Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 9th, ’24

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March 9th, 2024




Music Is TikTok's Past. Sounds May Be Its Future

More Universal Music songs are disappearing from TikTok as the two companies fail to reach new agreements. Sound clips are ready for their big break.
Reece Rogers

As music from Universal Music Group artists started to disappear from TikTok recently, a different kind of earworm got stuck in my head. Even though it’s not a song, I sang it in the shower and whispered it in my sleep: “You have been promoted! You are now one of my elite employees!”

I was not alone in my obsession. The memeable soundbite was used by TikTok creators to poke fun at everything from FaceTiming close friends to smoking leftover weed; official brand accounts for Xbox and SpongeBob even joined in. This particular audio originated from @mainlymannie’s satirical CEO character, but viral TikTok sounds can really come from anywhere. For example, a two-year-old audio clip of White Lotus characters talking about texting also appeared on my For You Page numerous times.

With so many popular songs still blocked from TikTok, it’s possible that smaller artists and songs from other labels, like Beyonce’s new music, might fill the gap, but the more likely scenario is that royalty-free, almost-contextless sound clips will become the new hot commodity on the platform.

Songs from signed UMG artists, like Taylor Swift, Drake, and Olivia Rodrigo, were pulled from TikTok at the beginning of February, and even more music is now disappearing. “Universal not only had their recording deal lapse, which took down all the music that their artists perform, but also had a lapse of their publishing deal,” says Tatiana Cirisano, a music industry analyst at MIDiA Research. “This now means any song that includes lyrics or a melody created by anyone who is signed under Universal Music Publishing Group—that music also gets taken down.”

UMPG released a statement on Thursday claiming the negotiations are centered on disagreements about music revenue, artificial intelligence, and platform safety. The company also lightly acknowledged the increasing number of artists who are expressing frustration about their songs being blocked from TikTok: “We understand the disruption is difficult for some of you and your careers, and we are sensitive to how this may affect you around the world.”

User-generated videos of music fans lip-syncing and dancing to songs were foundational to the beginning of TikTok’s breakout success. In 2017, the parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, purchased a popular app called Musical.ly, described by The Verge as a “teen karaoke app.” The following year, ByteDance merged Musical.ly and TikTok. In the years since, it has become a hub of music discovery where artists can find new forms of fame thanks to the platform’s memeing masses.

Leah Linder, a member of TikTok’s communications team, highlighted the platform’s ongoing commitment to music fans in an email to WIRED. Linder noted there are still plenty of songs on TikTok; though, depending on where you live, around a quarter of the typical catalog is currently missing. The company’s recent statement claims artists can continue to connect with fans on TikTok, even if their official music is gone. This seems true, especially for already well-known acts. Olivia Rodrigo songs might not be on my feed anymore, but a prolific number of fancams from her current concert tour are all over my FYP.

“Frankly, TikTok has a value to the recording industry that's far beyond the money that they make from royalties,” says David Herlihy, a copyright lawyer and music industry professor at Northeastern University. For artists, having a strong presence on TikTok isn’t even necessarily about increasing album sales or linking fans over to music streams. Rather, grabbing viewers’ attention on the platform and retaining that mass audience can lead to a form of cultural relevance for the artist and broaden their impact.

Over a month after the first songs vanished, it remains unclear when Universal and TikTok might reach new deals. “I think one of the risks for the music industry in general is if it turns out that the users on TikTok simply adapt,” says Cirisano, “and start using more unlicensed music. Start using more independent music. Start making more videos without music.” It’s quite frustrating for users to wake up one day and discover that videos with millions of views are now muted, and they might rethink their approach to making content.

Creators are often incentivized to use whatever audio is currently trending with TikTok’s algorithm. Back in 2023, an audio clip about loving womanhood, from the Canadian TV show Anne With an E, went viral on TikTok in two ways: as an opportunity for introspection when mixed with a melodic Hozier song and as a funny celebration when paired with Shakira’s “She Wolf.” Users created hundreds of thousands of videos for both sounds. Moments like these suggest a potential future where punchy sound clips will be further decontextualized and blended with other snippets to create aesthetic, memeworthy audios.

In the span of a 15-second video, about anything sounds good.
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-m...sounds-future/





In ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘The Zone of Interest,’ We Hear What We Are

Does morality have a sound? Both films use sonics and silence in contrast with images. The complex results raise questions about what makes us human.
Alissa Wilkinson

Humans have spent much of history coming up with novel ways to exterminate one another, but the defining feature of modern violence is its technologization. With a chilling practicality, systems and tools designed to enhance productivity can also separate the killers from the killing, stifling pesky human impulses like empathy and conscience. But a bomb has only one purpose. So does a concentration camp.

Both “Oppenheimer” and “The Zone of Interest” tangle with the psychology involved in creating highly efficient killing machines. Choosing to center on people who make and deploy lethal tools at roughly the same historical moment — an era of unprecedented technological advancement — the filmmakers faced a challenge. Viscerally depicting the psychic gulf between methods of massacre and their creators is not simple in a medium like film. Cinema tends to enforce closeness between us and the characters; we see the wrinkles in their skin, understand them as humans, feel their emotions and project our own onto them. To portray cognitive dissonance requires something unexpected.

The solution, for both of these movies, lay in the second most powerful tool available to filmmakers: sound. Not the music, but the knocks and steps and whizzes and shrieks. Generally we’re used to the sound in a film supporting the images. In both “Zone” and “Oppenheimer,” though, sound plays against image in a way that draws attention to itself, disconcerting the audience. Both films are up for Academy Awards in multiple categories, including best picture, which means their nominations for sound design are easy to overlook. But the way each uses sound is striking. It’s engineered as an unsettling agent, a means to carry moral weight from the screen to the audience on a level that approaches the subconscious.

