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Old 08-04-15, 07:36 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 11th, '15

Since 2002


































"If this is upheld then the days of anonymous pirating may be over." – Michael Fraser, UT Sydney


"There is zero chance of any domestic restrictions on encryption absent a catastrophic event which clearly could have been stopped if the government had been able to break some encryption." – Michael Vatis






































April 11th, 2015




Illegal Downloading: Australia Internet Firms Must Supply Data
BBC

Thousands of Australians have illegally downloaded The Dallas Buyers' Club, starring Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto

An Australian court has ordered internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over details of customers accused of illegally downloading a US movie.

In a landmark move, the Federal Court told six firms to divulge names and addresses of those who downloaded The Dallas Buyers Club.

The case was lodged by the US company that owns the rights to the 2013 movie.

The court said the data could only be used to secure "compensation for the infringements" of copyright.

In the case, which was heard in February, the applicants said they had identified 4,726 unique IP addresses from which their film was shared online using BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing network. They said this had been done without their permission.

Once they received the names of account holders, the company would then have to prove copyright infringement had taken place.

The judgment comes amidst a crackdown by the Australian government on internet piracy.

Australians are among the world's most regular illegal downloaders of digital content. The delay in release dates for new films and TV shows, and higher prices in Australia for digital content, have prompted many Australians to find surreptitious ways to watch new shows.

Deterrent

The ISPs involved in the case, including Australia's second-largest provider iiNet, said releasing customer information would be a breach of privacy and lead to what is known in the US as "speculative invoicing".

This is where account holders are threatened with court cases that could result in large damages unless smaller settlement fees are paid.

The ISPs argued also that the monetary claims which the US company, Dallas Buyers Club LLC, had against each infringer were so small "that it was plain that no such case could or would be maintained by the applicants".

But Justice Nye Perram ruled that the customer information could be released on condition it was only used to recover compensation for copyright infringement.

"I will also impose a condition on the applicants that they are to submit to me a draft of any letter they propose to send to account holders associated with the IP addresses which have been identified," he ruled.

Justice Perram said the ruling was also important for deterring illegal downloading.

"It is not beyond the realm of possibilities that damages of a sufficient size might be awarded under this provision in an appropriately serious case in a bid to deter people from the file-sharing of films," he said.

The case came to court after Dallas Buyers Club LLC contacted iiNet and other ISPs, asking them to divulge customer details without a court order. The ISPs refused.

The ISPs have yet to say if they will appeal against the court ruling.

Professor of Law at the University of Technology, Sydney, Michael Fraser said it was an important judgement for ISPs and customers.

"If this [judgement] is upheld then the days of anonymous pirating may be over," Prof Fraser told ABC TV.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-32200681





Music File Sharing Site T411 Gets Blocked In France
Edwin Kee

In the war against piracy, it is always a game of cat and mouse, especially when you take into consideration the rather borderless nature of how the Internet works. After all, you might have one particular site that carries a mix of legit as well as pirated content get blocked due to a court order, only to have another one spring up elsewhere with a different URL overnight, and the vicious cycle repeats itself again. Having said that, the French authorities known as the SCPP (“Civil Society of Producers of Phonograms”) has asked for certain sites to be blocked with regularity, and with one of the biggest “catches” being The Pirate Bay not too long ago, the crosshairs have now been trained on T411 .

A rough translation of a statement from the SCPP claims that a Parisian court has asked all ISPs to implement relevant and necessary measures so that there is no way that one will be able to access the T411 music file sharing site, as long as one remains in France. Phew! Aren’t you thankful that this is not the age of old school colonialism? If that were the case, plenty of other countries in Africa, as well as several countries in the Indo-China region too, would have had to face such a blockade.

Do take note that T411 happens to be one of the major torrent sites in France, where there are close to 5.6 million members who do exchange approximately 500,000 files. Needless to say, the top four ISPs, namely SFR, Orange, Bouygues Telecom and Free are expected to follow up with this block.
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2015/04/mus...ked-in-france/





Modders Defy Microsoft's DMCA Takedowns, Release Pirated Copies Of 'Halo Online' On Filesharing Websites
Nachiket Mhatre

No one saw it coming when Microsoft dropped a new "Halo" game and made it exclusive to the PC. Even more surprising was "Halo Online's" free-to-play backbone and the fact that it was restricted to Russia, with no sign of release for the western markets. Therefore, it isn't surprising when a few enterprising modders took it upon themselves to tinker around with the game code and release a customised build. However, it didn't take long for Microsoft to use its legal muscle to issue DMCA takedown notices to clean up the mess.

According to a VG247 report, a YouTube user going by the handle Noble had posted a lengthy gameplay video demonstrating never-before-seen features and gameplay elements from a "Halo Online" build. It was later found that the video was created using an illegally obtained and reverse engineered build of the game provided by two prolific modders Gamercheat13 and Lord Zedd.

PC Gamer points out that another group of modders was already working on a launcher dubbed ElDorito that would package the game assets into a playable version. The files had already been uploaded onto open-source repository GitHub. Microsoft has responded by swiftly raising a copyright claim and issuing DMCA takedown notices on both the modded version of "Halo Online" on GitHub and Noble's gameplay video on YouTube. Google as well as GitHub have complied with the notices and the content has now been taken down.

"We have received information that the domain listed above, which appears to be on servers under your control, is offering unlicensed copies of, or is engaged in other unauthorized activities relating to, copyrighted works published by Microsoft," read Microsoft's DMCA notice sent to Github. However, the pirated version of Microsoft's free-to-play version of "Halo" wasn't removed before a few enterprising gamers managed to create copies on file sharing services such as Mega.

