long and bumpy. But today’s news at least gives us a map for it.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/26/8...ement-sim-card





Politicians Want to Change the Internet’s Most Important Law. They Should Read It First.

The law is neither long nor inscrutable. So why do people keep getting it wrong?
Sarah Jeong

The myth that the tech companies are legally barred from discriminating against political viewpoints — specifically, conservative viewpoints — is running rampant, with no basis in law or even legislative intent.

The trouble first started when Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate commerce and judiciary committees in the spring of 2018. Senator Ted Cruz asked him whether Facebook considered itself a “neutral” platform, saying, “The predicate for Section 230 immunity under the C.D.A. is that you’re a neutral public forum.”

The senator was referring to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a limited liability shield that internet platforms have benefited from since 1996. His words had little bearing on the actual text of the law. Things only snowballed from there.

In late June, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced an ill-considered bill that would charge a federal agency with enforcing political neutrality on major social media platforms. On July 11, a surreal White House summit on social media focused on bias against conservatives. In advance of the summit, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk wrote in The Washington Post under the headline, “It’s time to treat tech platforms like publishers,” claiming that when companies like YouTube and Facebook “censor or suppress conservative content, they are behaving as publishers.” Section 230 of the C.D.A., according to Mr. Kirk, has allowed the social media companies to avoid “billions of dollars in potential copyright infringement and libel lawsuits.”

David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news — and offers reading suggestions from around the web — with commentary every weekday morning.

Section 230 of the C.D.A. is neither long nor particularly inscrutable. It clocks in at under 1,000 words, and it makes clear that the law does not premise protection on political neutrality. Neither does it force tech companies to assume either the role of “publisher” or “platform.” And it states that C.D.A. 230 has no bearing on federal criminal law — or on intellectual property law, for that matter.

The reason C.D.A. 230 exists is simple: internet platforms are not the same as internet users. This holds true for giants like YouTube and the comments section of obscure vegan cooking blogs. Posting in the comments section of The New York Times is not the same as writing for The New York Times.

The law describes users as the publishers of their own speech, and distinguishes them from the platforms, who are hosting user-generated content. The platforms can filter, censor, edit and delete user posts without becoming the speakers. There is no special “publisher” or “platform” designation for a tech company — C.D.A. 230’s reference to “publishers” is a description of the speech at issue.

The liability shield of the act is not meant to force websites to become politically neutral entities. But neither is its primary purpose to protect the worst actors on the internet — it is intended to cultivate and encourage moderation. The section is a broad liability shield under which the platforms may engage in whatever content moderation is necessary to keep their services from devolving into anarchy or worse.

The best analogy might be to tort reform. The internet is a vulnerable attack vector for frivolous lawsuits. People frequently get mad online and sue tech companies over trifles. (Earlier this year, Representative Devin Nunes sued Twitter and a Twitter user over mean tweets from an account called “Devin Nunes’ cow.”) C.D.A. 230 behaves as a broad buffer protecting Twitter from similar suits at the early stages of litigation.

Yet the analogy to tort reform cuts both ways. It’s easy to conjure up the image of ambulance chasers and shady characters who play up a bruise from slipping on the floor of a store. But there are real victims, too. A 79-year-old woman may be infamous for suing McDonalds over the temperature of her coffee, but she suffered third-degree burns on her legs and genitalia from coffee estimated to be at 190 degrees.

Over the years, C.D.A. 230 has barred lawsuits from people who have genuinely suffered. Countless women have had intimate nude photographs posted on the internet without their consent, hosted on unscrupulous websites that refuse to take them down. In New York, a man unsuccessfully sued the dating app Grindr after his ex-boyfriend set up a fake Grindr account on his behalf to attract harassers. The widows of Americans killed overseas by the Islamic State have sued Twitter for failing to take down ISIS propaganda accounts.