THE DIRECTOR OF “OPPENHEIMER,” Christopher Nolan, has long played around with sound in his films, which are often very loud and propelled by an intense, driving score. (Watching one of his films can feel at times as if you’re immersed in one very, very long montage.) Nolan also prefers not to rerecord actors’ dialogue, leaving them mixed into the sound as they were recorded during the performance, which can make them a little hard to hear. He knows, and he doesn’t mind.

“Oppenheimer,” with sound design by the frequent Nolan collaborator Richard King, is no different. Most of the three-hour movie, about the creation of the atomic bomb, is guys in suits, talking about fission and geopolitics and other brainy matters over a pulsating score by Ludwig Goransson. But right around the two-hour mark, something startling occurs.

If you’ve seen the film, you know the moment. The scientists of the Manhattan Project and select military officials have gathered in the New Mexico desert for the Trinity test, the first trial detonation of a nuclear bomb. It is the wee hours of July 16, 1945. If the test goes well, two more bombs will be deployed in mere weeks to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese — and, the scientists hope, end the war.

The bomb does, indeed, go off. Just before it explodes, the music mimics oscillating waves coming into alignment, giving the sense of something happening on an atomic level. But when the explosion actually happens, everything goes silent. For about 45 seconds, all we can hear is the shallow breath of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy). Eventually, a few quiet strings come in, while his voice echoes a moment from his memory, when he read the now infamous line from the Bhagavad Gita — “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” — to his lover.

It takes roughly a minute more for the sonic impact of the bomb to hit, which matches some scientists’ recollection of the event. For moviegoers, though, that’s a long time to watch a pillar of fire billow toward the sky without matching sound. The silence here draws attention to itself, starting to feel almost uncomfortable, for a really simple reason: the loudest sound in the theater is our own breathing.

After news of the bombing of Hiroshima reaches the scientists’ base at Los Alamos, N.M., jubilation breaks out. But this is the point where it fully dawns on Oppenheimer how little control the government will allow him, the “father” of the bomb, to exert over its use. A few minutes later, he’s asked to address the scientists while clearly bowing under the weight of conscience.

Here, Nolan brings in the same sound technique — palpable, clashing silence — in a way that almost precisely echoes the Trinity sequence. The scientists filling the bleachers stomp their feet and clap for him, rhythmically. (This very stomping sound is threaded throughout the film — even at the beginning, when text about Prometheus being punished for stealing fire from the gods is superimposed on a backdrop of fire.) Oppenheimer begins addressing the crowd with a triumph he does not seem to really feel.

And then, as they applaud wildly and cheer, the sound begins to waver. We’re entering Oppenheimer’s head space, and he’s hearing some kind of rumbling. The wall behind him starts to rattle a little, too, but it’s clear whatever we’re hearing and seeing isn’t actually happening. Then, as he struggles to keep giving the speech and his audience’s ruckus grows louder, we hear a scream and the sound drops out altogether. Oppenheimer is once again seeing the effects of a bomb going off, but this time it’s the human effects. The light grows bright, then white. He sees the skin of a young woman (played by Nolan’s own daughter, Fiona) peeling off; he walks forward and looks at his foot stepping into a charred corpse, and as he leaves the room, he is feeling panic.

The silence in this scene lasts nearly as long as it does in the Trinity scene, and that mirroring is deliberate. The bomb itself is a cause for something like wonder: a gadget built by men that harnesses the very material of the universe is practically a miracle, but its effects are the exact opposite. Oppenheimer cannot see those deaths directly, and Nolan chooses not to depict them directly either; imagining them, hearing their screams in his head, the victims aren’t images on a screen for us to shut out but inescapable sounds, for both him and us.

SCREAMS ARE PART of the sonic backdrop of Jonathan Glazer’s drama “The Zone of Interest,” with sound design by Johnnie Burn. Sound is the single most important element in this film, a way to harness the medium’s ability to split audio from image and create profound disharmony. It’s the sort of movie that teaches the audience how to watch it from the start, beginning with total silence as the opening credits roll. Then we hear voices, then strings that seem as if they are melting and degrading, with banging and squeaking and scratching metal slowly layering in.

This is almost too much to bear, the noise of sliding into a pit, and Glazer asks us to sit in the dark with it for three minutes before cutting to images of a happy family, the Hösses, enjoying a day near a river. Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), commandant of Auschwitz, his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their children will soon go home to their comfortable house just over the wall from the death camp. And that’s when the film splits on itself.

In interviews, Glazer has spoken of “The Zone of Interest” as being made up of two films. One is what we see in the foreground: the family members going about their day, doing chores, celebrating birthdays, playing in the yard. The other is what you hear, and it sounds like the pit of hell.

The background is a conglomeration of sound, tuned down low enough that it almost seems like manipulated room tone, or like the whirrings of a very orderly and well-run factory. There are dogs barking; there’s some yelling. At times there’s the sound of buzzing electrical wire, of planes overhead, and of what you slowly realize is fire. The muffled sounds of classical music are omnipresent — among other things, music was played over loudspeakers at Auschwitz. And then there are the gunshots, the screams, the pleading.

Mass death is happening with great efficiency just over the garden wall. Its noise disappears only when the family goes deeper into the house or leaves altogether. Movies tell audiences what to pay attention to, but “The Zone of Interest” muddles that on purpose. We’re used to watching action, but the real story is in our ears, and our brains can’t decide whether to tune it out, the way these characters apparently have, or listen intently to see what we’re not seeing.

This is, to put it mildly, appalling. It is offensive, very deliberately. What goes undepicted in “Zone” is, like “Oppenheimer,” the point — the absence is a vacuum that begs us to fill it with the horrors of our imagination. Rudolf is obsessed with and rewarded for finding ever more organized and productive ways to exterminate prisoners, but he lives at both a literal and an intellectual remove from the death, filtering it through the bureaucratic language and diagrams that were the hallmark of the Third Reich. It is nauseating.