The "Halo Online" Wiki has a page dedicated to the ElDorito launcher, which includes the link to a mirror of unauthorised copy of the game hosted in a 2.1GB file titled "Halo Online.zip" on Mega. Needless to say, it won't be long before Microsoft cracks down on illegal copies of its free-to-play game on such file sharing websites as well.

Nevertheless, it isn't surprising why gamers have been trying to pirate a game that is essentially free to download and play. YouTube user Noble had already raised concerns regarding the pay-to-win elements lying dormant within the game in his leaked gameplay reveal video. He had found the presence of overpowered paid weapons that would've skewed gameplay balance in favour of gamers with deep pockets.

Creating a level playing field isn't the only motivation. PC gamers have been itching for a fix of "Halo" games on their favourite platform for a long time now. "Halo Online" was a classic so-close-yet-so-far case, because the game has been restricted to the Russian territory, with no sign of a western release. That explains why it was western modders who cleaned up the microtransaction elements from the Halo Online build and made it available to the rest of the world.

In all probability, Microsoft could even be holding back on releasing "Halo Online" to Europe and North America to keep the markets focused on the upcoming "Halo 5." On the other hand, Russia might just be the initial testing ground for an eventual worldwide release. At any rate, even with no signs of a worldwide release for the game, modders have ensured that western gamers get a taste of what they're missing.
http://au.ibtimes.com/modders-defy-m...aring-websites





The Impact of Software Piracy on Inclusive Human Development: Evidence from Africa

Simplice A. Asongu

African Governance and Development Institute

Antonio R. Andrés

Universidad Camilo José Cela

December 11, 2014

2014 African Governance and Development Institute WP/14/035

Abstract:
This paper examines two dimensions of the software piracy-development nexus to complement existing formal literature. It empirically assesses the incidence of piracy on the Human Development Index (HDI) and its constituents and then the instrumentality of Intellectual Property Right (IPR) treaties (laws) in the linkages. An instrumental variable or Two-stage least squares is applied on panel of 11 African countries with data for the period 2000-2010. Three main findings are established: (1) software piracy has a negative incidence on inequality adjusted human development; (2) the unappealing effect of piracy on the HDI is fueled by per capita economic prosperity and life expectancy components of human emancipation; (3) software piracy increases literacy. Two major policy implications have been retained from the findings. Firstly, adherence to international IPRs protection treaties (laws) may not impede per capita economic prosperity and could improve life-expectancy. Secondly, adoption of tight IPRs regimes may negatively affect human development by diminishing the literacy rate and restricting diffusion of knowledge.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 30

Keywords: Software piracy; Human development; Intellectual property rights; Panel data; Instrumental variables.

JEL Classification: K42; O34; O38; O47; O57
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...7&download=yes





Francis Maude Warned by Scientists Over 'Chilling Effect' of New Media Rules

Letter to minister expresses fears that changes to the civil service code will effectively silence government scientists on important public issues
Ian Sample

Francis Maude has been warned that changes to the civil service code threaten to stop thousands of publicly-funded scientists from expressing their views on some of the most pressing issues faced by modern society.

In a letter to the cabinet secretary on Friday, science organisations expressed their “deep concern” over recent amendments to the code, which demand that all civil servants, including government researchers, seek ministerial approval before they talk to the media.

They fear that the blanket restriction will make it nearly impossible for government experts to speak to journalists on issues as varied as GM crops, vaccines, infectious diseases and fracking, because ministers could take days or more to respond to the requests.

The revised code was introduced with immediate effect two days before the spring budget, and has been circulated to Britain’s research funding councils and government research laboratories. Among the government-funded centres affected by the changes are the Met Office, the Department for Transport’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch, and the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control.

Under the new code, scientists and engineers employed at government expense must get ministerial approval before they can talk to the media about any of their research, whether it involves GM crops, flu vaccines, the impact of pesticides on bees, or the famously obscure Higgs boson.

“We have seen a lot of political decisions made very rapidly that don’t translate into anything that is workable,” said Tony Bell at Prospect trade union, which is seeking clarifications on the changes. “They are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. They don’t seem to have thought about the people out there who are doing science.”

The revised code has already angered the FDA, a union for senior civil servants, which branded the move draconian and intimidating.

The letter to Maude warns that by effectively silencing government scientists, the public will be left far less informed than before. “This will have a negative impact on the public understanding of science and the quality of the public discourse on some of the most important and contentious issues of our times,” it states.

“We urge the government to think again about this policy and its unintended and undesirable consequences,” the letter continues.

Sir Colin Blakemore, who signed the letter as the honorary president of the Association of British Science Writers, told the Guardian that under the revised code, it would be harder for the public to hear the evidence and opinions of scientists directly employed by the government.

“The real losers here are the public and the government. The public lose access to what they consider to be an important source of scientific evidence, and the government loses the trust of the public,” Blakemore said.

“It sends a message to the science community that the government is wary about scientists sharing their evidence and expressing their views in the media. And if that’s true, it contradicts the last 30 years of encouraging scientists to be more open.”

Fiona Fox, head of the Science Media Centre, who also signed the letter, said the revised code would have a “chilling effect” on government scientists who are often already cautious to speak to the media.

“The government is saying it doesn’t want its scientists to speak and that is going in completely the wrong direction. What we need are messages from on high that are supportive and back scientists sharing their evidence and expertise to better inform these debates,” she said. “Unless the situation is clarified, this will have a chilling effect. Scientists will keep quiet to be on the safe side.”

The cabinet office said that individual departments could apply for exemptions to the amendment.

“The minister has received the letter and will respond in due course,” a cabinet office spokesman said. “The recent amendment in the civil service code clarifies an existing requirement and will not impact the important and valuable role scientists play in the civil service.”

