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Old 06-05-15, 08:23 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 9th, '15

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"I watched last night’s fight by just browsing through different Periscope streams. This kind of live-piracy is going to be hard if not impossible to regulate." – Shelly Palmer


"Such expansive development of government repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans. We would expect such a momentous decision to be preceded by substantial debate, and expressed in unmistakable language. There is no evidence of such a debate." – 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Gerard Lynch






































May 9th, 2015




The Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, Torrentz And Other File Sharing Sites Snub Movie Studios 24 Hour Shutdown Threat
James Geddes

The Motion Picture Association, or MPA, has contacted top torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrentz, Torrentz and others and given them 24 hours to shutdown under threat of possible legal action.

The Motion Picture Association, the European branch of the American MPAA, a consortium of the six largest movie studios, (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures; Paramount Pictures Corporation; Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.; Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation; Universal City Studios LLC; and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.), has taken a new step in its attempts to stop illegal file sharing by users of torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents.

Rather than take the more indirect approach it has been favoring, which involves contacting ISPs who are then directed to warn and potentially punish offenders from infringing ISP addresses, or search engines such as Google who are directed to remove listings, the MPA is emailing a large number of file sharing sites and threatening to "pursue all remedies available", which includes legal action, if they do not shut down the claimed illegal activities in 24 hours.

The emails come from the MPA's Vice-President Global Content Protection, Internet Operations, Jan van Voorn, and read in part, "This Notice requires you to immediately (within 24 hours) take effective measures to end and prevent further copyright infringement. All opportunities provided by the Website to download, stream or otherwise obtain access to the Entertainment Content should be disabled permanently."

It doesn't appear as if the sites are taking the threat seriously however, as all major torrent and file sharing sites are still up and running, with no signs of any shutdown imminent. One small linking site, micromkv.com, which is not well known or frequently visited, has apparently shut down as a result of the notice, but that won't make even a small dent in the activity the MPA is attempting to prevent.

The MPA has not only made reference to copyright infringement of the actual entertainment content contained in the files shared on the sites, but also to movie poster and artwork displayed and used by the sites to promote the latest releases on offer.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/50...own-threat.htm





A New Grooveshark is Online and Streaming Music
Jacob Kastrenakes

Grooveshark has come back online — but not officially or in exactly the same form. What's being called a clone of Grooveshark is now being hosted at Grooveshark.io (the original site was a .com), allowing visitors to keep streaming, downloading, and searching for music files, including the many, many copyrighted files that got the original site in trouble.

The cloned site's creator, who goes under the pseudonym Shark, claims to have started backing up Grooveshark after suspecting that it was about to go offline. Shark claims to have backed up 90 percent of Grooveshark's content and to have also assembled a team dedicated to bringing all of Grooveshark's features, including playlists and favorites, back online. "I was connected to Grooveshark a few years back and I have, together with the team I've gathered, the knowledge and the technological abilities to bring it back to life," Shark writes in an email to The Verge.

It sounds challenging, to say the least, to scrape 90 percent of Grooveshark's content, but there may be another explanation for how Grooveshark.io came about so quickly. The site appears to be a rebranding of mp3juices.se, another music piracy site. That makes these claims seem less likely to be accurate, suggesting that Shark may instead be using the Grooveshark name to bring attention to mp3juices.

""It’s going to be a roller coaster, and we’re ready for it.""

The original Grooveshark was (in)famous for being an easy way to find and stream copyrighted music for free. Because those files were uploaded by users, Grooveshark was able to live for years behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which somewhat shielded it from copyright issues so long as it promptly removed problematic files at a copyright holder's request. While those removals had occurred, it was still fairly easy to locate copyrighted songs on the site. Grooveshark was in court over the issue for some time and finally shut down last week after settling with labels. Though that means there's no final ruling on Grooveshark's legality, it's a clear win for the labels. "We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service. That was wrong. We apologize. Without reservation," Grooveshark wrote in a note announcing its closure.

That means Grooveshark.io is on pretty shaky ground, though its creators seem to be well aware of that. Shark tells BGR, "It’s going to be a roller coaster, and we’re ready for it." At the same time, Grooveshark.io is still feigning an interest in playing by the rules. The site has a lengthy disclaimer about how its files aren't added manually, which goes on to say that you shouldn't download anything copyrighted because that'd be illegal. It writes, "Please respect these terms and conditions and support the artists!"

Grooveshark.io doesn't appear to allow visitors to upload their music, unlike the original site. Instead, it claims to be a music search engine that crawls the web for music hosted elsewhere, which could distance it from legal troubles. Of course, that's only true if the claim is true. Grooveshark.io says that all of its content is hosted on third-party servers and that it'll even display where the music was indexed from. In our brief testing, however, that turned out to be false. It took a matter of seconds to find a copyrighted song hosted under the site's domain. Maybe Grooveshark.io doesn't own the actual servers, but that's not exactly what "third party" means.

Already, Grooveshark.io was briefly brought down today amid a flurry of attention. Shark tells The Verge that the site's hosting company closed its server; it's now up and running again, apparently hosted elsewhere. "I have huge and unexpected plans for Grooveshark," Shark writes, "and I promise you this is not even close to being its end."
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/5/85...streaming-site





Judge Calls Prenda an “Ingenuous Crooked Extortionate Operation”
K`Tetch

Today was the long-awaited appeals court hearing in the ongoing Prenda saga. Almost exactly two years after Judge Otis Wright went sci-fi on Prenda and its principles, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held an appeals hearing requested by Prenda on the sanctions, and it was not a pretty day for Prenda.

Today was the long-awaited appeal for Prenda and associates in the 9th circuit. A welcome change from other hearings is that the case was live-streamed by the court, enabling those who were unable to get to the courtroom, a chance to view the proceedings, and what a show it was. Daniel Voelker, representing Prenda, left the first half hour battered and bleeding (metaphorically) from the many jabs and barbs by the three judges on the panel, while Morgan Pietz representing the Doe, had a much more cordial reception.

Central to the Prenda argument, as laid out in their earlier brief, was that in threatening incarceration at one point, the entirety of the hearing, and thus the sanctions awarded at the end of it, were improper. That includes the adverse inferences drawn from the mass decision to “plead the 5th” which is allowed in civil cases, but not criminal ones. However, they failed to contest any of the factual elements and conclusions from the case, relying wholly on procedural grounds.

The three judges – 91yo Senior Judge Harry Pregerson, 62yo Judge Richard Tallman, and 49yo Jacqueline Nguyen – were both sharp and to the point with Voelker, repeatedly asking probing questions, and even making fun of him on occasion. “Explain to me in simple english how this er operation worked” asked Pregerson of Voelker, adding “how they make their money” when asked to clarify shortly followed by “who ran this operation?“. Voelker’s answer of “I don’t know” prompted Pregerson to retort “You don’t know anything, do you?“. When Voelker tried to salvage that by referring to the 5th amendment pleading, Pregerson delivered one final blow saying “They should have asserted the 5th amendment because they were engaged in extortion, eh? They sent out thousands of extortionate letters“.

Perhaps the highlight of it all though, was the 7½ minutes spent by judge Pregerson describing how these cases work, including reading a letter that was sent (embedded below). His closing remark on it left no doubt what he was thinking, saying “That is just an ingenious, crooked, extortionate operation”.

Other arguments from Voekler were shot down, Ngoyen (reportedly Obama’s next choice for a Supreme Court justice) telling him that he’s “swimming upstream” while Tallman told him to stop ‘bobbing and weaving’ when asked questions, and if certain documents (specifically the forged copyright assignment) were ‘left by the tooth fairy’. However, all were left a little agasp when Voelker seemed to have no issues with remanding it back to Judge Wright, as a criminal matter under a special prosecutor, which would not only put the Prenda principles at risk of imprisonment, but also open things up to allow information from all other cases to be included.

Pietz by contrast, had a more boring turn before the judges. There to represent the judgment, he did engage in some mild banter with the judges, but in a good natured way, rather than the adversarial way of his opponent. The central issue here being the damages themselves, specifically Judge Wright’s “punitive” doubling, which is in the grey area of what’s allowed. since it seems to be for misconduct not entirely inside the courtroom. Pietz did seem happy with what seemed to be a general consensus (although we won’t know until the order is released) of the judges, which would be to let the original fee award sanctions stand, and remand the punitive doubling back down to the circuit court, as a criminal case.

It is of no doubt, however, that these three judges have “smelt a rat”, as Judge Wright’s motivation was described; the numerous times the word ‘extortion‘ was used made that clear, as did the jokes of Voelker’s ad saying that he was a great lawyer, which Popehat’s Ken Pope called “perhaps the most devastating line I’ve ever heard used against a lawyer“.

Pregerson: And you’re a great lawyer too.
Voelker: I really appreciate that.
Pregerson: That’s what your ad says, when you go on the internet, right? [Tallman chuckles] I wonder how many super lawyers there are in this country.


It seems probable that there will be some form of criminal investigation stemming from this. That’s on top of the references to the US Attorney’s office and the IRS in Judge Wright’s order. Plus, by not contesting the facts and conclusions drawn by Judge Wright, they may very well have admitted them as true, which won’t help them in other cases still pending nationwide.

Whatever the strategy was supposed to be for Prenda, it just didn’t work out well at all. However, the final word has to go (as most did in this hearing) to Judge Pregerson

This is going to be… going to be written about for years and year. You’re probably gong to be part of the story, we all will be. I don’t know where this is going to end up.

Truer words were never spoken.
http://ktetch.co.uk/2015/05/judge-ca...ate-operation/





Spotify Tripled its Losses in Two Years. Is Music Streaming Over?
Jason Abbruzzese

Jay-Z, consider yourself warned: It turns out it's pretty hard to make a profit on music streaming for $10 a month. Money is streaming out the door of Spotify.

The streaming music startup lost $197 million in 2014, a drastic increase over the year before.

Spotify is bringing in a lot of money — $1.3 billion in revenue last year — but it's just not turning a profit.

In fact, its losses are getting worse, almost tripling from 2013 when the company lost $68 million. Revenue grew by 45%.

See also: How Spotify Engineered the New Music Economy

The financial data, revealed in a public document in Luxembourg and reviewed by the New York Times, comes as the company is reportedly preparing to enter the streaming video market. That move could entice more advertising money, which would help alleviate the losses.

Spotify blamed the losses on costs associated with product development, expansion and licensing, the Times reported.

Spotify has long claimed that it would be able to achieve profitability once it hits a certain number of paying customers. The fact that its losses seem to grow as it brings in more money seems counter to that notion.

It now has 60 million total users, 15 million of which paid for the service.

The service's free streaming has become an issue recently, with numerous artists claiming it does not adequately compensate artists. Taylor Swift pulled her music off the service in November 2014 in protest. Spotify asked Swift to come back, and now it's clear why: Spotify needs Taylor Swift far more than Taylor Swift needs Spotify.

Competitors have also popped up, like Jay-Z's Tidal and Apple's launch of Beats, complicating Spotify's competitive position.
http://mashable.com/2015/05/09/spoti...ctly-how-much/





Apple Pushing Music Labels to Kill Free Spotify Streaming Ahead of Beats Relaunch

Aggressive tactics from the music giant have garnered scrutiny from the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission
Micah Singleton

The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are looking closely into Apple’s business practices in relation to its upcoming music streaming service, according to multiple sources. The Verge has learned that Apple has been pushing major music labels to force streaming services like Spotify to abandon their free tiers, which will dramatically reduce the competition for Apple’s upcoming offering. DOJ officials have already interviewed high-ranking music industry executives about Apple’s business habits, but it appears the FTC has taken the lead in recent weeks.

""All the way up to Tim Cook, these guys are cutthroat.""

Apple has been using its considerable power in the music industry to stop the music labels from renewing Spotify’s license to stream music through its free tier. Spotify currently has 60 million listeners, but only 15 million of them are paid users. Getting the music labels to kill the freemium tiers from Spotify and others could put Apple in prime position to grab a large swath of new users when it launches its own streaming service, which is widely expected to feature a considerable amount of exclusive content. "All the way up to Tim Cook, these guys are cutthroat," one music industry source said.

Sources also indicated that Apple offered to pay YouTube’s music licensing fee to Universal Music Group if the label stopped allowing its songs on YouTube. Apple is seemingly trying to clear a path before its streaming service launches, which is expected to debut at WWDC in June. If Apple convinces the labels to stop licensing freemium services from Spotify and YouTube, it could take out a significant portion of business from its two largest music competitors.

Apple has an antitrust monitor on its campus, courtesy of the DOJ after Apple was found guilty in an ebook antitrust case last year (Apple is appealing the decision), but it's not clear if that monitor is involved in this latest situation. The DOJ and the FTC aren't the only entity looking into Apple’s dealings with the music industry, either. According to the New York Post, Apple is being probed by the European Union’s Competition Commission to find out if the company is working with the labels to rid the industry of freemium services.

Apple declined to comment.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/4/85...tify-streaming





Pandora Defeats ASCAP, Music Publishers in Royalties Appeal
Jonathan Stempel

A federal appeals court in Manhattan rejected appeals by a music licensing group and music publishers that could have forced Internet radio service Pandora Media Inc to pay higher royalties and have access to fewer songs.

In a case closely watched in the music industry, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday rejected an effort by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers to charge Pandora more to licence its music from 2013 to 2015.

It also said rules governing ASCAP licensing "unambiguously" barred music publishers from negotiating higher rates for their works with "new media" users such as Pandora, even as ASCAP licensed the same works to other users.

Vivendi SA's Universal Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing and EMI Music Publishing had withdrawn their new media licensing rights from ASCAP, while retaining membership in that group.

Wednesday's decision is a defeat for publishers and songwriters who believe growth in streaming music has resulted in unfairly low licensing rates.

It upheld rulings by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan federal court, which reviews ASCAP rate disputes under a 1941 antitrust consent decree.

Pandora is the most popular Internet radio service. The Oakland, California-based company last month said it has more than 250 million users, including 79.2 million "active" users, who listen to 1.77 billion hours of music each month.

ASCAP Chief Executive Elizabeth Matthews said the decision shows the need to change licensing rules that are "completely out of step" with how people listen to music today.

Universal was not immediately available for comment. Sony/ATV, which administers the EMI catalogue, had no comment.

Kenneth Steinthal, a King & Spalding partner representing Pandora, said the decision helps ensure "equal treatment under the consent decree, including the right to perform all works by all publishers that are ASCAP members."

The 2nd Circuit said Cote did not commit "clear error" by requiring Pandora to pay ASCAP a royalty rate of just 1.85 percent of revenue to use its songs from 2011 through 2015. ASCAP proposed an escalating rate that peaked at 3 percent.

Moreover, the court said it could not "rewrite the decree" to let publishers pick and choose how works are licensed.

"The licensing of works through ASCAP is offered to publishers on a take-it-or-leave-it basis," it said.

ASCAP has about 525,000 members, and represents music from artists like Leonard Bernstein, Beyoncé, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Alan Jackson, Jay-Z and Katy Perry.

The cases are American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers et al v. Pandora Media Inc, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Nos. 14-1158, 14-1161, 14-1246.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Jeffrey Benkoe, Phil Berlowitz, Bernard Orr and Diane Craft)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0NR1JC20150506





Keurig Green Mountain Gets Roasted. Stock Drops 10%
Heather Long

Remember when everyone wanted a Keurig machine? Those days might be over.

Sales of Keurig brewing machines and accessories tumbled 23% in the first quarter compared to the prior year.

The company had a lot of excuses, but the basic problem is there are too many Keurig machines in stores and people aren't buying them, especially the newest Keurig 2.0 model.

"We do have some headwinds," said Chief Financial Officer Fran Rathke on a call with analysts.

Investors are fleeing the stock. Keurig (GMCR) dropped 10% Thursday when the market opened for trading. Shares are now down more than 25% this year.

It's a big change for the company which had been one of the hottest stocks in 2013 and 2014 and does over $1 billion in sales.

CEO Brian Kelley says he's listening to consumers and is ready to make changes. The biggest frustration for customers is that the 2.0 model only brews Keurig branded coffee cups.

"Quite honestly, we were wrong. We underestimated the passion the consumer had for this," Kelley told analysts on a call Wednesday evening.
keurig shares falling

Reviews of the product on Amazon.com are filled with complaints about the restrictions on what coffee cups can be used in the new machine.

"I think the Keurig is a great machine but it is a HUGE SHAME that the company decided to remove the ability to use your own coffee grounds in the home brew k-cup," a top reviewer on Amazon.com wrote.

Keurig plans to bring back the My K-cup accessory to allow customers to brew other brands of coffee. It is also working to launch the Keurig KOLD system in the fall, which it hopes will revolutionize how people consume cold beverages at home.

Still, the company lowered its financial projections for 2015, citing the challenges of the "complex product transition."
http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/06/inve...gs-stock-fall/





I Watched the Pacquiao-Mayweather Fight on Periscope and Saw the Future
Christina Warren

Like millions of others across the world, I watched the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight in a living room surrounded by other boxing fans. Except, the living room wasn't mine and my co-watchers were virtual.

That's right, like many, many others, I watched Mayweather defeat Pacquiao on Periscope.

A few days ago, we joked in the newsroom that the live streaming services Meerkat and Periscope would be heavily used during this "fight of the century." We had no-idea how prescient that would be.

Cable PPV connections may have experienced issues with overloading that delayed the start of the fight by about 45 minutes, but by the time the fight was ready to go, Periscope and Meerkat were ready.

I never had any intention of paying $90 to $100 for the fight; I'll watch it on HBO next week. But after waking up from my Kentucky Derby-induced hangover and finding that the fight was just starting, I decided to see if Periscope had any decent streams of the fight.

Did it ever. I tuned in in the third round and was able to see dozens and dozens of fight streams in the global "live" menu. Tapping into a few streams, it was quickly apparent that some were just standard Periscopes of friends at a fight-night party, while others were focused intently on television sets or computer screens playing the fight in real time.

The real media story on the fight is about how many people are Periscoping this stuff. Amazing— Christina Warren (@film_girl) May 3, 2015

The number of streams was almost overwhelming. Some Periscopers were shooting in portrait mode (as is standard for Periscope), while others were shooting in landscape to capture more of a TV screen.

Some streams featured commentary from parties and shots of friends; others focused almost completely on the fight itself. Some streams were in crowded rooms, other in almost empty homes.

Based on the map on Periscope, I saw streams from all over the world. There was even a stream of the fight from a police department in Africa. The Pacquiao-Mayweather fight was a very global story, and this was evident from the Periscope streams.

Keep in mind, Periscope is still relatively U.S.-centric and its iPhone-only nature skews its demographics somewhat. Still, this was the first time I've seen so many global streams — certainly at one time.

Hopping from stream to stream

Now, clearly, Periscope (and Meerkat for that matter) was not designed to be used to allow individuals to broadcast fights that cost $100 on Pay-per-view.

As a result, streams would frequently get shut down, either because Periscope put an end to the piracy or because of other intermittent connection issues.

As a result, finding a consistent way to watch the fight was a challenge. Often, a stream would be successfully active for one round, only to immediately go black.

This wasn't really a problem, however, because like a hydra, we could just go to another Periscope stream somewhere else in the world to watch the fight on someone else's TV.

Soon, viewers started to notice a trend. If a Periscope session go too many "hearts" (Periscope lingo for favorites, achieved by tapping on the screen), a stream would get shut down.

Viewers started to harangue the users who were obsessively "hearting" the Periscope streams, telling them to stop or the stream would get shut down.

The stream I ended up watching for half the fight was in Spanish (but still very viewable) and it had more than 10,000 people in it at its peak. That's right. 10,000 people, all watching some guy's stream of the fight in Spanish on his high-def TV.

The stream managed to say up for quite some time before the influx of hearts appeared. At this point, users started to beg the hearters to stop, both in English and Spanish.

People begging people to stop hearting during the fight. Hilarious. pic.twitter.com/zl2n5Y5VQj— Christina Warren (@film_girl) May 3, 2015

In some streams, there was lively commentary amongst the viewers. Other streams (like the one I was in for most of the fight) was almost silent (save the pleas to stop the hearts) until the very end.

After the fight was over, as audience awaited the judges' decision, commentary broke out over who should win. In my stream, Pacquiao was the clear favorite, and there was a barage of boos and jeers when Mayweather was deemed the winner.

The start of something new?

It's to frame the Periscope narrative as one about the new realm of piracy; and there's plenty to discuss there, from the complex economics of fighters' earning 9-figure payouts to the future of set-top cable television and old-school PPV in an increasingly digital and mobile environment.

But I think that misses the point.

And the #MayPac winner by unanimous decision... #Periscope— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) May 3, 2015

The experience of watching the fight on Periscope was inherently more social — and frankly, more interactive — than watching via one of the many pirate PPV or HBO streams available on the Internet.

@film_girl best part of the fight was feeling like I was in someone else's living room tbh— Dani Fankhauser (@DaniFankhauser) May 3, 2015

Let's be honest: Most of the people who watched the fight over Periscope never had any intention of paying for the fight. Ever. Media companies can and will wring their hands over lost revenue — and that's a potentially valid concern if this sort of thing becomes mainstream.

For its part, Periscope, which is owned by Twitter, seems to want to have it both ways.

CEO Dick Costolo and Twitter investor Chris Sacca both tweeted about how Periscope “won” the night, but this raised questions from media reporters who see basking in that success tantamount to celebrating piracy.

And the winner is... @periscopeco

— dick costolo (@dickc) May 3, 2015

Periscope won by a knockout.

— Chris Sacca (@sacca) May 3, 2015

This almost seems like an endorsement of piracy https://t.co/lW6V5eHZdU

— Alex Fitzpatrick (@AlexJamesFitz) May 3, 2015

For his part, Sacca later tweeted his success metrics were NOT the seemingly unending number of pirated streams, but the way some sports reporters used Periscope to offer commentary about the fight. That doesn’t change the fact that most of the activity on Periscope Saturday night was dedicated to contraband streams of the fight.

@AnthonyQuintano So, the broadcasts by @HBOboxing @darrenrovell @YahooSports and others weren't amazing?

— Chris Sacca (@sacca) May 3, 2015

Still, the truth is, watching a video stream of someone recording their TV doesn't replicate the experience or quality of watching a fight on TV any more than Handycam movie bootlegs replicate the theatrical experience.

From an experiential perspective, this exercise really did feel like being in someone else's home at their fight-night party.

The transformative aspect of Periscope and other live streaming apps is that it can take you to a place in a much more intimate way than we've experienced before.

Hundreds of thousands — if not potentially millions — of users logged into Periscope and Meerkat Saturday night. It may have been because of the fight, but I would bet many end up returning.

@film_girl this probably was the biggest night for @periscopeco. I used it for the 1st time because of this fight and it was great.— Dan Insinga (@DanInsinga) May 3, 2015

There is something compelling (and addictive) about watching live video. This was true 15 years ago when Josh Harris was using the medium on Pseudo.com (the experiment and the rise and fall of Harris is brilliantly recalled in Ondi Timoner's documentary We Live in Public) and when Big Brother debuted on TV and its true today.

The difference is that 15 years ago — even five years ago — streaming was something only a few people could do. Today, anyone with a smartphone can do it. And that's powerful.

I'll most certainly watch the entire Pacquiao-Mayweather fight on HBO next week. It was a good fight and I'd like to see it with my husband, who knows far more about boxing than I do. But something tells me the experience won't be as electric as it was watching in the living room in Spanish with 10,000 other Internet denizens.
http://mashable.com/2015/05/03/pacqu...her-periscope/





Periscope Piracy Sets Up Grudge Match: Hollywood vs. Twitter

Dick Costolo's triumphant tweet could come back to haunt him
Andrew Wallenstein

Forget Mayweather-Pacquiao. There’s a more interesting fight brewing between Twitter and Hollywood.