To the Höss family, the sound is background noise, and they no longer hear it, the way you stop hearing planes if you grow up near an airport. But a key scene later on suggests that’s not quite the whole story. It’s winter, and the Höss boys are playing in the yard alone. The older brother tricks his younger brother into entering the greenhouse, then locks him in and sits down, smiling, as the boy yells to be let out. The older one starts hissing. He’s playacting the part of a guard, having locked his brother in a gas chamber, and he knows exactly the sound it makes. His parents may have numbed their own ability to feel their humanity, but he has absorbed the massacre in a soul-stunting way.

IN BOTH FILMS, THE SOUND DESIGN draws attention to itself, which is the best signal that there’s meaning in what we’re hearing. So it’s worth noting that the technologies of gas chambers and nuclear bombs are reaching us, the audience, through a very particular technology as well.

The projector, the speakers and the screen are technologies that can create separation between us and the moral weight of the things we watch; that’s why there’s been so much debate, for decades, about cinematic portrayals of the Holocaust and other atrocities. Watching fabricated images of death on flat surfaces can in turn flatten the import of those events, or desensitize us to them. Using sound to shock us, to draw us back in, is thus profoundly effective. And if we find ourselves rattled, it’s because we are human.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/03/m...est-sound.html





They are TV’s Ghosts — Networks that Somehow Survive with Little Reason to Watch Them Anymore
David Bauder

The list of memorable characters and personalities who entered popular culture through cable television is long: Honey Boo Boo. Tony Soprano. Lizzie McGuire. Don Draper. Jon Stewart. Beavis and Butt-Head. Chip and Joanna Gaines. SpongeBob SquarePants.

Pick your own favorites. Chances are there won’t be many more to join them.

Few cable and satellite networks are a force anymore, the byproduct of sudden changes in how people entertain themselves. Several have lost more than half their audiences in a decade. They’ve essentially become ghost networks, filling their schedules with reruns and barely trying to push toward anything new.

Says Doug Herzog, once an executive at Viacom who oversaw MTV, Comedy Central and other channels: “These networks, which really meant so much to the viewing public and generations that grew up with them, have kind of been left for dead.”

As they fade, so are the communities they helped to create.

WHAT HAS BEEN LOST?

Pockets of success remain, notably with lifestyle and news programming. And it’s not like there’s nothing to watch. You’ll find more options on Netflix than a diner menu.

Yet something undeniably has been lost. Stewart’s triumphant return to Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” this winter only begs the question: Did it really have to be this way?

Cable TV primarily took flight in the 1980s, breaking the iron grip of ABC, CBS and NBC. Essentially the first fragmentation of media, cable brought people with common interests together, says Eric Deggans, NPR television critic.

“People who were previously marginalized by the focus on mass culture suddenly got a voice and a connection with other people like them,” Deggans says. “So young music fans worldwide bonded over MTV, Black people and folks who love Black culture bonded over BET, middle-aged women bonded over Lifetime and fans of home remodeling convened around HGTV and old-school TLC.”

Nickelodeon and Disney became de facto baby sitters. CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC changed the nation’s political discourse. ESPN occupied sports fans. HBO and Showtime, and later networks like FX and AMC, offered edgier fare that broadcasters shied away from.

Networks were endlessly malleable, too. Once MTV recognized there wasn’t much money in music videos — people would change channels when a song they didn’t like came on — the network became a relentless arbiter of cool. Generations had their own touchstones in programs like “Punk’d,” “The Osbournes” and “Total Request Live.”

Now MTV is a ghost. Its average prime-time audience of 256,000 people in 2023 was down from 807,000 in 2014, the Nielsen company said. One recent evening MTV aired reruns of “Ridiculousness” from 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.

The general interest USA Network’s nightly audience tumbled 69% in the same time span, and that was before January’s announcement that viewer-magnet “WWE Raw” was switching to Netflix.

Without favorites like “The Walking Dead” or “Better Call Saul,” AMC’s prime-time viewership sunk 73%. The Disney Channel, birthplace to young stars like Miley Cyrus, Hilary Duff and Selena Gomez, lost an astonishing 93% of its audience, from 1.96 million in 2014 to 132,000 last year.

TBS, TNT, History, Lifetime, FX, A&E, BET, E! Entertainment, SyFy, Comedy Central, VH1 and Discovery have all lost at least half of their 2014 audience.

For many, most of the schedules are big blocks of reruns: “Seinfeld” and “The Office” on Comedy Central, “The Big Bang Theory” and “Young Sheldon” on TBS. Tyler Perry movies dominate. Cheap and cheesy nonfiction fills time: “90 Day Fiance,” “Prison Brides,” “Married at First Sight,” “Contraband: Seized at the Border.”

That’s not appointment TV. It’s accidental. Ghosts.

MAYBE GOING DOWN THIS ROAD WAS INEVITABLE

With the explosion of Netflix, the giant companies that dominate the entertainment industry saw that as the future. To a large extent, they’ve concentrated time, energy and resources on these services, launching a competition that still hasn’t shaken out — no one knows yet how many streaming services the market will support and which ones will survive.

Was the downfall of cable the inevitable result? “That’s the gazillion-dollar question,” Herzog says.

“The conglomerates, they definitely jumped the gun, I think, in shifting their assets away from the cable networks and left them as zombies,” says Michael Schneider, television editor at Variety. “They’re paying the price.”

In 2015, some 87% of American homes had a cable or satellite television subscription, according to the Nielsen company. By 2023, only 47% of homes subscribed. If you include services like Hulu or YouTube TV, the percentage of homes with access to multiple channels was 62% last year, Nielsen said.