A request for comment from Sir Mark Walport, the government’s chief scientist, was referred back to cabinet office.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2...ew-media-rules





Tories Promise to Enforce Age Limits on Online Pornography

Sajid Javid says party would ensure under-18s were locked out of adult content via an independent regulator with power to compel ISPs to block sites
Press Association

The Conservatives say they will force hardcore pornography websites to put in place age-restriction controls or face being shut down if they win the election.

The culture secretary, Sajid Javid, said the party would act to ensure under-18s were locked out of adult content after a recent Childline poll found nearly one in 10 12-13 year olds were worried they were addicted and 18% had seen shocking or upsetting images.

Experts welcomed the move – targeted at both UK-based and overseas websites – but warned it would take hard work to implement in practice.

Under the Tory proposals the system would be overseen by an independent regulator with the power to compel internet service providers (ISPs) to block sites which failed to include effective age verification.

ISPs could be fined if they did not co-operate.

Javid said: “If you want to buy a hardcore pornography DVD in a store you need to prove your age to the retailers.

“With the shift to online, children can access adult content on websites without restriction, intentionally or otherwise.

“As a father to four young children, I worry, like every other parent, how easy it is for them to view explicit material.

“That is why we need effective controls online that apply to UK and overseas.

“This is about giving children the best start in life; we do not want to prevent adults from accessing legal content but we do want to protect our children from harmful material, so they are free to develop a healthy attitude to sex and relationships.”

The Mothers’ Union chief executive, Reg Bailey, who was commissioned by David Cameron to investigate the the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood, said it was “a really welcome development”.

He said: “A key recommendation of the Letting Children Be Children review ... was to help parents protect children from inappropriate content on the internet, especially pornography.

“Although huge progress has been made, this is a real step forward.

“Whilst I do not underestimate the energy that will be needed to implement this effectively, I am greatly encouraged by the prime minister’s continuing personal commitment to this task.”

Sarah Green, acting director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, said: “We warmly welcome proposals to better regulate access to online pornography by young people.

“Surveys have shown that more than half of young people have seen online pornography by the age of 14, and that many see it without even seeking it out as links are shared on social networks.

“Research has found that young people’s exposure to pornography is linked to beliefs that women are sex objects, and to negative and even fearful attitudes towards sex.”

NSPCC chief Peter Wanless said: “The easy availability to children of online pornography, much of it extreme, violent and profoundly degrading, is of deepening concern.

“It can leave them feeling frightened, confused, depressed or upset. The number of ChildLine counselling sessions regarding porn more than doubled last year to over 1,100 with some young girls revealing they were being pressured to mimic scenes from adult films.

“Any action that makes it more difficult for young people to find this material is to be welcomed. The key will be making any system work effectively as we know foreign outlets are recklessly flooding the market with films that can be viewed by anyone without any age checks in place.”
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...ne-pornography





Jay Edelson, the Class-Action Lawyer Who May Be Tech’s Least Friended Man
Conor Dougherty

When technology executives imagine the boogeyman, they see a baby-face guy in wire-rim glasses. His name is Jay Edelson.

Mr. Edelson, 42, is a class-action lawyer. He is also, if not the most hated person in Silicon Valley, very close to it. His firm, Edelson PC, specializes in suing technology companies, claiming privacy violations. He has gone after pretty much every tech company you have heard of — Amazon, Apple, Google — as well as many that you have not. His cases read like a time capsule of the last decade, charting how computers have been steadfastly logging data about our searches, our friends, our bodies.

Remember when companies started clogging your phone with text messages? Edelson sued dozens of them for that. Have you ever searched for yourself online and found that some of the stuff about you is wrong? This is the basis of a lawsuit against Spokeo, a search engine based in Pasadena, Calif.

If you have ever wondered how Facebook is able to automatically name your friends in pictures that you have uploaded to the social network, then you may be interested in a lawsuit Mr. Edelson filed on Wednesday. That one contends that Facebook has “secretly amassed the world’s largest privately held database of consumer biometrics data.”

Mr. Edelson is full of self-deprecating comments about how he is “not technologically savvy at all” and that his move into privacy law was “a total accident.” Nevertheless, his firm, which is based in Chicago, has become one of the most prolific filers of privacy class actions, a growing legal area that tech companies describe with a litany of unprintable terms. Asked to sum up the tech community’s feelings about Mr. Edelson, Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a technology incubator that invests in very young companies, said the lawyer was regarded as “a leech tarted up as a freedom fighter.”

Edelson PC is on the 13th floor of a high-rise building that looks over the Chicago River. The building’s lobby is full of people in suits, but the firm has the playful feel of a start-up. Lawyers — there are 20 of them — wear hoodies emblazoned with the Edelson logo, and their offices are labeled with old circuit boards mounted beside the doors. One of those offices has a pool table.

The start-up motifs are by design. Mr. Edelson may make his living suing tech companies, but he is breathless in his admiration for Silicon Valley culture and products. His office is decorated with images of Grumpy Cat, the famous Internet feline known for its morose-looking mouth, and he described the iPhone 6 Plus as “my favorite thing on earth.”

“He wants to be perceived as running a tech firm, but since he’s not a tech guy, the closest he will come is a law firm,” said Scott A. Kamber, a rival class-action lawyer who was Mr. Edelson’s partner before they amicably split.

Another way in which he is similar to a start-up founder is that he does not like to talk about money, except when he is talking about not being motivated by money.

“Money doesn’t mean a ton,” Mr. Edelson said during an interview in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco, wearing a watch whose face was loaded with diamond flecks.

The firm started suing technology companies in the early 2000s, before data privacy was a national debate. Mr. Edelson claims to have won more than $1 billion in settlements in all, a number that is difficult to confirm because many of those agreements are private. Today he views these cases the same way Apple views its collection of iPhones and other iThings: as a line of products to be refined, repackaged and resold. Text messages are a product line. Online video is a product line.

