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Old 09-12-15, 09:24 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 12th, '15

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"For workers it's very simple. There are no jobs on a dead planet." – Sharan Burrow, International Trade Union Confederation


"Somebody will say, 'Oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.' These are foolish people, we have a lot of foolish people." – Donald Trump


"You’re going to hear all of the usual complaints, you know, freedom of speech, et cetera...." – Hillary Clinton


"Our hope is that we can move beyond this seemingly endless debate... and start talking about how can law enforcement and intelligence [agencies] adapt to a world where encryption is common, rather than pretending that we could ever make encryption adapt to law enforcement and intelligence [agencies]." – Kevin Bankston






































December 12th, 2015




Streaming Video Now Accounts for 70 Percent of Broadband Usage
Peter Kafka

You use your Internet connection to do all kinds of things. But you use it for one thing much more than anything else: To stream video and music.

If you’re reading this site (or if you work at a giant TV and broadband provider), the odds are you know that already. But it’s always useful to see it in a chart, so here you go. Here’s the latest breakdown from broadband services company Sandvine of “fixed access” — for the purposes of this piece, read it as “home broadband” — Internet usage during peak evening hours. That big red bar in the middle is the one to focus on. It shows you that “real-time entertainment” — streaming video and audio — account for 70 percent of the Web traffic coming to your house:

Again, it’s not surprising to learn that broadband is moving from “the thing that brings you websites and email” to “the thing that brings you video.” But change over time drives it home: Sandvine says that five years ago, video/audio represented 35 percent of prime-time usage. Now it has doubled, to 70 percent.

Much of the increase comes from YouTube and Netflix, which already accounted for more than half of your broadband usage a couple of years ago and continues to grow. But now those services are joined by relatively new entrants, like Amazon* and Hulu, which barely registered a couple of years ago and now account for nearly 6 percent of usage.

What’s that? You’ve heard that mobile is the future of the Internet and you’d like to see what’s going on there, too? Same story, but different: Video and audio — primarily YouTube — dominate mobile usage, too. But social — basically Facebook and Snapchat — are also big. Video/audio accounts for 41 percent of mobile traffic, and social eats up 22 percent.

* I’ve asked Amazon about Sandvine’s numbers for years, in large part because Netflix has pointed to Sandvine as a reasonable proxy for its command of the streaming video market. And until today, Amazon has never commented on the record about Sandvine’s estimates. Today, though, Amazon’s PR agency has sent a note pointing out that “Amazon now represents one of the top three sources of video traffic in North America, up from rank #8 on Sandvine’s 2014 report.” So there you go.
https://recode.net/2015/12/07/stream...oadband-usage/





Netflix Still Dominates Online Streaming, and is Slowly Killing BitTorrent
Yoni Heisler

If you need any evidence of Netflix’s ongoing dominance in the online streaming space, look no further than the sheer amount of bandwidth the service eats up relative to everyone else. According to recent data compiled by Sandvine, Netflix-related bandwidth — measured during peak hours — now accounts for 37.05% of all Internet traffic in North America.

To truly appreciate this figure, consider this: the bandwidth consumed by Netflix users during peak hours is greater than the bandwidth seen from YouTube, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and iTunes combined. Indeed, the service that comes closest to matching Netflix is YouTube, which comes in second with a 17.85% share of Internet traffic.

More broadly, the chart below relays that a good 70% of downstream bandwidth is associated with streaming video and audio services.

Speaking to this new era of streaming services, Sandvine CEO Dave Caputo said:

“Streaming Video has grown at such a rapid pace in North America that the leading service in 2015, Netflix, now has a greater share of traffic than all of streaming audio and video did five years ago.”

While bandwith from sites like Netflix, YouTube, and Facebook all increased over the past few months, the sites that enjoyed the largest gains were Amazon Video and Hulu, with 3.11% and 2.58% shares respectively. By way of contrast, the bandwidth eaten up by each service just six months ago came in at 2% and 1.9%, clearly indicating that both sites are becoming much more popular with viewers.

Per usual, one of the more interesting takeaways from Sandvine’s report is how quickly BitTorrent is fading into irrelevancy. Thouth Sandvine’s data points to BitTorrent accounting for 5% of total Internet traffic in North America, remember that filesharing sites back in 2011 accounted for 22% of Internet traffic. Going back just a bit further, filesharing sites accounted for nearly 33% of Internet traffic in 2008.

Of course, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that BitTorrent has been trending downwards as affordable, easy to use, and compelling streaming services have proliferated over the past few years.

Speaking to this point, Sandvine’s Dan Deeth concisely articulated the shifting trend in consumer viewing habits last year.

“People have shifted their activities to streaming over file sharing, Subscribers get quality content at a reasonable price and it’s dead simple to use, whereas torrenting or file sharing is a little more complicated.”

Solid points all around.

Interestingly, the data looks a whole lot different when it comes to mobile bandwidth, with YouTube and Facebook dominating with a combined 36.74% share. Netflix, meanwhile, only checks in with a 3.44% share.
https://bgr.com/2015/12/08/netflix-v...ing-bandwidth/





Sling CEO: Comcast Data Caps So Low They Hurt Competing Video Providers

Five hours of TV streaming a day could blow through a Comcast data cap.
Jon Brodkin

Sling TV CEO Roger Lynch accused Comcast of setting its data caps just low enough to prevent customers from replacing cable TV with online video streaming.

In an interview with CordCutting.com today, Lynch said:

I think one of the areas we’re quite focused on is what’s happening in Washington, DC around net neutrality. We see concerning things happening if you look at cable companies like Comcast now instituting data caps that just happen to be at a level at or below what someone would use if they’re watching TV on the Internet—and at the same time launching their own streaming service that they say doesn’t count against the data cap. It’s something we’ve been warning Washington about for years, and it’s a risk to OTT [over-the-top Internet services] in general. We’re net neutrality proponents, and want to make sure that rules are implemented so that it really is a level playing field for new players like us.

Comcast is testing 300GB-per-month data caps in a variety of cities before a potential nationwide rollout. Customers are charged $10 for each additional 50GB, and in all but a few of the cities with data caps, they can pay an extra $30 or $35 per month for unlimited data.

Sling TV reportedly streams at speeds of 1.8Mbps to 4.5Mbps. At 4.5Mbps, it would take 148.15 hours to use 300GB. In a 31-day month, that's 4.8 hours of online TV streaming per day. That might sound like a lot, but Nielsen last year found that the average American adult spent four hours and 32 minutes watching live TV per day and another 30 minutes watching time-shifted TV each day.

Considering that families have multiple people watching different shows, these numbers indicate that it would be difficult for many American households to replace cable TV with Internet streaming if they face 300GB data caps. Even if they avoided all other types of Internet use, they could still end up paying overage fees to Comcast.

Sling TV, operated by Dish Network, launched earlier this year. The service offers live TV over the Internet starting at $20 a month. Netflix, still the king of online video in the US, streams at an average of 3.69Mbps to Comcast customers in the US, but can go up to 25Mbps with "Ultra HD" quality."

Dish is primarily a satellite TV provider but does offer satellite Internet. Dish's data caps are even more restrictive than Comcast's, but the company says its Internet service is only suitable for areas that have no other options. Data caps are pretty standard with satellite Internet, while the technically superior cable services generally have much higher limits or no caps at all.

Comcast’s own streaming video and net neutrality

Comcast, as Lynch said, is offering its own streaming service. Comcast's service provides in-home streaming of live TV to computers, tablets, and phones without a set-top box. To consumers watching on devices at home, the service would appear to be similar to offerings from Netflix or Sling TV, but Comcast's doesn't count against customers' data caps.

Lynch called this a net neutrality concern, and Sling could file a complaint against Comcast, but there's a good chance the Federal Communications Commission wouldn't side against the cable company. We've asked Sling if it plans a complaint but haven't heard back yet.

(UPDATE: Sling owner Dish replied to Ars but did not say whether it plans to file a net neutrality complaint. Instead, Dish pointed out that it filed a petition to deny Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable last year. The acquisition was blocked by regulators.)

Comcast's agreement to buy NBCUniversal requires it to treat its own traffic the same as competitors with regard to data caps. But Comcast notes that its streaming product "is an IP cable service delivered over our managed network to the home," rather than a service delivered over the Internet.

The FCC's net neutrality rules also don't specifically prevent ISPs from exempting their own streaming video from data caps. The FCC reserves the right to judge whether individual practices "unreasonably interfere" with the ability of consumers to reach content or the ability of content providers to reach consumers. That's why Sling could file a net neutrality complaint, but Comcast appears to think that it's on solid legal ground. ISPs are also trying to get those net neutrality rules overturned in court.

When contacted by Ars today, Comcast referred to a previous statement from the company that said, "Our data plan trials are based on a principle of fairness: those who consume more data pay more and those who use less pay less."

A Comcast spokesperson also pointed out that the company's data plans remain in trial mode and "we will continue to evaluate our policies. We want our customers to have a great online experience, and we want consumers to choose us because we offer the best Internet service in the marketplace."

So far, Sling TV's customers are mainly those who don't have traditional pay-TV service. "Only a very, very small percentage are people who have paid TV and then sign up for Sling TV," Lynch told CordCutting.com. "So we get people that have already cut the cord or people who have never had the cord."

Sling TV has had a few outages, and Lynch was asked to address complaints about streaming quality. Sling TV is working with its content delivery networks to improve performance, especially during peak viewing times, but Lynch said the technical hurdles remain formidable. "Streaming live TV over the Internet at the scale that we’re doing it is relatively new, and it’s a completely different animal than streaming on-demand content, because you have such little margin for error," he said.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...deo-providers/





A New Deal for Broadband Access Will Be A Key Issue in 2016
Issie Lapowsky

One key storyline of this election season has been how presidential campaigns are using technology—whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email—to target voters online. But an arguably more important story is how, if elected, those candidates would help the 55 million Americans who don’t have access to the Internet at all get online in the first place.

Among the Democratic candidates, at least, those plans are starting to emerge. Last week, Hillary Clinton unveiled a $275 billion infrastructure plan aimed at fixing America’s roads and bridges, upgrading the country’s airports, and creating a $25 billion national infrastructure bank, among other things. The plan also includes a substantive section on ensuring every citizen not only has access to high-speed broadband but is equipped with the digital literacy skills they need to use it.

The Internet is just as vital a part of the country’s infrastructure as its roads, bridges, and electrical grid.

Meanwhile, the Rebuild America Act proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders earlier this year sets aside $5 billion a year through 2019 to expand broadband connectivity in underserved communities.

To the tech industry, these proposals signal a recognition that the Internet is just as vital a part of the country’s infrastructure as its roads, bridges, and electrical grid—and ought to be treated as such.

“Historically the sectors that get the most attention are energy, education, and infrastructure from the standpoint of roads and bridges,” says Michael Beckerman, CEO of the Internet Association, whose members include the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon. “Now in this campaign, because the Internet has become ubiquitous and so important to our daily lives, it’s going to be more of an issue.”

A New New Deal

The political discussion about Internet access today mirrors the discussion about electricity in the 20th century, says Adie Tomer, author of a new Brookings Institution report released today on the stark differences between broadband coverage in different metro areas. “This was a big part of the New Deal. A big component was making sure we had rural electrification,” he says. “You’re going to see the same thing happen in broadband.”

Tomer says Clinton and Sanders are “out in front” on this issue. It still remains to be seen where most of the Republican candidates stand. Aside from Senator Marco Rubio, who introduced a bill with Senator Cory Booker last year aimed at opening up spectrum for Wi-Fi use, conservative candidates haven’t added much to the access discussion.

Most of the country has access to some form of broadband. The problem is some people just aren't taking advantage of it.

That is, not yet. Beckerman, who is also a former policy director for Republican Congressman Fred Upton, says he expects the GOP candidates to pay more attention to broadband access closer to the general election. “It’s still really early in the campaign,” he says. “But if you ask any candidate if there should be 100 percent access to high-speed broadband, it’s hard to disagree with that.”

It makes sense that the Democratic candidates are talking about these issues early on. After all, broadband access and adoption tends to be lowest in low-income communities, black communities, and communities with low educational attainment—all groups that tend to align with Democrats.