The piracy of Saturday’s welterweight boxing championship enabled by Periscope, a livestreaming app recently acquired by Twitter, is setting up a conflict that could be just as brutal.

HBO and Showtime, which partnered on what will likely be the most popular boxing pay-per-view event ever, took a one-two punch of their own Saturday. First, they watched multiple pay-TV distributors experience technical problems transmitting the fight, which probably cut into their sales total.

But what made matters even worse is that countless people who did pay for the fight used their smartphones to re-transmit the fight to users of Periscope and, to a lesser extent, rival app Meerkat. Each stream reached hundreds or thousands of non-paying fans with a picture quality that was shaky and pixilated, yet still quite adequate.

If Twitter CEO Dick Costolo understood the implications of this activity, he sure didn’t show it in a tweet that declared Periscope the “winner” of the night. There’s no question the app got tremendous exposure that will build nicely off the 1 million downloads impressively achieved in just its first 10 days, a fact Costolo made sure to mention in the company’s underwhelming first-quarter results last week.

And the winner is… @periscopeco

— dick costolo (@dickc) May 3, 2015

But what Costolo needs to be asking himself is if the price of all that publicity may end up too steep if the content companies come after him for backing an app that may be piracy’s biggest facilitator since PopcornTime.

Any pay-TV channel that pays billions to sports leagues for exclusive rights to programming is going to be concerned about what went on Periscope during the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight. While piracy via livestream is far from a new phenomenon, it may well have achieved a new level of visibility this weekend.

It would be one thing if Periscope was some rogue player like Napster. But Twitter has plenty of business with Hollywood that requires its content rights and advertising dollars, and the company does not have the leverage of bigger entities in Silicon Valley. Just as piracy via YouTube and Google’s search has impacted how Google and media conglomerates have dealt with each other over the years, Twitter is now heading in the same direction.

Costolo can’t plead ignorance, either. The title fight isn’t even the first time that HBO has had Periscope in its crosshairs, having issued takedown notices last month after the app became a source for “Game of Thrones” episodes. Piracy doesn’t typically trouble HBO, which has professed to be unfazed by piracy in the past; Jeff Bewkes, CEO of parent company Time Warner, once equated online copyright infringement in the past to free marketing. “Better than an Emmy,” he quipped.

Oddly enough, HBO itself used Periscope earlier in the evening to stream content from Manny Pacquiao’s dressing room via Twitter. There’s a double-edged sword here for sure: Like so many of the technologies that came before livestreaming, there may be more potential than peril to be tapped.

LIVE on #Periscope: Inside @MannyPacquiao room #MayPac LIVE now https://t.co/SQ0MiQEP7y

— HBOboxing (@HBOboxing) May 3, 2015

It will be absurd for Twitter to mount the defense that it complies with any takedown notices filed over copyright-infringing content. Because by the time the compliance occurs the livestream is already over, the company is going to need to figure out a better way to combat piracy on the fly. Periscope may require something like Google’s Content ID system, technology capable of identifying forbidden streams in an instant, and maybe even converting them to transactional opportunities for legal alternatives to the content in question.

Surely HBO and Showtime saw this problem coming. They had already filed lawsuits against a select number of notorious websites that had already been promoting illegal streams of the fight days in advance. Periscope is a cruder form of piracy but perhaps more attractive.

Livestreaming has never been treated as serious a piracy threat as torrent sites or content lockers, but that looks about to change. That said, let’s keep the threat here in perspective: While there’s always going to be some leakage for TV content via livestreaming, the amount that will go on will pale in comparison to the amount available in other forms of piracy that don’t require the perpetrator to be actively transmitting at a particular time.

Neverthless expect to hear from fearful rights holders in the coming days, and not just in boxing. The NHL has already suggested banning the app from its arenas; transmitting from within an arena (as opposed to in front of TV) is actually a separate legal can of worms. And though the MPAA and NATO haven’t shown much concern for the livestream threat yet, it’s hard to believe that equanimity will hold much longer.
https://variety.com/2015/digital/opi...er-1201486298/





Twitter’s Streaming App Creates Piracy of Year’s Biggest Fight
Lucas Shaw

Twitter Inc.’s video-streaming application Periscope enabled people to pirate Saturday’s fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, getting the thrill of the year’s biggest bout without paying the $100 pay-per-view tab.

Many of these users posted about being able to watch the event on Twitter, where Dick Costolo, the social-media company’s chief executive officer, pronounced Periscope the night’s victor. Executives from HBO and Showtime asked Periscope and other live-streaming services such as Meerkat to take down the streams as the fight was happening, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified while the matter is being investigated.

While Saturday’s piracy is unlikely to dent the millions made by Time Warner Inc.’s HBO and CBS Corp.’s Showtime, which partnered to produce the fight, it augurs a potential problem if more people use live-streaming apps to watch pay TV. HBO previously asked the service to take down streams of the season premiere of its hit show “Game of Thrones” when it realized people had used Periscope to stream it for free.

“I watched last night’s fight by just browsing through different Periscope streams,” Shelly Palmer, an adviser to media companies such as Viacom Inc. and 21st Century Fox Inc., wrote in a note. “This kind of live-piracy is going to be hard if not impossible to regulate.”
Streaming Video

People watching the fight, some of whom paid for it, used their mobile devices to capture the video and stream it for others to watch on Periscope. Periscope is one of a number of apps with this capability, and the most prominent given Twitter’s ownership.

A representative for Showtime declined to comment on the use of Periscope during the fight, while a spokesman for HBO did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The two companies already filed a joint lawsuit against sites that were planning to stream the fight for free, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Costolo wasn’t the only one to boast about the use of Periscope on the night of the fight, which Mayweather won by decision to remain undefeated. Chris Sacca, an early investor in Twitter, called Periscope the night’s winner “by a knockout,” and someone posted a stream from inside Pacquiao’s training room to the HBOboxing Twitter account.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...-biggest-fight





Mayweather-Pacquiao Fight Suffers Massive Piracy At Hands Of Twitter's Periscope
Merrill Barr

While so many purchased the much-publicized Mayweather-Pacquiao fight on PPV over the weekend that it led to reported outages across the U.S. that ultimately resulted in the fight being pushed back by a few minutes, it turns out a sizable portion of the fight’s audience ended up coming in from an unexpected place: Twitter ’s quickly growing video streaming app, Periscope. From the moment the broadcast began, streams from within the U.S. and around the globe gave non-paying audience members the chance to watch the “fight of the century” for free, and given the issues HBO has already had with the app and its ability to live-stream airings of Game of Thrones, one must wonder how much potential revenue was lost over the unexpected last-minute development.

In a statement concerning the pirating of Game of Thrones on the app, HBO previously stated, “in general, we feel developers should have tools which proactively prevent mass copyright infringement from occurring on their apps and not be solely reliant upon notifications.” Considering the fact the network is a producer of the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, one must imagine they’re taking the illegal streaming of the event as seriously, if not more.

Periscope video quality strong. Would I watch an FX-heavy movie like this? No, but it’s more than good enough for something like boxing

— Andrew Wallenstein (@awallenstein) May 3, 2015

Variety Co-Editor-in-Chief Andrew Wallenstein makes a very good point here. While the odds of major motion pictures or the effects heavy Game of Thrones losing massive amounts of potential paying customers to Periscope are limited, the same cannot be said for events like the fight from this weekend. There was no major need to watch the event on a traditional screen unless the viewer was in a large group of people at a viewing party. For the ones curious enough to watch the fight just for the sake of not missing out on a major cultural event, but not curious enough to trek out to a social gathering, the various Periscope streams served as a perfect middle ground: free, second-hand streaming that kept the individually curious viewer up to date just enough to remain current.

Ultimately, Periscope’s abilities could became a much larger issue later in the year at events like Comic-Con that often feature exclusive clips from major motion pictures and television series that can be as far as a year away. Will the organizers of the fan gathering be able to truly police every attendee in Hall H this year trying to broadcast clips out to the masses? It seems unlikely, and even if they do, what will it do to the overall enjoyment of the convention if security are plastered at every square inch watching for the inevitable smart phone to leave someone’s pocket?

In the coming months, it’s going to be very interesting to see how the sports and entertainment industries deal with a growing need for major protections against this new form of piracy. But, on the other side of the coin, there’s also going to be a question of how much Periscope will truly want to police its audience when the live-streaming of the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight may have just been the best advertising the app could have possibly gotten since its initial launch around the globe.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillb...iao-periscope/





Sports Leagues Respond to Periscope with Panic and Bans
Jason Abbruzzese

Stephanie Wei was introduced to Periscope by a swing instructor a month ago at the Masters, the most prestigious tournament on the Professional Golf Association Tour.

Last week, her use of the little live-streaming video app caused the PGA to revoke her credentials, banning Wei, a well-known golf blogger, from covering the PGA Tour for the rest of the season. Her profession and livelihood are at a standstill.

See also: I watched the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight on Periscope and saw the future

Wei, who runs her own site Wei Under Par and reports for various publications including Sports Illustrated, had livestreamed some of Australian golfer Matt Jones and reigning Masters champion Jordan Speith during a practice round for the Phoenix Open. She fielded questions from people watching the streams which she relayed to Jones, who answered back. The whole thing seemed great, Wei said.

She acknowledged to Mashable that she did think it “pushed the envelope” of what the PGA Tour would allow, having been previously warned about videos of Tiger Woods that she posted to Instagram.

But she figured the ephemeral nature of the streams (they disappear after 24 hours) and the fact that she was not taking video of competitive action would not cause too much trouble.

She was wrong. After using Periscope on what she called a “quiet” Monday, she arrived back at the media center on Wednesday and was told her credentials had been revoked. Later conversations with the tour’s head of communications and chief marketing officer Ty Votaw who went as far as to say "she's stealing."

“I was in shock,” Wei said.

“I take responsibility for my actions. I broke a rule, but I was not thinking about that. I was thinking, ‘there's this new, cutting-edge platform that would be good to engage fans and give them what they want to see.’”

Peris-nope

Golf has a reputation for being a bit uptight, but when it comes to livestreaming, the PGA's hard line is the rule and not the exception. If Wei’s ban seems like overkill, maybe that’s because it is. If it seems like the PGA Tour is spooked, that’s because they’re far from alone.

Twitter, which owns Periscope, fielded 66 takedown notices from HBO and Showtime for videos of the landmark Mayweather-Pacquiao "Fight of the Century," which cost $100 to buy on pay-per-view. At the same time, Twitter also had a deal with the networks to offer sports commentary and highlights about the fight on Periscope. While the company's CEO, Dick Costolo, declared Twitter the "winner" of the fight, other company executives were left to plead with viewers not to see Periscoping as piracy.

Others have already taken action. The NHL banned the use of livestreaming apps basically at all times, and warned reporters that had been using Periscope and Meerkat that they could be punished for doing so.

The threat of smartphones

Wei’s situation is far more subtle, but it also highlights the tension that arises when major sports leagues and networks find fans and media overtaking their hegemony on the lucrative world of sports broadcasting. While Periscope and its rival Meerkat don't yet offer the kind of high-resolution video that would be a threat to richly funded networks, no executive wants to take chances.

Sports media is big business. Sports programming rights in 2016 totaled $22.5 billion, according to SNL Kagan. That does not take into account the revenue that leagues have begun to generate from posting video online, which is a rich source of advertising revenue for them.

The emergence of online video - and the lucrative ads that accompany it - has led leagues to try to minimize how many other places put up video. This tension is not terribly new, said Brett Hutchins, an associate professor at Monash university that studies the impact of modern technology on sports media, who noted that there seemed to be a growing "grey zone" between what was acceptable use of technology at sporting events.

"You're now seeing broadcasters in major sports leagues come to terms with what mobile smartphones present," Hutchins said. "This is a new story obviously, but it's also very old story because you've seen the same sort of reactions going on around everything from pirating cable television through to the introduction of the Internet."

Mashable reached out to every major sports league and various other institutions (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NASCAR, MLS, Olympic Committee, NCAA) to discuss the rise of user-generated video and livestreaming. Mostly they passed along their boilerplate language that bans the livestreaming of any competitions by members of the press as well as fans. Some refused to comment entirely.

Sports leagues find themselves in a strange place. There has never been more money or more ways to monetize their content. At the same time, there’s also been an explosion in the number of sources to access that content, with many of them circumventing the usual media partners that leagues have worked with for decades.

Love/hate

It’s not that the PGA Tour hates Periscope. They just want to make sure you’re watching their Periscope account, a fact that was evident on Wednesday when the tour made some of its own streams.

That caught the eye of many who felt the move was hypocritical.

It also came to the attention of Wei, who noted that the stream featured some golfers joking about her ban.

Shout-out to the players who are being live-streamed on Tour’s @periscopeco and making credential jokes cc: @ahadwingolf @therealstrebber

— Stephanie Wei (@StephanieWei) May 6, 2015

Wei added that it was pretty clear that the PGA Tour had looked to prevent her from generating any content that could hit its wallet, regardless of whether it was good for fans or the sport in general. The reality is that the PGA Tour isn't the only company with Periscope. It's in the hands of journalists and fans, whose perspectives are often preferable to those of the company.

“Basically, the tour wants you to only go to pgatour.com and follow them,” Wei said. “They're cutting us off because, according to [PGA Tour CMO] Votaw, they own everything, including what the players say.”

That kind of control is elusive, Hutchins said, and poses a particular danger as sports leagues and their media rights continue to increase in value.

"I think the intensity of the policing going on around major sports has to do with what's going on in the larger industry," Hutchins said. "It's a constant moving feast around who gets to own the footage."
http://mashable.com/2015/05/07/sports-periscope-piracy/





Comcast Lets X1 Subs Stream Live Video to Set-Tops
Jeff Baumgartner

Comcast, targeting a category made popular by the recent debuts of Meerkat and Twitter’s Periscope app, has entered the mobile live streaming sector with Xfinity Share, an app that lets X1 subs send live video streams, recorded video, and digital photos to the TV as well as to other smartphones.

Comcast, which began to test the app last year under the "MyMedia" moniker, said Xfinity Share allows X1 customers to share that content (up to HD quality) to certain friends, family and other authorized users. X1 subs who take advantage of the app can send live streams or distribute recorded video and photos to their own X1 set-tops for display on the TV, or to the TV of another X1 customer.

To use Xfinity Share, a free app initially offered on the iOS and Android mobile platforms, currently both the sender and receiver must be Xfinity Triple Play customers with X1 DVR capable set-top boxes, Comcast said. However, Comcast plans to add functionality later this year that will allow those X1 triple-play subs to share content with virtually anyone -- Comcast customer or not --by sending a URL via email.

Xfinity Share relies on WebRTC, an open Internet standard that supports real-time communication over Web browsers, though Comcast is one of the first companies to apply WebRTC to TV (via the MSO’s IP-capable X1 platform).

“WebRTC and X1 are a natural fit,” Franklyn Athias, senior vice president of Comcast IP Communications Services, said in a blog post about the new app. “While WebRTC-enabled tools have proliferated online in recent months, Xfinity Share is the first technology that brings a robust WebRTC-enabled streaming experience to the television screen.This was important for us, because while the technology underpinning WebRTC may be cutting edge, it has the potential to be useful to just about anyone, including people who may be more comfortable navigating their televisions than they are downloading Internet applications.”

“We’re giving our customers the power to share special moments in their lives as they happen,” added Patti Loyack, Comcast Cable’s vice president of communications. “Whether a child’s baseball game, a graduation or just a beautiful sunset, Share lets users broadcast whatever they see in real time to the biggest screen in the home.”

To deliver a live stream to the TV, customers must first open the Xfinity Share app on their mobile device, select the “Stream Live” option, and then accept the notification that appears on the TV screen on the other end.

Early on, Xfinity Share users will have access to 20 Gigabytes of cloud storage from Comcast (enough to hold about 200 minutes of video) where they can place photos and recorded videos. Comcast said it also working on an update that will let customers store live streams, as well.

The initial version of Xfinity Share will let customers share content on a one-to-one basis, but plans are underway to enable customers to send content to up to five people at the same time.

Comcast said it plans to offer several more features to Xfinity Share later this year, including the aforementioned ability to share content by sending a URL via email that can be viewed by WebRTC-enabled browsers; and the ability to stop, pause and rewind live streams.

Live streaming via mobile devices also presents some copyright concerns. On Saturday (May 2), a number of Meerkat and Periscope users distributed unauthorized live streams of the pay-per-view welterweight championship bout between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. Prior to that, Periscope caught the attention of HBO when some Periscope's users were using the app to live-stream the April 12 season five premiere of Game Of Thrones. HBO tried to remedy it by sending take-down requests to Periscope, whose terms of service prohibits users from using the app to distribute copyrighted material.

Comcast’s Media Sharing terms and conditions also prohibit the distribution of unauthorized copyrighted material.
http://www.multichannel.com/news/tv-...et-tops/390349





Comcast Now has More Internet than Cable Customers
Tali Arbel

Just before its $45 billion deal with Time Warner Cable collapsed over regulators' fears about a giant cable company's control over the Web, Comcast was racking up more Internet customers.

For the first time, the country's largest cable provider, which also owns NBCUniversal, has more Internet subscribers than cable subscribers, Comcast executive Neil Smit said during an earnings call Monday.

Broadband subscribers surpassed cable this quarter. As of the end of March, there were 22.4 million customers for each.

The advent of streaming TV is reshaping the cable industry. It is slowly dripping video subscribers while Netflix adds more, and several online TV alternatives have launched in recent months. Meanwhile, costs are rising for the TV, movies and sports that cable companies transmit - Comcast's programming expenses rose 7.8 percent last year, to $9.8 billion. Combining with Time Warner Cable might have helped Comcast gain leverage against media companies in negotiations over content costs.

Selling Internet access, however, is highly profitable. SNL Kagan, a market research firm, estimates that cash flow margins for Internet were 60 percent for cable companies at the end of last year, while video margins were 17 percent.

In the January-March period, the Philadelphia company added 407,000 high-speed Internet customers, the most since early 2013. It shed 8,000 video customers.

Regulators were concerned about the power that Comcast and Time Warner Cable together would have had from all those Internet customers - more than half of the country's broadband subscribers under the government's definition of minimum broadband speed. The government worried that the combined company might harm online video competitors that need Comcast's pipes to get to consumers. Comcast walked away from the deal last month.

More people are signing up for Internet, but cable bills are bigger as companies pass on content costs to subscribers. Comcast said Monday that revenue from video customers rose 3 percent to $5.3 billion, while Internet revenue rose 10.7 percent to $3 billion.

A traditional TV package of hundreds of channels can cost $70 to $100 a month; on Comcast's website, broadband by itself is advertised for $67 a month. It also offers higher-priced tiers of service that include higher speeds. But many people buy Internet and TV in packages that give upfront discounts. Comcast said Monday that 69 percent of customers pay for at least two services, and 37 percent pay for phone, Internet and TV.

Some companies are trying new types of services. Verizon's FiOS has a customizable, "skinny" bundle that lets you choose groups of channels you want after a basic tier. ESPN is suing because it's been relegated to an optional sports package under that plan, though. Satellite TV company Dish's Sling TV service streams channels online. Media companies are experimenting, too - HBO is offering a stand-alone online service for people who don't pay for cable. And Apple is reportedly getting closer to launching a TV service.

Comcast does have a skinny bundle of its own in "Internet Plus," which sells broadband, about 25 channels including broadcast networks and HBO for $70 to $75 a month after discounts end. But you can't choose your channels.

Comcast executives on Monday said that there is "room for growth" with adding more Internet customers but brushed off questions about launching an online-only TV service.

Comcast reported that its net income rose 10 percent to $2.06 billion, or 81 cents per share, in the first quarter, while revenue rose 2.6 percent to $17.85 billion.

Revenue from the cable division, which includes phone, TV and Internet service for homes and businesses, rose 6.3 percent to $11.4 billion.

Revenue from NBCUniversal fell 4 percent to $6.6 billion. The division includes NBC; cable networks like Syfy, E!, Bravo and USA; the film studio Universal Pictures and theme parks. Advertising revenue fell for NBC and the cable networks.

Shares rose 2.3 percent to $59.77 in premarket trading.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...05-04-09-12-22





Comcast’s Earnings Rise 10%, Driven by High-Speed Internet
Emily Steel

Comcast, the cable and entertainment conglomerate, reported a 10 percent increase in earnings in the first quarter, driven by growth in its high-speed Internet business.

Total revenue inched up 2.6 percent to $17.9 billion during the quarter compared with the same period last year, the company said Monday. Without counting sales tied to the 2015 Super Bowl and the 2014 Olympics — both of which were broadcast on NBC, which Comcast owns — revenue increased 7.2 percent during the period.

Net income attributable to Comcast was $2.1 billion for the quarter, up 10 percent from the same period last year.

The results followed recent news that the company had abandoned its $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable after intense regulatory scrutiny. Costs related to the deal came to $99 million during the first quarter. That brings the total costs related to the transaction to $336 million since the deal was announced in February 2014.

Comcast, the largest cable operator in the country, is expected to detail its plans for moving forward during a conference call with investors on Monday morning.

“At Comcast, we have great products and technologies, and we were excited about bringing these capabilities to additional cities,” Brian Roberts, Comcast’s chief executive, said during a conference call. “The government ultimately didn’t see it the same way.”

The company’s cable group reported a 6.3 percent increase in revenue to $11.4 billion. The company lost 8,000 video subscribers for the quarter but added 407,000 high-speed Internet subscribers.

Revenue in the company’s NBCUniversal entertainment group tumbled 4 percent during the quarter to $6.6 billion. Subtracting for sales tied to the 2015 Super Bowl and 2014 Winter Olympics, revenue increased 7.9 percent to $6.2 billion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/bu...-internet.html





Comcast Spent $336 Million on Failed Attempt to Buy Time Warner Cable

And Time Warner Cable spent $219 million of its own.
Jon Brodkin

Comcast spent $336 million over the past year-plus on its failed attempt to acquire Time Warner Cable.

Comcast's earnings report for Q1 2015, released today, notes $99 million in "transaction-related costs" for its attempt to acquire Time Warner Cable and execute a related transaction with Charter. That's in addition to another $99 million in Q4 2014, $77 million in Q3 2014, $44 million in Q2 2014, and $17 million in Q1 2014.

Comcast announced the proposed $45.2 billion deal in February 2014 and finally called it off on April 24 of this year after facing government opposition. The $336 million covers all reported merger-related costs through March 31.

"The costs are mainly for legal fees and outside consulting firms—everything from Human Resources and IT consulting to banks and management consulting services," Comcast VP of Government Communications Sena Fitzmaurice told Ars. "Communications and lobbying fees would be included—however, what is included has to be direct and incremental—so only those fees that are directly and incrementally associated with the deal."

Time Warner Cable reported more than $200 million in merger-related costs over the past year or so, including tens of millions spent retaining employees (a common expense during times of organizational change).

"Merger-related and restructuring costs for the first quarter of 2015 included $24 million of Comcast merger-related costs (consisting of employee retention costs of $14 million and advisory and legal fees of $10 million)," TWC said in its Q1 2015 earnings announcement.

TWC's merger-related costs in the four quarters of 2014 totaled another $195 million. This included "employee retention costs of $40 million and advisory and legal fees of $9 million" in the second quarter and "employee retention costs of $29 million and advisory and legal fees of $33 million" in the first quarter.

On the plus side for Comcast, it did not have to pay TWC a breakup fee. AT&T had to pay T-Mobile $3 billion and another $1 billion worth of spectrum rights after a failed merger in 2011.

"Fortunately, we structured the transaction in such a way that it avoided unnecessary risk for our shareholders in the event that the regulatory outcome did not go our way," Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said in today's earnings call, according to Comcast's transcript.