“When we go after a dozen big companies and win,” he said, “the trickle-down effect is so much larger than if it’s perceived as a one-off suit.”

Taking On Facebook

On a snowy day in February, Mr. Edelson’s team was laying the groundwork for the recent Facebook suit, which they hope will create a new line of cases centered on biometric information. Given the explosion of “wearable” technologies, along with voice and face recognition software, this could be a lucrative area.

“We’re really eager to test it out,” Mr. Edelson said before the meeting.

The Facebook case concerns a feature that analyzes users’ photos and then suggests names to go with the faces in the picture from the users’ lists of friends. When it was introduced in 2010, bloggers regarded it, like pretty much every new technology, as incredibly useful but also a little creepy.

In the suit filed on Wednesday, Edelson asserts that the social network violated an Illinois law, called the Biometric Information Privacy Act, by storing images of its users’ faces without telling them or obtaining their permission and neglecting to say how long it planned to keep them.

“This lawsuit is without merit, and we will defend ourselves vigorously,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. She noted that the face-tagging feature could be turned off, at which point the data used to suggest tags to other people is deleted.

The idea came from Edelson’s investigative team, which consists of three lawyers and a computer analyst. The group’s job, to put it plainly, is to find ways to sue companies, and a few months ago the firm started looking into laws that regulate biometric data. This was inspired, in part, by a call to the firm by someone who was leery of cameras and wanted to know if wearing a mask in public was legal.

“He wanted to wear a mask at all times,” recalled David Mindell, an associate at the firm.

One of the members of the investigative unit is Shawn Davis, a digital forensics expert who previously worked as a network security analyst. Now, from an office strewn with cables and old cellphones, he spends his day playing with new devices as well as trawling through websites and mobile apps to try to figure out what kinds of data companies are collecting and how.

He joined the firm because “it seemed like a private version of the F.T.C.” — the Federal Trade Commission.

After several weeks of investigating Facebook, Mr. Davis presented his findings at the February meeting. Sitting in a corner conference room, he projected strings of computer code on a monitor, showing what he believed was evidence that Facebook was collecting and storing digitized facial images. Lawyers in the room said they thought Facebook had done this without the consent of its users.

“Why wouldn’t we want to go after a smaller company first?” asked one of the lawyers at the meeting. What he meant was that Facebook, with its practically limitless legal budget, might be too big a target.

Another colleague disagreed. If they sued a smaller company first, some other law firm would steal their idea, swoop in and sue Facebook — the big fish with the biggest potential rewards.

This led to a natural conclusion: “Why not file them all?” someone else said.

Helped by Snowden

There is no good data on how many cases have been brought claiming privacy violations by tech companies, but lawyers say the practice is escalating with the growth of social media and mobile phones, which are tracking people virtually all of the time. A recent legal treatise by Ian Ballon, a lawyer at Greenberg Traurig’s Silicon Valley office, describes “an explosion” in class-action suits related to data privacy. Defense firms are bolstering their privacy practices in response.

“It’s out there and it’s growing,” said Ted Frank, who runs the Center for Class Action Fairness, a nonprofit group in Washington that represents consumers unhappy with class-action settlements.

In Washington, the F.T.C. has stepped up its enforcement of privacy violations, and legislators like Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, are pushing for laws that would give people more control over the ways Internet companies use their data. But Mr. Edelson says the biggest lift to the kind of data privacy litigation he does came from Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked documents about government spying. Those revelations have, in his opinion, made judges much more sympathetic to privacy plaintiffs.

“Before, we would to go court and judges would just scoff at us,” he said. “Now they seem eager to listen to us and find ways to help us.”

Many prominent privacy suits involve big news events, such as when hackers stole 40 million credit card numbers from Target. Mr. Edelson tries to avoid these, partly because they are so competitive within the plaintiffs’ bar. His business niche relies on applying old laws to new technologies. Those cases can generate tens of millions of dollars each year for the firm, which usually collects 25 percent of its settlements.

Take, for instance, the Video Privacy Protection Act. The law, signed in 1988, was passed shortly after President Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. During the fight over Mr. Bork’s ultimately unsuccessful confirmation, a newspaper published the names of some of the videotapes he had rented from a local store.

They were not very interesting, but the next year a chilled Congress — acting in an age in which many people and possibly a few congressmen obtained their pornography from curtained rooms in local video stores — swiftly put the law on the books.

Three years ago, Mr. Edelson used the video law to sue Netflix for keeping data on the movies its users watched after they canceled their service, and settled for $9 million. The firm has used the same law to sue various dealers in online video. Mr. Edelson claims that his suits have led companies to be less cavalier with their users’ information. The firm’s settlement with Netflix, for instance, prompted the company to change its privacy policy. Now, when people cancel their service, the company has agreed to remove their names and other personal identifiers from their rental history within a year.

In addition to the video privacy law, Mr. Edelson’s practice relies on the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which was enacted in 1991 to restrict the use of automated telemarketing, as well as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which protects the privacy of phone calls and emails.

The penalties for each instance of breaking these laws are small, usually in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. But when they are applied to modern creations like an email service that has 425 million daily users, the potential liabilities can be comically high. One class action, in which Edelson was not involved, accused Google of violating wiretap laws by scanning messages in its Gmail email service. The suit was dismissed, but it could theoretically have been worth trillions.

What this means is that a company’s defense strategy typically involves trying to persuade a judge to throw the suit out of court on a “motion to dismiss,” or to try to prevent lawyers from suing on behalf of a class. If the judge lets the case go forward as a class action, companies usually start thinking about settlements. And that is good news for the plaintiffs’ lawyers.