Real Benefits

Whatever the candidates’ motivations, tech industry leaders welcome the attention. In particular, they applaud the attention Clinton’s plan pays to funding Internet adoption and digital literacy programs. Most of the country has access to some form of broadband, says Doug Brake, a telecommunications policy analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The problem is some people just aren’t taking advantage of it. A federal program aimed at educating people about why the Internet is worth their time and money could make a real difference, Brake says.

“The real gains aren’t so much from building the infrastructure itself, and building networks, but getting that last 25 percent of people a stable Internet connection in their home,” Brake says. “That’s a real wave of opportunity, and it’s encouraging to see a presidential candidate talking about it.”

Clinton’s plan also emphasizes the importance of investing in digital literacy training in low-income communities. This part is particularly important, Tomer says, as more and more jobs today require computer skills. “And I do not mean coding,” he adds. “If you’ve learned how to code, you know how to use a computer. I’m talking basic-order stuff.”

Still, Brake and others say they need to see more from all of the candidates, including Clinton and Sanders, about how exactly they would implement these policies—particularly how they would guarantee high-speed broadband to the small fraction of people living in extremely rural or mountainous regions. In those places, the cost of building out a wire network can be prohibitively high, says Brake, who worries that high costs could turn broadband access into a partisan issue.

“Internet access should not be a partisan issue. It shoudn’t even be a political issue,” Brake says. “Broadband adoption is a real area of opportunity. If we put some effort and real government funding behind it, it can get a lot more people online, and have all sorts of spillover effects that benefit the entire economy and our productivity.”
http://www.wired.com/2015/12/a-new-d...issue-in-2016/





A Group of Tech Companies has Urged Congressional Leadership to Abandon a GOP Plan to Kill the Federal Communications Commission's Net Neutrality Rules.
David Johnson

A group of tech companies has urged Congressional leadership to abandon a GOP plan to kill the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules.Budget proposals have included provisions preventing the FCC from continuing to enforce the rules that took effect in June, at least until broadband providers have exhausted all of their appeals in court.

"We are writing to urge you to refrain from including riders relating to net neutrality and the Federal Communication Commission’s Open Internet Order in the upcoming omnibus spending legislation," the tech companies wrote in a letter Wednesday to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Democrats have opposed efforts to gut net neutrality rules, with the White House telling Congress that the nation's budget should not be used to enact "unrelated ideological provisions."

The tech companies' letter was signed by Automattic, Codeacademy, Cogent, Contextly, Distinc.tt, Dwolla, Engine Advocacy, Etsy, Fandor, General Assembly, Kickstarter, Level 3, Mapbox, Meetup, Tumblr, Twilio, and Vimeo. It was also signed by consortiums including the Internet Freedom Business Alliance (IFBA), the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), and Incompas (formerly known as Comptel.) IFBA membership includes many of the letter signers and previously supported the FCC's net neutrality order in a court filing. CCIA members include Amazon, CloudFlare, Dish, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Pandora, PayPal, Red Hat, Samsung, Sprint, TiVo, and Yahoo.
Incompas' voting members include dozens of companies such as Amazon, Netflix, Google Fiber, Sprint, and T-Mobile. (AT&T and Verizon, outspoken net neutrality opponents, are non-voting members.)Congress is seeking to finish the end-of-year spending bill next week, The Hill wrote.

The House Appropriations Committee approved three anti-net neutrality riders earlier this year, the tech companies' letter said.

"After the House’s action, several technology companies met with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in the Senate to share how these riders are harmful to innovation and the thriving startup culture in the US," they wrote.
http://www.thecybercolumn.com/2015/1...s-to-drop.html





Net Neutrality Just Went to Court. Here’s How it Did.
Brian Fung

A federal appeals court on Friday challenged regulators to defend a series of strict new rules for Internet providers, asking them why it should allow the controversial regulations to stand in spite of an industry lawsuit that's become the centerpiece of a highly-charged battle over the future of the Internet.

Dozens of court-watchers began lining up before dawn to hear the case, with some having spent the night in frigid temperatures outside the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Heavy turnout led the court to open up an overflow room for other spectators. Inside the courtroom itself, a three-judge panel peppered agency and industry lawyers with probing questions in a roughly three-hour debate.

The stakes for the Federal Communications Commission are high. Friday marked the third time the agency has appeared before the court in recent years to justify regulating Internet providers more heavily. At issue is the FCC's net neutrality rules — which prevented Internet providers from slowing down or blocking Web content that they do not like, or even charging Web sites a fee for reaching Internet users faster.

Led by several industry associations, broadband providers argued the FCC had abused its authority when it approved those rules in February. In response, the FCC — backed by a number of tech companies and advocacy groups — said Congress had given it sufficient powers to implement the regulations it had written.

How the court ultimately rules could have far-reaching consequences for the way Americans experience the Web. If the FCC's policy is struck down, it could give Internet providers more freedom to determine what consumers can see online, and at what cost. The agency itself would be faced with a choice: Appeal to the Supreme Court, or attempt to rewrite the rules a fourth time — a process that analysts say will likely be interrupted by the 2016 election.

Alternatively, the court could uphold some parts of the FCC's rules while invalidating others. Depending on which portions survive, the judges could effectively affirm the agency's power to implement net neutrality but order the FCC to clarify problematic sections of the rules.

Friday's debate began by revisiting a controversial FCC decision: To subject broadband companies to the same legal obligations as legacy telephone companies.

Because consumers only purchase access to the system of wires and servers run by a broadband company as opposed to directly connecting to the Internet itself, Internet service is not like telephone service, argued Peter Keisler, the industry attorney arguing before the court. Instead, what consumers subscribe to simply "supports the ability for consumers to retrieve information" from the Internet and is not a telecommunications service, he said.

Judge David Tatel appeared unpersuaded, musing that when consumers sign up for broadband, they likely believe they are "just buying Internet" rather than access to something else. But Tatel — said to be a key vote in the case because of his role in writing the D.C. Circuit's last opinion on net neutrality — also seemed dissatisfied by the FCC's defense on some topics.

Tatel invited the FCC's top lawyer, Jonathan Sallet, to explain why the agency abruptly "abandoned" a plan to regulate Internet providers lightly, without imposing telephone-style obligations on them. Sallet said that the FCC's ultimate policy, which was much stricter, was simply the result of public feedback. But Tatel continued to press for specifics, demanding the "crispest answer" to the question as he sat impassively with one hand on his chin.

Sallet seemed more comfortable discussing the basis for the FCC's rules. Drawing a comparison to furniture and automobiles, Sallet said that a screw that might appear in either product should be regulated the same way by the government, even if the furniture and automobile industries are subject to different laws. Similarly, he said, technology that provides a telecommunications capability should operate under a single set of rules.

Another flashpoint in the debate occurred when Senior Judge Stephen Williams questioned the FCC's view of a tactic known as "paid prioritization," where an Internet provider attempts to charge a Web site for faster service. Williams, who is considered a skeptic of preemptive regulation, warned that the FCC's ban on the practice risked wiping out "a lot of perfectly innocent" deals between Internet providers and Web site operators.

Neither Tatel nor the panel's third judge, Sri Srinivasan, appeared to share Williams' skepticism of the FCC's paid prioritization ban. But all three closely examined the FCC's application of net neutrality to mobile Internet providers.

The FCC violated the law when it extended its policy to cover firms such as Sprint and T-Mobile, industry lawyers argued, because mobile Internet is not part of the "public switched network" that Congress originally instructed the FCC to regulate.

But if the mobile Internet is not subject to net neutrality, that could limit protections for consumers, Srinivasan pointed out. In that scenario, a tablet user who is surfing on WiFi would benefit from net neutrality, but the same tablet connected to a 4G LTE signal would not.

"You're saying where I am in my house determines whether I'm subject to blocking?" Srinivasan asked Keisler, to laughter in the courtroom.

Consumer advocates say the debate over mobile broadband led to "mixed results," but predicted a win overall in the end.

"I think you might get a 2-1 decision with Williams in dissent on the paid prioritization rule," said Harold Feld, senior vice president of the advocacy group Public Knowledge.

CTIA, the wireless industry's top trade association, said that although it supported an open Internet, the FCC's rules moved the country in the wrong direction.

"Today, we made our case to the court that imposing monopoly-era rules on the wireless industry is unlawful," the group said in a statement. The FCC declined to comment.

But some analysts said the outcome is still a toss-up.

"Sometimes you walk out of an oral argument with a pretty good sense of which way the decision is going to go," said Randolph May, president of the Free State Foundation. "After witnessing the entire 3 hour argument, to my mind this was not one of those cases."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...es-how-it-did/





AT&T Has Fooled The Press And Public Into Believing It's Building A Massive Fiber Network That Barely Exists
Karl Bode

A few years ago, AT&T realized something amazing: you don't have to build a cutting edge, fiber to the home broadband network, when it's relatively easy to fool the press and public into believing you're building a cutting edge, fiber to the home network. So as AT&T was actually busy reducing its fixed-line broadband spending and quietly walking away from DSL users it didn't want to upgrade, it launched a service it calls "U-Verse with Gigapower." Basically, AT&T's delivering gigabit speeds to high-end housing developments, then pretending the upgrades are much, much larger than they actually are.

Case in point: AT&T this week breathlessly announced that the company was deploying gigabit fiber to 38 more markets, bringing the grand total of its gigabit fiber deployment to an amazing 56 total metro markets:

"AT&T announced today it is planning to expand the availability of ultra-fast speeds through AT&T GigaPower to homes, apartments and small businesses in parts of 38 additional metros across the United States – which will total at least 56 metros served. With the launch of our ultra-fast Internet service in parts of 2 of these metros today – Los Angeles and West Palm Beach – AT&T GigaPower is now available in 20 of the nation’s largest metros.

Note a few things about the announcement, however. Nowhere does the company state when these connections will be delivered. Similarly nowhere does the company make clear that it's targeting mostly high-end housing developments where fiber is already in the ground, making costs negligible (the only way you could technically accomplish a deployment of this kind and magically have your CAPEX consistently drop). And while AT&T claims these improvements will reach 14 million residential and commercial locations, AT&T gives no timeline for this accomplishment. That means it could cherry pick a few hundred thousand University condos and housing developments per year and be wrapping up this not-so-epic fiber deployment by 2040 or so.

Nowhere -- now or ever -- will you see AT&T specify precisely how many users have, or will be able to get gigabit speeds from AT&T. That's because, in reality, users in these "launched" markets will almost always find it difficult if not impossible to sign up for this gigabit service. And, in some cases, by a "launched" market AT&T actually means a few dozen homes sitting on a hill in a single housing development.

Now take a minute and look at the press coverage of AT&T's announcement, and try to find one news outlet that could be bothered to note the limited nature of these launches. Whether it's the Shreveport Times or the pages of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, AT&T's convinced the entire country that it's on the cusp of getting gigabit fiber that -- for the vast majority of them -- is never going to actually arrive. Even technology news outlets that should know better (if they'd spent five minutes studying AT&T's history on this front) are busy bandying about quotes how AT&T is "outpacing every other competitor."

To be clear, some AT&T customers will certainly get fiber. If you live in one of the few areas where AT&T has to actually compete thanks to Google Fiber, or in locations where it's possible to upgrade to fiber with the least amount of effort and cost possible, you may be upgraded -- eventually. Granted it won't be cheap, and you'll have to pay a steep premium if you don't want AT&T to spy on you, but you'll get fiber. More likely than not, however, you live in a DSL or U-Verse (FTTN) market that AT&T not only won't upgrade, but may be walking completely away from in order to focus on more profitable (read: usage capped) wireless.

The press and public aren't the only ones being conned. AT&T has consistently used its phantom fiber deployment as a carrot on a stick with regulators, at one point threatening to stop making these barely-there investments unless regulators walked back net neutrality. AT&T backed off the claim when the FCC asked for hard data, but this kind of telecom theater works exceptionally well in state legislatures. Last week AT&T claimed net neutrality prevented them from innovating, and this week they're portraying themselves as the innovator of the century (even though the only actual innovation here is in misleading PR).

And AT&T's not alone when it comes to bogus gigabit bravado. Most of the major phone and cable companies have similarly responded to Google Fiber by cherry picking the nation's most affluent housing developments for gigabit deployment, then pretending they're keeping pace with the nation's broadband needs. Even Google Fiber has made a habit lately of getting oodles of press attention for fiber deployments that may or may not actually happen. In reality however, two thirds of homes lack the choice of more than one ISP at speeds of 25 Mbps or greater. And as AT&T and Verizon walk away from unwanted DSL markets, cable's monopoly power is going to grow, making broadband less competitive than ever in many markets.