Comcast also revealed today that it now has more broadband subscribers than cable TV subscribers. Comcast lost just 8,000 TV subscribers in Q1, an improvement over previous quarters, while gaining 407,000 broadband subscribers. Comcast ended the quarter with slightly more TV subscriptions than broadband ones—22,375,000 video customers to 22,369,000 Internet customers—but that flipped sometime in April.

"Broadband has in fact surpassed video in terms of the number of subs," Comcast Cable President Neil Smit said. "It is a less mature market, so we think there is room for growth. We believe we are increasing share, and the market is growing. We do target HSD [high-speed data] to satellite video households where we can use HSD [to get] a foot in the door and then expand the relationship from there."

Overall, Comcast's quarterly revenue was $17.9 billion, with operating income of $3.9 billion, year-over-year improvements of 2.6 percent and nine percent, respectively.

In another tidbit, Comcast said that although it still opposes the Federal Communications Commission decision to reclassify broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, the FCC decision actually has no impact on how the company operates.

"On Title II, it really hasn't affected the way we have been doing our business or will do our business," Smit said, according to the earnings call transcript. "We believe in Open Internet and while we don't necessarily agree with the Title II implementation, we conduct our business the same we always have—transparency and nonpaid peering and things like that."

Despite implementing data caps in parts of its territory, Comcast's total network capacity is growing faster than customer demand.

"Consumption patterns continue to go up," Smit said. "We increased 40 percent to 50 percent, our capacity consumption going up that amount per year, and we haven't seen a dramatic change in that, but we will continue to invest. We double our capacity every 18 months, and we don't see that slowing down in the near term."

As for broadband pricing, "we remain market flexible," he said. "We are always balancing rate and volume and packaging in different ways so we will be in tune with the market."
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...-warner-cable/





Netflix Urges FCC to Reject AT&T/DirecTV Merger “as Currently Proposed”

AT&T/DirecTV will have incentive to harm online video providers, Netflix says.
Jon Brodkin

Netflix wants the Federal Communications Commission to reject AT&T's proposed acquisition of DirecTV, or at least impose conditions that would prevent AT&T from abusing market power to harm online video services.

"Netflix urges the Commission to reject the merger as currently proposed," the streaming video provider said in a filing yesterday.

With DirecTV on board, AT&T would become the country's largest pay-TV provider, Netflix counsel Markham Erickson wrote. AT&T could also become the nation's biggest Internet service provider, ahead of Comcast, if it goes through with broadband investments that are contingent on merger approval, he wrote.

"Such market power creates new incentives and abilities to harm entities that AT&T perceives as competitive threats, and will exacerbate the anticompetitive behavior in which AT&T has already engaged," he wrote.

Netflix pointed to its own interconnection dispute with AT&T that resulted in poor video quality until Netflix paid AT&T for a direct network connection.

"AT&T already has a demonstrated ability to harm OVDs [online video distributors] by leveraging its control over interconnection to degrade its own customers’ access to Netflix’s service," Netflix wrote. "AT&T also has shown an interest in using data caps and usage-based pricing methods, which it can apply discriminatorily to advantage its own services. If AT&T is able to slow the development of the OVD industry, either by foreclosing access to broadband customers or imposing discriminatory data caps, AT&T would be able to preserve its market advantage by slowing or even reversing the shift toward competitive online video offering and away from bundled video/broadband offerings."

AT&T declined to comment when contacted by Ars.

Netflix released a statement today pointing out that it would not oppose the merger if it is approved with certain conditions. "While we are participating in the government's review, we are not opposing the merger," Netflix said. "We've been highlighting concerns about AT&T's broadband practices and the need for appropriate remedies since last September."

This week's filing proposed no such appropriate remedies, but Netflix described the conditions it wants imposed upon the merger in a submission last September. In addition to a permanent net neutrality commitment, Netflix asked the FCC to prevent a combined AT&T/DirecTV from charging interconnection fees to Netflix and other content providers. Moreover, "the combined entity should be prohibited from excepting its own affiliated services from any data cap applicable to any of its services (whether fixed or mobile)," Netflix wrote.

AT&T isn't likely to agree to all of Netflix's proposed conditions. The company has argued that large online content providers like Netflix should have to pay if they seek direct connections to AT&T's network. AT&T is also suing the FCC over its latest net neutrality rules (though it was satisfied with weaker rules issued by the FCC in 2010).

While the FCC prevented Comcast from buying Time Warner Cable, it's not yet clear how the commission will treat AT&T's attempted merger. AT&T has tried to distinguish its merger from Comcast's by pointing out that it is not acquiring any additional broadband subscribers and "has no significant video programming interests to protect."

But Netflix argued in this week's filing that "This is beside the point. AT&T’s investment in a business model that profits by selling bundled programming packages will result in a powerful incentive to protect that model."

AT&T has argued that it would not degrade online traffic because this would harm its broadband business, leading to falling sales. But Netflix says AT&T has degraded traffic anyway.

"AT&T’s degradation of its customers’ access to Netflix in 2013 and 2014 provides a natural experiment to test this proposition," Netflix wrote. "During this time, Netflix’s members using AT&T’s DSL and U-verse network declined to 1.0Mbps and 1.5Mbps, respectively, at their lowest points. Netflix recommends at least 3Mbps for DVD quality video and 1.5Mbps for VHS quality. A drop below 1.5Mbps can cause service interruptions... Moreover, during the congestion episode, AT&T publicly blamed Netflix for the degradation of Netflix’s service, leaving consumers in doubt as to the cause of the problem."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ntly-proposed/





How The Indian Telecom Industry Is Still Fighting To Kill Your #NetNeutrality - And The Fight To Stop Them
Kunal Anand

We've come together and sent over a million emails to TRAI in response to our opinion to their consultation paper on net neutrality (which TRAI then leaked!). We've also managed to generate enough noise to get Flipkart and other brands off Airtel Zero, an internet-breaking platform. But the war for net neutrality is not over. We presented a strong defense for net neutrality, and now the telecom industry, which wants to meddling with the internet for revenue, is waging a war to snatch it away from us.

Here's how the war is still going on.

The cellphone service provider lobby is attempting to confuse you

Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) is attempting to baffle us internet users. Since the united response to TRAI has come from viewing #NetNeutrality as a force for good, the COAI is copying that model. But they've kept it vague and at a 'feel good' level; as TOI Tech reported, they're "running a rather confusing campaign on net neutrality." GSM users suddenly got messages where COAI said they support "#SabkaInternet", and to agree with them with a missed calls.

#NetNeutrality or #SabkaInternet . pic.twitter.com/ci7mvXGnkq
— Phani Raj K (@prkvs) April 22, 2015

As Vishal Gondal rightly asked on Twitter – what is this?

Confusing message m COAI by dialing I am supporting #netnutrality or #airtelzero what is #sabkainternet ? @nixxin pic.twitter.com/rN0UITM4qY
— vishal gondal (@vishalgondal) April 22, 2015

What is Sabka Internet?

It's a subtle way of letting cellphone companies push internet packs – meaning you need one pack for Whatsapp, one for YouTube, and so on. Uninor has already done this. As Trak.in reported, they've killed VoIP on Facebook and WhatsApp from their standard Internet plans. Hence, the customer has to pay extra for using these features.

Oh yes, another baffle them with a bizarre campaign called #NetEquality

Thank you for your participation and making this tweetinar a sucess #NetEquality
— COAI (@ConnectCOAI) April 30, 2015

Now what is Net Equality?

> @ConnectCOAI on #NetEquality "We're the auto rickshaw taking you to work, we're equal to you, we want half your salary"
— Mahesh Murthy (@maheshmurthy) April 30, 2015

The COAI also wants to terrify the consumers into killing net neutrality

A COAI panel also want to fight the threat from VOIP like Skype, Facebook calling, Whatsapp calling and Viber.

In order to provide unlimited VOIP calling, the COAI want to ensure they don’t lose money from cellphone calling. COAI vice-chairman and Bharti Airtel India Managing Director Gopal Vittal told the media at a press conference that : "The only way this industry can be viable is data rate will be 6x from where they are there today. After that, you can do what you want, it really does not matter… But if you take data rate to 5x or 6x, a lot of people in India will never use the Internet."

Airtel Zero - still trying to play hero

Along with pushing its agenda via the COAI, the Airtel attempted to mislead both customers and employees about its stance on #netneutrality with an #Airtelpledge letter.

Mahesh Murthy took apart the #Airtelpledge - We've summed it up:

1. Airtel was attempting to break the Internet "into separate collections of sites available on separate payment plans. That too, using airwaves and bandwidth owned by the Indian government. It's excuse: we're spending so much, and hence we need to be profitable from this investment. But having declared a Rs 7,800-crore profit, Airtel still wanted more money from a select number of sites, to "cordon off one section of the internet, get it subsidized and sponsored by the sites in that cordon, and offer that at no bandwidth cost to the users."

2. Over 800,000 (now a million+) emails should inform corporate India that about what people "expect from licensed internet providers" - net neutrality.

Oh yeah, Airtel already broke its pledge:

The #AirtelPledge mentions that it will never create fast lanes. Really? http://t.co/yXT566wTqJ pic.twitter.com/xceHzcNWQZ
— Reddit India (@redditindia) April 20, 2015

Airtel had also, according to reports, lied about its "No blocking, No fast lanes. Never done it. Never will." in 2010, with 2 MBPS speed for YouTube viewers, and throttled BitTorrent traffic in India for years.
Facebook's Internet.Org - also fighting Net Neutrality

We've written about Mark Zuckerberg's attemts at breaking net neutrality via Internet.Org. Internet.org was debunked by Osama Manzar, the social entrepreneur who had hosted Mark Zuckerberg's visit to Chandauli where he went to promote the platform. In a Mint article, he pointed out that the app only worked in Hindi, only on Reliance enabled, Android OS phones – and for some reason needed Facebook.

And guess what – Internet.Org's true intentions – profit motive - were revealed in Indonesia

This is Facebook in Indonesia. Coming soon to India. #NetNeutrality #ZeroRating #SaveTheInternet pic.twitter.com/r3WT2dubtF
— Kiran Jonnalagadda (@jackerhack) April 20, 2015

You need to watch this
http://www.indiatimes.com/news/india...em-232330.html





The Mission To Save The Internet By Rewiring It From The Name Up
Lucy Vernasco

While most of us have been binge-streaming or strapping computers to our bodies or wrapping our heads around the ins and outs of net neutrality, an international team of academics and some of the world's biggest technology companies have been quietly pondering how to rewrite the basic structure of the internet—for our sakes.

Their idea sounds simple: instead of numbers, use names. Focus not on the locations of things, but on the things themselves.

The proposal, called Named Data Networking, shifts the focus from the numbered locations of data—IP addresses like 174.16.254.1—to the very names of data—something like motherboard/stories/NDN/photo1. Under this system, for example, when your computer makes a packet request for a new Netflix release, you could retrieve the video from the nearest computer that has it, rather than wait to get it from Netflix's heavily-trafficked centralized servers.

"As far as the network is concerned," the project's website says, "the name in an NDN packet can be anything: an endpoint, a chunk of movie or book, a command to turn on some lights, etc.” An internet not of numbers, but, if you will, of things.

What that means, in practice, could be big. An internet focused on the what, not the where, could be a more flexible internet, less likely to get clogged up as a steady stream of new devices join the party. An internet that no longer relies on the aging architecture known as TCP/IP could also be an internet with fewer of the middlemen that currently throttle speeds, gather our data, or control what can and can't be seen.

One person who thinks a lot about the need for switching to NDN is Lixia Zhang, a professor of computer science at UCLA who is known for research into protocols and security that have impacted how we use the internet today. (It's a far cry from her first job: as a teenage tractor driver in northern China during the Cultural Revolution.) Her own interest in NDN—she's now one of the project's leaders—emerged out of what she saw as changing needs for the network: The current internet simply doesn’t fit how we want to use our devices anymore.

Over lunch recently, a colleague at UCLA asked her to clarify that: Why, exactly, does the internet need a new architecture?

"I said, ‘There’s a simple answer.’ I had my phone on the table, and he had his phone on the table. I said, ‘Look, our phones are next to each other, can they talk to each other?’ He said, ‘of course they can.’ I said, ‘directly?’ And he said, ‘no, they cannot.’ And this is not because physically they can not, physically [you can connect] phone-to phone using WiFi, Bluetooth. But the TCP/IP protocol is the roadblock for phones to directly talk to each other. The protocols need to change because it doesn’t enable the communication that we want.”

The plan for NDN is one approach to what's known as information centric networking (ICN), an idea with roots in Ted Nelson's 1980s experiments with hypertext. It wasn't until 2006, however, when projects at Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and at the legendary Xerox PARC launched the idea into the networking mainstream. Internet pioneer and PARC researcher Van Jacobson, whose talk at Google in 2006 has been widely cited as the start of the ICN movement, is now a leader of the NDN project alongside Zhang.

Now there are a range of smaller NDN-like initiatives globally, and last September, the ICN's various research questions were the topic of its own conference. Other ambitious projects seeking to address current problems with the internet include software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV).

Zhang said the various approaches aren't competing so much as complementary, tackling related problems. But NDN is the best funded, with $15 million through 2016 under the National Science Foundation, in addition to corporate assistance (more on that below). “I’d rather say that they are near-term solutions, and not really competition. NDN is specific as a new protocol architecture [to] replace TCP/IP."

When it was first built in the 1970s, the current iteration of the global network was designed around IP addresses, numbers that specify and communicate the location of data, be it on a server, on your laptop, or on your phone (like 100.40.80.60). But this system, known as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP—designed for shuttling around small bits of data between relatively few machines having "conversations"—has been called inefficient, insecure, and terribly inadequate for the real world. Researchers back then didn't anticipate a far larger internet, brimming with heavy content like video and a wealth of new devices sucking that data down. A new system called IPv6, designed to handle far more devices (its numbers look like 2001:0db8:85a3:0042:1000:8a2e:0370:7334), debuted in 2008, but it has struggled to reach mainstream adoption.

The plan for a more distributed internet that's not dependent on scarce or lengthy IP addresses should appeal to proponents of security and of the Internet of Things, the project's researchers say. On an inter-network increasingly crowded with all sorts of devices, relying on names would allow for more flexibility, speed, and security, said Jeff Burke, assistant dean of technology and innovation at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, and a principal investigator for the project. NDN would also, he said, "make writing the kind of apps we use simpler and easier to do, making internet innovation easier to achieve.”

“This is a lot of people who have done work on the internet for many, many years who are investigating what worked and what didn’t work, and are proposing evolution for the underlying fundamental protocols," he added. Their hope is to build a network architecture that isn't just more efficient and flexible but, in a sense, more democratic too. With a named-data architecture, major media providers like Hulu and YouTube would not be the sole key-holders to digital content, nor the only methods of publication.

“Computers can store something others want instead of just [media providers] distributing it,” said Burke. “Instead of there being a single server that’s sourcing, lots and lots of people are able to access things." In other words, he said, "it’s decentralizing publication.”

How it works

Think of the current internet as a “point-to-point system,” like the way we use telephones: to get information, computers (clients) call servers and vice versa. Named Data Networking switches the focus from where digital information comes from to what users are looking for. Under this rubric, the request your computer or phone makes to the network is not "connect me to the computer with this name," but "give me the data associated with this name."

Imagine walking into a room full of people and asking everyone the time. Anyone with a watch can respond, and you don’t have to rely on one clock on the wall. This is how Named Data Networking works: As long as you name it, anyone who has the digital content you are looking for can provide it, making you less dependent on receiving information—or distributing information—through a middleman.

Currently, when you stream content from websites like YouTube, your computer pulls data from the closest YouTube server. Since the late ‘90s, media providers and e-commerce networks have paid for content delivery networks (CDNs), like those operated by Akamai, to provide high-speed availability to you by having servers in many different locations.

But this means that not all data is served equally: Content producers who don't use content delivery networks have trouble providing access and often face slow connections, which of course tend to get slower if their content becomes popular. NDN's efficient architecture would do away with a heavy reliance on CDNs, and better accommodate upswings in traffic with other, lighter kinds of infrastructure.

Alexander Afanasyev, a postdoc at UCLA’s Internet Research Lab, said NDN would eliminate the need for “complex cloud infrastructure,” often owned by Internet heavyweights. That's because, he said, “the NDN network itself inherently provides functions of traffic engineering and direct requests towards the closest available replica [of the data], splitting the load into multiple paths if necessary.” Data would be stored, he explained, on "in-network storage that will be installed and maintained by new providers," and "would potentially help all applications, not just HTTP/HTTPS based ones."

The capabilities of NDN echo the peer-to-peer design of the BitTorrent protocol, which lets anyone publish and request data based on what they are looking for, rather than where it lives on the network. But BitTorrent sits on top of and accommodates TCP/IP; NDN replaces it entirely.

For BitTorrent that difference means that the BitTorrent system must rely, said Burke, on "a lot of machinery to find out the names for content, to figure out who to issue requests to, a lot of things like that. NDN makes all of those features available at the lower layers for all applications.”

A network based around content, not IP addresses, could also make the distribution of data more efficient and equal, a prospect appealing if you favor network neutrality—the principle that everyone deserves equal access to the same bandwidth. It might not sound as favorable if, say, you're the head of a large telecom company, in control of the pipes that NDN would effectively decentralize.

Some big companies however are interested in being a part of NDN's development. PARC, where NDN was largely born, continues to be involved in the project, along with seven other members from industry, including Intel, Cisco Systems, and Huawei. This arrangement augments the project's academic research—the companies contribute their own work and funding—and allows these companies to guide the evolution of a nascent architecture. “Each of the companies involved contributes and has technical ideas about the particular approach that we’re taking," Burke said.

On the software side, for example, "Intel has people working on applications actively, developing and using NDN tools. They give us their ideas, they get to know that there will be resources they have provided, and they get to help make sure there’s a community of people working on it." The presence of hardware vendors suggests that the current NDN protocol, while designed to be a "universal overlay" on the existing internet, would eventually run on hardware specifically designed for NDN.

Despite the corporate influence, however, Burke underscores the project's commitment to remaining public and open source. While NDN may not be widely available to consumers for a decade, the codebase is already open to the public on Github so that others can begin exploring and implementing it. Researchers have already been using and testing Named Data Networking principles with applications for video communication and health tracking, and restructuring them for simpler access and easier data sharing.

One application that researchers have been testing, Open mHealth, relies on open standards for data exchange, as part of its approach to interoperability and data protection. "This is a good fit for NDN, and is an application area that encourages us to look at privacy and security carefully, too,” Burke said.

Security is a major concern for networking researchers—especially in a system where data is no longer coming from the server where it originates, but rather from the nearest computers, which may not be as trustworthy.

To that end, NDN embeds a kind of digital trust into the data itself, so that your computer can retrieve that data from anywhere with confidence. NDN's emphasis on the name of the data, rather than its location, extends to its security philosophy. The current internet’s security model allows for an encrypted connection between end points; for example, your computer browser and Gmail's servers. It’s a connection-oriented approach to security. Named Data Networking aims to encrypt the data itself, as it’s created, rather than just having encrypted—and vulnerable—end-points on the routes that data takes.

“In the current internet, the fundamental protocols don’t have any inherent security primitives, so we’ve built a lot of machinery on top of them to do security that essentially is based on a conversational model,” Burke said.

That machinery also allows for interesting new opportunities to prevent web content from disappearing (consider the problem of link rot), and to protect the intellectual property of a piece of data, or at least to attach it to a particular creator. In NDN, a signature is built into every data packet, creating a binding for the name for the data, the data itself and then the cryptographic identity of the publisher. What of this metadata would be available, and how it would be used, would be up to individual users and apps.

Narrow Waists and Bottlenecks

While it stretches across sixteen universities—half in the U.S., half overseas—linking up to the NDN testbed isn't easy: in addition to agreeing to a lengthy set of policies, NDN presently requires installing software applications and "the protocol stack," with its naming system at the core. Over time, as more nodes join the network, the hope is that IP—now the "narrow waist" at the center of the internet's hourglass architecture—will be replaced by NDN, with the internet as we know it—including servers and our own browsers—migrating along with it.

Of course, this won't be easy. Consider the adoption of IPv6: In a recent study of as many as half of the packets flowing across the Internet at certain times, researchers found that IPv6 packets numbered about 0.6 percent. This represented a big advance on previous years, but also demonstrated how hard it is to convince people to upgrade to a new kind of network.

There are plenty of challenges ahead. Aside from the not insignificant matter of converting to a new protocol, however, one lingering challenge to wider adoption is figuring out, how, exactly, to handle a network that would be overflowing with names instead of numbers. Because each set of data in the NDN architecture is specified by a panoply of names and hosts rather than simple IP addresses, the count of the number of things each person routes to is orders of magnitude greater than under an IP system. That unbounded "namespace" could make routing table sizes astronomically large and make the system unwieldy.

But Afanasyev and other researchers have proposed a solution: By building a catalog that stores network locations and points requests in the right direction, the system stem a flood of lots of individual names. This more conventional routing approach would, they write in a new paper, "separate what is required to be in the global routing/forwarding system from all names that can exist in the NDN universe,” enabling NDN to scale with the Internet’s well-understood routing protocols, while keeping all the benefits of the new NDN architecture.

Burke is certain that NDN, or some form of it, will be adopted in his lifetime. That's partly because the system was designed with existing applications and concerns in mind, from video to security to IP protection. The project is "being done in such a way that you could introduce NDN-engineered communication in challenging existing applications much sooner than you’d see evolution across a broader spectrum of the internet.”

Afanasyev notes that there is still skepticism about NDN, particularly related to its ability to perform reliably, "whether the system can scale, how would routers be able to process packets fast enough, etc. For some of these questions/challenges we know partial answers, for some not yet. That’s why NDN (and I would say information-centric networking area in general) is still in research stage :)"

"Although," he wrote in an email, "I have a feeling that people who dive deeper into NDN's details generally like the idea.

With additional reporting by Alex Pasternack

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-internet-of-names





Joseph Lechleider, a Father of the DSL Internet Technology, Dies at 82
Steve Lohr

In the late 1980s, Joseph W. Lechleider came up with a clever solution to a puzzling technical problem, making it possible to bring high-speed Internet service to millions of households. His idea earned him a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame as one of the fathers of the Internet service known as DSL.

Mr. Lechleider, who died on April 18 at his home in Philadelphia at 82, was an electrical engineer at the Bell telephone companies’ research laboratory, Bellcore. At the time, the phone companies wanted to figure out a way to send signals at high speed across ordinary copper wire into homes, mainly to compete with cable television companies and offer interactive video services.

Applying digital technology was the best route to sidestep the limitations of copper wire, but there was still a barrier. When the data speeds in both directions — downloading and uploading — were the same, there was a lot of electrical interference that slowed data traffic to a crawl.

Mr. Lechleider figured out that such meddlesome interference — known as electrical crosstalk — could be drastically reduced if the download speeds were far faster than the upload speeds. This approach became known as the asymmetric digital subscriber line. And these digital subscriber lines, or DSL, were how big phone companies like AT&T and Verizon brought fast broadband Internet into homes.

“Joe Lechleider’s idea was a simple, elegant solution to the problem,” said John M. Cioffi, an emeritus professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. “His contribution was essential to the development and spread of the Internet.”

Mr. Lechleider’s death was confirmed by his son, Dr. Robert Lechleider, who said the cause was cancer of the esophagus. Besides his son, he is survived by his wife, Marie; his daughter, Pamela; and four grandchildren.

Joseph William Lechleider was born on Feb. 22, 1933, in Brooklyn. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School and earned his undergraduate degree from Cooper Union and a Ph.D. from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.