“It’s legal gotcha, and he tries to convince you that because there’s a legal gotcha with a big number, then you should pay him instead of litigating,” said Michael Rhodes, a partner at the Cooley law firm in San Francisco, who has defended clients like Sony and Facebook against Mr. Edelson’s firm. “That’s his business model.”

‘Annihilating’ Damages

Mr. Edelson grew up outside Boston and went to the University of Michigan Law School. He worked first at defense firms but hated it, so he quit to file his own cases. He started with more traditional class actions, suing companies for things like tainted cat food and toys containing lead paint. “What I used to say at the beginning was that the only company I wouldn’t sue is Dr Pepper,” he said. “I really like Dr Pepper.”

His first run of technology suits, in the early 2000s, included a case that accused Register.com, which sells domain names, of running advertising on web pages it had sold to the customers for their use. Since then, the world has evolved. Our ordinary daily activities — communicating, buying things, seeking out information — often require us to reveal information that in the past was never created or collected.

The most muscular response to this corralling of data has been in Europe, where a sweeping new law nicknamed the “right to be forgotten” has set up a process for people to have links about them removed from search engines. Average Americans, however, seem caught in a gap between the privacy they say they want and what they actually do about it. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that 91 percent of American adults thought they had lost control over how their personal information is used by companies. Yet they gleefully use Facebook and Twitter while showing zero appetite for paying for those services with money instead of data.

Mr. Edelson sees himself doing the dirty, unpopular work of protecting privacy with laws that are already on the books. Several technology companies — Google, LinkedIn, Netflix — declined to discuss Mr. Edelson and his firm. If one were to compile a list of Silicon Valley’s least favorite topics, privacy would be up there with wealth inequality and gender imbalance.

Even the act of defending oneself can be unflattering. Take Google. Two years ago, in an attempt to head off a class-action lawsuit involving Gmail, the company wrote in a legal filing that people who used the service should never have expected their emails to be private, and it compared Gmail correspondence to business letters that can be viewed by assistants in an office. The company was quickly attacked by groups like Consumer Watchdog.

“A lot of privacy assurances fall away when companies like Google end up in court,” said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

When defending themselves against Mr. Edelson and his competitors, technology companies typically argue that the named plaintiffs on privacy suits do not have “standing,” which is a lawyer’s way of saying that you can’t sue someone for damages if you didn’t lose money or get hurt. That argument, which lawyers describe as the go-to defense in privacy cases, could face a big test from a 2010 suit Mr. Edelson filed against Spokeo, a search engine that, for a fee, displays everything it can find about a person.

Mr. Edelson sued under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a 1970s law that is meant to keep credit reporting agencies from providing inaccurate information that could make it harder for consumers to borrow money or get a job.

Mr. Edelson was not the only person with such concerns. Two years after he filed his lawsuit, Spokeo paid $800,000 to settle F.T.C. charges that it marketed its service as a background check for employers but without vetting the information or giving consumers the right to correct it, as required under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, according to the F.T.C.

Thomas Robins, the named plaintiff in Mr. Edelson’s case, said he had searched for himself on Spokeo and found that several things, including his age, were wrong. That has him worried that a potential employer might not consider him for jobs.

“He is not saying that has happened to him — it’s just a speculative injury that could happen,” said John Nadolenco, a partner at Mayer Brown in Los Angeles, who is defending Spokeo in the case. “Well, that’s not an injury.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, however, ruled that Mr. Robins did have standing to sue for damages. Spokeo has appealed that decision to the United States Supreme Court and is awaiting a response.

The company has a lot to lose if the case goes forward. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, Spokeo could face damages of $1,000 a violation. That could add up to several billion dollars, which would be “annihilating,” Mr. Nadolenco said.

The case is being closely watched in Silicon Valley. Companies have filed close to a dozen legal briefs in support of Spokeo. Lawyers for eBay, Facebook, Google and Yahoo filed a brief arguing that if the Ninth Circuit’s rule stands, those companies could be sued “even where they are not actually harmed by an alleged statutory violation, and in certain circumstances, seek class-action damages that could run into billions of dollars.”

Defending Class Actions

Whatever happens at the Supreme Court, Mr. Edelson is unlikely to win many new fans. Class-action lawyers, like Wall Street short-sellers, tend to justify their actions with high-minded morality, but they are often reviled as glorified extortionists.

“If we didn’t allow class actions, we would be in a much worse world,” said Michael Klausner, a professor at Stanford Law School. “The problem is they can also be abusive.”

Over all, class actions have generally been on the decline as courts have made it harder for lawyers to certify class actions so they can go forward, said Brian Fitzpatrick, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School who studies class-action cases.

Also, over the last few years many companies have adopted so-called arbitration clauses in which, simply by clicking the “accept terms” button, users waive their rights to join class actions. The move discourages plaintiffs’ lawyers because, unless they can sue on behalf of many clients at once, there is hardly any money in filing cases. “It may only be a matter of time before it is impossible for employees and consumers to file class actions,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.

Mr. Edelson seems worried about this. About three years ago, after AT&T adopted an arbitration clause, Mr. Edelson filed several dozen individual arbitrations over the course of a year. It was an expensive exercise, but forced AT&T to deal with each dispute one by one and sent a message “to other companies not to put arbitration clauses in their contracts,” he said.

AT&T still has the arbitration clause.

In defending his tactics, Mr. Edelson echoes a long-running defense of class-action law. He says he is acting like a sort of private attorney general, forcing companies to change their worst behaviors. The critical view is that lawyers like him make millions while recovering almost nothing for the people they represent.

“Everyone always has a story about getting a check from a class action for 15 cents,” said Christopher Dore, an Edelson partner. Mr. Dore said he had made peace with people questioning his profession.