None of this is to pooh pooh the actual gigabit fiber deployments that are occurring. While it only has an estimated 100,000 subscribers now, there's every indication Google Fiber's going to eventually have a major disruptive impact. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on at the grass roots level, whether it's municipal broadband, or companies like Tucows taking the reins and upgrading small towns, one at a time. But on the meta scale, an uncritical press is contributing to an epic case of delusion when it comes to the pace of broadband progress.

That's why we're not living in the age of fiber to the home -- so much as we're living in the age of fiber to the press release.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...y-exists.shtml





The Daredevils Without Landlines — And Why Health Experts Are Tracking Them
Alina Selyukh

Nearly half of U.S. homes don't have a landline and rely on cellphones instead, according to a federal report out this week.

The number predictably has been climbing over the years, now surpassing even the households with both a landline and a mobile phone. And it's tracked by — of all agencies — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics records all kinds of trends about the state of Americans' health. One of its surveys traces the decline of landlines and what kinds of health habits are common to mobile-only homes. (Hint: the drinking and smoking kind.)

How did the CDC become the expert on the rise of cellphone use? I spoke with Stephen Blumberg, who's been leading this research. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

So you're the guy who's basically monitoring the slow death of the landline.

I guess I am.

Why does the CDC study this?

You're definitely not the first one to ask that. Back in 2003, we recognized that the telephone-based surveys conducted by the CDC would be missing an ever-growing segment of the population (that didn't have a landline phone). We looked to find a survey that would answer the questions about who this population is and what their health characteristics are.

The National Health Interview Survey is an in-person survey with more than 40,000 households annually. And because it's conducted face-to-face by Census Bureau interviewers, it contacts landline households, wireless-only households, households that have no service at all. That made it an ideal vehicle for tracking the prevalence of the characteristics of the wireless-only population.

Since then, all of the major telephone surveys that CDC conducts now include cellphone numbers ... but we're the one survey in the federal statistical system that is tracking this estimate, and so we continue to do so.

In effect it started out of your own necessity?

That's correct. For telephone surveys, at first we were able to make adjustments for the exclusion of the individuals, or what's known as coverage bias — because we knew that they were younger, they were more likely to live in rented housing, they were more likely to be low-income. And so we could make adjustments.

What we started to recognize, however, fairly quickly, is that, in fact, their health characteristics were different, even when you controlled for all of those demographic differences. People who are wireless-only are more likely to smoke, they're more likely to binge drink, they're more likely to be uninsured. In effect, they are more likely to engage in risky behaviors.

All the daredevils are dropping their landlines!

You know, we can't say for certain; perhaps at that time dropping the landline was in effect risky behavior.

It would make sense for it to be a factor of youth, no?

Well, except when we controlled for age, we still saw these differences. Essentially, if we just looked at young people, we still saw that those young people who were wireless-only were more likely to drink and more likely to smoke than young people who had landlines.

Somebody once suggested that it would be interesting to try to extend preventive health messages to wireless-only individuals and try to target them for health promotion activities, but I don't know that anybody has actually done that.

So is it related to income?

We know that there's an income effect; however, part of that, if not all of that, is a function of age and living status. So young adults living in rented housing are more likely to be wireless-only. Those people are also more likely to have lower incomes than older adults who own their home.

We certainly see that lower-income households are more likely to be wireless-only. We think that's primarily the function of age and household tenure, but we also recognize that it costs money to have both a landline and a wireless phone, and those people who are looking to save money may recognize that a wireless phone gives them more functionality than a landline phone.

Are you still seeing that correlation with risky behavior, or are we maybe approaching a point where only having a cellphone is more of a factor of convenience?

We still see it in the general data, so if you take a look at the report, you can see that 29 percent of wireless-only adults are binge drinkers whereas only 18 percent of adults living in landline households drink heavily.

And what's the value of this information to the CDC?

It's a reminder to us that for our telephone surveys we still need to be vigilant to include proper proportions of wireless-only households. That's the primary benefit at this point.

We continue to track (the information about wireless-only households) because it increases the accuracy of the health data we collect in our survey.

In the years that you've studied these households, has something about the data surprised you?

I don't know that surprise is the word. But we've been tracking this for 12 years now. I think we had expected that by now we would see some leveling off in the prevalence of wireless-only households — we don't see any evidence yet that that's occurring.

So people are still dropping landlines?

That's correct.

I would have actually thought that by now, we would only see a small percentage of people even having landlines.

I'm guessing you're fairly young.

I haven't had a landline in a very long time. Though I'm talking to you over a landline now.

And yet I'm talking to you on a cellphone!
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechc...-tracking-them





The Little-Known Recording Trick That Makes Singers Sound Perfect
Meghan Neal

Put on a Taylor Swift or Mariah Carey or Michael Jackson song and listen to the vocals. You may think the track was recorded by the artist singing the song through a few times and the producer choosing the best take to use on the record. But that’s almost never the case.

The reality is far less romantic. Listen to almost any contemporary pop or rock record and there’s a very good chance the vocals were “comped.” This is when the producer or sound engineer combs through several takes of the vocal track and cherry-picks the best phrases, words, or even syllables of each recording, then stitches them together into one flawless “composite” master track.

Though it’s unknown to most listeners, comping’s been standard practice in the recording industry for decades. Everyone does it—“even the best best best best singers,” says producer and mix engineer Ken Lewis, who’s comped vocals for Mary J Blige, Usher, David Byrne, Lenny Kravitz, Ludacris, Soul Asylum, Diana Ross, and Queen Latifah.

“Comping doesn’t have to do with the quality of the vocalist,” Lewis says. “Back in the Michael Jackson days—and Michael Jackson was an incredible singer—they used to comp 48 tracks together, from what I’ve read and what I’ve heard.”

But surely cobbling together a song this way must sound disjointed, robotic, devoid of personality, right? That’s certainly what I thought when I first learned about the practice. And while it’s true that vocal comping is used heavily in pop music where the intention is usually to sound smooth and polished rather than honest and gritty, most producers will tell you that this piecemeal approach is the best way to get a superb recording from any vocalist.

“This is the epitome of all that is unglamorous in music, but very necessary for the best possible presentation of the most important element in the mix,” wrote music producer Frank Gryner in Recording Magazine. He’s recorded the likes of Rob Zombie and Tommy Lee. “I’ve yet to work on a major-label record that didn’t involve vocal comping to arrive at the finished product.”

The process works like this: A singer records the song through a handful of times in the studio, either from start to finish or isolating particularly tricky spots. Starting with between 4-10 takes is typical—too many passes can drain the artist’s energy and confidence and also bog down the editing process later. (That said, it’s sometimes much more. Christina Aguilera’s song “Here to Stay” was compiled from 100 different takes. “She sat on the stool and sang the song for six hours until it was done—didn't leave the booth once and didn't make a single phone call,” engineer Ben Allen said in an interview with Tape Op magazine.)

The engineer generally follows along during the studio recording with a lyric sheet and jots down notes to use as a guide for later, marking whether a phrase was very good, good, bad, sharp or flat, and so on.

An example of a comp sheet for lead vocal. The columns on the right indicate promising sections of the eight takes and final decisions are noted over the lyrics. Image: Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio by Mike Senior.

When the session’s over, they listen closely to each section of each take, playing the line back on loop with the volume jacked up twice as high as it will be in the final mix. They’re listening to make sure the singer’s on pitch, of course, but that’s not necessarily the primary measure of what makes the final cut.

Timing, tone, attitude, emotion, personality, and how each phrase or word fits in context with the other instruments and the rest of the vocal track can trump pitch perfection. Those little quirky gems add character and emotion to the track—they’re what the listener remembers.

The recording engineer picks out the best take for each bit of the song and edits all the pieces together, usually in a digital audio workstation (DAW) like Pro Tools.

“Often, I’ll have a three-syllable word in the middle of a line, and I’ll use the first syllable from take 3, the second syllable from take 7, and the third syllable from take 10," Lewis writes in a blog post. “Not kidding.”

Comping is one of the most common DAW tasks and the software has made it stupid simple, especially compared to cutting tape reels back in the analog days, when editors would mark the cut spot on the open tape reel with a pencil, slice it with a razor blade and attach the two ends together with sticky tape.

Most programs today let you input multiple files within an audio track, so you can simply drag and drop the portion you want from each take into the master track.

The editor makes sure the transitions are seamless, the track flows properly, that no glitches or bad edits made it into the final cut, and importantly, that no emotion or personality is lost in the process. A sign of a success is that the listener has no idea a song’s vocals were compiled from several different takes. The work should be invisible.

“It’s rare that you hear a really bad vocal comp,” says says recording engineer Mike Senior, a columnist for Sound on Sound and author of Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio. But that’s often because the edits are obscured by the other instruments in the track.

About 20 seconds into Aguilera’s “Genie in the Bottle” is a really clunky edit, but you can’t hear it in the song because it’s tucked behind a big heavy drum beat, says Senior. “If you think how many drum beats typically occur in a mainstream song, you can think how many places you can edit without it being heard.”

Listen closely to Adele’s hit “Someone Like You” and you can hear that in the first couple verses the opening breath is missing—there’s just no breath on that phrase, he points out. You can also hear some background noise on the mic throughout the song but then in certain places it cuts out, a sign of an edit.

As you can imagine, the whole process is incredibly tedious and time consuming; it can take hours, even days. “That’s why these records are expensive,” said engineer Mark Bright in an interview with Bobby Owsinski, author of The Music Producer’s Handbook.Blight has produced Carrie Underwood, Reba McEntyre, and Rascal Flatts, and typically spends 8-12 hours comping a track from upwards of 20 takes.

Max Martin and “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, the hitmakers behind mega pop stars like Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry and Britney Spears, are known for relying heavily on comping during their recording process. John Seabrook, author of The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, writes in the New Yorker: “Comping is so mind-numbing boring that even Gottwald, with his powers of concentration, can’t tolerate it.” However, "Max loves comping," songwriter Bonnie McKee told Seabrook. "He’ll do it for hours.’”

But while pop songs are often accused of being sterile, artificial, or overproduced, each producer I talked to said this is not the result of comping. “Comping is not the thing that makes something sound robotic. Actually I would say comping does the opposite,” says Senior.

Comping gets a bad rap because it’s lumped in with other editing tools like pitch correction and auto-tune, but “it is almost unreservedly a good thing,” Senior says. It gives singers the freedom to push the boundaries and perform at the edge of their capability, trusting it’s OK to mess up because there’s the safety net of having multiple other takes. And if there is a rogue bum note in an otherwise killer recording, you can swap it out with an on pitch note from another take instead of relying on pitch correction, which alters the overall sonic quality.

Pushing the limit and taking chances is what leads to those gems that can make a whole track, says Lewis. “That’s one of the beauties of comping—you get to search for the most magical piece of every take.”

“People have a very idealistic view of a producer or recording engineer’s job. If people really knew how records were made, they’d be much more jaded,” says Lewis. “But if you go into record making with the idea that you need to sing the song down from start to finish, come what may, you will rarely find the true magic.”
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the...-sound-perfect





Court: Breaking Your Employer's Computer Policy Isn't a Crime
Jamie Williams

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an opinion rejecting the government’s attempt to hold an employee criminally liable under the federal hacking statute—the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”)—for violating his employer-imposed computer use restrictions. The decision is important because it ensures that employers and website owners don’t have the power to criminalize a broad range of innocuous everyday behaviors, like checking personal email or the score of a baseball game, through simply adopting use restrictions in their corporate policies or terms of use.

The court also ruled that the government cannot hold people criminally liable on the basis of purely fantastical statements they make online—i.e., thoughtcrime.

The case, United States v. Gilberto Valle, received a lot of attention in the press because it involved the so-called “cannibal cop”—a New York City police officer who was charged with conspiracy to kidnap for posts he wrote on fetish websites about cannibalism. Valle was also charged with violating the CFAA for accessing a police database to look up information about people without a valid law enforcement purpose, in violation of NYPD policy. The jury convicted Valle on all counts, but the trial court reversed the jury’s conspiracy verdict, stating that “the nearly yearlong kidnapping conspiracy alleged by the government is one in which no one was ever kidnapped, no attempted kidnapping ever took place, and no real-world, non-Internet-based steps were ever taken to kidnap anyone.” The trial court ultimately found that holding Valle guilty of conspiracy to kidnap would make him guilty of thoughtcrime.