If fewer people have cable, then obviously fewer are watching. But it’s a classic chicken-and-egg situation: Have the number of subscribers dropped because people feel the networks have less to offer? Or is less being offered because there are fewer viewers?

To illustrate how fast habits are changing, a survey taken in January by the digital marketing agency Adtaxi found that 73% of viewers turned to streaming before cable or broadcast when they sat down to watch TV. Only a year earlier, 42% said streaming was their default choice.

Much of what people stream are programs originally on broadcast and cable. That provided a windfall hard to resist for creators of those shows, one top executive said. The tradeoff was getting people accustomed to a different kind of viewing experience — watching what they wanted, when they wanted it, even binging. All without the distraction of commercials, at least at first.

Remember couch potatoes? Channel surfers? Now the " Netflix and chill " generation has taken over.

That’s more than trading descriptive phrases. Reclining before a big screen with a remote control, searching for something to do, is an activity fading with the times, says John Landgraf, chairman of FX Content & Productions and a big-picture thinker of the media industry. It was Landgraf who coined the phrase “peak TV” to describe an overwhelming flood of television programming.

Streaming is more pro-active, he says. Tik-Tok, YouTube and gaming are supplanting television in occupying people who are simply looking to fill some time. “They figured out passivity,” Landgraf says. He says he’s optimistic FX’s parent, Disney, will solve this puzzle.

That’s no small thing when the industry is built upon advertisers who pay to reach those consumers — active or passive.

While streaming offers viewers the convenience of making their own schedules, its algorithms are designed to push people into ever-smaller circles, suggesting programming similar to what they’ve already watched before, Landgraf said. It further lessens the opportunities for communal viewing experiences, or stumbling upon something that broadens your outlook.

“Collectively,” he says, “we’ve lost something.”

THE ROAD TO STREAMING — AND TO THE FUTURE

Landgraf’s FX is one of the few companies keeping its brand strong while making a transition to streaming. “The Bear,” which just won an Emmy for best comedy, is an FX show but available exclusively on the Hulu streaming service. “American Horror Story” is on the actual FX television network. Several shows toggle between both.

HBO is also making the transition well, while Bravo programming is a strong draw for Peacock. Nickelodeon and MTV are among the brands having a harder time; S&P Global last week put their parent company, Paramount, on a negative credit watch, citing “the deterioration of the linear television ecosystem.”

There are still networks keeping the light on. Fox News Channel is cable’s top-rated network; news-oriented outlets thrived during the Trump administration but have faded recently. HGTV’s home remodeling holds up. The Hallmark Channel, with wholesome stories aimed at older women, averaged 929,000 viewers in prime-time last year, up 12 percent from a decade ago.

Despite the exodus of viewers, ghost networks survive because they still make money for their owners. Cable and satellite systems pay fees to carry them — passed on to consumers, of course — and advertisers buy commercials.

When that changes, all bets are off, and odds are the ghosts will move on.
https://apnews.com/article/televisio...5b795000d6db4e





Nintendo Wins Battle Against Piracy Software Company
FP - Agence France Presse

A company that was sued by Nintendo for creating software that allowed the mass pirating of video games agreed Monday to pay the "Super Mario" maker $2.4 million in damages and shutter the tool.

The company behind "Legend of Zelda" and "Donkey Kong" last week sued Tropic Haze, registered in the US state of Rhode Island, which owns and runs Yuzu, a popular video game emulator.

A video game emulator is a piece of software that can be downloaded onto a PC or smartphone to play video games intended for a specific console, such as the Switch, PlayStation or Xbox.

Initially, emulators were developed to play games that were no longer published on the latest consoles, before vintage gaming became a market in its own right for Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.

According to a settlement filed on Monday with the US federal court in Rhode Island, the defendant agreed to no longer make Yuzu available to the public and hand over all its programming code to Nintendo.

Nintendo would also take possession of the website where the Yuzu tool was made available to download.

The defendant is "fully aware" that Yuzu is "facilitating piracy at a colossal scale" the company said in the suit, which was filed a week ago in a federal court in Rhode Island.

The Japanese gaming juggernaut had accused the company of going out of its way to circumvent elaborate safeguards and encryption to make Nintendo games available to Yuzu's users.

Nintendo said that Yuzu was an important platform for existing games but also for playing games that were illegally leaked before their release.

Last year's "Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom," was downloaded one million times before its release with pirate websites directing users to Yuzu to play the game, the suit alleged.

The company had argued that Tropic Haze was liable for thousands of dollars in damages for each copyright violation.
https://www.barrons.com/news/nintend...mpany-5e553ce7





Spotify Calls Apple’s €1.84B Antitrust Fine a ‘Powerful Message,’ But Cautions that the Next Steps Matter
Sarah Perez

Spotify is cheering the European Commission’s decision to hold Apple accountable for anticompetitive practices in the streaming music market to the tune of a massive €1.84 billion fine, announced today. The streamer called the fine a “powerful message” that sends a signal that even “a monopoly like Apple” is not able to “wield power abusively” to control how other companies interact with their customers.

“Today’s decision marks an important moment in the fight for a more open internet for consumers. The European Commission (EC) has made its conclusion clear: Apple’s behaviour limiting communications to consumers is unlawful,” Spotify shared in a statement on its corporate blog.

Despite the EC ruling favoring Spotify and other streamers over Apple, the company was still cautious about how Apple would proceed. The Cupertino tech giant has already promised to appeal the ruling, and Spotify adds that in cases like this, “the details matter.”

“Apple has routinely defied laws and court decisions in other markets. So we’re looking forward to the next steps that will hopefully clearly and conclusively address Apple’s long-standing unfair practices,” Spotify wrote.

Apple, notably, cleverly worked around the EC’s Digital Market Act requirements, meant to foster new competition in the app store market by allowing developers to launch independent app stores and manage their own payments. But Apple’s solution was to charge iOS developers accepting its new DMA rules a new, additional fee, the Core Technology Fee, as a means of recouping its lost revenue.