A lawsuit against a tech company may not be the best way to address these tragedies, but the fact remains that these are examples of real pain and real harm. And in many of these cases, it is worth considering whether narrow legislative exceptions can protect victims at the edges. There is always the risk that a series of exceptions ends up effectively breaking C.D.A. 230, but there is still a worthwhile debate to be had.

But there can be no honest debate over a version of C.D.A. 230 that doesn’t exist. Political neutrality has never been part of C.D.A. 230, and to make it so would require a complete overhaul of the law. Senator Hawley’s bill calls for government regulation of the internet on an unprecedented scale. The Federal Communications Commission used to enforce the Fairness Doctrine on the airwaves, a policy under which broadcasters were required to air balanced opinions on controversial issues — balanced from the F.C.C.’s perspective, that is. It’s already perilous to have a government regulator decide what is fair and balanced. It makes even less sense when applied to the internet. In 1969, the Supreme Court upheld the F.C.C.’s power to enforce the Fairness Doctrine on the grounds that the airwaves are an inherently limited resource. But the sea of internet postings is boundless.

The Republican Party’s new obsession with “political neutrality” has left former allies reeling. Berin Szòka, the president of the libertarian-leaning think tank TechFreedom, said in an interview that Republicans were once his natural allies on a wide range of issues, but have now “betrayed their most fundamental principles, principles they spent decades fighting about — to keep the government out of meddling in broadcast media, fighting against the Fairness Doctrine. And now they want exactly that but on steroids for the internet.”

Of course, the Republican Party has abandoned quite a few historical norms recently. But the distortion of C.D.A. 230 doesn’t make much sense on its own merits. In a blog post, Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School, criticized the Hawley bill for promoting “false equivalencies.” He wrote, “Not all political parties and viewpoints are equally legitimate. For example, I don’t think the Republican Party and the American Nazi Party are equally legitimate.” Mr. Goldman wrote that internet services should treat Republican candidates and platforms differently from those of the Nazi party — but that the bill would prevent internet services from doing so. (He added, somewhat plaintively, a request for his blog commenters to refrain from equating the Republican Party with the Nazi party).

Under President Ronald Reagan, Republicans once fought against the F.C.C. Fairness Doctrine. (Indeed, regardless of the 1969 Supreme Court ruling in its favor, the F.C.C. voluntarily abandoned the Fairness Doctrine in 1987). In an interview, Mr. Goldman said that it was hard to find Reagan Republicans anymore.

Mr. Szòka was more dismissive about the profound change he sensed in the Republican Party. “Republicans feel victimized here, and in one sense, they are right. There is a disparate impact of content moderation on these platforms for Republicans” whose base is more likely to propagate “hate speech, and fake news, and conspiracy theories — and what is either incitement to violence, or just short of it.”

Mr. Szòka pointed to a study suggesting that conservatives were more likely than liberals to be permanently banned by Twitter, and pointed out that many names from the data set that had been identified as conservative were far-right (e.g., Richard Spencer and David Duke). “Which one of those people they actually want to claim as their own?” he asked rhetorically.

In a better world, we should reopen the debate on C.D.A. 230 only because so much of the internet has changed. The law is a creature of 1996, written long before Facebook or Twitter existed. It assumes the internet is still just beginning to blossom and that legislators, judges and regulators should adopt a hands-off approach. In A.C.L.U. v. Reno, a Supreme Court decision the following year, the court marveled at how “tens of thousands of users are engaging in conversations on a huge range of subjects” — a number of people and postings we would now recognize as minuscule.

But the debate is not focused on the real issues with C.D.A. 230 — indeed, it is not focused on the actual text of C.D.A. 230.