But the trial court upheld the CFAA conviction. And on appeal, we filed an amicus brief with the Second Circuit, urging the court to overturn the lower court’s dangerous ruling. We argued that the lower court’s ruling would make criminals out of millions of innocent individuals, and the Second Circuit agreed—throwing out Mr. Valle's CFAA conviction and joining two other federal circuit courts in rejecting the government’s attempt to expand the reach of the vaguely worded federal statute: “We decline to adopt the prosecution’s construction [of the CFAA], which would criminalize the conduct of millions of ordinary computer users[.]” The court went on:

“While the Government might promise that it would not prosecute an individual for checking Facebook at work, we are not at liberty to take prosecutors at their word in such matters. A court should not uphold a highly problematic interpretation of a statute merely because the Government promises to use it responsibly.”

The Second Circuit also upheld the trial court’s decision to throw out the conspiracy conviction, as we had urged in a second amicus brief filed in the case, holding that “[t]he mere indulgence of fantasy, even of the repugnant and unsettling kind here, is not, without more, criminal.”

Thanks again to the Center for Democracy & Technology, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the Internet scholars who joined our CFAA amicus brief, and to UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh of the Scott & Cyan Banister First Amendment Clinic for writing our amicus brief regarding the conspiracy charges.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/1...s-computer-use





After Paris Attacks, Proposed French Law Would Block Tor and Forbid Free Wi-Fi
Joseph Cox

After the recent Paris terror attacks, the French government is proposing to forbid and block the use of the Tor anonymity network, according to an internal document from the Ministry of Interior seen by French newspaper Le Monde.

That document lays out two proposed pieces of legislation, one around the state of emergency, and the other concerning counter-terrorism.

In the former, the French government is considering to “Forbid free and shared wi-fi connections” during a state of emergency. This comes from a police opinion included in the document: the reason being that it is apparently difficult to track individuals who use public wi-fi networks.

The latter piece of legislation, meanwhile, says the government is considering “to block or forbid communications of the Tor network.” The legislation, according to Le Monde, could be presented as early as January 2016.

Tor is a network of servers maintained by volunteers, which route a user's traffic through several different points, obfuscating their original, and perhaps identifying, IP address. At first a project from the US Navy, and now attempting to diversify its funding, Tor has become more popular recently, especially after the 2013 Snowden revelations around various mass surveillance programs.

It is used by journalists, whistleblowers and people who just want to protect their privacy online, as well as terrorists, pedophiles, and cybercriminals.

The internal document reviewed by Le Monde suggests that the French government may propose legislative measures as well as technological ones against Tor.

The Tor Project, the non-profit that maintains the Tor network, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even if it was the French government's intention to block the use of Tor within its borders, it is not totally clear how this would be done, but other countries have attempted to do so.

China actively blocks connections to known Tor entry nodes. These are the first relays that a Tor user's computer connects to, and are publicly listed. Tor can also use non-public entry nodes, called “bridges,” and these are typically effective at allowing someone to connect to Tor from a country that blacklists the network. (China's firewall can sometimes detect these as well, by analyzing the internet traffic flowing through the country.)

So, if the French really wanted to block Tor, they might have to consider a model similar to the Chinese regime's. Naturally, that might be worrying for anyone that cares about free-speech, increasing surveillance, or, say, democracy.

Indeed, in the document the French Directorate of Civil Liberties and Legal Affairs (DLPAJ) questions whether some of the moves in the proposed legislation, including the attempt to block or forbid Tor, could be unconstitutional.

As for how the French government might enforce a legal ban on the use of Tor, it may be possible for an internet service provider to tell when one of its customers is using the anonymity network (although the ISP cannot see what sites the user is visiting.)

In the continuing debate around privacy and security, knee-jerk reactions to encryption and other technologies are becoming a common sight. While the US has arguably been the epicentre for this anti-crypto dialogue in recent months, the debate is going to get more ferocious in Europe too.

Pascale Mueller contributed reporting.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/aft...bid-free-wi-fi





France Will Not Ban Wi-Fi or Tor, Prime Minister Says
Patrick Howell O'Neill

Despite requests from police, France will not ban the Tor anonymity network or public Wi-Fi, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Wednesday.

In the weeks after the deadly attacks in Paris, France has been in a perpetual state of emergency. Le Monde reported an internal law enforcement document proposing to restrict freedom of Internet access ostensibly as a way to fight terrorism.

"A ban of Wi-Fi is not a course of action envisaged," Valls responded on Wednesday. Nor is he in favor of a ban on Tor, which encrypts and masks users' identifying data, the Connexion reported.

"Internet is a freedom, is an extraordinary means of communication between people, it is a benefit to the economy," Valls added.

Even so, the global response to Paris involves lawmakers in Europe and the United States calling for new legislation on technology.

Authorities in the E.U. and U.S. are increasingly raising the issue of encryption. On Wednesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) vowed to seek a bill to "pierce" encryption.

While both E.U. and U.S. officials have said throughout the year that they have no plan to introduce legislation requiring "backdoors" on encryption—intentional weaknesses in the code for the purposes of law enforcement surveillance—critics say their proposals could effectively achieve the same ends, even if there is no technical backdoor requirement.

Technologists say such laws will undermine encryption, which is used widely, and will make the entire Internet far less safe than it already is.

One day prior to her proposal on encryption, Feinstein re-introduced a bill requiring social media companies to report terrorist activity. The legislation was previously blocked for being "terribly vague."
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/fra...ifi-pm-no-ban/





Top Democratic Senator Will Seek Legislation to 'Pierce' Through Encryption
Patrick Howell O'Neill

A leading Democratic senator will seek legislation requiring the ability to "pierce" through encryption to allow American law enforcement to read protected communications with a court order.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that she would seek a bill that would give police armed with a warrant based on probable cause the ability “to look into an encrypted Web."

"I have concern about a PlayStation that my grandchildren might use," she said, "and a predator getting on the other end, and talking to them, and it's all encrypted. I think there really is reason to have the ability, with a court order, to be able to get into that."

A spokesman for Feinstein's office told the Daily Dot in an email that the senator has been working with Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) the issue of encryption and that Burr's office is taking the lead on potential legislation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is actively warning America's biggest technology companies about the "public safety and national security risks" of encryption, according to FBI Director James Comey.

Deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, California, and elsewhere around the world have reignited a major U.S. debate about encryption. Feinstein cited Paris as a reason the debate against encryption had evolved so quickly. Despite these concerns, the attackers in both of Paris and San Bernardino did not use encryption to organize or execute the deadly strikes, according to authorities.

The lack of evidence showing that encrypted communications played a role in either the Paris attacks, which killed 129 people, or the San Bernardino shooting, which killed 14 people, has not deterred law enforcement, who believe the technology is making their job more difficult and Americans less safe.

Most Internet and gadget users encounter encryption without ever knowing it. The “HTTPS” connection that allows users to safely buy products on Amazon or access their bank account uses one category of encryption, while newer Apple iOS and Android devices apply strong encryption whenever a user locks her phone

"The tech companies and the FBI both care about safety on the Internet," Comey told the Senate Judiciary committee in an FBI oversight hearing. "We understand that encryption is a very important part of being secure on the Internet. We also all care about public safety. We also see a collision course between those two things."

"We see encryption is getting in the way of our ability to have court orders effective to gather information we need in our most important work. We all agree we have to figure out if we can maximize both those values, safety and security on the Internet and public safety. We're not at war, we care about the same thing."

Comey said that use of encryption by terrorists and criminals is growing. He offered one example.

Encryption played a significant role in the killing of two people during a shooting in Garland, Texas, earlier this year, Comey said. One of the shooters, Comey said, exchanged 109 encrypted messages with an "overseas terrorist."

"We have no idea what was said because those messages were encrypted," he explained. "To this day, I cannot tell you what he said with that terrorist, 109 times the morning of that attack. That is a big problem."

Comey did not say what kind of encryption software was used in these communications. However, the fact that Comey knew the shooter spoke to an overseas terrorist means that metadata revealed the extensive communications.

Metadata is data surrounding communications that includes phone numbers, times of calls, and identities of callers, or the subject lines of emails. It's unencrypted and relatively easy for law enforcement to collect.

Over the last two years, Comey has been one of the most prominent figures in the American debate over encryption, increasingly known as the new "Crypto Wars." He's consistently warned of terrorist and criminal communications "going dark," which he says is a "continuing focus for the FBI."

In response to recent terrorist attacks, President Barack Obama recently said he would “urge high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder to use technology to escape from justice.” Many observers took that to be a comment about encryption.

Comey said on Wednesday that the Obama administration is still not seeking new encryption laws "at this time." However, conversations are still ongoing.

"We will continue the productive conversations we are having with private industry, state, local, and tribal law enforcement, our foreign partners, and the American people," Comey said.

Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) issued rare pushback in the debate over encryption, implying that Comey’s idea essentially mandates that companies have to build their own "backdoors"—intentional weaknesses in the code—in encrypted products.

Lee added that such a rule wouldn’t end the “going dark” problem because foreign companies would not be subject to U.S. law and that individual users could build their own encrypted apps. Comey agreed, saying any solution to the problem has to be international.

"There’s no way we solve this entire problem," Comey said. "Encryption is always going to be available to the sophisticated user. The problem is, post-Snowden, it’s moved to become default.”

Privacy advocates and technologists have long fought against the idea of a legally-mandated "backdoor" into encryption that would give the government the ability to read any encrypted message, with or without a court order.

Objections vary, including that doing so would violate and chill free speech. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who has become a prominent encryption advocate, argues that any "backdoor" artificially added to encryption can be utilized by any hackers—not just law enforcement—from petty criminals to those backed by countries like China and Russia.

Comey countered that argument on Wednesday, insisting that the encryption debate is "not a technical issue" because "there are plenty of companies today who provide secure services to their customers and still comply with court orders."

The FBI director explained his hopes for the encryption debate by saying that "government doesn't want a backdoor."

Instead, Comey said, "if a judge issues an order, the company figures out how to supply that information to the judge and figures out on its own what would be the best way to do that. The government shouldn't be telling people how to operate their systems."

When Comey argued that "encryption is part of terrorist tradecraft now," he received a lot of pushback from online observers.

Matt Blaze, a security researcher who testified before Congress on this issue earlier this year, issued a reminder to Comey:

Crypto is also part of consumer tradecraft, business tradecraft, and critical infrastructure tradecraft. https://t.co/ppgjmmpxUk
— matt blaze (@mattblaze) December 9, 2015

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/fbi...ech-companies/





Obama to Clarify His Stance on Encryption by the Holidays
Eric Geller and William Turton

The Obama administration plans to clarify its stance on strong encryption before Washington shuts down for the holidays.

Administration officials met Thursday with the civil-society groups behind a petition urging the White House to back strong, end-to-end encryption over the objections of some law-enforcement and intelligence professionals.

At that meeting, White House and Department of Homeland Security officials told representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, Access, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Human Rights Watch, and New America's Open Technology Institute that they were eyeing a holiday deadline for their formal response, according to Kevin Bankston, OTI's director, who helped organize the meeting.

A senior administration official confirmed that an encryption response was forthcoming but did not comment on the deadline. "The response we posted was an interim one," the official said of the brief reply to the petition, "and we will have a more fulsome response soon."

Bankston called Thursday's discussion "a very hopeful meeting." He said that the officials present were Michael Daniel, President Obama's cybersecurity coordinator; Ed Felten and Alexander Macgillivray, Obama's deputy chief technology officers; and Daniel Prieto, director of civil liberties and privacy for the National Security Council.

"They were mostly in listening mode," Bankston said, "but they did seem to share our overall goal of moving the discussion beyond the debate over encryption into a more productive conversation about how best to provide for national security in the current technological environment."

As tech companies have improved the security of their products and have begun to offer encryption that even they cannot bypass, national-security officials have complained that those companies are aiding criminals and terrorists by stymying investigations. These officials want tech companies to add "backdoors" to their encryption that the government could access with a warrant.

FBI Director James Comey, the staunchest advocate for making tech companies modify their products to facilitate investigations, has warned that criminals are "going dark" by encrypting their communications in indecipherable ways.

Security experts overwhelmingly oppose backdoors, which they say would create opportunities for criminals, not just cops, to breach secure systems.