Spotify is likely concerned that Apple will again find a way to sidestep any new requirements, as well, if not carefully spelled out.

The Financial Times had earlier reported that the fine would be around €500 million (about $539 million USD). As it turns out, they had the decision right, but not the price tag.

The ruling follows years of complaints led by Spotify and other smaller streamers, like Deezer, over the App Store’s business model and associated rules. In 2019, Spotify first filed its antitrust complaint against the tech giant, which later led to the EU’s formal investigation of Apple’s App Store announced in 2020. In April of the following year, the EU issued a statement of objections, accusing Apple of distorting competition in the market for streaming services.

Spotify says that Apple’s rules “muzzled” it and other streaming music services from communicating with their own customers in their apps about how to upgrade subscriptions, access promotions, discounts and other perks. Apple countered that Spotify doesn’t pay Apple anything, but still wants “limitless access to all of Apple’s tools.”

A part of the issue here is the nature of Apple’s App Store commission structure, which charges developers a 15% to 30% commission on subscriptions for digital services, like streaming music, that iOS developers offer to their customers. (In year two, subscriptions drop from 30% to 15%). Spotify argued that Apple’s “30% tax” was unfair and that Apple’s rules hurt consumers as they prevented developers from informing their app’s users about alternative — and sometimes cheaper — ways to pay. In other words, Spotify wanted the opportunity to drive customers to its website where they could arguably pay for the subscription directly, which wouldn’t involve a commission.

“Spotify pays Apple nothing for the services that have helped them build, update, and share their app with Apple users in 160 countries spanning the globe,” Apple stated last month. It also stressed that despite offering subscriptions via its website, Spotify had never lowered its prices. And it noted that Spotify had a 56% share of the music streaming market in Europe, compared with Apple Music’s 11% share.

Of course, that’s not a fair comparison, given that Spotify offers a free, ad-supported service as well as a paid plan, like Apple’s, allowing it to funnel a number of free users into the paid product over time. And, as Apple has repeatedly pointed out, 85% of App Store developers don’t pay Apple a fee because they don’t offer “digital goods and services” — a distinction that loses its impact when you think about how services like Uber, Airbnb and others rely on Apple’s platform to acquire and sell their offerings to customers.

Following the announcement of the EC’s fine, Spotify said the fight was not over.

“Our work will not be done until we succeed in securing a truly fair digital marketplace everywhere and our commitment to helping to make this a reality remains unwavering,” it wrote. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek also explored this sentiment in a video post on X, where he added that “Apple has a history of skirting these rules,” referring to other cases, like the antitrust order in the Netherlands, where Apple ignored the penalty and allowed the fine to increase for half a year before resolving its concerns.

The Coalition for App Fairness, a lobby group that counts Spotify, Deezer, Epic Games and other app developers as members, also issued a statement in response to the fines.

“Today the European Commission sent a clear message that Apple’s anti-steering policies, which prevent developers from communicating directly with consumers, are anticompetitive and illegal,” stated CAF Executive Director Rick VanMeter. “Apple’s restrictions on app developers have stifled innovation, driven up prices, and limited consumer choice for far too long. We applaud the Commission for taking this meaningful first step towards bringing competition to iOS devices. However, more needs to be done to truly create a fair and open mobile app ecosystem that benefits consumers and developers. In less than 48 hours the Digital Markets Act will be enforced, and consumers and developers across Europe are relying on the Commission to demand real compliance from Apple and Google to ensure the entire app store ecosystem benefits from the promises of the law,” he said.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/04/sp...-steps-matter/





Roku Issues a Mandatory Terms of Service Update That You Must Agree To or You Can’t Use Your Roku
Luke Bouma

Over the last 48 hours, Roku has slowly been rolling out a mandatory update to its terms of service. In this terms it changes the dispute resolution terms but it is not clear exactly why. When the new terms and conditions message shows up on a Roku Player or TV, your only option is to accept them or turn off your Roku and stop using it.

Many Roku owners are upset about a clause about the arbitration rules but these terms for arbitration and class-action waiver are not new and Roku’s page explaining them has existed since 2019.

In an email to customers, Roku says:

We wanted to let you know that we have made changes to our Dispute Resolution Terms, which describe how you can resolve disputes with Roku. We encourage you to read the updated Dispute Resolution Terms. By continuing to use our products or services, you are agreeing to these updated terms.

Thank you for making Roku part of your entertainment experience.

The Roku Team

Roku does offer a way to opt out of these new arbitration rules if you write them a letter to an address listed in the terms of service. You do need to hurry though as you only get 30 days to write a letter to Roku to opt out. Though it is unclear if that is from when you buy your Roku or agree to these new terms.

Customers are understandably confused by these new terms of service that have appeared in recent days. Raising questions about why now and why such an aggressive messaging about them that forces you to manually accept them or stop using your device. Roku has slowly been rolling out these new terms of service, and if you have not received them yet you likely will in the days to come at least in the United States.

The new terms of service do come a few weeks after Roku sent developers a beta version of its new Roku OS 13. It is unknown if these are related.

Cord Cutters News has reached out to Roku and will update our story as we learn more.
https://cordcuttersnews.com/roku-iss...use-your-roku/





Meet the Woman Who Helped Libraries Across the U.S. 'Surf the Internet'
Diba Mohtasham

When former librarian and author Jean Armour Polly first introduced the idea of having computers in libraries in the early 1980s, she was met with pushback.

"People scoffed and said, 'Why would you go to a library to use a computer?' " she said.

Even when the internet rolled around, many librarians felt they were supposed to be the sole gatekeepers of knowledge and information.

"But I just knew it would be a wonderful thing. You know, school kids could use [computers] in schools, but what about the lifelong learners? And adults and seniors?" Polly said.