Perhaps the discourse will be improved if we all take a moment to actually read the text of C.D.A. 230, but Mr. Szòka is not optimistic. Senators Cruz and Hawley, he said, are totally aware of what the statute says and what the case law around it actually is. “They’re smart lawyers. And they absolutely know what they’re talking about is a warping of Section 230.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/o...eutrality.html





Resurrected Stones Film Finds Pivot Point In Rock History
Kat Aaron

In December of 1968, some of the biggest names in rock and roll came together to film a concert organized by The Rolling Stones. Over the two-day lifespan of the "Rock and Roll Circus," which was intended to air on the BBC, the Stones recorded performances from that era's most celebrated artists — the Who, John Lennon and Eric Clapton, to name a few.

But the Stones wanted some re-shoots, and the production lost momentum. Then, the filmstock went missing.

Decades later, the Circus' reels were found leaning against a hay bale in a barn in France. Recordings from the event were subsequently released in 1996. Now, a remastered film and concert album presents unreleased outtakes from Lennon and others. The 4K restoration captures a snapshot of a critical moment in rock and roll history — a time when the Stones and their contemporaries sat at the height of their fame but teetered on the brink of Altamont-esque unraveling.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a young director in the 1960s, shot the show. He recalls how the Circus — complete with a live tiger, trapeze artists, and a 25-year-old Mick Jagger dressed as a ringmaster — symbolized the decade to an almost-surreal degree.

"The Who, Jethro Tull, Taj Mahal, Marianne Faithfull, John Lennon, Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones was the 1960s in one room," says Lindsay-Hogg. "On the day, I knew that it was more than a rock and roll show. It was almost a document of its times."

David Dalton, who covered the event for Rolling Stone, shared a similar impression with filmmaker Robin Klein in a 2003 interview included in the film's re-release. "It was just still at the point when everybody thought rock was going to inherit the earth," Dalton says in the film. "We all assumed Mick and Keith [Richards] were on the phone to Fidel [Castro] and Mao [Zedong], and you know, Mick was going to become a member of Parliament. And say delusionary if you wish, but it really was sort of an inspiring time."

The Circus' legend-studded line-up came together in a quintessentially easygoing '60s-fashion. "All the performers in the show had basically come out of a little address book in Mick Jagger's back pocket," Lindsay-Hogg explains. "He looks up L, he calls John, and then John says he'll do it." Lennon, Richards and Eric Clapton joined forces to play as The Dirty Mac, a last-minute addition to the show and the group's one and only performance (which featured a jam with a classical violinist and Yoko Ono).

Still, Lindsay-Hogg says, there was a palpable sense of oncoming change amidst the Circus' fun. "In the middle '60s, no one had been wounded or damaged by drugs. But then, as we come into the last year of that decade, there was starting to be casualties. And I had a sense that things could not last in this glorious way."

Indeed, spontaneous supergroups aside, attendees of the Circus say there was a certain darker messiness about the event. The concert film was being shot with new French cameras that no one quite knew how to use and that kept breaking down. And as the event went on, the artists grew less and less sober.

In the remastered version of the film, Dalton describes watching Brian Jones onstage. "He almost looked as if he had become the kind of scapegoat for all the sins of swinging London," Dalton remembers. "He just looked like the gods had shunned him and turned their backs on him, you know?"

At the time of the Circus, heroin hadn't fully taken over the rock-and-roll scene — but it was looming. Marianne Faithfull, who played the Circus and spent many years struggling with addiction herself, also spoke with director Robin Klein about that moment in the rock and roll scene. "Everybody knew something was coming, and it did. Jimi Hendrix died, Janis Joplin died, Jim Morrison died, Brian Jones died," she says in the film. "There was an apocalyptic air about the whole thing."

A year after the Rock and Roll Circus, almost to the day, the Stones played at California's Altamont Speedway. An audience member was stabbed and died, and the show went down as one of the most infamous in popular music history. James Riley, a lecturer at Cambridge University and author of The Bad Trip, a book about the end of the '60s, traces a trajectory between the two events.

"When you watch the Rock and Roll Circus, it looks like a rehearsal for the terrible events that happened at Altamont," Riley says. "You see a band in transition. They're moving into a sort of diabolical, Luciferian set of personae, particularly on the part of Mick Jagger."