Upon graduation, he went work for General Electric for a few years, and in 1955 he joined Bell Labs. After the 1982 court order breaking up American Telephone & Telegraph, the research arm of the regional Bell companies was established as Bellcore.

Mr. Lechleider’s insight about how to increase data speed came when he was 55. He had spent decades studying signal processing, so he was deeply grounded in the field. But Mr. Lechleider, according to Mr. Cioffi, was something of an iconoclast in a large, often bureaucratic organization.

“He was not afraid to take a risk and fight for a new idea,” Mr. Cioffi said.

Mr. Lechleider was fueled by a wide-ranging curiosity, his son said. Two walls of his study, he recalled, were bookshelves, double-stacked, with books on subjects ranging from physics to philosophy. The study also had a bust of Albert Einstein, whom Mr. Lechleider revered for advancing ideas that challenged accepted wisdom.

Digital subscriber lines were not an immediate success. Early versions were not capable of video-on-demand services, the market the Bell companies originally wanted to enter. And when the Internet began to take off in the 1990s, most consumers went online using dial-up modems, which increased the demand for second phone lines in homes. That was a good business for the phone companies, and a familiar one. Why opt for this new DSL technology?

“There was considerable skepticism,” Mr. Lechleider said an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2003. “There were people who didn’t want to deploy it. There were people who didn’t think it would work. Many of them weren’t sure there was a market for it.”

But as the web added more data-rich images, music and video, the demand for affordable, higher-speed communications services surged. And DSL technology afforded the phone companies a path to do that for years without having to undertake the costly alternative of installing fiber-optic cable into homes.

Mr. Lechleider contributed a key idea. But it was younger engineers like Mr. Cioffi who developed DSL modem technology.

The inexpensive cleverness of DSL technology, industry analysts say, meant the phone companies did not invest heavily to upgrade their broadband systems, as did the cable companies, like Comcast and Time Warner Cable. The cable operators initially feared competition from satellite television, but their investment paid off, allowing them to offer ever-faster Internet service.

“DSL allowed the phone companies to milk another two decades out of their copper infrastructure,” said Craig Moffett, a telecommunications analyst. “But the phone companies now find themselves far behind the cable companies in the speeds they can offer.”

Mr. Lechleider was not an early adopter of Internet technology. But when he signed up for high-speed service, he chose cable.

Yet his son recalled first getting DSL service years ago in his own home and, realizing how much faster it was than dial-up service, thinking of his father. “I loved him for it,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/te...ies-at-82.html





Not to Be Stopped, Google Takes On the Wireless World
James B. Stewart

Call it the Google paradox.

Last month, the European Union’s antitrust chief accused Google of abusing its dominant market power in web searches.

A week later, Google announced it was entering the wireless service market in the United States, threatening to disrupt one of America’s most concentrated industries. Meantime, it is expanding its super-high-speed broadband Internet service to as many as 34 cities, taking on another market so concentrated that the government recently derailed the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger.

So is Google an evil monopolist or competitive champion?

In the stodgy wireless service industry, long dominated by AT&T and Verizon, with struggling Sprint and feisty T-Mobile a distant third and fourth, the possibility that a new competitor might disrupt this cozy oligopoly has long been considered a pipe dream. When the Justice Department sued to block the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile in 2011, it concluded it was highly unlikely that other competitors would enter the market. Last year, Sprint abandoned its bid for T-Mobile after the Justice Department suggested that deal, too, would be anticompetitive.

But now Google’s entry into wireless — named Project Fi — has changed the conversation about competition in that market, even though Google said the move was still an experiment.

“I’m delighted that Google is doing this,” said Scott Hemphill, visiting professor of antitrust and intellectual property at New York University School of Law. “This is an industry that’s ripe for disruption.”

Google’s wireless business certainly seems disruptive. It takes direct aim at the fat profit margins and high prices of the dominant firms. Google is charging $20 a month for basic voice and text service, and $10 for a gigabyte of cellular data, according to a blog post on the company’s website. And in a move unheard of among traditional wireless providers, Google will rebate payments to customers for any unused data.

(A Google spokeswoman, Niki Christoff, said Project Fi is currently available only to users of the Motorola Nexus 6 smartphone, and even then only by invitation.)

Google’s service also uses a combination of innovative technology and partnerships with existing cellular providers to overcome its lack of wireless spectrum. Project Fi uses Wi-Fi networks whenever possible (hence its name) and, when Wi-Fi isn’t available, moves seamlessly to cellular networks. The cellular networks are provided by Sprint and T-Mobile, the current cell service underdogs.

Professor Hemphill said that Google’s inventive service shows the wisdom of the Obama administration’s having challenged the T-Mobile-AT&T transaction. “Now you have two firms open to alternative business models,” he said. “Surely a duopoly would have thumbed their noses at Google’s idea.”

In the high-speed broadband market, even the prospect of Google’s coming to town has caused entrenched providers to improve their service in anticipation of a new competitive threat. After Google said it would bring its fiber service to the Charlotte, N.C., market, Time Warner Cable announced it was offering a free higher-speed upgrade to its customers there.

And after Google pushed into Austin, Tex., in December, AT&T and Time Warner Cable announced they would upgrade service, and new entrants have made Austin a high-speed Internet paradise that’s enhancing its reputation as a technology magnet. Google has also said it is bringing its service to the Atlanta, Nashville, Raleigh-Durham and Salt Lake City metropolitan areas.

Of course, Google isn’t doing this because it’s trying to win a corporate good citizenship award from the Justice Department’s antitrust division. These are strategic moves aimed at enhancing Google’s position in search while exploiting new profit opportunities.

Like many of Google’s forays into nonsearch businesses, cellular service and high-speed broadband feeds users to its search business, since the more cellular usage and broadband access, and the cheaper they are, the more consumers will use Google’s search function.

“We call these businesses complements, since having more of one creates demand for the other,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa College of Law.

Also, entering big, concentrated markets offers Google greater profit opportunities. “There is something to be said about going for fat, complacent industries,” Professor Hovenkamp said.

That, of course, might be said of Google’s core search business, which is what drives the company’s high profit margins — which have typically exceeded 20 percent. New entrants and existing competitors have failed to erode Google’s market share, which in the United States has been fairly consistent at about 65 percent and in Europe is over 90 percent.

Google’s dominant position has long drawn regulatory scrutiny in both the United States and Europe and now a European enforcement action. (On Wednesday, European officials continued to flex their antitrust muscles, opening an investigation into whether large technology companies were impeding competition in online shopping.)

It isn’t inconsistent for a monopolist in one industry to be an innovative upstart in another. “Monopolists have historically invested in more competitive markets,” Professor Hovenkamp said. “They might prefer to pour all their investment capital into their high-margin dominant business, but that isn’t feasible, so they turn to related businesses.” (He mentioned Ford, which at the height of its market power in automobiles turned to manufacturing tractors.)

But success and a dominant market position aren’t illegal unless they’re acquired unlawfully or if a monopolist abuses its market power.

European antitrust officials have tended to be more skeptical about large market shares than American regulators, especially when it comes to American technology companies. In the suit against Google, they claim it rigged search results to favor its shopping sites over competitors (including some large European companies). They have also said they are scrutinizing Google’s Android mobile phone operating system, which typically features Google as the default search engine.

It remains to be seen what new evidence the European Union investigators may have uncovered, but both of those issues have been examined at length by United States regulators, who concluded no action against Google was warranted after the company agreed to relatively minor adjustments.

And the European case has generated skepticism among American antitrust experts. “You have to ask, where’s the harm to consumers?” Professor Hemphill said. “By all indications, Google is providing something that consumers want.”

Professor Hovenkamp added that even if Europe wins the case, it risks having to micromanage search algorithms. “That’s a costly, never-ending and ultimately destructive game,” he said. “You don’t want to turn Internet search into a regulated industry.”

Google has denied the charges in detailed blog posts, arguing that European consumers have benefited and that Android has created more choice and innovation.

Whatever the outcome in Europe, Google is emerging as a formidable competitor in wireless and broadband, two of the most entrenched oligopolies in the United States. So while European regulators go after the search giant, their American counterparts would seem to be rooting for Google.

“The Justice Department must be thrilled,” Professor Hemphill said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/bu...ess-world.html





Facebook’s Internet.org Platform is a Privacy Nightmare: Tracks Users on Partner Sites, Allows Telcos to Track
Nikhil Pahwa

Facebook announced today that it was opening up its Internet.org service to all sites, probably in response to criticism (including that from us), that it was selecting services, and playing kingmaker. It has announced its Internet.org platform. Along with the announcement comes more information on Internet.org, which brings to light fresh issues.

So, now with full disclosures on what Internet.org is about, here’s what we noticed about it:
– It is an open platform that allows any company to sign up to be zero rated, wherein customers won’t have to pay for accessing these sites, and websites will have to be approved to be allowed in.
– Facebook will allow all types of low bandwidth services to sign up for the platform.
– Websites do not pay Facebook to be included, operators do not charge developers
– Services should not use VoIP, video, file transfer, high resolution photos, or high volume of photos.
– No JavaScript or SSL/TLS/HTTPS
– There will be bookmarked services, and a search option.

Issues with the Internet.org Platform

First up, no matter what Facebook says about Internet.org being a means of promoting Internet usage, it isn’t. It’s a fundamental, permanent change in the way the Internet works by splitting it into free vs paid access. It isn’t the same as giving someone Rs 10 of data access or even 100 mb. It is a permanent shift.

While the kingmaker issue has been somewhat addressed by opening up the platform, there is only one true king in all of this, which is Facebook. There are significant concerns with their terms and conditions, especially those around Facebook’s favorite topic – Privacy, apart from other issues:

1. If you’re a user, Facebook, your telecom operator and the government will know what you are doing: “We collect information when you install, run or use any of our services, including the free websites and services provided through Internet.org,” says Facebook. Facebook’s Data Policy and Cookies Policy are applicable. (Hat Tip: Kiran Jonnalagadda)

Also “we may share information such as your phone number or data usage with your mobile operator so we can provide and improve our services, and to enable us and your operator to understand how you are using and interacting with Internet.org and the carrier’s products and services. For information regarding how your mobile operator uses the information they receive, we recommend you also review their privacy policy” (source)

“In addition, secure content is not supported and may not load”…”your content or service should not rely on passing or collecting encrypted information — resources that do so will not be accessible within Internet.org or will be dropped altogether. While we would prefer to support fully encrypted connections between user and website in all cases, proxying for third-party sites does not allow for this in its current implementation without introducing man-in-the-middle capabilities.” (source)

Without https (secure content), this means that telecom operators will also be able to snoop on your users, and through them, so will the government. Is Privacy a small price to pay for free access to a directory of services? Should the fact that India doesn’t have a privacy law be a factor in allowing Facebook to launch Internet.org? The Internet.org proxy (details) is without https.

To understand what kind of data Facebook is tracking, check out their privacy policy.

Also, if you’re a site on Internet.org, it appears that Facebook will know what users are doing on your site.

2. Telecom operators can still choose to reject you, hence play kingmaker:

“Operators may decline services that cause undue strain to networks, or breach legal or regulatory requirements.”

3. Facebook will get non-exclusive rights to content: Facebook’s Internet.org ‘participation guidelines‘ page points developers towards its “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities“, which clearly states that for content that is covered by Intellectual Property Rights, “you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

3. If your competitors are on board, you will have little choice: The reason why Times Internet publications remained on Internet.org was that their competitors are also there. If one competitor chooses to come on board, you will have little choice but to also follow, else lose out on a potentially large user base. This gives Facebook access to data from across websites.

4. If users try to go to the open web from the Internet.org ecosystem, they’ll get a warning message: The idea of a warning message when users are moving from a free to a paid service is a good idea. It prevents “bill shock” for users, but this hurdle (to jump over) doesn’t exist on the web.

As an online business, if a user is accessing your service on the open web via a Facebook link, and they get this warning message, it is likely that they will drop off. That will force you to go on board, in order to gain access to this user base.

5. Facebook becomes an even stronger source of access for your content: Lest we forget: Facebook throttles content on its own platform, and this strengthens Facebook and Internet.org’s role in discovery. It appears that you’ll need a Facebook account for Internet.org:

“We may collect and use your phone number to determine your eligibility to receive free services, to provide you with relevant offers and services from your operator and others, and to provide you with access to your Facebook account.”

6. If you’re a Video service or use high resolution images, you’re not allowed: Telecom operators have been, for long, complaining about how consumers who use video services take up significant bandwidth. It probably appears to be fair to telcos like Reliance Communications, and a prerequisite for Facebook, to offer low bandwidth services without video, because RCOM will be paying for it, but this something that should perhaps have been a function of availability of bandwidth (video services taking more time to buffer because of slow speeds), and not a function of which type of service is being offered by any service provider.

What should Facebook do?

If it really wants people to get online, subsidize data packs of Rs 10-100 for potential Internet users. Let them access whatever they want, whether video, VoIP, images, and whichever site they want.
http://www.medianama.com/2015/05/223...t-org-privacy/





German Prosecutors Launch Investigation of Spying Charges
Erik Kirschbaum

Germany's top public prosecutor will look into accusations that the country's BND foreign intelligence agency violated laws by helping the United States spy on officials and firms in Europe, including Airbus group, the federal prosecutors office said.

A spokesman for the prosecutors office confirmed weekend media reports that an investigation had been launched as opposition politicians demanded more information about the unfolding scandal from Chancellor Angela Merkel's government.

"A preliminary investigation has been started," the spokesman said. In a related development, federal prosecutor Harald Range himself will be questioned by a parliamentary committee looking into the affair in Berlin on Wednesday.

Der Spiegel magazine said the BND helped the U.S. National Security Agency over at least 10 years, embarrassing Germany and upsetting many in a country where surveillance is a sensitive topic due to abuses by the Nazis and the East German Stasi.

The magazine also reported that in 2013 the BND ordered staff to delete 12,000 internet "selectors" -- IP addresses, email addresses and phone numbers of German government officials -- that it had been tracking for the NSA.

Opposition members of parliament for the Greens and Left party have requested more information from Merkel's government about the BND's assistance to the NSA. German media said there were indications EU governments and agencies, especially France, were the targets of the BND's spying for the NSA.

"This appears to be reaching a criminal dimension," Christian Stroebele, a senior Greens member of parliament, told the Rheinische Post newspaper.

Airbus Group AIR.PA said on Thursday it planned to complain to the German authorities over reports that the country's foreign intelligence agency had helped the United States to spy on it and other European firms.

At the heart of the controversy is the scope of cooperation between the BND and NSA that began in 2002 after the September 11, 2001 attacks -- and how long the Chancellor's office was aware of BND's activities on behalf of the NSA.

It is an especially touchy issue in Germany because Merkel and many Germans reacted strongly in 2013 to reports that the NSA had long been tapping Merkel's cell phone. "Spying among friends is not at all acceptable," she said at the time.

(Writing by Erik Kirschbaum; additional reporting by Matthias Sobolewski; editing by Ralph Boulton)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0NO0H520150503





German Intelligence Agency Halts Internet Monitoring for NSA

According to press reports, the German intelligence service BND ended internet monitoring for the US National Security Agency at the start of the week. Only information from faxes and phone calls is still being sent on.

The "Süddeutsche Zeitung" website reported overnight on Thursday that the German intelligence service BND has stopped internet monitoring for the US National Security Agency (NSA).

Since the start of the week, according to the website, the BND listening station in Bad Aibling is only sending on information from fax messages and telephone calls.

The BND has drastically reduced its collaboration with the NSA, according to the website. According to information from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR and WDR broadcasters, internet traffic which until the start of this week would have been forwarded to the US, is no longer being recorded.

The report added that, in consultation with the chancellor's office, the BND had asked the US to give precise reasons why it required the monitoring of any person or institution. The request was a reaction to reports of alleged misuse of the station for the monitoring of European politicians and government leaders as well as EU institutions. The NSA had apparently replied that a shortage of time prevented the agency from providing justifications for requested internet searches.

Internet search terms accounted for the bulk of the most recent, 4.6 million searches carried out by the BND. The "Süddeutscher Zeitung" said it was not yet known if the US agency would continue to decline to provide justifications for internet searches. In the past, the NSA has apparently given reasons for proposed telephone and fax monitoring.

The report said the NSA had equipped the listening station in Bad Aibling with sophisticated technical equipment. A number of NSA personnel are believed to work there together with some 120 BND personnel.

The NSA has made no comment on the restriction of co-operation by the BND.

According to a report in the "Rheinische Post" newspaper, the German and US governments are also working to reorganize their intelligence cooperation.

jm/gsw (dpa, Reuters)
http://www.dw.de/german-intelligence...nsa/a-18435768





Lawmakers in France Move to Vastly Expand Surveillance
Alissa J. Rubin

At a moment when American lawmakers are reconsidering the broad surveillance powers assumed by the government after Sept. 11, the lower house of the French Parliament took a long stride in the opposite direction Tuesday, overwhelmingly approving a bill that could give authorities their most intrusive domestic spying abilities ever, with almost no judicial oversight.

The bill, in the works since last year, now goes to the Senate, where it seems likely to pass, having been given new impetus in reaction to the terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January, including at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher grocery, that left 17 people dead.

As the authorities struggle to keep up with the hundreds of French citizens who are cycling to and from battlefields in Iraq and Syria to wage jihad — often lured over the Internet — the new steps would give the intelligence services the right to gather potentially unlimited electronic data.

The provisions, as currently outlined, would allow them to tap cellphones, read emails and force Internet providers to comply with government requests to sift through virtually all of their subscribers’ communications.

What Would the Law Allow?

▪ The intelligence services could analyze vast quantities of digital data pertaining to a large swath of French society.
Some of the provisions:
▪ The authorities could install recording and filming devices in people's homes or cars or private space. They could also bug their computers, cell phones and other digital devices.
▪ Associates of people under surveillance could also have their communications monitored, regardless of whether they are implicated in potentially illegal acts.
▪ The right of surveillance would also apply to people in France communicating with someone outside the country.

Among the types of surveillance that the intelligence services would be able to carry out is the bulk collection and analysis of metadata similar to that done by the United States’ National Security Agency.

The intelligence services could also request a right to put tiny microphones in a room or on objects such as cars or in computers or place antennas to capture telephone conversations or mechanisms that capture text messages. Both French citizens and foreigners could be tapped.

“The last intelligence law was done in 1991, when there were neither cellphones nor Internet,” said Manuel Valls, the prime minister, who took the unusual step early last month of personally presenting the bill to the National Assembly and defending the measures, which are already facing gathering opposition from concerned lawyers, Internet companies and human rights groups.

Indeed, the move by the lower house of Parliament underscored the fervent debate going on across Europe over how best to balance civil liberties and privacy rights against mounting threats to security in an age of rising extremism and global interconnectivity.

The confluence of new technologies, virtual social networks and alienated Muslims has made it all the easier for militant groups like the Islamic State to recruit young Europeans for their cause of establishing a new caliphate in the Middle East — and, potentially, of striking at European adversaries at home.

Last month, virtually by a fluke, the French authorities uncovered an apparent plot to attack at least one church near Paris by a gunman who appeared to have been encouraged solely over the Internet by handlers in Syria, without ever having gone there to enlist in jihad.

The growth of global communication, however, has also encouraged governments toward expansive and sometimes unchecked surveillance powers, as the leaks from the National Security Agency’s files by a former contractor, Edward J. Snowden, revealed in 2013.

Even as rising security threats have pushed some European governments to expand their intelligence gathering, elsewhere, like in Germany, the Snowden revelations continue to generate pressures to rein in government surveillance.

Despite the breadth of the provisions in the French bill, Mr. Valls promised that the French law would be “targeted,” and insisted its main focus was to protect French citizens from terrorism.

“The means of surveillance for anticipating, detecting and prevention of attacks will be strictly limited,” he promised.

But opponents, including one of France’s leading judges dealing with terrorism cases, Marc Trévidic, say that the law’s text contradicts the prime minister’s assurances.

“It is a state lie,” said Pierre-Olivier Sur, the head of the Paris bar association. “This project was presented to us as a way to protect France against terrorism, and if that were the case, I would back it,” he said.

“But it is being done to put in place a sort of Patriot Act concerning the activities of each and everyone,” he said, referring to the American legislation that among other things authorized extensive electronic surveillance as a way to intercept terrorist activity.

Mr. Sur said that he and others worried that the measure could be used to monitor any behavior the government viewed as potentially disruptive.

The editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo — a victim of the kinds of attack the measure is presumably meant to thwart — also criticized it. “I think that opportunistic laws are always bad laws,” the editor in chief, Gérard Biard, said in an interview at The New York Times Editorial Board.

“I understand the spirit of this law,” he said. “But I think we already have a lot of laws, and with these laws, if they’re used correctly, you can fight and you can fight terrorism. So I understand the government, you have to do something. The easiest thing to do is to invoke a law. But maybe it’s a mistake, because if this law is not correct, if this law is not fair, it’s not the right answer.”

In the current text of the proposed law it states that the intelligence services can propose surveillance to protect “national independence, the integrity of French territory and national defense” and to “prevent terrorism.”

It also can be used to “prevent attacks on the republican form of institutions,” and to fight organized crime.

French judges and lawyers also site the need for oversight in their criticisms of the law. Mr. Trévidic, the terrorism judge, has gone on national television and described the law as “dangerous” because it lacks any routine judicial review.

The new law would create a 13-member National Commission to Control Intelligence Techniques, which would be made up of six magistrates from the Council of State and the Court of Appeals, three representatives of the National Assembly and three senators from the upper house of the French Parliament and a technical expert.

Any requests to initiate surveillance would have to go through the commission. However, if the commission recommended not to set up the monitoring, it could be overridden by the prime minister.

While in theory the prime minister would act independently, it is likely to be difficult for him or her to oppose the intelligence services because they would be most likely to be supplying the information about possible terrorist or criminal targets.

The only judicial oversight is a provision that allows the commission to lodge a complaint with the Council of State, but lawyers are dubious that they could be convened on a routine basis. The Council of State functions as a legal adviser to the executive branch of government and a supreme court for matters of administrative law.

As for metadata, it would be electronically sorted and then only if the sites visited or searches carried out suggested suspicious behavior as defined by the intelligence services would it trigger a human review of a person’s emails and Internet browsing.

Protesting the legislation are more than 800 Internet companies, web hosts, software developers, e-commerce firms, and other digital businesses which have mounted a broad based campaign against the legislation under the slogan “Neither Pigeons Nor Spies.” A pigeon in French slang refers to someone who is a patsy.

They warn that “to put massive surveillance on the Internet would sacrifice the advent of the digitalization of France, its jobs and contribution to the French economy.” Some of the companies, which have international clients, are threatening to leave France since they fear their customers will no longer trust the confidentiality of their communications.

The opposition goes further, and includes human rights groups and civil liberties supporters.

These opponents want more protections in the legislation. As written the legislation creates a “French Big Brother,” they say, referring to the George Orwell novel “1984” in which two lovers’ loyalty to the state is constantly watched and regulated by an all-knowing, all-seeing government.

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris, and Rick Gladstone from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/wo...ence-bill.html





France’s Push to Expand Surveillance Is Predictable but Possibly Futile
Alissa J. Rubin

France’s embrace of vastly expanded government surveillance powers was clearly a response to national trauma in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks here in January, but it is unlikely that any of the proposed new tools would have been able to stop them, some experts said Wednesday.

Despite the breadth of the proposed legislation, which was overwhelmingly passed by the lower house of Parliament on Tuesday, the increased surveillance would probably not have prevented Chérif and Saïd Kouachi from massacring 12 people at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the analysts said.

Nor would the added measures probably have headed off Amedy Coulibaly from taking hostages days later at a kosher grocery store, killing four of them, in addition to a police officer, they said.