President Obama has not taken a firm stance on backdoors. He told Re/code in February that "there’s no scenario in which we don’t want really strong encryption," but he called on tech companies to work with the government to make investigations easier in an Oval Office address on Sunday. His administration continues to pressure tech companies to make such accommodations.

The White House considered a variety of backdoor policies but ultimately rejected them as unworkable. Mark Stroh, a White House spokesman, told the Daily Dot in October that "the administration is not seeking legislation at this time."

Bankston hopes that the White House will go further now. "What we want to hear from the White House is for them to not only continue to hold to their current position—which is that they are not seeking legislation at this time—but have them drop the qualifier of 'at this time.'"

"Our hope," he added, "is that, if they are willing to do that, we can move beyond this seemingly endless debate... and start talking about how can law enforcement and intelligence [agencies] adapt to a world where encryption is common, rather than pretending that we could ever make encryption adapt to law enforcement and intelligence [agencies]."

The debate over whether businesses should weaken their encryption to help the government, known as the "crypto wars," began in the 1990s and took on new life after the Paris terrorist attacks in November and the San Bernardino shooting in December. Some officials and lawmakers have blamed encryption and called for a policy response, although there is no evidence that the perpetrators of both attacks relied on encryption to evade detection.

"One of our key arguments at this stage," Bankston said, "is simply continuing to highlight—as was true in the '90s... during the original crypto wars, but is even more true now—no matter what U.S. law and U.S. companies do… strong end-to-end encryption is going to be widely available to anyone who wants it."

Two lawmakers are working on legislation that could outlaw unbreakable encryption. The White House did not promise to rebuke those attempts, according to Bankston, but it is aware of the problems with such a law.

"At this point, they clearly understand all of our concerns and arguments," he said. "In fact, many of those concerns and arguments were laid out in the White House’s own memos that were leaked a few months ago."

Another participant in the meeting, who asked not to be named, said that the White House "seemed to very clearly understand the security implications of weakening encryption."

"I think the civil society groups broadly shared their concerns... both from a security standpoint and also from a First Amendment standpoint about some of these harms associated with weakening encryption or mandating a backdoor," this person said. "The meeting participants really stressed that this was an important moment for the White House to be clear about their position."

Civil-society groups hope that their talk launches "a series of meetings of more dialogue between not just us but other stakeholders as well," the participant said. "The participants in the room seemed to recognize the pressure domestically and globally and the importance of the U.S. to really lead on this issue."

Bankston warned that requiring companies to weaken their encryption, whether through backdoors or other means, would "make us less secure, in terms of our cybersecurity, and also shoot our tech industry in the foot, in terms of its economic competitiveness."
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/whi...onse-petition/





MIT Invents Untraceable SMS Text Messaging System that is Even More Secure than Tor
Mary-Ann Russon

Computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new SMS text messaging system that is untraceable and apparently even more secure than the Tor anonymity network, in order to create truly anonymous communications.

In July, researchers from MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) succeeded in cracking a security vulnerability affecting the Tor anonymity network to make it possible to identify hidden servers with up to 88% accuracy.

The researchers did this by looking for patterns in the number of packets passing in each direction through Tor nodes, and they found that they could tell with 99% accuracy whether a circuit was for a regular web browsing request, an introduction point (which gives a user access to a hidden website) or a rendezvous point, which is used when another user wants to connect to the same hidden website at the same time as the first user.

Confusing would-be attackers with fake messages

Learning from this discovery, several researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new system that permits the exchange of text messages between two parties at roughly once a minute.

Their open-access paper, titled Vuvuzela: Scalable Private Messaging Resistant to Traffic Analysis, was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October. Unlike Tor, the Vuvuzela system provides a strong mathematical guarantee of user anonymity by drowning out any visible traffic patterns that could lead to identification of the parties through issuing lots of spurious information.

To make the system work, one user leaves a message for another user at a predefined location, such as a memory address on an internet-connected dead-drop server, while the other user retrieves the message. So for example, if there were three people using the system but only two of them were sending text messages to each other, it would look obvious that the two people were talking to each other, as the only traffic on the server would come from exchanges between the two people.

To hide this, the system makes all the users send out regular messages to the dead-drop server, whether they contain any information or not, so then the traffic pattern makes it look like there is traffic going through the server from multiple locations at all times.

Using three servers to disguise the messages even more

But just sending out regular spoof messages is not enough to confuse the bad guys. If an attacker managed to infiltrate the dead-drop server, the criminal would instantly be able to see which users were actually communicating and where the messages were being sent by looking to see which users were accessing which memory addresses.

So to make it even harder for attackers to infiltrate Vuvuzela, the system uses not one but three different servers. All the messages, both real and fake, are sent through the system wrapped in three layers of encryption.

The first server peels off the first layer of encryption on a message and then passes the message onto the second server, but the first server also deliberately mixes up the order of the messages so they get to the second server in a different order, and the second server does the same, so only the third server can see which are the real messages which need to go to the memory address so a user pick it up.

MIT says that statistically, as long as one of the three servers is not compromised the system still works to protect the messages.

"Tor operates under the assumption that there's not a global adversary that's paying attention to every single link in the world," said Nickolai Zeldovich, an associate professor of computer science and engineering, and co-leader of the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group at CSAIL.

"Maybe these days this is not as good of an assumption. Tor also assumes that no single bad guy controls a large number of nodes in their system. We're also now thinking, maybe there are people who can compromise half of your servers."
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techno...tor/ar-AAgc2TO





Donald Trump Wants to Close Up the Internet
Patrick Howell O'Neill

Hours after Donald Trump suggested the U.S. ban Muslims from entering the United States, the leading Republican presidential candidate said America should also consider “closing the Internet up in some way” to fight Islamic State terrorists in cyberspace.

#DonaldTrump advocates closing up the Internet 2 stop the process of thought/free speech. So Communist China-like. pic.twitter.com/hRab3xpVcK
— NotBuffytheVMPslayer (@NotBUFFY_VS) December 8, 2015

Trump mocked anyone who would object that his plan might violate the freedom of speech, saying “these are foolish people, we have a lot of foolish people.”

“We have to go see Bill Gates,” Trump said, to better understand the Internet and then possibly “close it up.”

Trump characterized the problem of Internet extremism by saying, “We’re losing a lot of people because of the Internet.”

The Internet has taken center stage in both the 2016 presidential race and the Obama administration’s current fight against ISIS. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton urged tech companies to “deny online space” to terrorists. Clinton then anticipated and waved away presumed First Amendment criticisms.

“We’re going to hear all the usual complaints,” she said on Monday, “you know, freedom of speech, et cetera. But if we truly are in a war against terrorism and we are truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow of foreign fighters, then we’ve got to shut off their means of communicating. It’s more complicated with some of what they do on encrypted apps, and I’m well aware of that, and that requires even more thinking about how to do it.”

The Obama administration spoke about cyberspace in a Sunday night speech from the Oval Office. The president said he would “urge high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder to use technology to escape from justice.”

While less explicit and extreme a statement than Trump’s, many observers took Obama’s statement to be about outlawing strong encryption.

Here's Trump's complete statement on his proposal to crack down on the Internet due to ISIS:

We have kids that are watching the Internet, and they want to be masterminds. And then you wonder why we lose all these kids, they want to be masterminds; they're young, they're impressionable, they want to join ISIS.

And we have our anchors—I think I've got 'em mostly stopped, have you noticed that, they don't say it as much—but they say, the 'young mastermind', oh he's brilliant. I don't think he's got a high IQ. In Paris, I called him the guy with the dirty, filthy hat. 'K? Not a smart guy, a dummy. A mastermind? Bing bing bing, starts shooting everybody.

The press has to be responsible; they're not being responsible. We're losing a lot of people because of the Internet. We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people who really understand what's happening and maybe, in some ways, closing that Internet up in some ways.

Somebody will say, 'Oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.' These are foolish people, we have a lot of foolish people. We've got to maybe do something with the Internet because they're recruiting by the thousands, they're leaving our country, and then when they come back, we take them back.

'Where were you?' 'I was fighting for ISIS.' 'Oh, come on back. Go home, enjoy yourself.' When they leave our country and they go to fight or go to ISIS, they never can come back.


Update 10:33pm CT, Dec. 7: Added complete quote of Donald Trump's statement on the Internet and theoretical ISIS recruits who return to the U.S.
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/tru...p-in-some-way/





Hillary Clinton Urges Silicon Valley to ‘Disrupt’ ISIS
David E. Sanger

Hillary Clinton said on Sunday that the Islamic State had become “the most effective recruiter in the world” and that the only solution was to engage American technology companies in blocking or taking down militant websites, videos and encrypted communications.

“You are going to hear all the familiar complaints: ‘freedom of speech,’ ” Mrs. Clinton said in an hourlong speech and question-and-answer session at the Saban Forum, an annual gathering at the Brookings Institution that focuses mostly on Israel’s security issues.

In a reference to Silicon Valley’s reverence for disruptive technologies, Mrs. Clinton said, “We need to put the great disrupters at work at disrupting ISIS,” an acronym used for the militant group.

It was the second time in two weeks that Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, had thrown herself into the brewing battle between Silicon Valley and the government over what steps should be taken to block the use of Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and a range of encrypted apps that are adopted by terrorist groups.

Mrs. Clinton’s comments echo recent White House calls for what would amount to a cease-fire with technology firms after the revelations by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, that the government had gotten inside the firm’s communications technology.

But Mrs. Clinton is also risking putting herself at odds with technology executives and entrepreneurs crucial to her campaign’s fund-raising. And in Iowa and New Hampshire, states important early in the campaign, there is still considerable suspicion of the government and its demands for greater access to daily electronic communications.

Mrs. Clinton used the forum to continue staking out a harder line on Iran than President Obama has in public. She repeatedly threatened to take what she called “harsh” steps at the first sign that Iran seeks to violate commitments it made in the July nuclear agreement, which sharply limits its ability to possess or produce nuclear fuel for the next 15 years.

She said there should be “no doubt in Tehran” that if the United States saw “any violations in the deal” or an effort to procure or develop nuclear weapons technology, “we will stop them,” including, she added, “taking military action.”

At one point, responding to a question, she referred to using the “nuclear option” against Iran — usually interpreted as using a nuclear weapon — before her attention was caught by a prominent member of the audience, Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court.

“Oh, the military option, thank you, Justice Breyer. He’s a careful listener,” Mrs. Clinton said, reiterating that she meant a military option to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. It was a rare moment: a sitting member of the court rescuing a political candidate from a mistaken comment.

Much of Mrs. Clinton’s speech was closely aligned with Mr. Obama’s recent arguments about confronting the Islamic State. She spoke of the need to make sure that anyone on a “no-fly” list also could not purchase a gun — a position several Republican candidates took issue with on Sunday — and to explicitly avoid blaming the American Muslim community for the acts of a small number of extremists.

“Declaring war on Islam, or demonizing the Muslim community, is not only counter to our values; it plays right into the hands of the terrorists,” she said.

Her critique of American technology companies was impassioned but vague on the specifics of what she was asking them to do. A senior campaign official noted that Facebook regularly deletes incendiary posts and has blocked the accounts of people believed associated with the Islamic State. But for most social media companies, keeping up with suspected radical postings — much less removing them — is a major challenge.

It is also a question with considerable First Amendment implications. Company executives say removing YouTube videos of beheadings is an easy call; removing critiques of the West, or calls for religious purity, is not.

Over the past year, technology firms have made clear they do not want to be in the position of ideological censors. And Mrs. Clinton herself was a major advocate, as secretary of state, of programs that expanded Internet access to get around the censorship of repressive societies, starting with China.

Encryption poses an even more difficult problem, and Mrs. Clinton appeared to be calling for discussion among the technology companies, intelligence agencies and law enforcement groups. But that discussion has been underway, in public and private, for nearly a year now.

She had strong words as well for America’s Arab allies, calling on them to crack down on the financing of ISIS and other extremist groups, and to think about military contributions far beyond what they are now committed to. “We will do our part, but it is their fight too, and they need to act like it is,” she said.

On Saturday, Secretary of State John Kerry, Mrs. Clinton’s successor, appeared in front of the same group and warned against allowing the Palestinian Authority to collapse. He argued that that would place Israel in the position of having to occupy and administer the West Bank, which Mr. Kerry just visited. He said that was not viable and would kill any hope of a two-state solution.