It is precisely for showing that moment of transition, Riley suggests, that the new concert film is so valuable. "I think it is impossible to see this without thinking of the tragic histories that befell a lot of these individuals," he says. "But what this film has captured is that pivot point. It captures all these characters just as they are moving from one phase to another."
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/25/74528...n-rock-history





You Might Want to Uninstall VLC. Immediately.
Sam Rutherford

Because of its free and open-source nature, VLC is one of, if not the most popular cross-platform media player in the world. Unfortunately, a newfound and potentially very serious security flaw discovered in VLC means you might want to uninstall it until the folks at the VideoLAN Project can patch the flaw.

Discovered by German security agency CERT-Bund (via WinFuture), a new flaw in VLC (listed as CVE-2019-13615) that has been given a base vulnerability score of 9.8, which classifies it as “critical.”

The vulnerability allows for RCE (remote code execution) which potentially allows bad actors attackers to install, modify, or run software without authorization, and could also be used to disclose files on the host system. Translation: VLC’s security hole could allow hackers to hijack your computer and see your files.

Thankfully, it seems no one has taken advantage of the flaw yet, but with WinFuture reporting that the Windows, Linux, and Unix versions of VLC are all affected (but not the macOS version), there’s a huge number of potentially vulnerable systems out there.

VideoLAN is also aware of the issue and is currently working on a patch, though right now, that patch appears to only be 60 percent complete. Sadly, that means while people are waiting for a fix, your only recourse to protect yourself from the flaw is to uninstall VLC and switch to an alternative like KMPlayer or Media Player Classic.

Or you could take the chance that no one tries to hack you while you wait for a fix. But either way, you’ve been warned.
https://gizmodo.com/you-might-want-t...ely-1836641101





No, You Don’t Need to Uninstall VLC
Chris Hoffman

“The sky is falling; uninstall VLC right now!” That’s the advice some websites are providing. But the purported VLC flaw is overblown—and, according to VLC’s developers, may not even be a real risk.

This commotion all started with the publication of CVE-2019-13615, which is marked as a “critical” vulnerability with a score of 9.8 out of 10. VLC’s developers aren’t happy they weren’t even contacted before the publishing of this flaw.

Hey @MITREcorp and @CVEnew , the fact that you NEVER ever contact us for VLC vulnerabilities for years before publishing is really not cool; but at least you could check your info or check yourself before sending 9.8 CVSS vulnerability publicly…

— VideoLAN (@videolan) July 23, 2019

But it’s bad, right? That’s 9.8 out of 10—as security flaws go, it sounds like an incoming nuclear strike. This flaw could reportedly result in remote code execution, which is bad. Attackers could gain control of your system through a bug in VLC.

As the CVE explains, this flaw requires playing a malformed MKV file. In theory, if you download a malicious MKV file from the web and run it, it could compromise VLC—although no one claims this has ever happened in the real world. Also, the macOS version of VLC doesn’t seem to be affected.

So, even if this flaw is as bad is it appears, you just have to be careful about MKV files—don’t download untrusted MKV files and play them in VLC until a patch is released. Stay away from MKV if you’re pirating media.

But not so fast! VLC’s developers say they can’t even reproduce the issue, suggesting that there are serious problems with the original exploit report.

Did you even check this?
No one can reproduce this issue here.

— VideoLAN (@videolan) July 23, 2019

At the end of the day, it’s probably a good idea to stay away from downloaded MKV files until VLC patches this flaw. But that’s all you would really need to do, and even that’s being kind of paranoid.