“The funniest thing is you talk about it in the abstract, and people have one reaction,” he said, “but then you give them specific examples, like I’ll explain a case or something to them, and they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s really messed up. You should definitely sue them.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/te...on-valley.html





USPTO Demands EFF Censor Its Comments On Patentable Subject Matter
Mike Masnick

As you know, last year the Supreme Court made a very important ruling in the Alice v. CLS Bank case, in which it basically said that merely doing something on a general purpose computer didn't automatically make it patentable. This has resulted in many courts rejecting patents and the USPTO being less willing to issue patents, based on that guidance. The USPTO sought to push out new "guidance" to its examiners taking the ruling into account. Soon after the Alice ruling, it issued some "Preliminary Examination Instructions." However, it then issued the so-called 2014 Interim Guidance on Subject Matter Eligibility and sought public comment through March 16 of this year.

Plenty of folks did comment, including the EFF. However, the USPTO apparently was offended at parts of the EFF's comment submission, claiming that it was an "improper protest." In response, the EFF refiled the comment, but redacted the part that the USPTO didn't like. Here's what page 5 of the document on the USPTO site looks like.

However, EFF also added the following footnote (footnote 8) on page 6:

On April 2, 2015, the PTO contacted EFF to request that we remove a portion of these comments on the basis that they constituted an improper “protest.” We respectfully disagree that our comments were a protest under 35 U.S.C. § 122(c). Rather, our comments discussed a specific application to illustrate our broader points about the importance of applying Alice. Nevertheless, to ensure these comments are considered by the Office, we have redacted the relevant discussion in this revised version of our comments. Our original comments remain available to the public at: https://www.eff.org/files/2015/03/18...nts_regarding_ interim_eligibility_guidance.pdf.

And, of course, if you go to that link, you get the full, unredacted version of the EFF's filing.

As you can see by the full filing, the EFF filing isn't some sort of improper protest. Rather it is a clear demonstration of how the USPTO does not appear to be living up to what the courts are saying in the wake of the Alice ruling. It is difficult to see what the USPTO was thinking in trying to silence the EFF's comment. It is beyond ludicrous on multiple levels. First, it suggests a skin so thin at the USPTO that you can see right through it. Second, it suggests that the USPTO doesn't want people to recognize that its guidance is problematic in light of what actual federal courts are saying. And, finally, it suggests (still) a complete lack of understanding of how the internet and freedom of expression works, thereby guaranteeing that the EFF's complete dismantling of the USPTO's guidelines will now get that much more attention...

Has anyone patented a method and system for self-inflicted shaming for being overly sensitive to someone pointing out your flaws?
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...t-matter.shtml





TV Networks Put Subscriber Caps on Skinny Bundles and Streaming Video Services

2 Million Max Can Sign Up for Sling, Executive Says
Bloomberg

Thinking about joining the ranks of cable cord-cutters and signing up for Sling TV? Better act fast.

The companies whose channels are included in Dish Network's new online-TV service are putting caps on the number of people who can subscribe. If the limits are exceeded, content companies may have the right to pull their shows and movies, said Geetha Ranganathan, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.

Subscriber caps are a way for the media industry to cope with an increase in viewers shunning traditional pay-TV packages with their hundreds of channels -- many never watched. Programmers like Walt Disney Co. and Time Warner can't ignore the rise of online options, yet don't want these cable alternatives growing too fast. Cable companies pay fees to programmers based on their subscribers. If large swaths drop pay-TV plans for Sling TV or Apple's planned service, it would mean less money for cable operators and certain programmers alike.

"They want it to be a complementary product and not a competing product that cannibalizes their core business," Ms. Ranganathan said. "They don't want it to become too popular."

Programmers want the skinny bundles to help them reach the estimated 10 million or so broadband subscribers who don't opt to buy pricey pay-TV packages, while making sure those less-costly plans don't encourage people to cut the cord with cable and satellite operators.

Not just streaming services capped

"It's still early stages," said Amy Yong, an analyst with Macquarie Group. "They're all testing the market."

Subscriber limits aren't new. Cable companies that offer similar low-priced packages with a dozen or so channels are often restricted to sign up no more than 10% of their customers to such plans, said Rich Fickle, CEO of the National Cable Television Cooperative in Lenexa, Kansas. That way, programmers can ensure their channels on pricier tiers have a large enough audience to maintain advertiser interest, he said.

Sling TV, introduced in February, offers about 20 channels for $20, including Time Warner's CNN and TBS, as well as ESPN, Disney Channel and AMC, and provides sports and entertainment series such as "Monday Night Football" and "The Walking Dead."

Apple plans to debut a service this year with about 25 channels, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Verizon Communications, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, also intends to enter the web-based streaming market with a slimmed-down package.
So far, Sling TV has signed up at least 100,000 subscribers, the technology site Re/Code reported last month. By comparison, online video-subscription service Netflix has more than 57 million members worldwide, with more than 39 million in the U.S.

Danielle Johnson, a spokeswoman for Englewood, Colorado-based Dish, declined to comment on the number of people who have signed up for Sling or whether the service has subscriber limits.

Limited content

Skinny bundles could have trouble gaining traction because their content is limited or their price is too high to attract a large number of pay-TV subscribers, Todd Juenger, a media analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York, said in a March 26 note to clients.

But industry executives still want to make sure they don't get too popular and cite subscriber caps as a reason why the traditional pay-TV bundle is safe.

"Sling is by its agreements with the content owners itself limited to be sold to people that don't have cable, with a limit of 2 million subscribers," Discovery CEO David Zaslav said at a media conference last month. "I don't see ŕ la carte or different bundles really having much of an impact here in the U.S."

None of Discovery's channels is currently in Sling TV's lineup.