“The law would not have added anything,” said Pierre-Olivier Sur, the head of the Paris bar association, who opposes the new measures, which will allow the intelligence services to collect and monitor bulk cybercommunications, read texts and email and tap cellphones as well as place recording devices in people’s homes and cars, with little judicial oversight.

“The Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly were already targeted by the intelligence services,” Mr. Sur noted, and the authorities already have more information and suspects than they can possibly track with the current levels of resources and funding, neither of which are provided by the proposed legislation.

Yet the French push to vastly expand domestic spying in reaction to the attack is hardly a unique response.

Many governments and societies, not least in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks, have gone through similar seismic shifts, rebalancing civil liberties and security in the wake of terrorist attacks.

What was most striking in France, however, was the near absence of attention and debate around the measures — the bill passed the National Assembly by a vote of 438 to 86, and the news barely made the front pages of newspapers here on Wednesday.

Perhaps that is not all that unusual. Citizens in nations that have been attacked tend to look for reassurance that they will not be the next victims, and politicians tend to believe that there is little to be gained — and potentially a lot to be lost — if they fail to emphasize that they are doing everything possible to keep their citizens safe.

Although a Socialist government like France’s might be expected to be sympathetic to those wary of government intrusiveness — the majority of Green Party lawmakers voted against the bill — President François Hollande is politically weak and cannot risk being seen as casual in the face of threats foreign or domestic.

Such prominent attacks also present opportunities for intelligence and security services to amass powers that previously eluded them in dealing with the new and shadowy forms of terrorism that are spreading globally today.

Nowhere, perhaps, is that sense of a lurking danger greater than in Europe, where officials estimate that several thousand people have gone to Syria and Iraq to join extremist groups, and some have tried to return and are perceived as coming back with violent intentions.

These countries are also facing a threat from homegrown terrorists, who never go abroad but plot attacks sitting at their computers, encouraged by handlers in Syria whom they have never met.

And nowhere do those factors play a stronger role than in France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe and has seen more of its citizens go to Syria and Iraq than any other European country.

While the spread of extremism is a concern across Europe, views and reactions differ according to demographics and history.

In former communist countries there is an aversion to giving the government broad powers, not least because of the ways those powers were abused under the Soviet Union, which fell less than 30 years ago.

In Germany, for example, where the memories of the secret police, known as the Stasi, and the Nazis’ police state are not so distant, the government has been accused of spying on foreign companies on behalf of the United States National Security Agency.

In Macedonia, citizens have poured into the streets to demonstrate against the prime minister, who they say has hidden broad internal surveillance of journalists, opposition politicians, judges, diplomats and others. The anger is hardly surprising given the country’s past as part of Yugoslavia, a Soviet satellite state — although a less tightly run one than some other Eastern European countries.

By contrast, in Britain, which has long hewed closely to an American approach on intelligence and whose intelligence services work closely with their American counterparts, there is broad acceptance of some state intrusiveness. Britain was a pioneer in the use of video surveillance by private citizens and businesses but also by local governments, which use it to capture petty criminals and small-time lawbreakers.

After the terrorist attacks on the British public transportation system in 2005, the government endorsed a number of counterterrorism measures that made it easier to track and detain potential assailants. Although denounced by civil liberties and human rights advocates, they were adopted with little fuss.

Now, human rights and civil liberties advocates say their worry is that if the French legislation is enacted, the country will be in the vanguard of repressive states like Russia that use surveillance powers to monitor not only potential terrorists but also anyone who is seen as a threat to the government.

And because France is identified as a strong supporter of individual freedom and human rights, its plans to eavesdropping on cyber, cell and verbal communications could be used as a justification for other countries to take a similar path.

“My fear is that France is setting an example here and it encourages a race for the bottom on a global level,” said Cynthia Wong, a lawyer and senior Internet researcher for Human Rights Watch. “If France does it, why wouldn’t every other government do the same thing?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/wo...lie-hebdo.html





EU, U.S. Close to Data Sharing Deal for Security Cases – Sources
Julia Fioretti

The European Union and the United States are close to completing negotiations on a deal protecting personal data shared for law enforcement purposes such as terrorism investigations, three people familiar with the matter said.

The two sides have been negotiating since 2011 over the so-called "umbrella agreement" that would protect personal data exchanged between police and judicial authorities in the course of investigations, as well as between companies and law enforcement authorities.

However, talks have been hampered by the lack of a right for EU citizens not resident in the United States to go to U.S. courts if they believe their data has been misused. U.S. citizens enjoy such rights in the EU.

The EU has repeatedly insisted that until such a "right to judicial redress" is enshrined in law, the agreement cannot be signed.

The protection of personal data in the United States has been a sore point in the EU since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed mass U.S. surveillance programmes involving EU citizens.

But the introduction of the Judicial Redress Act in March by U.S. Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, aimed precisely at giving citizens of U.S. allies the right to sue over data privacy in the United States, was seen as a step in the right direction.

"The finishing line is in sight," said one person familiar with the matter, cautioning that the final adoption of the deal would still require Congress to pass Sensenbrenner's bill.

However, in what would be a major step forward, the text could be initialled at the next EU-U.S. meeting on justice and security issues, scheduled for June 2-3, the person said.

That would mean that all other outstanding issues would have been resolved.

The intention is to have the text initialled by the chief negotiators of both sides, another person familiar with the matter said, in what would be a boost for frayed transatlantic relations after the allegations of mass U.S. spying.

The U.S. Justice Department had no immediate comment.

The closing of negotiations on the umbrella agreement would bode well for a separate deal being negotiated between the two blocs on data transfers between companies.

The European Commission, which leads the negotiations on behalf of the EU, has said that it aims to complete those negotiations before the summer.

(Editing by Alison Williams)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0NT2BC20150508





U.S. Will Change Stance on Secret Phone Tracking

Justice Department will reveal more about the use of such devices and launch a review
Devlin Barrett

The Justice Department will start revealing more about the government’s use of secret cellphone tracking devices and has launched a wide-ranging review into how law-enforcement agencies deploy the technology, according to Justice officials.

In recent months, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun getting search warrants from judges to use the devices, which hunt criminal suspects by locating their cellphones, the officials said. For years, FBI agents didn’t get warrants to use the tracking devices.

Senior officials have also decided they must be more forthcoming about how and why the devices are used—although there isn’t yet agreement within the Justice Department about how much to reveal or how quickly.

The move comes amid growing controversy over the Justice Department’s use of such devices, some versions of which, as The Wall Street Journal reported last year, are deployed in airplanes and scan data from thousands of phones used by Americans who aren’t targets of investigations.

There are still many instances where law enforcement doesn’t get warrants before using the devices, sometimes called “IMSI catchers” and known by various names like Stingray, Hailstorm, and “dirtbox,” according to officials’ public statements. The agencies that use the devices within the Justice Department—the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration—each have different rules and procedures for their use.

The Justice Department review will determine how they should be used, officials said.

A Justice spokesman said the department is “examining its policies to ensure they reflect the Department’s continuing commitment to conducting its vital missions while according appropriate respect for privacy and civil liberties.”

The devices were first designed more than a decade ago to hunt terrorists and spies overseas, but they are increasingly in the hands of local police departments that use them to hunt all manner of criminals—from kidnappers to everyday thieves.

The use of the technology, and the tight secrecy that surrounds it, has begun to anger some judges and lawmakers.

Federal law-enforcement and phone-company officials also have expressed concerns that some local police authorities were abusing a legal shortcut by submitting an inordinate number of requests for cellphone information, according to people familiar with the matter. A Baltimore police official, for example, told a local judge overseeing a murder case last month the department had used the devices at least 4,300 times dating to 2007. The judge ruled the use of the device in that case was permissible.

One of the most effective ways to find a suspect using the technology is to get the last known location of the suspect’s phone—which can be provided by a phone company. Some companies can “ping” a phone in real time to determine its general whereabouts while others can tell investigators where it made its last call or text.

The Journal last year detailed how the U.S. Marshals Service flies planes equipped with the devices from airports around five major U.S. cities, scanning tens of thousands of phones at a time in densely populated areas as it hunts for fugitives. The Justice Department also uses them outside U.S. soil, and a Marshals employee was shot last July in a secret operation with such a device in Mexico, leading some law-enforcement officials to question how Justice Department managers decide to deploy them.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has demanded more details from the Justice Department about their use in response to the articles.

“We know it’s got to come out,” one law-enforcement official said. “At some point, it becomes more harmful to try to keep it secret than to acknowledge it. We just want to acknowledge it carefully and slowly, so we don’t lose what is a very effective tool.”

Officials said they don’t want to reveal so much that it gives criminals clues about how to defeat the devices. Law-enforcement officials also don’t want to reveal information that would give new ammunition to defense lawyers in prosecutions where warrants weren’t used, according to officials involved in the discussions.

And one federal agency, the U.S. Marshals, are fugitive-hunters who rarely testify in court, so they are likely to reveal much less about how they use the technology than their counterparts at the FBI and DEA, these people said.

Law-enforcement officials say they aren’t interested in gathering large amounts of information with the devices and say their purpose is typically finding a single suspect in a sea of floating digital data. Privacy advocates say the methods amount to a digital dragnet—a silent ID check of untold numbers of innocent people who aren’t suspected of anything, or even aware their phones are being checked. The machines can also interrupt service on cellphones being scanned.

The effectiveness of the technology in finding suspects is prompting some local law enforcement to use it frequently.

About a year ago, Baltimore police officials began deluging some phone companies with requests for customer cellphone information, claiming it couldn’t wait for a judge’s order, according to people familiar with the matter. Normally, police need a court order to get that kind of information about a phone customer. But there is an exception for emergency requests. Phone companies’ rules vary, but they generally allow emergency requests to be fulfilled in missing-persons cases or when there is a risk of death or serious injury. Typically, the phone company employee doesn’t ask questions to verify the nature of the emergency.

Local police departments must sign a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI before getting access to the technology—agreeing not to reveal details of how the technology works and to seek guidance from the FBI if questioned in court or elsewhere. As part of that agreement, police agencies acknowledge they may have to drop charges against suspects if prosecuting a suspect risks revealing information about the machines.

In contrast, the FBI doesn’t require or provide legal standards to police on best practices for how to use the devices, according to people familiar with the issue. Officials say that if a police department asks for advice on how they use the devices, the FBI will provide it.

People familiar with the Baltimore matter said police there have scaled back their emergency requests.

But some phone company officials remain concerned the emergency request function is prone to abuse, according to people familiar with the issue. A spokesman for the police department didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Verizon Wireless, the nation’s largest cellphone provider, saw an 8% increase in emergency requests by law enforcement nationwide from the first half to the second half of 2014, according to company data.

The overall number of law-enforcement requests fell by 7% from the first half, according to Verizon. AT&T Inc. data showed a 4% increase in emergency law-enforcement requests along with an increase in nonemergency requests. Emergency requests encompass a range of issues, including trying to track information from dropped 911 calls.

In a federal court filing last year in Atlanta, AT&T broadly discussed the increasing demands that law enforcement is putting on phone companies.

“AT&T receives and responds to an enormous volume of official demands to provide information to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies in the United States,” lawyers for the company wrote in the filing.

The company has more than 100 full-time employees staffed to meet the volume of requests from law enforcement and civil lawsuits.
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/u-s...NDA0MzEwNjMzWj





Appeals Court Overturns Privacy Win in Phone-Tracking Case
Jacob Gershman

Police don’t need a warrant to track the cellphones of criminal suspects, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday, reversing an early decision in a closely watched privacy case.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta held that the government didn’t violate the privacy rights of a man convicted of a 2010 armed robbery spree and sentenced to life in prison.

The case is the latest test of the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure in the digital age.

At issue in the ruling is a case that went to trial in 2012, where prosecutors presented cell tower location data that placed the defendant, Quartavius Davis, and his cohorts near the scene of the robberies. To obtain a court order for the records, covering a 67-day period, prosecutors didn’t need a search warrant backed by probable cause. They had just needed to show that the information obtained from a T-Mobile-owned prepaid wireless service was relevant and material their investigation.

However, a three-judge panel from the 11th Circuit ruled last year that the government, going forward, would have to get warrant to obtain such location data in criminal cases but it agreed to reconsider that decision with a full roster of judges participating.

In deciding the case on Tuesday, the full court said it balanced the degree to which the collection of location records intruded on privacy against the government’s interest in obtaining them.

Here’s the key passage from Judge Frank Hull’s majority opinion:

The stored telephone records produced in this case, and in many other criminal cases, serve compelling governmental interests. Historical cell tower location records are routinely used to investigate the full gamut of state and federal crimes, including child abductions, bombings, kidnappings, murders, robberies, sex offenses, and terrorism-related offenses.

Davis had at most a diminished expectation of privacy in business records made, kept, and owned by MetroPCS; the production of those records did not entail a serious invasion of any such privacy interest, particularly in light of the privacy-protecting provisions of the SCA; the disclosure of such records pursuant to a court order authorized by Congress served substantial governmental interests; and, given the strong presumption of constitutionality applicable here, any residual doubts concerning the reasonableness of any arguable “search” should be resolved in favor of the government.


While vacating the panel opinion, the en banc court upheld Mr. Davis’s conviction based on a legal doctrine known as the Good Faith Exception, which says courts may not suppress evidence if police had good reason to believe their actions were legal under existing statute.

“The majority opinion fails to appreciate the necessity of protecting our privacy in the digital age, but this is not the last word,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a brief in the case to support a warrant requirement.

Two judges disagreed with the majority on the constitutional question, including Judge Beverly B. Martin who wrote a dissenting opinion arguing that the Fourth Amendment required the government to get a warrant before accessing the cell site location data.

“The judiciary must not allow the ubiquity of technology—which threatens to cause greater and greater intrusions into our private lives—to erode our constitutional protections,” she wrote.

Two other appeals courts, the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit and the Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit, have ruled that police can obtain cellphone location data without a warrant.

A lawyer for Mr. Davis, David Oscar Markus, criticized what he said was “sweeping language” in the 11th Circuit’s opinion, telling Law Blog in a statement Tuesday that Judge Martin’s dissent “provides the Supreme Court a powerful roadmap…for further review.”

In June, the Supreme Court said that police must almost always get a warrant before searching mobile devices seized from suspects upon arrest. That precedent, though, didn’t apply to Mr. Davis’s situation.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2015/05/05/...tracking-case/





The Truth About Smartphone Apps That Secretly Connect to User Tracking and Ad Sites

Security researchers have developed an automated system for detecting Android apps that secretly connect to ad sites and user tracking sites.
KentuckyFC

There are essentially two starkly different environments in which to download apps. The first is Apple’s app store, which carefully vets apps before allowing only those deemed fit to appear. The second is the Google Play store, which is more open because Google exercises a lighter touch in vetting apps, only excluding those that are obviously malicious.

But because Google Play is more open, the apps it offers span a much wider quality range. Many connect to ad-related sites and tracking sites while some connect to much more dubious sites that are associated with malware.

But here’s the problem—this activity often takes place without the owner being aware of what is going on. That’s something that most smartphone users would be appalled to discover—if only they were able to.

Today, Luigi Vigneri and pals from Eurecom in France have a solution. These guys have come up with an automated way to check the apps in Google Play and monitor the sites they connect to. And their results reveal the extraordinary scale of secret connections that many apps make without their owners being any the wiser.

Vigneri and co began by downloading over 2,000 free apps from all 25 categories on the Google Play store. They then launched each app on a Samsung Galaxy SIII running Android version 4.1.2 that was set up to channel all traffic through the team’s server. This recorded all the urls that each app attempted to contact.

Next they compared the urls against a list of known ad-related sites from a database called EasyList and a database of user tracking sites called EasyPrivacy, both compiled for the open source AdBlock Plus project. Finally, they counted the number of matches on each list for every app

The results make for interesting reading. In total, the apps connect to a mind-boggling 250,000 different urls across almost 2,000 top level domains. And while most attempt to connect to just a handful of ad and tracking sites, some are much more prolific.

Vigneri and co give as an example “Music Volume Eq,” an app designed to control volume, a task that does not require a connection to any external urls. And yet the app makes many connections. “We find the app Music Volume EQ connects to almost 2,000 distinct URLs,” they say.

And it is not alone in its excesses. The team say about 10 percent of the apps they tested connect to more than 500 different urls. And nine out of 10 of the most frequently contact ad-related domains are run by Google.

The user tracking sites that apps connect to are less pervasive. More than 70 percent of apps do not connect to any user tracking sites. But those that do can be extravagant, some connecting to more than 800 user tracking sites. What’s more many of these are created by organizations that Google has designated with “top developer status.” The worst offender is an app called Eurosport Player which connects to 810 different user tracking sites.

A small proportion of the apps even seem designed to connect to suspicious sites connected with malware.

Most users of these apps will have little, if any, knowledge of this kind of behavior. So Vigneri and co have developed their own app that monitors the behavior of others on a user’s smartphone and reveals exactly which external sites these apps are attempting to connect to.

They call their new app NoSuchApp or NSA for short “in honor of a similarly acronymed monitoring agency.”

That should give Android users confidence in the apps they use. “With this application, our goal is to provide a mechanism for end users to be aware of the network activity of their installed Android applications,” say Vigneri and co.

The team plan to make the app publicly available on Google Play in the near future.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view...-and-ad-sites/





Encrypted Chat App Wickr Creates New Non-Profit Arm, Nico Sell Steps Down As CEO To Lead It
Ingrid Lunden

Some big changes ahead for Wickr, the messaging app that emerged in the wake of the NSA private data leaks to offer consumers an encrypted, more secure alternative to mainstream services like Facebook.

As of today, the company is splitting its operations in two: a for-profit division that will double down on Wickr as a business, specifically targeting enterprises and as a paid, white-label service; and a non-profit Wickr Foundation, dedicated to advocating secure and safe communications among groups that might need it most, such as children, human rights activists and journalists.

And, as part of the separation, co-founder and outspoken privacy advocate Nico Sell is stepping away as CEO of Wickr and moving over to become the CEO of the Wickr Foundation. She will be replaced in the Wickr CEO role by Mark Fields, who had been leading the Strategic Investment Group for CME, one of Wickr’s investors.

Sell is also taking a role as co-chair of the Board of Directors of Wickr. Others on the board include investors Jim Breyer and Gilman Louie (the other co-chair).

The leaks of data from secretive government agencies like the NSA in the U.S. — which emerged in full force starting in 2013 — cast a strong light on how our online activity is tracked and observed. Coupled with that we have seen a surge of criticism over how a lot of free online services collect our data in the name of “more relevant content.”

These two currents have created something of a perfect storm for a new wave of apps and even special phones and other hardware designed to give consumers and businesses more private and encrypted alternatives for staying connected.

But there is also an inherent tension for many of these services.

The push to make them truly private essentially restricts how they can make money from its users, since advertising and marketing, and all the tracking that goes along with them, is out of the question.

This is not an impossible task, but it does mean that if you are trying to build a business you have more pressure to use other revenue models which could prove to be a harder sell. Wickr from the outset had committed itself to always remaining free for users.

Indeed, when I first wrote about the company in 2014, when it picked up its first round of funding — $9 million led by Alsop Louie Partners — I wondered aloud if the company would be able to stick to its very principled guns as it matured. (Sell, who also co-founded the DEF CON security/hacker conference, has in the past referred to Facebook as “the devil”.)

Speaking with both Sell and Fields yesterday, it’s not directly clear why Wickr decided to split in this way, but I suspect that maybe some of that tension proved to be too challenging when trying to execute on the company’s business.

Sell tells me that to date there have been 6 million downloads of the app to date, and it has collectively served over 1 billion secret messages. “We have seen an appetite for this app,” she says.

While there have been some notable (and quirky) additions to Wickr’s functionality — recall the stenography-inspired cats to mask photos on Facebook — perhaps some of the company’s forays into building a business around its technology haven’t panned out as it had hoped. A paid, white-label version of the app launched with high hopes last year, but to date the company has only named a couple of customers.

Now it will be trying to widen that B2B remit even further.

“We have a platform and more than just an application,” Fields says. The business side will be looking at ways of selling “Encryption as tools for those who need it. Wickr is well suited to help enterprises a lot, and we are talking with a lot of companies to use the core technology and extend the functionality to make it an enterprise grade app, or tool they can use to build their own apps. There are a variety of ways to work with enterprises that we are going to pursue.”

The idea will be that the Wickr Foundation will continue to have access to all of the technology and products that Wickr has built and will built. But Sell told me in an interview that Wickr is still working out how it will allocate other resources, such as the venture funding the startup has raised ($39 million to date), across its two divisions.

In a way, it will be about Sell putting her efforts back to what compelled her to start Wickr in the first place.

“The foundation’s goal is the reason why I started Wickr. The strong belief we have is that to have a strong society, you need freedom of information,” she said, citing the Mozilla Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation as two models of how a dichotomy can exist with business and nonprofit today.

“The vision here is that I see thousands of Wickr apps on the platform. We’ll focus on building out tech for human rights activists and advocacy and tech for teenagers and we’ll also work on the trust component whether its crypto that is ours or other people’s.” She says she will also be spending a lot of time in Washington, DC, making her voice heard with legislators and others.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/06/enc...kr-foundation/





The Computers are Listening

How the NSA converts spoken words into searchable text
Dan Froomkin

Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record.

But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either.

Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.

The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.

Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community’s “holy grail,” the Snowden documents describe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and “extract” the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest.

The documents include vivid examples of the use of speech recognition in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Latin America. But they leave unclear exactly how widely the spy agency uses this ability, particularly in programs that pick up considerable amounts of conversations that include people who live in or are citizens of the United States.

Spying on international telephone calls has always been a staple of NSA surveillance, but the requirement that an actual person do the listening meant it was effectively limited to a tiny percentage of the total traffic. By leveraging advances in automated speech recognition, the NSA has entered the era of bulk listening.

And this has happened with no apparent public oversight, hearings or legislative action. Congress hasn’t shown signs of even knowing that it’s going on.

The USA Freedom Act — the surveillance reform bill that Congress is currently debating — doesn’t address the topic at all. The bill would end an NSA program that does not collect voice content: the government’s bulk collection of domestic calling data, showing who called who and for how long.

Even if becomes law, the bill would leave in place a multitude of mechanisms exposed by Snowden that scoop up vast amounts of innocent people’s text and voice communications in the U.S. and across the globe.

Civil liberty experts contacted by The Intercept said the NSA’s speech-to-text capabilities are a disturbing example of the privacy invasions that are becoming possible as our analog world transitions to a digital one.

“I think people don’t understand that the economics of surveillance have totally changed,” Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, told The Intercept.

“Once you have this capability, then the question is: How will it be deployed? Can you temporarily cache all American phone calls, transcribe all the phone calls, and do text searching of the content of the calls?” she said. “It may not be what they are doing right now, but they’ll be able to do it.”

And, she asked: “How would we ever know if they change the policy?”

Indeed, NSA officials have been secretive about their ability to convert speech to text, and how widely they use it, leaving open any number of possibilities.

That secrecy is the key, Granick said. “We don’t have any idea how many innocent people are being affected, or how many of those innocent people are also Americans.”

I Can Search Against It

NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who was trained as a voice processing crypto-linguist and worked at the agency until 2008, told The Intercept that he saw a huge push after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks to turn the massive amounts of voice communications being collected into something more useful.

Human listening was clearly not going to be the solution. “There weren’t enough ears,” he said.

The transcripts that emerged from the new systems weren’t perfect, he said. “But even if it’s not 100 percent, I can still get a lot more information. It’s far more accessible. I can search against it.”

Converting speech to text makes it easier for the NSA to see what it has collected and stored, according to Drake. “The breakthrough was being able to do it on a vast scale,” he said.

More Data, More Power, Better Performance

The Defense Department, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), started funding academic and commercial research into speech recognition in the early 1970s.