As VLC’s developers explain on the VideoLAN bug tracker:

“Sorry, but this bug is not reproducible and does not crash VLC at all.” -Jean-Baptiste Kempf

“If you land on this ticket through a news article claiming a critical flaw in VLC, I suggest you to read the above comment first and reconsider your (fake) news sources.” -Francois Cartegnie

“This does not crash a normal release of VLC 3.0.7.1” -Jean-Baptiste Kempf
https://www.howtogeek.com/434487/no-...uninstall-vlc/





Hackers Stole 7.5TB Of Secret Data From Russia’s Intelligence Agency
Manisha Priyadarshini

It appears that the hackers got hacked this time! According to BBC Russia, hackers have managed to steal data from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).

The attackers managed to steal about 7.5 terabytes of data from a major FSB contractor, thus exposing the secret projects the agency was working on to de-anonymize Tor browsing, scrape data from social media, and cut off Russia’s internet from the rest of the world.

Russia’s FSB is the successor agency to the infamous KGB and is similar to the FBI and MI5; a major part of their work includes electronic surveillance in the country and overseas as well.

The attack on FSB took place on July 13 when a hacking group that goes by the name 0v1ru$ breached SyTech, a major FSB contractor that works on several internet projects.

The hackers defaced SyTech’s homepage and left a smiling Yoba Face and other pictures to indicate the breach.

0v1ru$ passed on the stolen data to the larger hacking group Digital Revolution, which in turn shared the files with various media outlets and posted on Twitter.

Все мы, журналисты, студенты и даже пенсионеры, находимся под навлюдением ФСБ. Присоединяйтесь к нам, как и 0V1ru$, защищая наше будущее! Они не заглушат наши голоса! @tjournal @Dobrokhotov @bbcrussian @unkn0wnerror pic.twitter.com/HUYDas7FSN

— DigitalRevolution (@D1G1R3V) July 18, 2019

FSB’s secret project data leaked

BBC Russia outlined the project data that was stolen and listed the major ones:

• Nautilus: A project launched between 2009 and 2010 to scrape data on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace
• Nautilus-S: A research project to de-anonymize Tor users by creating exit nodes that are controlled by the Russian government
• Nadezhda (Hope in English): This project visualizes how Russia is connected to the rest of the Internet and attempts to create a “sovereign internet” that is isolated from the rest of the Internet
• Reward: Penetrates and performs secret operations on peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent, Jabber, OpenFT, and ED2K
• Mentor: Specially developed for the Russian military unit No. 71330 which serves as the radio-electronic intelligence of Russia’s FSB. A part of this project is to monitor selected email accounts at regular intervals to scan for certain phrases
• Tax-3: It is the most recent project that offers the ability to manually remove information from the Federal Tax Service on individuals who are under state protection

SyTech’s website remains shut down ever since the breach and the agency is yet to comment on the same. Meanwhile, 0v1ru$ hacking group’s Twitter account has also been shut down. It isn’t clear whether Twitter closed the account or the group pulled the plug itself.
https://fossbytes.com/hackers-stole-...igence-agency/





Siri Records Fights, Doctor’s Appointments, and Sex (and Contractors Hear it)

In a new report, Apple takes its turn in the crosshairs over how it reviews user recordings.
Anna Washenko

Voice assistants are growing in popularity, but the technology has been experiencing a parallel rise in concerns about privacy and accuracy. Apple’s Siri is the latest to enter this gray space of tech. This week, The Guardian reported that contractors who review Siri recordings for accuracy and to help make improvements may be hearing personal conversations.

One of the contract workers told The Guardian that Siri did sometimes record audio after mistaken activations. The wake word is the phrase “hey Siri,” but the anonymous source said that it could be activated by similar-sounding words or with the noise of a zipper. They also said that when an Apple Watch is raised and speech is detected, Siri will automatically activate.

“There have been countless instances of recordings featuring private discussions between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on,” the source said. “These recordings are accompanied by user data showing location, contact details, and app data.”

Apple has said that it takes steps to protect users from being connected with the recordings sent to contractors. The audio is not linked to an Apple ID and less than 1% of daily Siri activations are reviewed. It also sets confidentiality requirements for those contract workers. We reached out to Apple for further comment and will update the story if we receive it.