'Constructive' strategy

Agreements that use subscriber caps are "a constructive way to make an offering to a given part of the market that does not undermine the other part of the market," Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said at a media conference last year.

But as the lower-cost packages increase in popularity, it will put pressure on cable networks and pay-TVdistributors to reassess those limits, said Mr. Fickle, whose group negotiates programing contracts on behalf of 900 smaller cable-TV providers.

"It's going to grow, it has to," Fickle said. "Current programming agreements have problems in adapting to that."
http://adage.com/article/media/tv-pr...undles/297887/





Viacom Says the Internet Made Its Reruns Less Valuable
Peter Kafka

Sorry, Snooki. You’re not worth as much as you used to be.

Blame Amazon, YouTube and the rest of the Internet.

That’s part of the message Viacom sent out today, when it announced it was taking a $750 million restructuring charge as part of a “strategic realignment,” which includes firing a lot of people.

The cable TV conglomerate had already been struggling with weaker ratings, and CEO Philippe Dauman had previously announced that layoffs were coming, so the news wasn’t a complete surprise.

But the scope of the overhaul, for a company that seemed on top of the world just a few years ago, is news. So is the company’s acknowledgement that some of the shows it makes and buys aren’t as valuable as they used to be, because people don’t watch TV the same way anymore.

Specifically: They’re a lot less likely to watch old reality shows, because technology gives them so many more options.

Here’s the language from Viacom’s press release: “The charge also reflects accelerated amortization of programming expenses associated with a change in the company’s ultimate revenue projections for certain original programming genres that have been impacted by changing media consumption habits.” (Emphasis added.)

And now the translation, with help from a person familiar with Viacom’s thinking: The shelf life for Viacom’s reality shows like “Teen Mom” and “Jersey Shore” is shorter than it used to be, because why watch a reality show rerun when you can watch something on YouTube or Twitch, or play around with Vine and Snapchat, or Clash of Clans or whatever. So the company has to knock down the value it had attributed to those shows in its catalog. The same goes for some reruns the company had purchased from other providers.

If you want to add insult to injury, you can say that Viacom helped hasten this problem by making its own repeats available lots of places besides Viacom’s own channels. Amazon Prime members, for instance, can stream “Jersey Shore” and many of Viacom’s other old shows for free.

That’s the argument Bernstein Research’s Todd Juenger has been making for months — not just about Viacom, but the rest of the cable TV guys, who saw ratings fall off a cliff last summer. Now other industry observers, including those at Nielsen, are coming around to his view.

Viacom’s defense, if it could make one out loud, is that it thinks this viewing shift is only affecting a tranche of its programming, not all of it. Viacom might also note that it did get paid for all of those licensing deals, and since its competitors made the same ones, the cost of not doing them might have been even more expensive.

Next question: Is Viacom going to discover more of its programming has been affected by “changing media consumption habits”? Even more important question: Will the rest of the TV networks make the same discovery?
https://recode.net/2015/04/06/viacom...less-valuable/





Ready for Primetime?
Peter Kafka

Yesterday was a big test for Sling TV: How would the Web TV service do when lots of subscribers logged in at the same time, to watch some of the biggest sports events of the year?

Not that well, apparently. By Sling’s own admission, it couldn’t handle an influx of users who tuned in to watch Turner Networks’ broadcasts of the March Madness college basketball semi-finals, featuring Duke vs. Michigan State and Wisconsin vs. Kentucky. That led to streams that were choppy or nonexistent, according to frustrated Sling users.

“We’re sorry some basketball fans saw errors tonight due to extreme sign-ups and streaming. Engineers rebalanced load across network partners,” Sling’s @slinganswers Twitter account posted last night, around the middle of the evening’s second game.

We're sorry some basketball fans saw errors tonight due to extreme sign-ups and streaming. Engineers rebalanced load across network partners

— Sling Answers (@slinganswers) April 5, 2015

On conventional TV, Duke/Michigan State was one of the most popular Final Four games in a decade, while Wisconsin/Kentucky was even bigger: It attracted more viewers than any other Final Four game in the last 22 years. (On Wisconsin!)

Without any more detail from Sling or its parent company Dish Network (I’ve asked them for comment but am not holding my breath), it’s hard to diagnose what went wrong last night. But if you take Sling’s Twitter operator at face value, the company didn’t anticipate that one of the biggest nights in sports would be a big night for the service, which delivers a package of pay TV channels over the Web for $20 a month.

[UPDATE: Sling TV CEO Roger Lynch called back, and says his service was well aware that streams and sign-ups would be in high demand on Saturday. And while Lynch concedes that his service was overwhelmed, he says outages and quality issues only affected around 1,000 users — “a fraction” of Sling’s base. (And no, Lynch wouldn’t disclose his overall numbers). Lynch says new software he’s rolling out this week should help Sling deal with future spikes, which could come soon: Next weekend HBO launches a new season of “Game of Thrones” , and Sling will allow users to sign up for the pay TV channel for an extra $15 a month.]

On the one hand, that’s hard to believe. Watching live sports on the Web, via ESPN and Turner’s channels, is by far the most compelling reason to sign up for Sling, which attracted 100,000 sign-ups in its first month. So you’d think the Sling folks would have circled Saturday night on their calendars many months ago, and would have gone out of their way to make sure they could handle demand.

On the other hand, that excuse is uncomfortably familiar. Many big Web streaming events in the last few years seem to be accompanied by user complaints and operator apologies.

For instance: In February, some people who tuned into watch ABC’s streaming coverage of the Oscars saw old movies and game shows instead. Last year, ESPN cited “unprecedented demand” when it struggled to serve everyone who wanted to watch the U.S. play Germany in the World Cup. And HBO’s streaming service conked out a couple times when lots of people tried to watch some of its most popular shows.