She got interested in the potentials of technology early on. Years earlier, in the mid-1970s, Polly had taken free computer classes while a graduate student in library sciences so.

In 1981, Polly managed to secure an Apple II Plus into the small library she was working at the time in Liverpool, N.Y. At the time, there was only one other library in the nation that she knew offered public computing.

Within six months, her library would add a second computer and a printer.

"And we had to have these validation sessions because nobody knew how to use a floppy disk or a disk drive," Polly said. "It was the Wild West back then."

She would go on to help the Liverpool Public Library create its own bulletin board system, an old-school computerized system that allowed users to exchange public messages or files.

By 1992, they were offering free internet for the public, a year after the first website was introduced to the public.

Since the internet was hard to use back then, the service was mediated by local librarians, who would help library-goers take their baby steps online.

"We didn't have all the graphic interfaces like we have now, and we didn't even have Google or anything. So you really needed somebody to hold your hand," Polly said.

Polly would also go around attending library conferences about the internet, excitedly speaking to anybody who would listen about the resource.

How "surfing the internet" was born

It was around that time that Wilson Library Bulletin, a library magazine, asked her to write a beginner's article for librarians explaining what the internet was and how you could use it.

She needed a good metaphor as to what navigating the internet felt like in the early days. "It was hard. You needed some skill to do it, but it was fun," Polly said.

Her mousepad happened to have a picture of a surfer and said "information surfer," a phrase that was already floating around. The words just clicked for her.

"Surfing the Internet" was published in the summer of 1992, quickly becoming viral as a catchphrase after Polly put the article up online that same year.

In 2019, Polly was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame for evangelizing computers in public libraries, the precursor to the internet being offered as a core service in those spaces.

Today, Polly runs a website called Net-mom, which is a registered trademark, and spends her free time doing genealogy and gardening. She retired from being a librarian in 2014.

When asked what she hopes for the future of libraries, Polly expressed concern because of the growing battle over book bans. However, she remains optimistic.

"Libraries have always been the intellectual freedom bastion and they're coming under a lot of fire," she said. "But they will survive. I think they will."
https://www.npr.org/1236671339





How to Become a Pirate Archivist
annas-blog.org, 2022-10-17 (translations: 中文 [zh])

Before we dive in, two updates on the Pirate Library Mirror (EDIT: moved to Anna’s Archive):

1. We got some extremely generous donations. The first was $10k from the anonymous individual who also has been supporting "bookwarrior", the original founder of Library Genesis. Special thanks to bookwarrior for facilitating this donation. The second was another $10k from an anonymous donor, who got in touch after our last release, and was inspired to help. We also had a number of smaller donations. Thanks so much for all your generous support. We have some exciting new projects in the pipeline which this will support, so stay tuned.

2. We had some technical difficulties with the size of our second release, but our torrents are up and seeding now. We also got a generous offer from an anonymous individual to seed our collection on their very-high-speed servers, so we're doing a special upload to their machines, after which everyone else who is downloading the collection should see a large improvement in speed.

Entire books can be written about the why of digital preservation in general, and pirate archivism in particular, but let us give a quick primer for those who are not too familiar. The world is producing more knowledge and culture than ever before, but also more of it is being lost than ever before. Humanity largely entrusts corporations like academic publishers, streaming services, and social media companies with this heritage, and they have often not proven to be great stewards. Check out the documentary Digital Amnesia, or really any talk by Jason Scott.

There are some institutions that do a good job archiving as much as they can, but they are bound by the law. As pirates, we are in a unique position to archive collections that they cannot touch, because of copyright enforcement or other restrictions. We can also mirror collections many times over, across the world, thereby increasing the chances of proper preservation.

For now, we won't get into discussions about the pros and cons of intellectual property, the morality of breaking the law, musings on censorship, or the issue of access to knowledge and culture. With all that out of the way, let's dive into the how. We'll share how our team became pirate archivists, and the lessons that we learned along the way. There are many challenges when you embark on this journey, and hopefully we can help you through some of them.

Community

The first challenge might be a surprising one. It is not a technical problem, or a legal problem. It is a psychological problem: doing this work in the shadows can be incredibly lonely. Depending on what you're planning to do, and your threat model, you might have to be very careful. On the one end of the spectrum we have people like Alexandra Elbakyan*, the founder of Sci-Hub, who is very open about her activities. But she is at high risk of being arrested if she would visit a western country at this point, and could face decades of prison time. Is that a risk you would be willing to take? We are at the other end of the spectrum; being very careful not to leave any trace, and having strong operational security.

* As mentioned on HN by "ynno", Alexandra initially didn't want to be known: "Her servers were set up to emit detailed error messages from PHP, including full path of faulting source file, which was under directory /home/ringo-ring, which could be traced to a username she had online on an unrelated site, attached to her real name. Before this revelation, she was anonymous." So, use random usernames on the computers you use for this stuff, in case you misconfigure something.

That secrecy, however, comes with a psychological cost. Most people love being recognized for the work that they do, and yet you cannot take any credit for this in real life. Even simple things can be challenging, like friends asking you what you have been up to (at some point "messing with my NAS / homelab" gets old).

This is why it is so important to find some community. You can give up some operational security by confiding in some very close friends, who you know you can trust deeply. Even then be careful not to put anything in writing, in case they have to turn over their emails to the authorities, or if their devices are compromised in some other manner.

Better still is to find some fellow pirates. If your close friends are interested in joining you, great! Otherwise, you might be able to find others online. Sadly this is still a niche community. So far we have found only a handful of others who are active in this space. Good starting places seem to be the Library Genesis forums, and r/DataHoarder. The Archive Team also has likeminded individuals, though they operate within the law (even if in some grey areas of the law). The traditional "warez" and pirating scenes also have folks who think in similar ways.