Apple, along with Google and Amazon, all have similar policies for the contract workers it hires to review those audio snippets. But all three voice AI makers have also been the subject of similar privacy breaches, either by whistleblowers going to the press or through errors that give users access to incorrect audio files.

The tech companies have also all been the subject of inquiries around voice platforms recording conversations they weren't supposed to. Amazon recently outlined its policies for keeping and reviewing recordings in response to queries from Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware). A whistleblower report from a Google contractor said that workers had heard conversations between parents and children, private and identifying information, and at least one possible case of sexual assault.

These cases bring up a series of questions. What can Apple and its colleagues do to better protect user privacy as they develop their voice systems? Should users be notified when their recordings are reviewed? What can be done to reduce or eliminate the accidental activations? How should the companies handle the accidental information that its contractors overhear? Who is responsible when dangerous or illegal activity is recorded and discovered, all by accident?

Voice assistants appear to be yet another instance where a technology has been developed and adopted faster than its consequences have been fully thought-out.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019...ctors-hear-it/





US Attorney General William Barr Says Americans Should Accept Security Risks of Encryption Backdoors
Zack Whittaker

U.S. attorney general William Barr has said consumers should accept the risks that encryption backdoors pose to their personal cybersecurity to ensure law enforcement can access encrypted communications.

In a speech Tuesday in New York, the U.S. attorney general parroted much of the same rhetoric from his predecessors and other senior staff at the Justice Department, calling on tech companies to do more to assist federal authorities to gain access to devices with a lawful order.

Encrypted messaging has taken off in recent years, making its way to Apple products, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, a response from Silicon Valley to the abuse of access by the intelligence services in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013. But law enforcement says encryption thwarts their access to communications they claim they need to prosecute criminals.

The government calls this “going dark” because they cannot see into encrypted communications, and it remains a key talking point by the authorities. Critics — including lawmakers — and security experts have long said there is no secure way to create “backdoor” access to encrypted communications for law enforcement without potentially allowing malicious hackers to also gain access to people’s private communications.

In remarks, Barr said the “significance of the risk should be assessed based on its practical effect on consumer cybersecurity, as well as its relation to the net risks that offering the product poses for society.”

He suggested that the “residual risk of vulnerability resulting from incorporating a lawful access mechanism is materially greater than those already in the unmodified product.”

“Some argue that, to achieve at best a slight incremental improvement in security, it is worth imposing a massive cost on society in the form of degraded safety,” he said.

The risk, he said, was acceptable because “we are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, e-mail, and voice and data applications,” and “not talking about protecting the nation’s nuclear launch codes.”

The attorney general said it was “untenable” that devices offer uncrackable encryption while offering zero access to law enforcement.

Barr is the latest in a stream of attorneys general to decry an inability by law enforcement to access encrypted communications, despite pushback from the tech companies.

In a rebuttal, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said the attorney general’s remarks were “outrageous, wrongheaded and dangerous.”

“If we give this attorney general and this president the unprecedented power to break encryption across the board burrow into the most intimate details of every American’s life – they will abuse those powers,” the senator said.

The U.S. is far from alone in calling on tech companies to give law enforcement access.

Earlier this year U.K. authorities proposed a new backdoor mechanism, the so-called “ghost protocol,” which would give law enforcement access to encrypted communications as though they were part of a private conversation. Apple, Google, Microsoft and WhatsApp rejected the proposal.

The FBI inadvertently undermined its “going dark” argument last year when it admitted the number of encrypted devices it claimed it couldn’t gain access to was overestimated by thousands.

FBI director Christopher Wray said the number of devices it couldn’t gain access to was less than a quarter of the claimed 7,800 phones and tablets.

Barr did not rule out pushing legislation to force tech companies to build backdoors.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/23/wi...sks-backdoors/

















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