Mrs. Clinton did not discuss the Palestinian Authority’s future in her speech. But with some of the most right-wing members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet in mind, she said, “A one-state solution is no solution — it is a prescription for endless conflict.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/07/us...ban-forum.html





The Two Leading Presidential Candidates -- Clinton And Trump -- Are Both Mocking Free Speech On The Internet
Mike Masnick

Yesterday, we wrote about Hillary Clinton's absolutely terrible plan for undermining both encryption and free speech on the internet as a way to "deal" with ISIS. I left out the worst quote of all that she stated in the process, mockingly:

"You’re going to hear all of the usual complaints, you know, freedom of speech, et cetera..."

Free speech et cetera? That's handwaving it away. You can see the whole clip here, of the leading Democratic Presidential candidate who will almost certainly win the nomination:

Her full statement:

You’re going to hear all of the usual complaints, you know, freedom of speech, et cetera. But if we truly are in a war against terrorism and we are truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow of foreign fighters, then we’ve got to shut off their means of communicating. It’s more complicated with some of what they do on encrypted apps, and I’m well aware of that, and that requires even more thinking about how to do it.

Shut off their means of communicating? These tools are tools that everyone uses -- and, in fact, which Hillary Clinton herself did a tremendous amount of (good) work helping to spread around the globe as Secretary of State. And now she's trying to cut it all off?

And over on the other side of things, the leading Republican candidate, Donald Trump, basically said the exact same thing on Monday, just in a more Trump fashion.

We're losing a lot of people because of the internet. We have to do something. We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's happening. We have to talk to them, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, 'Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.' These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people. We have a lot foolish people.

You can see that one here:

#DonaldTrump advocates closing up the Internet 2 stop the process of thought/free speech. So Communist China-like. pic.twitter.com/hRab3xpVcK
— NotBuffytheVMPslayer (@NotBUFFY_VS) December 8, 2015

Think about this for a second. You have the two leading Presidential candidates -- one from each party -- each advocating that we shut down entire parts of the internet and censor speech, because bad people can use the internet just like good people. And both of them flat out say that, sure, some people will complain about free speech, but they both dismiss such complaints mockingly with nothing more than a suggestion that you can't take anyone who cries "free speech" seriously.

I usually laugh off people who get deeply scared about one person or another winning the Presidency, as they usually overestimate how much power the President really has. But, either I'm suddenly turning into an old cranky guy, or we're facing one hell of a scary Presidential election next year where the major candidates are not just bad, but downright scary. It's become pretty cliche to argue "that's what the terrorists want" in response to various kneejerk reactions by politicians, but really, does anyone not think that certain people are getting a kick out of US politicians shoving each other aside to belittle one of the most cherished rights that is a key principle of our country -- the First Amendment -- at the first opportunity?
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...internet.shtml





Google’s Chairman Wants Algorithms to Censor the Internet for Hate Speech
Hanna Kozlowska

In an op-ed for The New York Times (paywall), Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, inserted himself directly into the middle of a heated debate about the line between fighting terrorism’s online reach and internet censorship.

“It’s our responsibility to demonstrate that stability and free expression go hand in hand,” he writes. “We should build tools to help de-escalate tensions on social media—sort of like spell-checkers, but for hate and harassment.”

His words came just after Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, called on Silicon Valley to “disrupt ISIL” last weekend in Washington DC. Clinton said it is crucial to “deprive jihadists of virtual territory” by shutting off their means of communication.

With the rapid rise of ISIL and its sophisticated online recruitment and propaganda efforts, tech companies have been struggling with finding the balance between preventing terrorists from disseminating their message and being perceived as government tools for controlling the internet. Schmidt underlined that tech platforms should target terrorists’ social media accounts and remove video content—something that Google, Facebook, and Twitter already strive to do.

Schmidt did not provide details about his proposed “spell-checkers” for hate, but his suggestion may prove difficult to realize.

The debate about free speech versus hate speech is already a very controversial one, both in the United States where free speech is protected by the constitution, and elsewhere. People can barely agree on the definition of hate speech, so building algorithms to balance that fine line would be a tall order.

There are some other, less complicated ideas out there for fighting terrorists online. Donald Trump offered at a rally in South Carolina that maybe we should just shut down the internet. Trump said:

We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet. We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.
http://qz.com/568580/googles-chairma...r-hate-speech/





Terrorists Mock Bids to End Use of Social Media
Nicole Perlroth and Mike Isaac

In the hours after 14 people were killed in San Bernardino, Calif., a familiar voice celebrated the attacks on Twitter: “California, we have already arrived with our soldiers. Decide how to be your end, with knife or bomb.”

That comment was posted from the 335th Twitter account of a pro-Islamic State group that calls itself Asawitiri Media. Twitter has repeatedly tried to cut off the authors of the account, most recently known to its thousands of followers as @TurMedia335, @TurMedia334 and @TurMedia333.

As soon as Twitter suspends one account, a new one is created. After the group’s 99th account was suspended, it taunted Twitter by creating @IslamicState100, posting images of birthday candles, cake, trophies and fireworks.

Politicians and even some technologists say that account, and hundreds just like it, show how Silicon Valley’s efforts to crack down on the use by terrorists of social media have been toothless. And Washington is using the latest terrorist attacks to renew its calls for Silicon Valley to roll back the encryption in their products. On Sunday, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, called on tech companies to become more aggressive.

“Resolve means depriving jihadists of virtual territory, just as we work to deprive them of actual territory,” she told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “They are using websites, social media, chat rooms and other platforms to celebrate beheadings, recruit future terrorists and call for attacks. We should work with host companies to shut them down.”

But as the 335 versions of the pro-Islamic State Twitter account demonstrate, technology companies are dealing with a tenacious adversary. Also, when it comes to terrorists using encryption technologies to hide their communications — a frequent complaint of law enforcement — technology companies are quick to point out that of the top five encryption apps recommended by the Islamic State, none are American-made.

Indeed, members of the Islamic State used technology created by a company in Germany to claim credit for last month’s attacks in Paris, and text messages discovered on one of the attackers’ phones suggested that the attackers were not even using encryption.

Still, while the tech industry cannot block all terror content on the web, people who have battled other online threats say it could be doing more. They point to technology that has successfully eradicated large swaths of child pornography on the web, or even older tools for spotting computer viruses, as potential guideposts for blocking terror-related content.

“When Twitter says, ‘We can’t do this,’ I don’t believe that,” said Hany Farid, chairman of the computer science department at Dartmouth College, who co-developed the child pornography tracking system with Microsoft. The actual task of identifying child pornography is managed by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Mr. Farid said the same technology could be applied to terror content, so long as companies were motivated to do so. “There’s no fundamental technology or engineering limitation,” he said. “This is a business or policy decision. Unless the companies have decided that they just can’t be bothered.”

The 335 pro-Islamic State accounts certainly did not escape the notice of executives at Twitter after it carried simultaneous death threats against Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo, Twitter’s current and former chief executives. And its recent naming convention — adding one digit to a new account after the last one is suspended — does not seem as if it would require artificial intelligence to spot.

Asawitiri Media also uses the same photo of a bearded man’s face over and over again, said Rita Katz, the director of SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks terrorists’ communications.

“The bottom line is that Twitter is not doing enough,” Ms. Katz said. “With the technology Twitter has, they can immediately stop these accounts, but they have done nothing to stop the dissemination and recruitment of lone wolf terrorists.”

In response, Twitter said it actively investigated potential terrorist threats. “Violent threats and the promotion of terrorism deserve no place on Twitter, and our rules make that clear,” a Twitter spokesman said. “We have teams around the world actively investigating reports of rule violations, and they work with law enforcement entities around the world when appropriate.”

The White House on Monday also urged the technology industry to do more. “There should be common ground the government and tech can find to address this concern and make sure the American people are safe,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, echoing comments made earlier by President Obama.

Conversations between government officials and tech companies have been going on for more than a year, but since the mass shootings in San Bernardino and Paris, “there has been a reintensified or reinvigorated engagement,” according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

But some who advocate free speech argue that relying on companies like Twitter and Facebook to be more aggressive arbiters of what constitutes free speech puts those companies in a difficult spot.

“We don’t believe that law enforcement should delegate their responsibilities to private enterprise,” said David Greene, director for civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Especially ones that haven’t sought out that role.”

In some cases, Internet companies have been criticized for not taking down websites that belong to the Islamic State, only to have it discovered later that the sites were critical of it. Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare, a San Francisco company, said that in one case Internet activists criticized his company for keeping several Islamic State websites online when, in fact, the sites in question were pro-Kurdish.

“It’s particularly risky to take a bunch of tech companies that are not certified policy experts and insert them into Middle East politics,” Mr. Prince said.

Pulling all terror-related content is not always preferred by law enforcement. In several cases, tech executives say, they have been asked to keep terror-related content online so that law enforcement agents can monitor terrorist networks or because the content was created by law enforcement agents to lure terrorists into divulging information.

The issue is thornier for companies like Facebook, in which the bulk of posts are meant to be private. “Do you want Facebook looking at over 1.5 billion people’s posts?” said Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor in technology policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “And if so, then for what?”

Facebook primarily relies on user reports to ferret out terrorist accounts, but recently it has gone further. If the company is informed of specific terrorist activity, Facebook will take down the account as well as others similar to the one reported.

Last week, it went a step further. Tashfeen Malik, one of two terrorists involved in the San Bernardino attacks, posted her public allegiance to ISIS on Facebook just minutes before the shootings occurred on Wednesday. The post did not initiate any user reports to Facebook, and until now it had been unclear how the authorities were able to tie Ms. Malik to the post.

According to law enforcement officials, the Facebook account that Ms. Malik used was linked to an email account she had used for many years. Facebook found the posting, reported it to the F.B.I., and removed it on Thursday.

“We work aggressively to ensure that we do not have terrorists or terror groups using the site, and we also remove any content that praises or supports terrorism,” said Monika Bickert, head of global product policy at Facebook.

A spokeswoman for YouTube said that it had policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content meant to incite violence and that it quickly removed those videos when flagged by users.

A trickier issue is presented by the encryption deployed by Apple, Facebook, Google and a range of smaller services that thwart law enforcement’s ability to access a target’s communications, even with a court order.

Companies say that weakening the encryption in their products would only make regular users more vulnerable to cybertheft and set a bad precedent for other countries to follow. What’s more, they note, there are plenty of encryption options not made by American companies and many of them are free.

Addressing the topic on Monday, the White House urged Silicon Valley to find a compromise.

“We are going to resist the urge to trample a bunch of civil liberties,” Mr. Earnest said in the White House briefing. But he added, “We don’t want terrorists to have a safe haven in cyberspace.”

Nicole Perlroth reported from San Francisco and Mike Isaac from New York. Cecilia Kang and Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/te...ial-media.html





Cyber Bill's Final Language Likely to Anger Privacy Advocates
Cory Bennett

Digital rights advocates are in an uproar as the final text of a major cybersecurity bill appears to lack some of the privacy community's favored clauses.

In the last few weeks, House and Senate negotiators have been working unofficially to reach a compromise between multiple versions of a cyber bill that would encourage businesses to share more data on hacking threats with the government.

The Senate passed its bill in October, while the House passed two complementary bills in April. In recent days, the two sides have ramped up talks on merging the bills in the hopes of having the final text on President Obama’s desk by the end of the year.
It’s believed an official conference could begin this week.

And it now appears the final language is unlikely to include notable privacy provisions that digital rights and civil liberties groups insist are necessary to reduce the odds the bill enables greater government surveillance.

Many industry groups, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers and even the White House have insisted the cyber bill is a necessary first step to better understanding and thwarting the cyberattacks that have plagued the country in recent years.

But many tech companies, technologists and privacy advocates argue the measure would simply shuttle more personal data on Americans to the National Security Agency (NSA), just months after Congress voted to rein in its surveillance programs. They had pushed for some late alterations they said would mitigate the bill’s potential damage.

The cyber bill’s final text may confirm opponents’ worst fears, according to multiple people both on and off Capitol Hill with knowledge of the negotiations.

The Senate’s recently passed bill, known as the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), is expected to serve as the basis for the finished language. The compromise text will also likely include elements from a bill that originated in the House Intelligence Committee, observers said.

This completed product would mostly sideline the privacy advocate-preferred bill from the House Homeland Security Committee. They believe the Homeland Security bill includes the strongest provisions to protect people’s sensitive data from falling into the NSA's hands.