What emerged were several systems to turn speech into text, all of which slowly but gradually improved as they were able to work with more data and at faster speeds.

In a brief interview, Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, indicated that the government’s ability to automate transcription is still limited.

Kaufman says that automated transcription of phone conversation is “super hard,” because “there’s a lot of noise on the signal” and “it’s informal as hell.”

“I would tell you we are not very good at that,” he said.

In an ideal environment like a news broadcast, he said, “we’re getting pretty good at being able to do these types of translations.”

A 2008 document from the Snowden archive shows that transcribing news broadcasts was already working well seven years ago, using a program called Enhanced Video Text and Audio Processing:

(U//FOUO) EViTAP is a fully-automated news monitoring tool. The key feature of this Intelink-SBU-hosted tool is that it analyzes news in six languages, including Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Spanish, English, and Farsi/Persian. “How does it work?” you may ask. It integrates Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) which provides transcripts of the spoken audio. Next, machine translation of the ASR transcript translates the native language transcript to English. Voila! Technology is amazing.

A version of the system the NSA uses is now even available commercially.

Experts in speech recognition say that in the last decade or so, the pace of technological improvement has been explosive. As information storage became cheaper and more efficient, technology companies were able to store massive amounts of voice data on their servers, allowing them to continually update and improve the models. Enormous processors, tuned as “deep neural networks” that detect patterns like human brains do, produce much cleaner transcripts.

And the Snowden documents show that the same kinds of leaps forward seen in commercial speech-to-text products have also been happening in secret at the NSA, fueled by the agency’s singular access to astronomical processing power and its own vast data archives.

In fact, the NSA has been repeatedly releasing new and improved speech recognition systems for more than a decade.

The first-generation tool, which made keyword-searching of vast amounts of voice content possible, was rolled out in 2004 and code-named RHINEHART.

“Voice word search technology allows analysts to find and prioritize intercept based on its intelligence content,” says an internal 2006 NSA memo entitled “For Media Mining, the Future Is Now!”

The memo says that intelligence analysts involved in counterterrorism were able to identify terms related to bomb-making materials, like “detonator” and “hydrogen peroxide,” as well as place names like “Baghdad” or people like “Musharaf.”

RHINEHART was “designed to support both real-time searches, in which incoming data is automatically searched by a designated set of dictionaries, and retrospective searches, in which analysts can repeatedly search over months of past traffic,” the memo explains (emphasis in original).

As of 2006, RHINEHART was operating “across a wide variety of missions and languages” and was “used throughout the NSA/CSS [Central Security Service] Enterprise.”

But even then, a newer, more sophisticated product was already being rolled out by the NSA’s Human Language Technology (HLT) program office. The new system, called VoiceRT, was first introduced in Baghdad, and “designed to index and tag 1 million cuts per day.”

The goal, according to another 2006 memo, was to use voice processing technology to be able “index, tag and graph,” all intercepted communications. “Using HLT services, a single analyst will be able to sort through millions of cuts per day and focus on only the small percentage that is relevant,” the memo states.

A 2009 memo from the NSA’s British partner, GCHQ, describes how “NSA have had the BBN speech-to-text system Byblos running at Fort Meade for at least 10 years. (Initially they also had Dragon.) During this period they have invested heavily in producing their own corpora of transcribed Sigint in both American English and an increasing range of other languages.” (GCHQ also noted that it had its own small corpora of transcribed voice communications, most of which happened to be “Northern Irish accented speech.”)

VoiceRT, in turn, was surpassed a few years after its launch. According to the intelligence community’s “Black Budget” for fiscal year 2013, VoiceRT was decommissioned and replaced in 2011 and 2012, so that by 2013, NSA could operationalize a new system. This system, apparently called SPIRITFIRE, could handle more data, faster. SPIRITFIRE would be “a more robust voice processing capability based on speech-to-text keyword search and paired dialogue transcription.”

Extensive Use Abroad

Voice communications can be collected by the NSA whether they are being sent by regular phone lines, over cellular networks, or through voice-over-internet services. Previously released documents from the Snowden archive describe enormous efforts by the NSA during the last decade to get access to voice-over-internet content like Skype calls, for instance. And other documents in the archive chronicle the agency’s adjustment to the fact that an increasingly large percentage of conversations, even those that start as landline or mobile calls, end up as digitized packets flying through the same fiber-optic cables that the NSA taps so effectively for other data and voice communications.

The Snowden archive, as searched and analyzed by The Intercept, documents extensive use of speech-to-text by the NSA to search through international voice intercepts — particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Mexico and Latin America.

For example, speech-to-text was a key but previously unheralded element of the sophisticated analytical program known as the Real Time Regional Gateway (RTRG), which started in 2005 when newly appointed NSA chief Keith B. Alexander, according to the Washington Post, “wanted everything: Every Iraqi text message, phone call and e-mail that could be vacuumed up by the agency’s powerful computers.”

The Real Time Regional Gateway was credited with playing a role in “breaking up Iraqi insurgent networks and significantly reducing the monthly death toll from improvised explosive devices.” The indexing and searching of “voice cuts” was deployed to Iraq in 2006. By 2008, RTRG was operational in Afghanistan as well.

Keyword spotting extended to Iranian intercepts as well. A 2006 memo reported that RHINEHART had been used successfully by Persian-speaking analysts who “searched for the words ‘negotiations’ or ‘America’ in their traffic, and RHINEHART located a very important call that was transcribed verbatim providing information on an important Iranian target’s discussion of the formation of a the new Iraqi government.”

According to a 2011 memo, “How is Human Language Technology (HLT) Progressing?“, NSA that year deployed “HLT Labs” to Afghanistan, NSA facilities in Texas and Georgia, and listening posts in Latin America run by the Special Collection Service, a joint NSA/CIA unit that operates out of embassies and other locations.

“Spanish is the most mature of our speech-to-text analytics,” the memo says, noting that the NSA and its Special Collections Service sites in Latin America, have had “great success searching for Spanish keywords.”

The memo offers an example from NSA Texas, where an analyst newly trained on the system used a keyword search to find previously unreported information on a target involved in drug-trafficking. In another case, an official at a Special Collection Service site in Latin America “was able to find foreign intelligence regarding a Cuban official in a fraction of the usual time.”

In a 2011 article, “Finding Nuggets — Quickly — in a Heap of Voice Collection, From Mexico to Afghanistan,” an intelligence analysis technical director from NSA Texas described the “rare life-changing instance” when he learned about human language technology, and its ability to “find the exact traffic of interest within a mass of collection.”

Analysts in Texas found the new technology a boon for spying. “From finding tunnels in Tijuana, identifying bomb threats in the streets of Mexico City, or shedding light on the shooting of US Customs officials in Potosi, Mexico, the technology did what it advertised: It accelerated the process of finding relevant intelligence when time was of the essence,” he wrote. (Emphasis in original.)

The author of the memo was also part of a team that introduced the technology to military leaders in Afghanistan. “From Kandahar to Kabul, we have traveled the country explaining NSA leaders’ vision and introducing SIGINT teams to what HLT analytics can do today and to what is still needed to make this technology a game-changing success,” the memo reads.

Extent of Domestic Use Remains Unknown

What’s less clear from the archive is how extensively this capability is used to transcribe or otherwise index and search voice conversations that primarily involve what the NSA terms “U.S. persons.”

The NSA did not answer a series of detailed questions about automated speech recognition, even though an NSA “classification guide” that is part of the Snowden archive explicitly states that “The fact that NSA/CSS has created HLT models” for speech-to-text processing as well as gender, language and voice recognition, is “UNCLASSIFIED.”

Also unclassified: The fact that the processing can sort and prioritize audio files for human linguists, and that the statistical models are regularly being improved and updated based on actual intercepts. By contrast, because they’ve been tuned using actual intercepts, the specific parameters of the systems are highly classified.

“The National Security Agency employs a variety of technologies in the course of its authorized foreign-intelligence mission,” spokesperson Vanee’ Vines wrote in an email to The Intercept. “These capabilities, operated by NSA’s dedicated professionals and overseen by multiple internal and external authorities, help to deter threats from international terrorists, human traffickers, cyber criminals, and others who seek to harm our citizens and allies.”

Vines did not respond to the specific questions about privacy protections in place related to the processing of domestic or domestic-to-international voice communications. But she wrote that “NSA always applies rigorous protections designed to safeguard the privacy not only of U.S. persons, but also of foreigners abroad, as directed by the President in January 2014.”

The presidentially appointed but independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) didn’t mention speech-to-text technology in its public reports.

“I’m not going to get into whether any program does or does not have that capability,” PCLOB chairman David Medine told The Intercept.

His board’s reports, he said, contained only information that the intelligence community agreed could be declassified.

“We went to the intelligence community and asked them to declassify a significant amount of material,” he said. The “vast majority” of that material was declassified, he said. But not all — including “facts that we thought could be declassified without compromising national security.”

Hypothetically, Medine said, the ability to turn voice into text would raise significant privacy concerns. And it would also raise questions about how the intelligence agencies “minimize” the retention and dissemination of material— particularly involving U.S. persons — that doesn’t include information they’re explicitly allowed to keep.

“Obviously it increases the ability of the government to process information from more calls,” Medine said. “It would also allow the government to listen in on more calls, which would raise more of the kind of privacy issues that the board has raised in the past.”

“I’m not saying the government does or doesn’t do it,” he said, “just that these would be the consequences.”

A New Learning Curve

Speech recognition expert Bhiksha Raj likens the current era to the early days of the Internet, when people didn’t fully realize how the things they typed would last forever.

“When I started using the Internet in the 90s, I was just posting stuff,” said Raj, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute. “It never struck me that 20 years later I could go Google myself and pull all this up. Imagine if I posted something on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica or something like that, and now that post is going to embarrass me forever.”

The same is increasingly becoming the case with voice communication, he said. And the stakes are even higher, given that the majority of the world’s communication has historically been conducted by voice, and it has traditionally been considered a private mode of communication.

“People still aren’t realizing quite the magnitude that the problem could get to,” Raj said. “And it’s not just surveillance,” he said. “People are using voice services all the time. And where does the voice go? It’s sitting somewhere. It’s going somewhere. You’re living on trust.” He added: “Right now I don’t think you can trust anybody.”

The Need for New Rules

Kim Taipale, executive director of the Stilwell Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy, is one of several people who tried a decade ago to get policymakers to recognize that existing surveillance law doesn’t adequately deal with new global communication networks and advanced technologies including speech recognition.

“Things aren’t ephemeral anymore,” Taipale told The Intercept. “We’re living in a world where many things that were fleeting in the analog world are now on the permanent record. The question then becomes: what are the consequences of that and what are the rules going to be to deal with those consequences?”

Realistically, Taipale said, “the ability of the government to search voice communication in bulk is one of the things we may have to live with under some circumstances going forward.” But there at least need to be “clear public rules and effective oversight to make sure that the information is only used for appropriate law-enforcement or national security purposes consistent with Constitutional principles.”

Ultimately, Taipale said, a system where computers flag suspicious voice communications could be less invasive than one where people do the listening, given the potential for human abuse and misuse to lead to privacy violations. “Automated analysis has different privacy implications,” he said.

But to Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, the distinction between a human listening and a computer listening is irrelevant in terms of privacy, possible consequences, and a chilling effect on speech.

“What people care about in the end, and what creates chilling effects in the end, are consequences,” he said. “I think that over time, people would learn to fear computerized eavesdropping just as much as they fear eavesdropping by humans, because of the consequences that it could bring.”

Indeed, computer listening could raise new concerns. One of the internal NSA memos from 2006 says an “important enhancement under development is the ability for this HLT capability to predict what intercepted data might be of interest to analysts based on the analysts’ past behavior.”

Citing Amazon’s ability to not just track but predict buyer preferences, the memo says that an NSA system designed to flag interesting intercepts “offers the promise of presenting analysts with highly enriched sorting of their traffic.”

To Phillip Rogaway, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, keyword-search is probably the “least of our problems.” In an email to The Intercept, Rogaway warned that “When the NSA identifies someone as ‘interesting’ based on contemporary NLP [Natural Language Processing] methods, it might be that there is no human-understandable explanation as to why beyond: ‘his corpus of discourse resembles those of others whom we thought interesting'; or the conceptual opposite: ‘his discourse looks or sounds different from most people’s.'”

If the algorithms NSA computers use to identify threats are too complex for humans to understand, Rogaway wrote, “it will be impossible to understand the contours of the surveillance apparatus by which one is judged. All that people will be able to do is to try your best to behave just like everyone else.”
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2...archable-text/





Extreme Secrecy Eroding Support for Obama's Trade Pact

Classified briefings and bill-readings in basement rooms are making members queasy.
Edward-Isaac Dovere

If you want to hear the details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal the Obama administration is hoping to pass, you’ve got to be a member of Congress, and you’ve got to go to classified briefings and leave your staff and cellphone at the door.

If you’re a member who wants to read the text, you’ve got to go to a room in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center and be handed it one section at a time, watched over as you read, and forced to hand over any notes you make before leaving.

And no matter what, you can’t discuss the details of what you’ve read.

“It’s like being in kindergarten,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who’s become the leader of the opposition to President Barack Obama’s trade agenda. “You give back the toys at the end.”

For those out to sink Obama’s free trade push, highlighting the lack of public information is becoming central to their opposition strategy: The White House isn’t even telling Congress what it’s asking for, they say, or what it’s already promised foreign governments.

The White House has been coordinating an administration-wide lobbying effort that’s included phone calls and briefings from Secretary of State John Kerry, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and others. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has been working members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro has been talking to members of his home state Texas delegation.

Officials from the White House and the United States trade representative’s office say they’ve gone farther than ever before to provide Congress the information it needs and that the transparency complaints are just the latest excuse for people who were never going to vote for a new trade deal anyway.

“We’ve worked closely with congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle to balance unprecedented access to classified documents with the appropriate level of discretion that’s needed to ensure Americans get the best deal possible in an ongoing, high-stakes international negotiation,” said USTR spokesman Matt McAlvanah.

Obama’s seeking a renewal of fast-track authority, which would empower him to negotiate trade deals that then go to Congress for up-or-down votes but not amendments. He says he needs that authority to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-country free trade agreement that he calls essential to stopping China from setting trade, labor and environmental standards in the Asia-Pacific region.

Administration aides say they can’t make the details public because the negotiations are still going on with multiple countries at once; if for example, Vietnam knew what the American bottom line was with Japan, that might drive them to change their own terms. Trade might not seem like a national security issue, they say, but it is (and foreign governments regularly try to hack their way in to American trade deliberations).

Moreover, many of the leaders of the opposition, administration aides argue, are people who aren’t used to dealing with classified information and don’t realize how standard this secrecy is. And by the way, they note, neither congressional conference committees nor labor contract talks allow even this level of access to negotiations while in process.

But those arguments aren’t making much headway among trade skeptics, who feel they are being treated with disrespect and condescension. And they increasingly are pinning the blame directly on United States Trade Representative Mike Froman, who’s been headlining the classified briefings, in addition to smaller meetings with members.

“The access to information is totally at the whim of Ambassador Froman,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), who’s a hard no on fast track but says he’d like to see other ways of promoting international trade. “He likes to make available information that he thinks helps his case, and if it conflicts, then he doesn’t make the information available,” Doggett said.

Doggett, like other critics, pointed out that the cover sheets of the trade documents in that basement room are marked only “confidential document” and note they’re able to be transmitted over unsecured email and fax — but for some reason are still restricted to members of Congress.

“My chief of staff who has a top secret security clearance can learn more about ISIS or Yemen than about this trade agreement,” Doggett said.

“He’s incredibly condescending. It’s like, ‘You’d be all for this if only you hadn’t gotten an F in economics,’” said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who said he’s opposed to what he’s seen because it lacks labor standards and measures to address currency manipulation.

“We know when we’re being suckered,” said Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), who said he believes that the USTR quotes percentages instead of absolute values on trade statistics that give an overly positive impression. “It’s not only condescending, it’s misleading.”

Asked about those criticisms, Froman responded by praising his adversaries.

“I have great respect for the critics, many of whom have shown great leadership on progressive causes, and I look forward to a continued dialogue with members of Congress based on facts and substance,” Froman told POLITICO.

Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), who supports giving Obama fast-track authority, says the division among Democrats is between members who are looking for a reason to say no and those that are actually trying to work on the deal.

“They’ve been very engaging with Congress and to members who want to be in the room and engaging them on the text … so we can ask questions but, more importantly, so we can provide input,” Kind said.

As for Froman, Kind said, “he’s very cordial, he’s very respectful and listening to other people’s opinion. … I don’t get a sense of condescension and arrogance.”

Kind says he expects several more Democrats to announce their support for the president’s efforts in the coming days, some of them because of what they’ve heard from Froman.

Doggett insisted that the outreach is costing the White House support.

“The more people hear Ambassador Froman but feel they get less than candid and accurate answers, I think it loses votes for them,” Doggett said.

Administration officials point to other members who’ve publicly praised Froman for his responsiveness and his accessibility. Those include House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who at a late April news conference called Froman a “remarkable, remarkable trade rep” who’s “just fabulous, and he’s been just boundless in his willingness to spend time with members to go through this.”

Pelosi herself remains undecided on the trade pact, though she says she’s trying to find a path to yes. She’s telling members what she’s told them from the start: They’re going to be able to influence the deal only if they actually engage with Froman and the White House.

In February, it was Pelosi who urged the administration to begin the briefings, warning that Democratic support was nowhere near what the White House would need for fast-track to pass the House.

Obama has started to get more personally engaged trying to shore up support for the deal. The president hosted a White House meeting Thursday with members of the New Democrat Coalition, who are generally inclined to support him on trade but still pressed him to make more information available.

“He emphasized that under the trade promotion bills, this is going to be the most transparent bill ever,” said Kind, who attended.

Two days earlier, speaking at the news conference he held in the Rose Garden with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Obama dismissed “this whole notion that it’s all secret.”

“They’re going to have 60 days before I even sign it to look at the text, and then a number of months after that before they have to take a final vote,” Obama said forcefully.

“He’s indignant when we say it’s secret,” said Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.). “Maybe there’s some definition of secrecy he knows that I don’t know.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/0...ay-117581.html





WikiLeaks Finally Brings Back Its Submission System for Your Secrets
Andy Greenberg

It’s taken close to half a decade. But WikiLeaks is back in the business of accepting truly anonymous leaks.

On Friday, the secret-spilling group announced that it has finally relaunched a beta version of its leak submission system, a file-upload site that runs on the anonymity software Tor to allow uploaders to share documents and tips while protecting their identity from any network eavesdropper, and even from WikiLeaks itself. The relaunch of that page—which in the past served as the core of WikiLeaks’ transparency mission—comes four and a half years after WikiLeaks’ last submission system went down amid infighting between WikiLeaks’ leaders and several of its disenchanted staffers.

“WikiLeaks publishes documents of political or historical importance that are censored or otherwise suppressed. We specialise in strategic global publishing and large archives,” reads the new page, along with the .onion url specific to Tor for a “secure site where you can anonymously upload your documents to WikiLeaks editors.”

“We thought, ‘This is ready, it should be opened,'” WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson told WIRED in an interview. “We’re hoping for a good flow of information through this gateway.”

In a statement posted to the WikiLeaks website, the group’s founder Julian Assange wrote that the new system is the result of “four competing research projects” launched by the group, and that it has several less-visible submission systems in addition to the public one it revealed Friday. “Currently, we have one public-facing and several private-facing submission systems in operation, cryptographically, operationally and legally secured with national security sourcing in mind,” Assange writes.

The long hiatus of WikiLeaks’ submission system began in October of 2010, as the site’s administrators wrestled with disgruntled staff members who had come to view Assange as too irresponsible to protect the group’s sources. Defectors from the group seized control of the leak platform, along with thousands of leaked documents. Control of that leak system was never returned to WikiLeaks, and the defectors eventually destroyed the decryption keys to the leaks they’d taken, rendering them useless.

WikiLeaks vowed in 2011 to relaunch its submission system, announcing that the leaks page would reappear on the one-year anniversary of its massive Cablegate release of State Department documents. But that date came and went with no new submission system. In the following years, Assange seemed to become preoccupied with WikiLeaks’ financial difficulties, including a lawsuit against PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and Bank of America for cutting off payments to the group, as well as his own legal struggles. Accusations of sex crimes in Sweden and fears of espionage charges in the United States have left him trapped for nearly three years in London’s Ecuadorean embassy, the country that has offered him asylum. The goal of getting Wikileaks back in the anonymous leak submission game got sidelined.

The group, and Assange in particular, has also become more focused on the modern surveillance challenges to any truly anonymous leaking system. That, too, has delayed WikiLeaks’ willingness to create a new target for intelligence agencies trying to intercept leaks. “If you ask if the submission from five years ago was insecure, well, it would be today,” says Hrafnsson. “We’ve had to rethink this and rework it, and put a lot of expertise into updating and upgrading it.”

Hrafnsson declined to comment on what new security measures WikiLeaks has put into place. He was willing to say that the submission system has already been online—though not linked from the main WikiLeaks site—for weeks as it’s been tested. “As always, we’ve wanted to to make sure we can deliver on the promise that people can give us information without being traced,” he says. Though the site remains in “beta,” Hrafnsson adds that “we wouldn’t have made it available unless we considered it to be as safe as it’s possible to be.”

Despite its years-long lack of a leak portal, WikiLeaks had continued to publish documents over the last few years, never revealing where they got them. In some cases they appear to have been directly shared with WikiLeaks by hackers, as was the case with the massive collections of emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor and the Syrian government. Or in other cases, the group has simply organized and republished already-public leaks, as with its searchable index of the emails stolen by hackers from Sony Pictures Entertainment.

But few of those leaks have been as significant as those it obtained while its submission system was still online, most notably the leaks from Chelsea Manning that included millions of classified files from the Iraq and Afghan wars as well as hundreds of thousands of secret State Department communiqués.

In the years since WikiLeaks ceased to offer its own Tor-based submission system, others have sought to fill the gap. Projects like GlobaLeaks and SecureDrop now offer open-source systems that have replicated and improved on WikiLeaks’ model of using Dark Web servers to enable anonymous uploads. SecureDrop in particular has been adopted by mainstream news sites such as the New Yorker, Gawker, Forbes, the Guardian, the Intercept and the Washington Post.

In his statement on the WikiLeaks site, Assange notes that those projects are “both excellent in many ways, [but] not suited to WikiLeaks’ sourcing in its national security and large archive publishing specialities,” he writes. “The full-spectrum attack surface of WikiLeaks’ submission system is significantly lower than other systems and is optimised for our secure deployment and development environment.”

One former WikiLeaks staffer contacted by WIRED argues that with several more mainstream outlets for leaks now available thanks to tools like SecureDrop, sources would be wiser to stay away from WikiLeaks’ new submission system. “As a leaker…You’d have to be fucking insane to trust Assange,” writes the former WikiLeaker, who asked for anonymity because his association with WikiLeaks has never been publicly revealed. He points to WikiLeaks’ past decisions to publish large troves of raw documents, rather than ones carefully filtered by journalists to avoid harming innocent people. “Why would you go for Anarchist Punks Weekly instead of, say, the Guardian or the Washington Post?”

But the same ex-staffer also admits that Assange probably knows more about protecting leakers than many journalists dealing with sensitive sources. “I do not believe that WL endangers sources,” he adds. “In fact, Assange is likely far better trained than most to handle sources well.”