We are open to ideas on how to foster community and explore ideas. Feel free to message us on Twitter or Reddit. Perhaps we could host some sort of forum or chat group. One challenge is that this can easily get censored when using common platforms, so we would have to host it ourselves. There is also a tradeoff between having these discussions fully public (more potential engagement) versus making it private (not letting potential "targets" know that we're about to scrape them). We'll have to think about that. Let us know if you are interested in this!

Projects

When we do a project, it has a couple of phases:

1. Domain selection / philosophy: Where do you roughly want to focus on, and why? What are your unique passions, skills, and circumstances that you can use to your benefit?
2. Target selection: Which specific collection will you mirror?
3. Metadata scraping: Cataloging information about the files, without actually downloading the (often much larger) files themselves.
4. Data selection: Based on the metadata, narrowing down which data is most relevant to archive right now. Could be everything, but often there is a reasonable way to save space and bandwidth.
5. Data scraping: Actually getting the data.
6. Distribution: Packaging it up in torrents, announcing it somewhere, getting people to spread it.

These are not completely independent phases, and often insights from a later phase send you back to an earlier phase. For example, during metadata scraping you might realize that the target that you selected has defensive mechanisms beyond your skill level (like IP blocks), so you go back and find a different target.

1. Domain selection / philosophy

There is no shortage of knowledge and cultural heritage to be saved, which can be overwhelming. That's why it's often useful to take a moment and think about what your contribution can be.

Everyone has a different way of thinking about this, but here are some questions that you could ask yourself:

• Why are you interested in this? What are you passionate about? If we can get a bunch of people who all archive the kinds of things that they specifically care about, that would cover a lot! You will know a lot more than the average person about your passion, like what is important data to save, what are the best collections and online communities, and so on.
• What skills do you have that you can use to your benefit? For example, if you are an online security expert, you can find ways of defeating IP blocks for secure targets. If you are great at organizing communities, then perhaps you can rally some people together around a goal. It is useful to know some programming though, if only for keeping good operational security throughout this process.
• How much time do you have for this? Our advice would be to start small and doing bigger projects as you get the hang of it, but it can get all-consuming.
• What would be a high-leverage area to focus on? If you're going to spend X hours on pirate archiving, then how can you get the biggest "bang for your buck"?
• What are unique ways that you are thinking about this? You might have some interesting ideas or approaches that others might have missed.

In our case, we cared in particular about the long term preservation of science. We knew about Library Genesis, and how it was fully mirrored many times over using torrents. We loved that idea. Then one day, one of us tried to find some scientific textbooks on Library Genesis, but couldn't find them, bringing into doubt how complete it really was. We then searched those textbooks online, and found them in other places, which planted the seed for our project. Even before we knew about the Z-Library, we had the idea of not trying to collect all those books manually, but to focus on mirroring existing collections, and contributing them back to Library Genesis.

2. Target selection

So, we have our area that we are looking at, now which specific collection do we mirror? There are a couple of things that make for a good target:

• Large
• Unique: not already well-covered by other projects.
• Accessible: does not use tons of layers of protection to prevent you from scraping their metadata and data.
• Special insight: you have some special information about this target, like you somehow have special access to this collection, or you figured out how to defeat their defenses. This is not required (our upcoming project does not do anything special), but it certainly helps!

When we found our science textbooks on websites other than Library Genesis, we tried to figure out how they made their way onto the internet. We then found the Z-Library, and realized that while most books don't first make their appearance there, they do eventually end up there. We learned about its relationship to Library Genesis, and the (financial) incentive structure and superior user interface, both of which made it a much more complete collection. We then did some preliminary metadata and data scraping, and realized that we could get around their IP download limits, leveraging one of our members' special access to lots of proxy servers.

As you're exploring different targets, it is already important to hide your tracks by using VPNs and throwaway email addresses, which we'll talk about more later.

3. Metadata scraping

Let's get a bit more technical here. For actually scraping the metadata from websites, we have kept things pretty simple. We use Python scripts, sometimes curl, and a MySQL database to store the results in. We haven't used any fancy scraping software which can map complex websites, since so far we only needed to scrape one or two kinds of pages by just enumerating through ids and parsing the HTML. If there aren't easily enumerated pages, then you might need a proper crawler that tries to find all pages.

Before you start scraping a whole website, try doing it manually for a bit. Go through a few dozen pages yourself, to get a sense for how that works. Sometimes you will already run into IP blocks or other interesting behavior this way. The same goes for data scraping: before getting too deep into this target, make sure you can actually download its data effectively.

To get around restrictions, there are a few things you can try. Are there any other IP addresses or servers that host the same data but do not have the same restrictions? Are there any API endpoints that do not have restrictions, while others do? At what rate of downloading does your IP get blocked, and for how long? Or are you not blocked but throttled down? What if you create a user account, how do things change then? Can you use HTTP/2 to keep connections open, and does that increase the rate at which you can request pages? Are there pages that list multiple files at once, and is the information listed there sufficient?

Things you probably want to save include:

• Title
• Filename / location
• ID: can be some internal ID, but IDs like ISBN or DOI are useful too.
• Size: to calculate how much disk space you need.
• Hash (md5, sha1): to confirm that you downloaded the file properly.
• Date added/modified: so you can come back later and download files that you didn't download before (though you can often also use the ID or hash for this).
• Description, category, tags, authors, language, etc.

We typically do this in two stages. First we download the raw HTML files, usually directly into MySQL (to avoid lots of small files, which we talk more about below). Then, in a separate step, we go through those HTML files and parse them into actual MySQL tables. This way you don't have to re-download everything from scratch if you discover a mistake in your parsing code, since you can just reprocess the HTML files with the new code. It's also often easier to parallelize the processing step, thus saving some time (and you can write the processing code while the scraping is running, instead of having to write both steps at once).