Specifically, the Homeland Security bill would give the greatest role to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for collecting cyber threat data from the private sector and disseminating it throughout the government.

It’s believed the DHS is best suited to scrub data sets of personal information.

The realization that the Intelligence Committee offerings would dominate the completed bill has sent some privacy groups into an 11th-hour frenzy.

“We’ve just learned that the Intelligence Committees are trying to pull a fast one,” Nathan White, senior legislative manager at digital rights advocate Access, said in a recent email to supporters. “They’ve been negotiating in secret and came up with a Frankenstein bill — that has some of the worst parts from both the House and the Senate versions.”

The group is trying to pressure Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas), a co-sponsor of his committee’s bill, to take a stand.

But several people tracking the negotiations believe McCaul is under significant pressure from House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and other congressional leaders to not oppose the compromise text.

They said lawmakers are aiming to vote on the final cyber bill as part of an omnibus budget deal that is expected before the end of the year.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecur...vacy-advocates





Stop the "Cyber" Bills

It’s not information sharing—it's surveillance.

Don't let Congress fool you: cybersecurity bills aren't about "information sharing," they're about surveillance.

This year the House and Senate passed CISPA-like "information sharing" bills to stop computer security threats. But the bills—like the Senate Intelligence Committee's "Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act"(CISA) and House Intelligence Committee's Protecting Cyber Networks Act—grant companies broad legal immunity to spy on users and share that information with the NSA.

The bills ignore reality: experts can already share technical information to stop threats without sharing unrelated personal information. And some experts even say the bills may not help computer security.

Right now the Senate and House are reconciling the differences of the bills for a final passage this week. That's why it's important to tweet to one of the lead negotiators—Rep. Mike McCaul of the Homeland Security Committee—and ask him to stand up for privacy. Will you join us?
https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-cyber-bills





Attorney General Lynch Chides European Decisions to Restrict Data Sharing
Michael Holden

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch warned on Wednesday that a planned European Union data protection law could undermine efforts to thwart terrorist attacks by restricting transatlantic information sharing.

The United States and European Union countries are discussing ways to improve the speed and scope of sharing data in the wake of deadly militant attacks on Paris, California and a Russian passenger plane.

"No nation can fight terrorism alone," Lynch said in a speech at London's Chatham House think tank.

"Terrorists, like other criminals, count on the difficulties that law enforcement agencies have in sharing information across borders, difficulties that are magnified now that electronic information may be stored in many different countries."

Lynch singled out a planned EU-wide data protection law for particular criticism.

"It is certainly highly concerning to us that data privacy legislation advancing in the European Parliament might further restrict transatlantic information sharing," she said.

She said such a step "ignores the critical need for that information sharing to fight terrorism and transnational crime, but also overlooks the important steps forward that the Obama administration and Congress have taken to protect privacy."

Members of the European Parliament and national governments are in final negotiations to find an agreement on a new EU-wide data protection law that would set stricter conditions on how companies use Europeans’ data and transfer it outside the 28-member bloc.

Lynch also criticized a decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) to strike down the so called Safe Harbor deal that allowed thousands of companies to transfer personal data easily from Europe to the United States.

"It was particularly disappointing that the European Court of Justice - in a case based on inaccurate and outdated media reports - recently struck down the Safe Harbor Agreement," Lynch said.

Lynch said the decision overlooked the efforts of Obama's administration to ensure the protection of civil liberties and privacy.

The United States has crafted information sharing agreements with 45 partners to identify and track suspected terrorists, a partnership that has given Interpol 4,000 profiles of foreign fighters, Lynch said.

"No nation can exist in a bubble of isolation; no country can imagine themselves immune from world events; and the security of each state increasingly depends on the security of all states," she said, before quoting English poet John Donne.

"The words of four centuries past ring ever true today, 'no man is an island entire of itself.'"

(Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-usa...0TS0UV20151209





Germany Wants to Become Encryption Site Number One

In November, the Interior Minister of Germany, Thomas De Maizière, signed a charta to strengthen confidential communication online. This charta states that is supports and promotes strong end-to-end encryption. While around the world surveillance measures are on the rise, Germany wants to become 'Encryption Site Number One'.

This is great news for Tutanota, and we welcome the initiative taken by the German government. It is good to see that there are politicians who understand the importance of our right to privacy.

End-to-end encryption should become the standard

The 'Charta for Strengthening Confidential Communication' declares that it supports easy-to-use encryption. Translated to English it reads: “We support more and better encryption. We want to become the encryption site number 1 in the world. For this, encryption should become a standard for the masses in their private communication.”

This will not only strengthen Germany as a good place for security companies like our secure email service Tutanota, but it is also an important signal that German politicians are committed to protecting their citizens' right to privacy.
Lesson learned: Never let surveillance prevail over freedom

25 years ago, the surveillance state GDR came to an end with the unification of Eastern and Western Germany. With it one of the most rigorous monitoring of the entire population came to an end. We as Germans have learned our lesson.

We know how difficult it can be to live under total surveillance. We never want a system like this to monitor its own citizens 24/7 ever again. We will do everything to fight for our right to privacy. We want freedom to prevail.

Encryption is important to achieve privacy

Encryption is essential if you want to keep your private communication truly private. Unfortunately, the Internet with all its advantages has made it incredibly easy to monitor the entire communication – emails, text messages, phone calls. The only solution is strong end-to-end encryption.

That's why it is so important that German politicians support this Charta and take a stand in favor of encryption. While the world turns on more and more surveillance methods, recently accelerated by the horrible terrorist attacks in Paris, Germany will become a safe haven for security companies that want to offer true privacy to their users. We are very thankful for that, and we hope that politicians will remain true to their words.

If you haven't already, get your own free, encrypted mailbox to stop the surveillance of your private communication.
https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/germany-encryption-site





There is No Internet Censorship in China, Says China’s Top Censor
Vivienne Zeng

A senior Chinese official known as the “gatekeeper” of the country’s internet has denied that the country censors online information.

Lu Wei, chief of the State Internet Information Office, said China does not censor but “manages” internet content in Zhejiang on Wednesday.

Lu was answering a CNN reporter’s question in a press conference ahead of the Second World Internet Conference to be held in Zhejiang’s famous water town Wuzhen next week.

“It is a misuse of words if you say ‘content censorship.’ But no censorship does not mean there is no management. The Chinese government learnt how to manage the internet from Western developed countries, we have not learnt enough yet,” Lu said, according to scripts published by Xinhua news agency.

Lu went on to say the Chinese government blocks some foreign websites because it “has the right to choose friends.”

“As for who comes to my home, indeed I have to choose [to make sure] those who come are friends. We don’t welcome those who earn China’s money, take China’s market, and then slander China.”

Lu is known for his outspoken character and his talks about protecting China’s “internet sovereignty.” The 55-year-old was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world this year for his power to decide what 650 million Chinese netizens are allowed to see. The New York Times called him “the gatekeeper of the Chinese internet.”

Today I met President Xi Jinping of China at the 8th annual US-China Internet Industry Forum in Seattle. The Forum is an…

Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, September 23, 2015


In September, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself shaking hands with visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping in Seattle. Lu was seen standing next to the pair, wearing a big smile.

Under Xi’s rule, China’s internet freedom has decreased continuously since 2012, according to research by US-funded group Freedom House. In 2015, China came last of 65 nations on the group’s internet freedom ranking.

However, Lu denied that China’s internet has increasingly becoming an intranet: “China’s open door will never be closed, we are open to the world’s internet companies. As long as [companies] do not harm China’s national interests, do no harm the interests of Chinese consumers, we welcome [them] to develop in China.”
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2015/12/0...as-top-censor/





FBI Admits it Uses Stingrays, Zero-Day Exploits

The "queen of domestic surveillance" inches closer to hot-button topics.
Dan Goodin

The head of the FBI's science and technology division has admitted what no other agency official has acknowledged before—the FBI sometimes exploits zero-day vulnerabilities to catch bad guys.

The admission came in a profile published Tuesday of Amy Hess, the FBI's executive assistant director for science and technology who oversees the bureau's Operational Technology Division. Besides touching on the use of zero-days—that is, attack code that exploits vulnerabilities that remain unpatched, and in most cases are unknown by the company or organization that designs the product—Tuesday's Washington Post article also makes passing mention of another hot-button controversy: the FBI's use of stingrays. As reporter Ellen Nakashima wrote:

One area of controversy is the bureau’s use of cell site simulators, or Stingrays, which mimic cellphone towers to elicit signals from cellphones in an area, including from innocent bystanders. The FBI has long been secretive about the tool’s use, and has even made state and local law enforcement sign nondisclosure agreements.

Though the agreements typically state that the local agency “will not# . . . disclose any information concerning” the equipment, Hess insists that the FBI has never imposed a gag on local police. For the record, she said, the bureau does not object to revealing the use of the device. It’s the “engineering schematics,” details on exactly how the tool works, that the FBI wants shielded, she said.

Another group that remains shrouded is OTD’s Remote Operations Unit. There, technicians with a warrant hack computers to identify suspects. Euphemistically called “network investigative techniques,” that activity has stirred concerns similar to those raised with the use of Stingrays.

For one thing, the warrant applications do not describe the technique’s use in detail. So judges may not really understand what they are authorizing. Hess said that agents can describe the process more fully to a judge in closed chambers. That’s if the judge knows to ask.

Privacy advocates also worry that to carry out its hacks, the FBI is using “zero-day” exploits that take advantage of software flaws that have not been disclosed to the software maker. That practice makes consumers who use the software vulnerable, they argue.

Hess acknowledged that the bureau uses zero-days—the first time an official has done so. She said the trade-off is one the bureau wrestles with. “What is the greater good—to be able to identify a person who is threatening public safety?” Or to alert software makers to bugs that, if unpatched, could leave consumers vulnerable?

“How do we balance that?” she said. “That is a constant challenge for us.”

She added that hacking computers is not a favored FBI technique. “It’s frail,” she said. As soon as a tech firm updates its software, the tool vanishes. “It clearly is not reliable” in the way a traditional wiretap is, she said.


The Post also includes counterpoint from privacy advocate and American Civil Liberties Union Principal Technologist Christopher Soghoian. He referred to Hess as the "queen of domestic surveillance" and opines: "if it's high-tech and creepy, it's happening in the Operational Technology Division."

The FBI's secrecy surrounding stingrays has been well documented. And the controversy over the use of zero-days by governments has also generated its share of headlines. Both issues are controversial, in part because they have the potential to harm vast numbers of people who aren't suspected of committing any crime. That's because stingrays generally intercept all cell phone communications in a given area, not just those of a drug or kidnapping suspect. Paying large sums of money to buy zero-days, meanwhile, creates powerful incentives for governments to keep the underlying vulnerabilities secret. FBI officials have long attempted to distance themselves from such topics. Today, they inched slightly closer.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...-day-exploits/





New Software Watches for License Plates, Turning You Into Little Brother

How long until a license plate reader data blackmail-style website appears?
Cyrus Farivar

We now live in a world where if you have an IP-enabled security camera, you can download some free, open-source software from GitHub and boom—you have a fully functional automated license plate reader (ALPR, or LPR).

Welcome to the sousveillance state: the technology that was once was just the purview of government contractors a few years ago could now be on your own street soon.

For years now, specialized LPR cameras have been used mounted in fixed locations or on police cars. These devices scan passing license plates using optical character recognition technology, checking each plate against a "hot list" of stolen or wanted vehicles. The devices can read up to 60 plates per second and typically record the date, time, and GPS location of any plates—hot or not.

With this new open-source software, anyone can freely and easily create their own hot list.

For the last six months, the two-man team behind OpenALPR has built this software and given it away for free, largely as a way to draw attention to their other paid services: a cloud-based $50 per camera per month solution that includes "high-speed processing" and "priority tech support." The company also offers a $1,000 per camera per month "on-premises" version that integrates with an existing (usually government) network that has qualms about outsourcing data storage.

OpenALPR notes its software "will work with any camera that supports MJPEG streams. This includes visible-light and infrared cameras. The camera and optics should be configured such that the license plates are clearly legible in the video stream."

Matt Hill, OpenALPR’s founder, told Ars that this is a good way to level the playing field and mitigate the need for long-term retention.