Assange, for his part, argues in his statement that WikiLeaks is bolder than other media outlets that might censor a leaker’s materials. He points, for instance, to the relatively small number of Edward Snowden’s leaks journalists including Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras that have actually been published. “To date, more than 99 per cent of Snowden documents have been completely censored by the mainstream press involved,” he writes. “WikiLeaks will continue publishing, as it has since its foundation, full archives of suppressed documents in strategic global partnerships. The 2.0 public-facing submission system is an important new method in our arsenal for recovering subjugated history.”
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/wikilea...ystem-secrets/





Activists Ticketed for Putting Snowden Bust on NYC Monument
Jennifer Peltz

Two activists who put a bust of Edward Snowden on a Revolutionary War memorial were ticketed and got their confiscated sculpture back Wednesday, saying they felt the episode had sparked conversation about freedom.

Jeff Greenspan and Andrew Tider had tried to stay anonymous after the 4-foot-tall, 100-pound likeness of the exiled National Security Agency secrets-leaker briefly appeared last month on a monument in a Brooklyn park.

But after the summonses made their names public record, they told The Associated Press they'd spent a year planning their unauthorized artistic statement, enlisted a sculptor to craft it and aimed to place Snowden's disclosures of government surveillance in the context of revolutionary values of liberty.

"The ideal that Snowden seemed to be fighting for with his actions seemed to be in line with the ideals the revolutionaries, who might also have been called traitors, were fighting for," Tider said by phone.

Police noted last month that the statue was erected without permission. Greenspan and Tider were issued summonses for being in a park after hours, a noncriminal violation.

Snowden is living in exile in Russia after divulging the confidential U.S. government collection of phone records, among other intelligence gathering. He faces charges in the U.S. that could land him in prison for up to 30 years.

So New Yorkers awoke to something of a mystery when a fiberglass-reinforced cement rendering of his face materialized early April 6 in Fort Greene Park, on a monument that honors American captives who died on British prison ships during the Revolutionary War. Parks officials quickly ordered the bust removed.

Greenspan and Tider realized that linking a war monument with an image of a man who disclosed American secrets might be seen as disrespectful, but they said they didn't intend it to be. Los Angeles-based sculptor Doyle Trankina designed the piece to echo the memorial's proportions, and they chose an adhesive that wouldn't damage the memorial, they said.

They said they wanted to provide an alternative view of Snowden, whom they feel the media have vilified.

"We felt that was shortchanging the public because it wasn't giving the public an opportunity to make up its own mind about its level of comfort with this level of surveillance," Greenspan said.

Their lawyer, Ronald Kuby, called the sculpture's return a reflection of the city's "commitment to the arts, even those that are unusual and offbeat."

The activists, both New Yorkers who work in creative fields, said they were considering seeking permission to exhibit the piece legally through a temporary art-in-parks program.

In the meantime, the Postmasters gallery has said it wants to display the statute at a show opening Friday.

Its theme: "Anonymity, no longer an option."
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...ue-6246227.php





Of Snowden and the NSA, Only One has Acted Unlawfully – and it’s Not Snowden

With the NSA’s bulk surveillance ruled illegal, the debate on the Patriot Act should be reinvigorated – with Edward Snowden free to join in
James Ball

On 6 June 2013, the Guardian published a secret US court order against the phone company Verizon, ordering it on an “ongoing, daily basis” to hand over the call records of its millions of US customers to the NSA – just one of numerous orders enabling the government’s highly secret domestic mass surveillance program. Just days later the world learned the identity of the whistleblower who made the order public: Edward Snowden.

NSA mass phone surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden ruled illegal

Now, almost two years later, a US court has vindicated Snowden’s decision, ruling that the bulk surveillance program went beyond what the law underpinning it allowed: the US government used section 215 of the Patriot Act to justify the program. A US court of appeals has ruled the law does not allow for a program so broad. In short, one of the NSA’s most famous and controversial surveillance programs has no legal basis.

Of Snowden and the NSA, only one has so far been found to have acted unlawfully – and it’s not Snowden. That surely must change the nature of the debate on civil liberties being had in America, and it should do so in a number of ways.

The first is the surprisingly thorny question of what to do with Snowden himself. The whistleblower is in his second year of exile, living in asylum in Russia, as he would surely face criminal prosecution should he return. The nature of the punishment – and pre-trial mistreatment – meted out to Chelsea Manning shows his fears are well founded.

But now the courts have ruled that Snowden’s flagship revelation, the very first and foremost of the programs he disclosed, has no legal basis, who now might challenge his status as a whistleblower?

Certainly not Judge Sack, who in his concurring opinion alongside today’s rulings acknowledged Snowden’s revelations led to this litigation, and likened his disclosures to Daniel Ellsberg’s famous “Pentagon Papers” leak.

The philosophy of privacy: why surveillance reduces us to objects

If the US government seeks to jail someone who has shown its own security services acting unlawfully, its international reputation will deservedly take a beating. If the US wants moral authority to talk to other governments about whistleblowers and civil liberty, it needs to be brave: it needs to offer Snowden amnesty.

The other actions for the US executive and for Congress are broader. The court of appeals judges very deliberately chose not to consider the constitutionality of NSA bulk surveillance programs, as such questions are currently before Congress with the ongoing debate on how to reform the Patriot Act.

Congress should allow this ruling to reinvigorate that debate, and in a sense the ruling forces it to do so. If Congress want a law that allows phone surveillance on the scale of the NSA’s existing programs, it will have to explicitly create that: gone is the option of trying to push through something near the status quo with a fringe of reform.

For domestic bulk surveillance to continue and be legal, Congress must explicitly vote for it – and then, in time, the judicial branch will consider the constitutional case in earnest.

If Congress sincerely wishes to curb it, it now has substantial backing from the judicial branch to push forward and do that. Reformers finally have the jolt in the arm they needed to prevent the positive impact of Snowden’s revelations dribbling away.

NSA bulk data collection ruled illegal – read the court document

The president could also use this ruling as an opportunity to consider his stance. The line endlessly aired by the administration and its officials is that all surveillance is legal. That line is no longer valid. Rather than just seeking a new script – or as is almost certain, merely appealing against the decision – this could be a great opportunity for some introspection. These surveillance programs are wildly expensive and have very few proven results. Why not look at which ones the US really needs, and whether old-fashioned targeted surveillance might not keep us all as safe (or safer), and freer too?

The final debate is one that is unlikely to happen, but should: the US needs to start considering the privacy and freedom of foreigners as well as its own citizens. The US public is rightly concerned about its government spying on them. But citizens of countries around the world, many of them US allies, are also rightly concerned about the US government spying on them.

Considering Americans and foreigners alike in these conversations would be a great moral stance – but pragmatically, it should also help Americans. If the US doesn’t care about the privacy of other countries, it shouldn’t expect foreign governments to care about US citizens. There’s something in this for everyone.

These are the debates we could be having, and should be having. The judiciary has spoken. The legislature is deliberating. The public is debating. And all of it is enabled thanks to information provided by Edward Snowden.

He should be free to join the conversation, in person.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...llance-illegal





NSA Phone Surveillance Not Authorized: U.S. Appeals Court

A federal appeals court on Thursday revived a challenge to a controversial National Security Agency program that collected the records of millions of Americans' phone calls, saying the program was not authorized by Congress.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said a lower court judge erred in dismissing a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union that challenged the constitutionality of the surveillance on the ground it violated people's privacy.

At issue was the NSA's collection of "bulk telephony metadata," a program whose existence was first disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In December 2013, U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan dismissed the ACLU lawsuit, saying the NSA program was a "counter-punch" by the government to aid its efforts to fight terrorism.

Writing for a three-judge appeals court panel, however, Circuit Judge Gerard Lynch said Congress did not authorize the NSA program under a section of the Patriot Act governing how investigators may collect information to fight terrorism.

"Such expansive development of government repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans," Lynch wrote in a 97-page decision.

"Perhaps such a contraction is required by national security needs in the face of the dangers of contemporary domestic and international terrorism," he added. "But we would expect such a momentous decision to be preceded by substantial debate, and expressed in unmistakable language. There is no evidence of such a debate."

Thursday's decision did not resolve the issue of whether the NSA program violated the bar against warrantless searches under the Fourth Amendment. The 2nd Circuit returned the case to Pauley for further proceedings. It upheld his denial of a preliminary injunction to stop the collection of records.

The U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The ACLU did not immediately respond to a similar request.

The case is American Civil Liberties Union et al v. Clapper et al, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 14-42.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Frances Kerry)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/...0NS1IN20150507





Court Ruling on N.S.A.’s Data Collection Jolts Both Defenders and Reformers
Jonathan Weisman and Jennifer Steinhauer

A federal appeals court ruling that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records is illegal has scrambled bipartisan efforts to overhaul the program, emboldening those who say the efforts do not go far enough and undermining Senate Republican leaders who want to keep the current program in place.

Although both chambers of Congress are under Republican control, only the House has coalesced around a bipartisan effort to make substantial changes to the government’s bulk data collection, while the Senate has grown more divided in light of the court’s decision. Emblematic of that, the three declared Senate Republicans running for the White House have adopted different positions on a path forward.

“The sacrifice of our personal liberty for security is and will forever be a false choice,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, wrote for Time magazine, vowing to block even a short-term extension of the Patriot Act, under which phone data has been collected. “And I refuse to relinquish our constitutional rights to opportunistic and overreaching politicians.”

In the face of such disarray, federal law enforcement officials appear braced to lose some of their power, at least temporarily. “I don’t like losing any tool in our toolbox, but if we do, we press on,” said James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director. “I hope it doesn’t go away, but if it does, we press on.”

The House next week is expected to overwhelmingly approve legislation, known as the USA Freedom Act, that ends the N.S.A.’s bulk data collection program, instead allowing such data to be held by telecommunications companies, accessible only with a court order.

But backers of the program, led by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, and Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, remain defiant that it will not be changed. Both dismissed the court’s findings.

“The idea that somehow we wrote the law in a way that didn’t provide that statutory language?” Mr. Burr said. “That is a joke.”

On the other side of the debate, the Senate’s most ardent civil libertarians say that legislation has now been supplanted by the court’s ruling.

Mr. Paul said Friday that he would press to ban the collection of phone records altogether. And Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said he would filibuster efforts by Mr. McConnell to extend the government’s current collection authority beyond its May 31 expiration.

Senators expect Mr. McConnell to try to get a short-term extension of the existing law, possibly as short as three weeks. But the filibuster threats of Mr. Wyden and Mr. Paul — backed by the two authors of the overhaul legislation, Senators Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, and Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont — could make that strategy untenable. With their objections, each short-term extension would take up a week of the Senate’s time, pushing aside other legislative matters. House leaders will also be displeased with that plan.

“I will filibuster any effort to have a short-term extension of the Patriot Act if there are not major reforms, specifically getting rid of the federal human relations database, also known as bulk phone records collection,” Mr. Wyden said Friday. “I believe I can also find other members to join me in it.”

Mr. Wyden pressed his point Friday on Twitter with the hashtag #EndThisDragnet.

That has left supporters of the intelligence agencies scrambling for a compromise, with few on the other side willing to talk. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican, acknowledged the landscape had changed. “Obviously we need to factor in what the court did,” he said.

Mr. McConnell remains unbowed. The majority leader will attempt to put a straight reauthorization of the Patriot Act’s bulk data collection provision, known as Section 215, on the Senate floor before the end of the month.

“The expiring provisions of FISA are ideally suited for the terrorist threats we face in 2015,” Mr. McConnell said on the floor of the Senate after the court’s decision was revealed, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Section 215 bolsters. “These provisions work together to protect us from foreign terrorists abroad who use social and other media to conspire and eventually plan attacks inside the United States.”

Many Democrats are hoping that the United States Court of Appeals ruling could push opponents of change, or those who may be on the fence, into the reform camp. “I hope this will bring Democrats and Republicans together in defense of liberty,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon.

Both sides say a long-term reauthorization of the current Patriot Act cannot pass the Senate, but there is no clear alternative.

The largest blocs in both parties back the House bill, negotiated with Mr. Lee and Mr. Leahy. But another faction, led by Mr. Paul, Mr. Wyden and Mr. Merkley, has vowed to strengthen that legislation. Still another bipartisan bloc wants changes to the Patriot Act, but do not want to go as far as the House bill.

Even presidential politics has muddled the vote counting, with Mr. Paul rallying supporters behind a stronger bill; Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, backing the USA Freedom Act; and Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, backing Mr. McConnell’s straight extension.

Further complicating the issue are senators — like Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin — who voted against a procedural measure on a similar overhaul bill last year but are facing competitive re-elections next year. Mr. Johnson is likely to face former Senator Russ Feingold, a Democrat, the only senator to oppose the Patriot Act when it passed in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Republicans senators who voted for changes last year when they were serving in the House, such as Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, say they will stick by that position. But Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, who supported the bill in the House, is now working against it.

And with 10 legislative days until expiration, no one knows what will happen.

“Don’t you think that the strategy has always been to get up to the deadline and maybe you can force an issue that you couldn’t otherwise win on?” asked Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose efforts to negotiate a compromise have made little headway.

Scott Shane and Charlie Savage contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/us...reformers.html





This Mesh We're In: Why Communities Are Building An Internet That's More Local

Hackers and artists are signal-boosting mesh networks and other ad hoc alternatives to ISPs like Verizon and Comcast. Can they catch on?
Steven Melendez

Recently, a pair of artists in New York put forward an unusual plan for teaching middle school students about the Internet: specifically, by teaching them how to get off it and build their own.

The plan will combine two series of lessons: one on building a social network, and the other dedicated to constructing a private Wi-Fi network, or "darknet," in the classroom, disconnected from the Internet at large. In the process, write Joanne McNeil and Dan Phiffer in their proposal, students will learn important concepts about how the Internet works. Last week the project, called "OurNet," was awarded a $35,000 grant from a MacArthur Foundation digital learning initiative.

Unlike the physical networks of Time Warner and Verizon or the virtual networks of Facebook and Instagram, however, the networks they and their students build will be noncommercial, and limited to people in their Wi-Fi range. That’s not just a way to simplify the lesson: It’s a deliberate choice to help students think about alternatives to corporate Internet providers and platforms built around advertising and tracking.

"This is an opportunity for the students to see what kind of middlemen they don’t need to connect—the idea that you can socialize with people without going on Facebook, or the idea that you can actually have a network that’s not through an ISP," says McNeil.

The OurNet networks are part of a growing movement that aims to consider and build alternative digital networks. Using affordable, off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software, hundreds of communities around the world are assembling small, independent, nonprofit wireless networks, often organized as so-called "mesh networks" for their weblike, decentralized design, in which each node—a phone, for instance, or a sophisticated wireless router—relays the connection onwards to the next node. OurNet's darknet, with its one central classroom router, will have a simpler structure, though it shares the mesh networks' philosophy of decentralization.

For years, independent mesh networks have been used in places like Berlin, Athens, and Barcelona to help expand Internet access across neighborhoods that lack it, but they have also gained attention for their usefulness in more extreme circumstances. Various mesh networks have been deployed to build independent communication networks at Occupy Wall Street and at Hong Kong's Occupy Central, for instance, and the State Department has helped to fund their installation in Detroit and Tunisia. They've also been used to improve communications after disasters to replace severed communications links.

One network in Red Hook, Brooklyn, built by activists as a way to help the neighborhood stay connected and get emergency updates after superstorm Sandy struck New York in 2012, and supported by the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, was selected last week to be part of the city's new resiliency initiative.

While mesh networks still pose a number of technical challenges, communities around the U.S. are slowly assembling their own meshes as a way to provide alternatives to ISPs, spread Internet access across neighborhoods, or just experiment with the boundaries of the existing network.

The concept of localized wireless networks goes back at least to the 1970s, when University of Hawaii researchers built ALOHANet, connecting computers across the Hawaiian islands. In a "mesh," instead of relying on a central network, users wirelessly transmit information directly between each other, relaying messages across a network of computers whose connections are chained together.

As inspiration for their private anonymous social network, Phiffer and McNeil cite writer and programmer Paul Ford's deliberately retro but still Internet-accessible Tilde.club network, as well as various other networks built around shared interests, limited geographical areas, and often, anonymity.

"The internet once provided users the space to share their ideas without prejudice against their age, race, gender, sexual orientation, or other aspects of their identity," Phiffer and McNeil wrote. "These workshops offer the opportunity to experience what the Internet used to be like, and could be like again—as an open forum for many people to share their ideas."

Phiffer knows these platforms well. In 2011, he built Occupy.here, an open source software toolkit that turns off-the-shelf Wi-Fi routers into wireless servers for community forums that are limited, by design, to those within reach of the signal. It's a portable network, with one central node, often trading in data directly relevant to its physical location.

The project took its name from Occupy Wall Street, when Phiffer first deployed routers equipped with the forum software for use as a digital bulletin board during the original 2011 demonstrations in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. A few routers equipped with the software—each hosting their own independent forum available to anyone who connects to them—are still active across the city.

"I kind of felt like it was more useful after the park, potentially, as a way to create alternate spaces where people could come and go and leave messages," says Phiffer, who also works as a developer at The New Yorker. "The one that was in the park was always competing with other things that people were doing in the park."

You're The Network

Sarah Grant, a Brooklyn-based artist and programmer, imagined an interesting sociological use for a wireless mesh network. If deployed in a place like a coffee shop, she thought, a local network might be a more comfortable forum for strangers to communicate than, say, speaking face-to-face.

That hypothesis seemed to pan out during Grant's 2012 residency at the art and technology center Eyebeam, when she debuted Subnodes, an open source project that turns the under-$50, credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi computer into a Wi-Fi router equipped with its own local web server and chat room. "Obviously people thought it was fun," she says. "It also gave people a space to kind of talk about the work really candidly—what they liked, what they didn’t like—maybe just a way for people to more openly express their feelings about what’s in front of them while also just having fun and goofing off."

Subnodes could help artists set up local digital art galleries, or help activists or events organizers set up local, short-term message boards without having to work with big ISPs like Comcast or Time Warner Cable. "They could set up a network in a place that wouldn’t normally have connectivity, like a subway, or in a park, or really anywhere, because you’re the source of the network: you’re the server," she says. "To me, that was really interesting and empowering."

Nearby Raspberry Pis running Grant's software can also connect with one another through a popular mesh networking protocol called BATMAN.

Grant took some inspiration from the pre-Web, dial-up bulletin-board systems that connected computer users in the 1980s and early '90s. Since long distance calls were expensive at the time, users generally connected to BBS’s in their own areas, meaning each local server developed its own culture, she says.

Local BBS servers weren’t entirely disconnected from one another—a complex network called FidoNet would slowly transfer email from server to server through late-night modem calls scheduled to minimize long-distance calling charges—but BBS’s were ultimately eclipsed by national networks like AOL and CompuServe, and by the global Internet itself.

Mesh Networks' Uphill Climb

For modern-day community networks that grow beyond a single wireless router and the phones and laptops that connect to it, organizers face similar challenges in gaining the interest of the public and network infrastructure challenges, not unlike those that would be seen by a commercial ISP.

In New York, a previously somewhat dormant effort that was revitalized last year, NYC Mesh, hopes to eventually blanket the city in a mesh Wi-Fi network that could share community information in the event of a disaster, or let its users reach the Internet through mesh-connected gateway computers when their own connections are down. It has about 20 publicly accessible access points, including in a bar and a video-game store in the East Village, says Brian Hall, a volunteer contributor to the project.

"My personal interest was sort of a dissatisfaction with the monopoly by cable companies and other Internet service providers to consumers," says Kurt Snieckus, an engineer who worked on NYC Mesh before moving to Chicago last year. "I saw a mesh network as a sort of way to create a more competitive or another option to having Internet service for the consumer public."

To add to the network, volunteers can either use a powerful $90 router that can communicate with other nodes within about a mile's range, provided they establish a a line-of-sight connection to other routers, or a $22 router with a few buildings' range—about the same as a home router. The more routers that join the network and expand its coverage, the more useful it is to the average person, providing a backup connection to the Internet and access to local information stored on the network itself at https://nycmesh.net/, Hall says. (To get started building a mesh with Cjdns, the protocol used by NYC Mesh, see the Project Meshnet wiki.)

And yet, while the decentralized, ad hoc network architecture appeals philosophically to tech-savvy users fed up with monopolistic ISPs, nobody’s found a way to make mesh networks work easily and efficiently enough to replace home Internet connections. Built more for resiliency than for speed, each participating router must continuously search for the best paths to far-flung machines. For now, that makes them of limited interest to many ordinary consumers who simply want to check their email and watch movies.

"The density of a mesh network adds reliability—somebody comes in and out of the network, the routing table updates itself, and you can still get messages from one place to another," explains Jeff Lunt, a developer who works on a mesh in Chicago, ChicagoMeshNet. But keeping track of those routes can get messy. "[With] so many redundant connections, the bandwidth can start to get saturated just with routing table traffic."

That is, while the mesh network architecture works well for sending small bits of data from one loosely connected set of computers to another—like disaster relief information or other short messages—it is less useful for holding data for far-flung machines until a path can be found. Mesh networks can quickly get too saturated with data too quickly send a large file, or reliably maintain a connection to a streaming media service. "If you were trying to watch Netflix on a mesh network because you’re trying to use it for Internet service, that’s not going to work," says Snieckus.

Participants in the effort say the group has been somewhat divided between those more interested in building an emergency-ready network for transmitting local information and those interested in building an alternative to ISPs. This, according to Snieckus, "was one of the biggest stumbling blocks we had."

A lack of funds has also slowed progress, Hall says. "If we got the money, the first thing we’d do is hire someone full time to help us out."

There’s also some difficulty in connecting nodes operated by far-flung volunteers across the city. "Today someone said he wants to set up a node in Staten Island, and he could he do that, but it might be a while before we reach that far, so it would just be isolated."
Scaling Up

To address some of the technical challenges of distributing data across a mesh, Lunt's project in Chicago has transitioned to more of a traditional ISP-style hub-and-spoke model network, making the matter of routing data much simpler.

By offering a Virtual Private Network service that lets users access ChicagoMeshNet-specific services like chat and message boards via the ordinary Internet, the developers have allowed the community network to spread to a larger geographic area.

A growing international network of local meshes, called Hyperboria, takes a similar approach. Organizers have said they hope the network develops into "a viable alternative to the regular Internet."

Lunt and others point to Guifi.net, a 30,000-node community network centered mostly in rural areas of Spain’s Catalonia region and in parts of Northern

The network lets anyone join by connecting a wireless router or fiber-optic line, so long as they agree to let others connect on the same terms, says Roger Baig, a full-time staff member on the project. Members can connect to chat and other services hosted on the network, access limited web services through public proxy servers, or connect to the Internet through competing ISPs who offer connections through the network, he says. Independent Guifi-inspired networks have also launched around the world, including in Kansas City, where the KC Freedom Network aims to bring wireless access to underserved parts of the community.

But while the network aims for transparency and openness in its organizational structure, it’s moved away from the ad hoc mesh model in its engineering. "The ad hoc model is the one that the hackers love, because everybody has the same right to talk and to listen, so it’s a very horizontal architecture, but it has a lot of technical challenges," says Baig, so Guifi’s adopted a more hierarchical network model.

"We came up with a network that performs much better rather than the mesh networks," he says. "Our network is used by companies to deliver services, and other companies are using the [network] on a daily basis in their work—I don’t think this could be done with an ad hoc network."

Meshing For Science (And Philosophy)

But in some cases, ad hoc networks are the most attractive solution available. Consider the need to connect to scientific and industrial equipment located in areas too remote or chaotic to set up more traditional data links.

"It’s very different from the urban example, but we do it conceptually for the same reasons: the sort of areas that are underserved by Internet," says Jer Thorp, an artist and data visualization consultant who’ll be helping to build a small mesh network during an expedition through remote regions of the Okavango River delta in Angola and Botswana this summer. Wireless sensors deposited during the expedition will monitor water quality in remote parts of the region and form a mesh network to relay data through Internet connections at nearby safari camps.