Finally, note that for some targets metadata scraping is all there is. There are some huge metadata collections out there that aren't properly preserved.

4. Data selection

Often you can use the metadata to figure out a reasonable subset of data to download. Even if you eventually want to download all the data, it can be useful to prioritize the most important items first, in case you get detected and defences are improved, or because you would need to buy more disks, or simply because something else comes up in your life before you can download everything.

For example, a collection might have multiple editions of the same underlying resource (like a book or a film), where one is marked as being the best quality. Saving those editions first would make a lot of sense. You might eventually want to save all editions, since in some cases the metadata might be tagged incorrectly, or there might be unknown tradeoffs between editions (for example, the "best edition" might be best in most ways but worse in other ways, like a film having a higher resolution but missing subtitles).

You can also search your metadata database to find interesting things. What is the biggest file that is hosted, and why is it so big? What is the smallest file? Are there interesting or unexpected patterns when it comes to certain categories, languages, and so on? Are there duplicate or very similar titles? Are there patterns to when data was added, like one day in which many files were added at once? You can often learn a lot by looking at the dataset in different ways.

In our case, we deduplicated Z-Library books against the md5 hashes in Library Genesis, thereby saving a lot of download time and disk space. This is a pretty unique situation though. In most cases there are no comprehensive databases of which files are already properly preserved by fellow pirates. This in itself is a huge opportunity for someone out there. It would be great to have a regularly updated overview of things like music and films that are already widely seeded on torrent websites, and are therefore lower priority to include in pirate mirrors.

5. Data scraping

Now you're ready to actually download the data in bulk. As mentioned before, at this point you should already manually have downloaded a bunch of files, to better understand the behavior and restrictions of the target. However, there will still be surprises in store for you once you actually get to downloading lots of files at once.

Our advice here is mainly to keep it simple. Start by just downloading a bunch of files. You can use Python, and then expand to multiple threads. But sometimes even simpler is to generate Bash files directly from the database, and then running multiple of them in multiple terminal windows to scale up. A quick technical trick worth mentioning here is using OUTFILE in MySQL, which you can write anywhere if you disable "secure_file_priv" in mysqld.cnf (and be sure to also disable/override AppArmor if you're on Linux).

We store the data on simple hard disks. Start out with whatever you have, and expand slowly. It can be overwhelming to think about storing hundreds of TBs of data. If that is the situation that you're facing, just put out a good subset first, and in your announcement ask for help in storing the rest. If you do want to get more hard drives yourself, then r/DataHoarder has some good resources on getting good deals.

Try not to worry too much about fancy filesystems. It is easy to fall into the rabbit hole of setting up things like ZFS. One technical detail to be aware of though, is that many filesystems don't deal well with lots of files. We've found that a simple workaround is to create multiple directories, e.g. for different ID ranges or hash prefixes.

After downloading the data, be sure to check the integrity of the files using hashes in the metadata, if available.

6. Distribution

You have the data, thereby giving you possession of the world's first pirate mirror of your target (most likely). In many ways the hardest part is over, but the riskiest part is still ahead of you. After all, so far you've been stealth; flying under the radar. All you had to do was using a good VPN throughout, not filling in your personal details in any forms (duh), and perhaps using a special browser session (or even a different computer).

Now you have to distribute the data. In our case we first wanted to contribute the books back to Library Genesis, but then quickly discovered the difficulties in that (fiction vs non-fiction sorting). So we decided on distribution using Library Genesis-style torrents. If you have the opportunity to contribute to an existing project, then that could save you a lot of time. However, there are not many well-organized pirate mirrors out there currently.

So let's say you decide on distributing torrents yourself. Try to keep those files small, so they are easy to mirror on other websites. You will then have to seed the torrents yourself, while still staying anonymous. You can use a VPN (with or without port forwarding), or pay with tumbled Bitcoins for a Seedbox. If you don't know what some of those terms mean, you'll have a bunch of reading to do, since it's important that you understand the risk tradeoffs here.

You can host the torrent files themselves on existing torrent websites. In our case, we chose to actually host a website, since we also wanted to spread our philosophy in a clear way. You can do this yourself in a similar manner (we use Njalla for our domains and hosting, paid for with tumbled Bitcoins), but also feel free to contact us to have us host your torrents. We are looking to build a comprehensive index of pirate mirrors over time, if this idea catches on.

As for VPN selection, much has been written about this already, so we'll just repeat the general advice of choosing by reputation. Actual court-tested no-log policies with long track records of protecting privacy is the lowest risk option, in our opinion. Note that even when you do everything right, you can never get to zero risk. For example, when seeding your torrents, a highly motivated nation-state actor can probably look at incoming and outgoing data flows for VPN servers, and deduce who you are. Or you can just simply mess up somehow. We probably already have, and will again. Luckily, nation states don't care that much about piracy.

One decision to make for each project, is whether to publish it using the same identity as before, or not. If you keep using the same name, then mistakes in operational security from earlier projects could come back to bite you. But publishing under different names means that you don't build a longer lasting reputation. We chose to have strong operational security from the start so we can keep using the same identity, but we won't hesitate to publish under a different name if we mess up or if the circumstances call for it.

Getting the word out can be tricky. As we said, this is still a niche community. We originally posted on Reddit, but really got traction on Hacker News. For now our recommendation is to post it in a few places and see what happens. And again, contact us. We would love to spread the word of more pirate archivism efforts.

Conclusion

Hopefully this is helpful for newly starting pirate archivists. We're excited to welcome you to this world, so don't hesitate to reach out. Let's preserve as much of the world's knowledge and culture as we can, and mirror it far and wide.

- Anna and the team (Reddit)
https://annas-blog.org/blog-how-to-b...archivist.html
















Until next week,

- js.



















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