"I’m a big privacy advocate as well—now you’ve got LPR just in the hands of the government, which isn’t a good thing. This brings costs down," he said.

On the government side, there have been incidents where police-owned LPR misread and led to dangerous confrontations. Some cities have mounted such cameras at their city borders, monitoring who comes in and out (case in point: the wealthy city of Piedmont, California, which is totally surrounded by Oakland). And again, the data associated with LPRs (plate, date, time, location) is often retained for months or years.

As the nation’s largest LPR private data collection company—Vigilant Solutions—has argued, automatically collecting license plates in public is fully within the bounds of the law. After all, drivers do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy over their publicly-visible plate number while driving down public roads.

As a result, privacy advocates say, there’s not much to stop someone who wanted to use OpenALPR and compile their own hot list for cars passing in front of their home. An enterprising person could even use a car-mounted camera and create a mobile plate hunting device along the lines of what many police agencies already use.

Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that she had never heard of something like this.

"While a handful of states have passed laws explicitly restricting private citizens and companies from using ALPR technology, outside of those states, there is not much in the law that would prevent someone from using the technology unless its use rises to the level of stalking or harassment," she e-mailed Ars. "License plates are exposed to public view, and ALPR companies like Vigilant consistently argue they have a First Amendment right to photograph plates and retain the data they collect."

Mike Katz-Lacabe, a San Leandro, Calif.-based privacy activist, concurred. His local police department captured a photo of him and his daughters in their own driveway in 2009.

"Law enforcement has always argued that this technology does not violate privacy because you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place," he e-mailed. "If someone takes an open source ALPR in a car and parks it outside the local police department, local sheriff’s office, etc., will they keep putting forward that same argument? What if that information, complete with photos of the driver and vehicle, are posted on a public web site?"

Hill added that while his young company isn’t getting immediately rich, having only brought in less than $500,000 in revenue so far, he’s gotten a lot of interest from small business that are interested in perimeter security.

"Right now the big government agencies, they spend so much on these cameras that they want to catch the bad guys, but they want to get a ton of value out of them," he said. "Now they have a list of 100 bad guys, and they find one, and then I think everybody likes that—they think that we want to save this data. That’s kind of dangerous. Whereas if the price of these cameras was 10 times cheaper, that need [for long-term retention] isn’t there. I think you don’t even need retention if you have adequate coverage. I think people are concerned about the data being only exclusive to government. Having the LPRs in the hands of private individuals is not a bad thing."
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...-own-hot-list/





Phase Out Fossil Fuels to Limit Temperatures, a Few CEOs Say

Heads of companies including Unilever and Virgin Group urged a Paris summit on Sunday to get on track to limit temperature rises to the lowest possible level by setting a goal of phasing out fossil fuel use by 2050.

In an unusual alliance spanning companies and civil society, the "B Team" is an extreme in the business world by arguing that radical measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions can promote, rather than hinder, growth, jobs and profits.

Last month, they called on the Paris summit, held on Nov. 30-Dec. 11, to set a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to "net zero" by 2050, by when any emissions would be offset, for instance by planting trees that soak up greenhouse gases as they grow.

On Sunday, members of the team said such a goal - highly unlikely to be agreed in Paris because most governments are far less ambitious - would be the best chance to limit rising temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).

The overriding U.N. goal is to limit temperature rises to 2 degrees (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, but more than 100 developing nations including small island states at risk from rising seas want a ceiling of 1.5 degrees.

"We are pushing definitely for 2 Celsius, with the door open for 1.5," Keith Tuffley, CEO of the B Team, told reporters.

"Economic growth and action on climate can go hand-in-hand," said Poul Polman, chief executive of consumer goods maker Unilever.

They say they are not just burnishing their green credentials, but also changing corporate plans. Last month, Unilever said it would switch to using only renewable energy by 2030 and stop using energy from coal by 2020.

Richard Branson, head of Virgin, said the B Team would continue calling for tough action even if the Paris summit falls short of strong action. "It would be irresponsible not to act," he said.

Other members of the B Team include David Crane, head of NRG Energy and Zhang Yue, chairman of BROAD Group, and Sharan Burrow, head of the International Trade Union Confederation.

She said: "For workers it's very simple. There are no jobs on a dead planet".

(Reporting By Alister Doyle; Editing by Digby Lidstone)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-cli...0TP0LO20151206





Stakes are High in Hunt for Bitcoin's 'Messiah'
Jeremy Wagstaff

The stakes are high in the hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto, the person or people behind bitcoin, not just for the journalist who gets it right first, but also for the cryptocurrency itself.

An Australian entrepreneur and academic, Craig Steven Wright, is the latest candidate, outed in articles by Wired magazine and technology news website Gizmodo hours before his home and office in Sydney were searched by police.

Both articles said investigations based on leaked emails, documents and web archives pointed strongly to Wright being "Nakamoto". "Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he's a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did," said Wired.

But the search has already tripped up several journalists, most famously Newsweek's Leah McGrath Goodman, who identified Japanese American Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto in March 2014 as bitcoin's creator.

Dorian Nakamoto denied it - as has nearly everyone else alleged to be the mastermind credited with writing the paper, protocol and software in 2008 that gave rise to bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology.

Unmasking the "real" Nakamoto would be significant both for the future development of bitcoin and, potentially, the currency's market value.

While any changes to the bitcoin protocol can only be implemented by consensus, the proven founder of the cryptocurrency could hold considerable sway.

"Decision-making power doesn't rest with any individual, but Nakamoto is such a mythical figure, if he appears he could become a sort of messiah to the community," said Roberto Capodieci, a Singapore-based entrepreneur focussing on the blockchain.

ELECTRONIC MINERS

Persuading that community is not easy: while the system is decentralised by design, a cluster of so-called bitcoin miners based in China are key, Antony Lewis, a Singapore-based bitcoin consultant, said.

Unlike traditional currency, bitcoins are not distributed by a central bank or backed by physical assets such as gold, but are "mined" using computers to calculate increasingly complex algorithmic formulas.

Miners run pools of computers that process transactions and create new bitcoins, an energy intensive business that has frozen out all but a handful of players.

The group effectively scuttled a recent effort by one key bitcoin thinker to make processing simpler and cheaper, Lewis said.

David Moskowitz, Singapore-based founder of start-up Bitcoin Brokerage, said knowing who Nakamoto was would be significant "because people are looking for a core voice behind (bitcoin). It would help us understand what Satoshi thought".

Then there's the fact that bitcoin researchers believe he or she may be holding up to 1 million bitcoins, which if sold today would fetch $414 million (£274.6 million).

If Nakamoto chose to sell out, or even hinted that he might, that would push the price down, reducing the incentive to mine which might in turn provoke a steeper fall in the currency, Lewis said.

On the other hand, Nakamoto could help reduce uncertainty by reassuring bitcoin users he was not going to sell his holdings in one go or, more drastically, do something called "burning" — publicly deleting the coin by sending them to a bitcoin address to which he or she did not have the key.

"It would be like throwing the money into the bottom of the sea, and reduces the uncertainty of dumping onto the market," said Lewis.

"MR BITCOIN"

Wright has not commented publicly on the Wired and Gizmodo reports, and Reuters attempts to contact him using various listed email addresses were unsuccessful.

Fellow tenants at the north Sydney office building listed as the address of one of his companies described him as "an outgoing guy", who they nicknamed "Mr Bitcoin" because he had once offered to pay for some work in the currency.

And even if Wright did admit to being Nakamoto, he would still have to prove it.

That could be done by announcing he would move some of the bitcoin believed to belong to him, and then doing so, or signing a message with one of the encryption keys used in emails known to have been written by Nakamoto when bitcoin first appeared.

Wright has not been a prominent member of the bitcoin community, but he has appeared at several gatherings in the past year or two.

Moskowitz, who met him at a Singapore conference this year, said he was interesting and pleasant to talk to. "He's clearly very intelligent and fits the profile," he said. "But that doesn't necessarily mean he is Nakamoto."

Hints as to Wright's own feelings on unmasking Nakamoto can be found on Quora, a website where users answer questions posed by other users and vote for the best answer.

In September someone with his name, position and profile picture "upvoted" another Quora user's comment that "as a currency that is meant to be 'for the people, by the people', it is probably smart that no one knows who exactly started this coin. It is perfect that Satoshi Nakamoto founded it and vanished."

(Reporting By Jeremy Wagstaff; Additional reporting by Colin Packham in Sydney; Editing by Alex Richardson)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-aus...0TS1H620151209





Australian Police Raid Sydney Home of Reported Bitcoin Creator
Byron Kaye and Colin Packham

Australian police raided the Sydney home and office on Wednesday of a man named by Wired magazine as the probable creator of bitcoin and holder of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the cryptocurrency, Reuters witnesses said.

More than a dozen federal police officers entered a house registered on the electoral roll to Craig Steven Wright, whom Wired outed as the likely real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous figure that first released bitcoin's code in 2009.

Locksmiths broke open the door of the property, in a suburb on Sydney's north shore. When asked what they were doing, one officer told a Reuters reporter they were "clearing the house".

A reporter who approached an office listed as the location of two of Wright's registered businesses, DeMorgan Ltd and Panopticrypt Pty Ltd, in another Sydney suburb, was turned away by police with one officer saying: "There's an operation going on at the moment, I can't answer any questions." Several police officers could be seen speaking with workers inside.

The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto has long been a mystery that journalists and bitcoin enthusiasts have tried to unravel.

The police raids in Australia came hours after Wired magazine and technology website Gizmodo published articles saying that their investigations showed Wright, an entrepreneur and academic, was most probably the secretive bitcoin creator.

Wright is the chief executive of Australian-registered DeMorgan Ltd, which he describes on his Linkedin page as "a pre-IPO Australian listed company focused on alternative currency".

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) said in a statement that the officers' "presence at Mr. Wright's property is not associated with the media reporting overnight about bitcoins".

The AFP referred all inquiries about the raids to the Australian Tax Office, which said it could not comment on "any individual's or entity's tax affairs" due to legal confidentiality.

Emails to various addresses listed for Wright did not receive a reply.

The Wired and Gizmodo investigations were based on leaked emails, documents and web archives, including what was said to be a transcript of a meeting between Wright and Australian tax officials.

"Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he's a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did," Wired said.

Reuters could not independently verify the authenticity of the documents and transcripts quoted in the reports.

POWERFUL COMPUTERS

At Wright's rented home, a modest brick house in the leafy middle class suburb of Gordon, three police workers wearing white gloves could be seen searching the garage, which contained gym equipment.

A man who identified himself as the owner of the house, Garry Hayres, told Reuters that Wright and his family had lived there for a year, and were due to move out on Dec. 22 to move to Britain.

Hayres said that Wright had a "substantial computer system set-up" and had attached a "three-phase" power system to the back of the house for extra power.

Police personnel at Wright's office in nearby Ryde wore shirts tagged "Computer Forensics". A fellow business tenant at the building, who declined to be named, said Wright had not been seen there in the past week.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym of the person or group of people who authored the paper, protocol and software that gave rise to bitcoin.

The New York Times, Newsweek and other publications have guessed at Nakamoto's real identity, but none has proved conclusive.

Newsweek identified a Japanese-American called Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto in March 2014, but he has steadfastly denied being the author of cryptocurrency.

Uncovering Nakamoto's real identity would be significant, not just to solving a long-standing riddle, but for the future of the world's most commonly used virtual currency.

Unlike traditional currency, bitcoins are not distributed by a central bank or backed by physical assets like gold, but are "mined" by users who use computers to calculate increasingly complex algorithmic formulas.

As an early miner of bitcoins, Nakamoto is also sitting on about 1 million bitcoins, worth more than $400 million at present exchange rates, according to bitcoin expert Sergio Demian Lerner.

The treatment of bitcoin for tax purposes in Australia has been the subject of considerable debate. The ATO ruled in December 2014 that cryptocurrency should be considered an asset, rather than a currency, for capital gains tax purposes.

Australia's major banks announced in September they were closing accounts of bitcoin companies, forcing at least 13 digital currency providers out of business in response to tougher rules on money laundering and terrorism financing.

A Reuters investigation in October found that Australian businesses were turning their backs on bitcoin as the banks' move accelerated a trend by mainstream businesses to drop the currency.

(Additional reporting by Jeremy Wagstaff in SINGAPORE; Writing by Jane Wardell; Editing by Alex Richardson)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-aus...0TS0SY20151209

















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