"The plan is to leave the sensor nodes out there and get their data over time," says Shah Selbe, an engineer and conservation technologist on the project. "Overall, we want to get an idea of how things shift month after month and, ultimately, year after year."

In New York, McNeil and Phiffer hope their high school experiments won't just educate students about network technology, but will offer a more meta lesson, shining a light back on the network itself.

"People of my generation, Dan’s generation, grew up watching the Internet develop," McNeil says. One benefit of seeing the global network evolve the way they did, Phiffer adds: "We kind of realize that none of these systems that we use are inevitable."
https://www.fastcompany.com/3044686/...ernet-movement





USBKill Turns Thumb Drives Into Computer Kill Switches
Zeljka Zorz

A coder that goes by the online handle "Hephaestos" has shared with the world a Python script that, when put on an USB thumb drive, turns the device in an effective kill switch for the computer in which it's plugged in.

USBkill, as the programmer dubbed it, "waits for a change on your USB ports, then immediately kills your computer."

The device would be useful "in case the police comes busting in, or steals your laptop from you when you are at a public library (as with Ross [Ulbricht])," Hephaestos explained.

Using a cord to attach the USB key to one's wrist will assure that the USB is removed instantly with a quick tug upon the arrest of the user or the seizure of the computer.

Of course, if the user doesn't use full disk encryption in the first place, the device becomes useless.

Hephaestos says that USBkill is still in the early stages, but that it works, and works well.
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=18347





Rombertik Malware Can Overwrite MBR if Audited
Michael Mimoso

A new strain of spyware that logs keystrokes and steals data has a destructive side to it, unleashing wiper capabilities if it detects it’s being analyzed and audited.

A limited number of samples of the malware, dubbed Rombertik by researchers at Cisco Talos, were spotted at the start of the year. That relatively small number indicates it could have been used in targeted attacks at the outset, but Craig Williams, security outreach manager at Cisco, said attacks are more widespread now, and are not focused on any particular vertical or geographic location.

“It sounds cliché, but this is really a digital arms race and we’re seeing the next evolution of it here,” Williams said. “They’re no longer content with detect-and-shut-down, now if malware realizes it’s being audited, the binary will destroy the system. It’s a simple case of attackers trying to dissuade researchers from going after a sample.”

Rombertik has a number of unusual and complex features, Williams said, most of which are designed to evade detection and analysis. For example, once the malicious executable is launched from a phishing or spam message, the malware contains volumes of garbage code that would have to be analyzed (1264Kb that includes 75 images and 8,000 functions that are never used).

Like many other pieces of malware, this one also contains capabilities to detect and evade sandboxes. Unlike others that sleep for a predetermined period of time before executing, Rombertik writes a byte of random data to memory 960 million times, Cisco said. Sandboxes cannot differentiate this stall tactic from normal behavior, and also, if all that data is logged, the size of the log would exceed 100Gb and would take a half-hour to write to the hard drive. This is just one of three anti-analysis checks, Cisco said.

If the malware passes those checks, it will install itself in the startup folder and into AppData to ensure persistence. It will eventually copy the executable a second time and overwrite memory of the new process with the unpacked executable, Cisco said.

“The unpacking code is monstrous and has many times the complexity of the anti-analysis code. The code contains dozens of functions overlapping with each other and unnecessary jumps added to increase complexity,” the Talos report said. “The result is a nightmare of a control flow graph with hundreds of nodes.”

The malware, however, is not done with its anti-analysis checks. The malware computes a hash of a resource in memory and compares it to the unpacked sample, and if there’s been an alteration, it will first attempt to overwrite the Master Boot Record of the physical disk. If that fails, it destroys all the files in the user’s home folder, encrypting each file with a randomly generated RC4 key.

“One of the things that’s interesting about this malware is that it doesn’t have one malicious feature, it’s got several,” Williams said. “At nearly every turn, it attempts to hang, destroy, or take up storage space of static or dynamic analysis tools. The more samples we see, the more problems companies are likely going to have. [Other attackers] are going to find this effective and copy it.”

Most of the phishing and spam emails pushing Rombertik carry a similar theme of an organization making a business pitch to work with an enterprise. One sample shared by Cisco shows the attackers impersonating “Windows Corp.” and pitching a business partnership with a semiconductor manufacturer.

The messages contain an infected attachment in a .zip file. If the user downloads and unzips the file, they will see a document thumbnail, such as a PDF icon, for example. The file is really a .scr file that contains Rombertik. If the malware passes all the checks and executes, it scans running processes looking for a instances of Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer running on the machine and injects itself into the process. The malware hooks API functions that handle plaintext data, Cisco said, and reads anything typed into the browser before it’s encrypted and sent over HTTPS. Data such as usernames, passwords, account numbers and more are at risk.

Rombertik indiscriminately targets data, just stealing as much data as it can from the victim, which is Base64 encoded and sent to the attacker’s command and control server. Cisco listed one domain in its report: www[.]centozos[.]org[.]in/don1/gate.php.

“When we first observed it at the beginning of the year, it was fairly unknown and had almost zero detection rates,” Williams said. “Today’s there’s a decent amount of detection for it, and at this point, it’s just being sent out shotgun style.”
https://threatpost.com/rombertik-mal...audited/112608





Advertising Shits In Your Head
Anthony Lister, John Fekner

As you have seen recently, there has been a large media frenzy over the hijacking of billboards and bus stop advertising spaces across the UK, which sees wonderful illustrations placed inside them depicting the true realities of life, rather than the false expectations we are led to believe through advertising. We thought we would get in touch with Bill Posters, the man behind Brandalism, to discuss the group’s work further.

Advertising shits in your head – but, first, its torrential, golden flow stains your magazines, your phone, your computer, your newspapers and your streets. Advertising shits all over and dominates our culture. It is a visceral, powerful form of pollution that not only affects our common public and cultural spaces, but also our deeply private intimate spaces. Advertisers want your ‘brain time’ – to shit in your head without your knowledge. We want to stop them.

First Thing’s First

As you read these words, the UN’s Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights is preparing a landmark report into the effects of advertising and marketing on our cultural rights – specifically the right for us to choose our own identities, without coercion or persuasion. The report focuses on the development of conventional advertising and marketing practices and also emerging ones linked to behavioural targeting and neuromarketing. It is becoming increasingly apparent that from the sides of entire buildings to the individual neurons in our brains (the microscopic cells in our brains that inform us of our reality), advertising, media and marketing corporations are waging a war of perception on our individual and collective consciousnesses. So citizens and artists across the UK, with help from others across the world, have begun fighting back.

The Brandalism project started in 2012, as an extension of the guerilla art traditions of the 20th Century, and a manifestation of various elements influenced by agitprop, the Situationists and graffiti movements. We began by merging the arts, the social and the political in the UK’s largest unauthorised exhibition, taking over 36 billboards in 5 UK cities. Internationally recognised artists were involved, but on the street you wouldn’t know it: all the works were unsigned and anonymously installed within public space, as gifts to society.

We attempted to connect individual forms of expression with collective bigger-than-self issues. It was part propaganda, part art – or ‘popaganda’ as Ron English calls it. They were installed in spaces traditionally associated with commodity exchange but the artworks spoke of something else. It was a threat and the result was the national mobilisation of the big 3 outdoor advertisers (JCDecaux, ClearChannel and Primesight) to hunt down our art works and remove them from public space.

It is important to consider here that the spaces reclaimed by artists are in public space, despite being privately owned and operated by multinational advertising corporations. There are hundreds of thousands of these spaces across the UK, but we have never consented to being pissed on from above by their messages and their branded advertisements. This is fundamentally different to the other forms of advertising that we come into contact with and have, to a greater extent, some agency over. We can choose to turn a page, a channel or install software on our computers to remove these trespassers on our visual realm. We have no such luxury concerning public space.

How did this happen?

The drive to consumerism that infiltrated society told citizens to become more concerned about consumption than political action. The expansion of capitalistic economies inevitably led to an uneven distribution of wealth, thus widening economic disparity. Suddenly the media (and the art created by designers) became a tool of political forces and a medium for advertising, rather than the medium from which the public got their information on political matters. This limiting of access to the public sphere, by the political control of the public sphere, was necessary for the modern capitalistic forces to operate and thrive in the competitive economy.

We have always seen culture as the spaces and places where society tells stories about itself. Every society has a space where these stories are told and in our culture it’s advertising that dominates these spaces (both physical and digital). If we want to understand the messages that define (popular) culture then we have to look at the main storytellers. In our culture that is the storytellers that have the most money – the advertisers. Advertisers underwrite and subsidise most forms of communication (print, radio, TV, outdoor, digital, online) in the UK and their spending topped £14 billion in 2013; with the digital outdoor sector showing growth rates of 17% in 2013, it isn’t about to slow down anytime soon.

Cognitive and social science (neuroscience, psychology and sociology in particular) studies have shown that advertising distorts our most automatic behaviours, including unconscious behaviours (low attention processing model). Using brain imaging, neuroscientists have recently begun to look at the effects of branding on our brains. Focussing on our reward systems, the region of the brain that interacts with emotions and decision-making, they found it is highly sensitive to signals from our environment, which can influence our behavior even when they are not consciously perceived.

These studies are finally proving what many have suspected for decades: advertising affects and normalises attitudes, behaviours and values. Advertising doesn’t just reflect culture, as the industry purports, it actively shapes our values. Could we therefore say that the control of our collective values remains with those who can afford it?

If we want to understand our culture and society we had better come to terms with the role and power of commercial images. Consumerism does not stress the value of a collective, sustainable future, and the prevailing values of the commercial system provide no incentives to develop bonds with future generations. Faced with growing ecological and social crises, and with advertising being the engine of an unsustainable and detrimental economic system, we have to manifest alternative values that will provide a humane, collective solution to these global crises. With so much of our culture focused on consuming, to accept that you can’t make a mark on the world – that your only pleasure is to say “I bought”, never to say “I made” – is a form of disempowerment that we need to reverse, quickly. We have to give them their shit back. And we are stronger together.

If we are to fundamentally alter this reality, we must begin from the understanding that we need to create – with rediscovered knowledge of our inherent abilities as creative humans, as cultural producers, and not as the consumers we have been told we are from day one.

Re-democratising Public Space

Every citizen should be guaranteed the right to choose where and when they want to access advertising information. This would protect citizens from unwanted influence, or simply allow them to rest from information overload. In the UK we see on average 4000 brand impressions in the city, every day. Faced with this daily grind, the mental freedom of citizens must be ensured, especially in public space. We as citizens must be the guarantors of our own intellectual freedom, as well as helping to provide psychological security for everyone. We don’t need anyone else to do it for us. We are the city. We are the streets.

This understanding of the public sphere forged the starting point of the Brandalism project. How could we, as creative people, help re-democratise public space and share alternative messages about the social and environmental injustices caused by consumerism? How can we break their monopoly over message and meaning in public space?

So the idea behind Brandalism was to create new ideas and perceptions of public space at a time when its democracy is highly contested. On reflection, the first forray fell short: even though the project received international acclaim, striking chords of discontent across the world, in the end it was two pissed-off people in a van intervening directly in public space. What emerged in 2012 was clearly a temporary intervention, a starting point for further dialogue and development. It didn’t offer a solution to the problem of who gets the chance, opportunity and right to share messages and create meaning within public space and culture.

When the Brandalism project returned in 2014, we were fundamentally concerned with movement. We asked ourselves the question: what can we as a global network of citizens do to challenge the cultural pessimism arising from the power of consumerism? How can we facilitate the reclamation of our right to the city and the revolution of everyday life?

Across the globe the chasm between citizens and political institutions is growing and privatization of our public spaces is increasing. Neoliberal values ensure that the logic of the market dictates social relations via commodification. In response to this, a networked culture, a ‘movement of movements’, centered around global solidarity – a worldwide activism spawned by globalisation and driven by citizens, new media technologies and the expansion of art’s urban context – has emerged in the last decade.

Brandalism’s most recent attacks on the spaces of corporate advertising form part of this emerging movement in an attempt to shift artists’ and public attention to grassroots activism, as a means to combat the privatisation and corporate takeover of our cities, public spaces and culture. Public space is an arena in which no single authority should reign and multiple voices should be heard, so we started from a profoundly democratic conviction that the public sphere is a place for communication, a place where people can speak, establish their presence, and assert their rights. By raising issues via art works, viewers could interpret and debate: Brandalism therefore attempts to wrest authority away from the wealthy and return it to the public. The public sphere should not be an arena of market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling.

Our project saw a global network of artists transferring art works to us to print. We voted with consensus as to whether each artwork should be included in what became the world’s largest unauthorised outdoor exhibition. On home-made printing equipment, 400 art works were collectively screen-printed, each one an original. They were then installed by teams in 10 major UK cities (teams who are now a network of citizens as artists/activists). The art was revealed and existing when the works were installed and observed in situ: at once, privatized parts of public space became user-generated. Occupied spaces that are usually the preserve of powerful advertisers and political parties shared alternative messages, ideas and perceptions of what the public realm could be.

To build the movement, we now run workshops showing other people how to intervene and take back these spaces. And we are already planning the next project with others from around the world. We are working together to position the citizen as narrator, and in the telling reveal to others how the city can become a playground, stage and instrument for unsanctioned artworks and activist interventions. This is the terrain of arts activism that re-democratises message, meaning and cultural forms of communication dominated by global mass-media corporations. We want to force them out of public space permanently. They do not have the right to our cities, our head space, our culture. We do. Reclaim your right to the city and to your self.
http://strikemag.org/advertising-shits-in-your-head/





Campaign Coverage via Snapchat Could Shake Up the 2016 Elections
Jonathan Mahler

During the 2008 presidential race, two online upstarts, Politico and The Huffington Post, elbowed their way onto the rope line and, for better or for worse, helped change the way campaigns were covered. In 2012, it was BuzzFeed’s turn. The site that specialized in cute kittens and funny lists turned up at the Iowa caucuses and sped up the news cycle even further, flooding Twitter feeds with tidbits from the trail.

Will 2016 be the Snapchat election?

The question arises after last week’s reports that Snapchat, America’s fastest-growing smartphone app, had hired Peter Hamby, a political reporter for CNN, to lead its nascent news division. Snapchat has said little about its plans, and both it and Mr. Hamby declined to comment for this article. But a couple of things are clear: A company known for enabling teenagers in various states of undress to send disappearing selfies to each other is getting into politics. And with well over 100 million users, a huge swath of whom are in the United States and between the ages of 18 and 31, its potential to shake up the next election is considerable.

“There is no harder riddle to solve in politics than reaching young Americans who are very interested in the future of their country but don’t engage with traditional news,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Obama, wrote to me in an email. “Snapchat may have just made it a whole lot easier to solve this riddle.”

There’s nothing quite like a presidential race for a new media company looking to make its presence known. Campaigns are pageants, and the candidates aren’t the only ones on stage; so, too, are the outlets that cover them. Break a story, push it out across social media, and you’re on the map.

That’s what happened with BuzzFeed, which was the first news organization to report that John McCain was endorsing Mitt Romney in early 2012, only three days after the site started covering the campaign. (An anonymously sourced story that Romney spray-tanned would come later.)

Snapchat is hardly the only social platform looking to beef up its content with the hope of better engaging its audience. Facebook has been talking to a number of media companies, including The New York Times, about hosting their articles and videos on its own servers, rather than driving users to their external sites.

But Snapchat is going a step further: It is creating its own content. This is something social platforms have generally been reluctant to do for the simple reason that it’s difficult. And expensive.

The latter won’t be a problem for Snapchat, which was recently valued at a staggering $15 billion by investors. It has the resources to hire a lot more editors and reporters, even if they won’t gather and deliver news in the traditional way.

What might Snapchat’s political coverage look like? This year, the company introduced a feature called “Discover,” which allows Snapchat’s media partners — CNN, Vice and ESPN among them — to post content to the app every 24 hours on their own Snapchat channel. Think of it as something akin to a cable TV bundle, only with content specifically meant, or at least edited, for Snapchat’s users, with a lot of bright colors and crisp images, plenty of videos and a minimum of text. It’s snack food for your smartphone.

On Comedy Central’s channel on Saturday, you could watch the comedians Key & Peele play Mayweather and Pacquiao at a prefight news conference. Vice’s channel opened with a story about drug use in China; swipe to the left and you’d find a video about Baltimore.

Snapchat also has its own channel: For now, you’re more likely to learn about Nicki Minaj performing at a bar mitzvah than you are about Rand Paul’s position on Iran. This could change under Mr. Hamby.

But maybe more interesting are the possibilities with regard to Snapchat’s “Live” feature. Here’s how Live works: The company drops a digital boundary, or “geofence,” around an event. Snapchat users within the boundary can upload their “snaps” — still images or video — to a Snapchat “story” built around the event. These snaps are stitched into a narrative by a team of Snapchat curators. They are basically home movies, shot by the app’s own users. Over the weekend, Snapchatters could watch reactions from England to the birth of the new royal baby or videos from the Kentucky Derby.

The audiences for some of Snapchat’s stories have been enormous. During a 24-hour stretch in January, nearly 25 million people tuned in to its coverage of New York’s “snowpocalypse.” Over three days in April, some 40 million watched Snapchat’s feed from the Coachella music festival. These are numbers that network executives can only dream about.

It’s easy to imagine Snapchat dropping a geofence around the Iowa State Fair during a candidate’s visit, or even around a presidential debate. Would these events be as popular among Snapchat’s users as a rock concert? Maybe not, but even a fraction of that viewership would be significant.

Mr. Hamby, who is 33, joined CNN in 2004 straight out of journalism school. He had a front-row seat as the web and smartphones eroded the network’s stature as an indispensable source of political news, especially during campaign season.

At CNN, Mr. Hamby developed a reputation for experimenting with new technology. He encouraged his CNN colleagues to use social media to promote their journalism and produced digital video shorts called “Hambycasts.”

But there’s something else about Mr. Hamby that makes him uniquely qualified — or uniquely unqualified — to lead Snapchat’s foray into politics. In 2013, he wrote a 95-page report for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center that criticized how campaigns were covered in the digital era.

In the report, Mr. Hamby does not romanticize an earlier age, when a handful of anointed reporters — the Boys on the Bus, as the writer Timothy Crouse called them — crafted the dominant political narrative of the day. But Mr. Hamby also disliked a lot of what he saw on the campaign trail in 2012. He writes that social media forced both reporters and campaigns “to adapt to a treacherous media obstacle course that incentivized speed, smallness and conflict, leaving little room for good will or great journalism — but plenty of tweets.”

The gist of Mr. Hamby’s complaint is that the hyperactive metabolism of today’s media and the general lack of access to the candidates have produced a lot of shallow, self-involved reporting. Can he reverse this trend working for an app whose multibillion-dollar valuation is built on the back of technology that makes selfies disappear after 10 seconds?

“It sounds ludicrous given how Snapchat started, but I don’t know what Snapchat is going to evolve into,” said Jeff Greenfield, a campaign trail veteran who is active on Twitter and said he was impressed by Mr. Hamby’s report.

Snapchat, with its celebration of the ephemeral, may wind up only contributing to the problems that Mr. Hamby identifies in his report. At the same time, the app’s popularity gives it the potential to bring millions of first-time voters into the political discourse.

Either way, campaigns will no doubt try to use the app to tap into the bloodstream of millennial voters.

“There are a lot of young people who are just killing time on their phones, who are on Snapchat and are not getting all that much exposure to political news right now,” said Tim Miller, a communications adviser for the potential Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush. “I doubt there will be any policy symposiums taking place on Snapchat, but you’ve got to find a way to reach people who aren’t reading long-form political articles.”

Of course, there’s peril here too. Snapchat has a particular sensibility — casual, fun, unforced. Content is delivered in colloquial shorthand. Bad news, and there isn’t much of it, might be followed by an “Ugh.” There is liberal use of emojis.

This is not a tone that will be easy for middle-aged politicians to get right. And getting it wrong could be painful for everyone involved. Especially the candidates.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/bu...elections.html





Google Can't Ignore The Android Update Problem Any Longer (Op Ed)
Lucian Armasu

Android 5.0 "Lollipop" was released about half a year ago, and while its adoption rate was much slower in the beginning, it has now spiked to almost 10 percent of the Android market, according to the latest platform distribution numbers from Google.

Google usually releases a major platform, to which it gives a dessert-themed name, and then iterates on it with bug fixes and a few minor feature additions. In this case, we have "Lollipop," which includes Android 5.0 and the recently released Android 5.1.

There may or may not be an Android 5.2 as well, depending how big of a change Google plans for Android 6.0 and whether it needs to delay it in order to implement those major changes. However, chances are that Google is now trying to keep a major-version-per-year schedule, and it should release a preview of Android 6.0 at the next Google I/O event, while the stable version could arrive late fall this year.

Until then, we have only Android 5.0 and Android 5.1 (Lollipop), which currently represent 9.0 percent and 0.7 percent of the Android market, respectively, for a combined total of 9.7 percent. That's definitely nothing to be proud about, because it could be years by the time the vast majority of users are on the Android 5+ platforms. By then, 10 percent of users could be on Android 8.0.

As we can see in the distribution numbers chart, Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), which was released just about three years ago, still only has 15.6 percent of the market, and there's no reason to believe new versions will transition more rapidly from Android 5.0 in the future.

Because Android is open source and because so many (essentially) OEM-tweaked "forks" of it exist, a "clean" upgrade path is almost impossible. To have a clean standardized update system would mean all the OEMs would have to agree to abide strictly by Google's guidelines for what they can and cannot modify on the platform.

However, as soon as Google tries to do something like that, the OEMs usually cry foul that Google is making Android more proprietary and restricting what they can do with it. Google may also not want to upset the OEMs too much by forcing a unified update system on them either, because of the fear that those OEMs could take their business elsewhere, as it were.

When we look at the matter practically, though, we see that some have already tried that (Samsung with Tizen), and it hasn't worked very well. The reality is that Android and iOS are so entrenched in the market right now that it's hard to believe a significant third platform could arise on mobile when it comes to apps.

Even Microsoft, after spending billions upon billions trying to make Windows Phone popular, has essentially admitted failure on the app store front, and is now trying to make Android and iOS apps work with Windows instead. This strategy isn't too different from how BlackBerry adopted Android apps on its platform because it also knew it had no chance to build a strong third app store. Trying to build a new app platform from scratch is an insurmountable effort. Google shouldn't be fearing it so much, even if the OEMs threaten to do it.

As for OEMs starting to adopt Windows on their phones because Google would force a unified update system on them, that doesn't make any logical sense. OEMs may have other reasons for the switch, but the unified update system wouldn't be the real reason, because Windows has even stricter platform guidelines and its own unified update system.

For years, Apple has made fun of Android and its fragmented update system, and it will continue for years more. Microsoft has recently started doing the same. The update system on Android is something Google can ignore no longer, and it needs to do whatever it takes to fix it. Otherwise, it risks having users (slowly but surely) switch to more secure platforms that do give them updates in a timely manner. And if users want those platforms, OEMs will have no choice but to switch to them too, leaving Google with less and less Android adoption.

Google also can't and shouldn't leave the responsibility to OEMs and carriers anymore, because so far they've proven themselves to be quite irresponsible from this point of view. At best, we see flagship smartphones being updated for a year and a half, and even that is less than the time most people keep their phones.

Even worse, the highest volume phones (lower-end handsets) usually never get an update. If they do it's only one update, and it comes about a year after Google released that update to other phones, giving malicious attackers plenty of time to take advantage of those users.

This update "system," if you can call it that, ends up leaving the vast majority of Android users with security holes in their phones and without the ability to experience new features until they buy new phones (which is sadly a kind of planned obsolescence as well). This can't be an acceptable state of affairs for Google, and it shouldn't be. Google already has a great six-week update system for Chromebooks, and it's time to have Android catch up to that, as well.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/goo...fix,29042.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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