(For what it’s worth, I streamed the second half of the Wisconsin game on my iPhone, via Turner’s “March Madness” app, and it worked just fine — except in the last couple of minutes, when it shut down twice, sending me into convulsions. Luckily it all worked out. (Nice job, Bronson.)

In the past, it was hard to get too worked up about Web TV streaming problems, since Web TV streaming was always presented as an alternate option for a relatively small group of people.

But now Web TV is supposed to be mainstream: Dish and Sony are presenting their online packages as full-blown replacements for cable TV subscriptions, and this month HBO will sell HBO Now, an online-only service targeted at an audience of more than 10 million potential subscribers. In the fall, the NFL will stream a game to a national audience. Apple wants to launch its own streaming service this year.

And bear in mind that there are many ways for a Web stream to break down before it gets to your laptop or Apple TV. Even when operators like Sling aren’t at fault, something else down the line — your local broadband provider, your router or your own operator error — can prevent you from watching what you want, when you want. It seems like it might be some time before regular humans can reliably depend on the Web to show them something that lots of other people want to watch at exactly the same time.
https://recode.net/2015/04/05/sling-...for-primetime/





Why the Cable Companies You Hate May Be Forced to Compete Online
Alex Sherman

The largest U.S. cable companies may be approaching a cliff they’ve long tried to avoid -- competition with each other.

As a slew of companies, from Dish Network Corp.’s Sling TV to Sony Corp., begin to offer online television viewing, cable providers may be forced to respond with their own nationwide live streaming packages, or lose even more subscribers, said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG LLC in New York.

The result will be “nationwide war” as cable companies battle each other and the newcomers for online subscribers, said Greenfield. Regardless of where they live, customers could choose from among such providers as Comcast Corp., Charter Communications Inc. and Cox Communications Inc. The fight could endanger cable industry profits as consumers switch to cheaper online offerings. That prospect is already helping drive consolidation, such as this week’s $10.4 billion merger agreement between Charter and Bright House Networks.

“Sling launched, and as soon as others follow, Comcast will have no choice but to launch, with Charter and other cable companies following,” Greenfield said.

Head-to-head competition in the cable industry has long been anathema. It wasn’t sensible to spend billions of dollars building cable lines in overlapping territories only to split business and compete on price. So consumers have been left to pick a TV service from their local cable company, like Comcast, satellite providers Dish and DirecTV, or maybe a phone carrier like Verizon Communications Inc. But they’ve almost never had the option to choose between two cable companies.

’Not Realistic’

In an era of Internet television, consumers don’t need a set-top, satellite dish or a cable to view many of their favorite networks.

Philadelphia-based Comcast has said it has no plans for a national online video product, writing in a March 9 filing to the Federal Communications Commission that such an offering “would not be realistic or profitable.” The California Office of Ratepayer Advocates, an independent consumer-advocacy office, and Dish both disagree, citing documents filed by Comcast to U.S. regulators. Comcast responded that executives considered and rejected the idea.

The pressure for cable companies to offer a lower-cost alternative that can compete with mobile streaming is growing. The number of U.S. subscribers to cable, satellite or fiber services fell for a second straight year in 2014, by about 176,000, according to research firm SNL Kagan. One reason is poor customer relations. Internet providers and pay-TV services were ranked last among 43 industries for consumer happiness in the 2014 American Customer Satisfaction Index.

Sling Package

In February, Dish, based in Englewood, Colorado, rolled out its Sling TV service, offering a package of cable networks, including Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN, streaming over the Internet for $20 a month. A typical monthly TV bill is $87.

Sony began selling PlayStation Vue in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia in March, a $50-a-month service that includes programming from more than 85 channels. Apple is planning a streaming service later this year, the Wall Street Journal reported recently, as is Verizon, Chief Executive Officer Lowell McAdam has said.

Meanwhile, programmers such as CBS Corp., Time Warner Inc.’s HBO and even Comcast Corp.’s NBC are offering slimmer packages of video directly to consumers, outside of a cable subscription.

Cable companies could respond by offering a live streaming product to their regional subscribers first before they debut a nationwide service, said Paul Sweeney, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.

’Nuclear War’

But cable companies have to worry about hurting profits if they compete on online packages, according to Rocco Commisso, chief executive officer and founder of Mediacom, the nation’s eighth largest cable provider. That’s why he said he doesn’t expect such moves -- what he calls “nuclear war” -- anytime soon. Nationwide competition would make more sense if there were far fewer cable companies -- which could happen with increased consolidation, he said.

Dish founder Charlie Ergen acknowledged that Sling TV will cannibalize his core satellite-TV business in a March 25 interview with CNBC.

Comcast Chip

Still, Comcast holds a chip that other cable companies don’t have -- ownership of NBC Universal. Comcast must offer NBC and NBC Universal’s cable channels, which include Bravo, CNBC and USA, to rival service providers until 2018, a condition the FCC and the Justice Department placed on its 2011 acquisition. After that, unless the rules change, Comcast could offer NBC and its cable networks exclusively or semi-exclusively -- a significant differentiator in a nationwide online offering.

The potential of online cable competition is already an issue for regulators who are weighing Comcast’s $45.2 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable Inc. The deal would remove one competitor if Internet video becomes a standard delivery mechanism, Ergen has argued.

Comcast’s insistence that any online video streaming it plans would be for regional customers only “is not accurate,” Ergen said. The two companies “would be natural competitors. That goes away in a merger.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...compete-online





Comcast Mega-Merger Brings More Cable Consolidation with New Charter Deal

Charter to buy Bright House, but only if side deal with Comcast gets approved.
Jon Brodkin

Another cable company merger was announced today, but it won't be completed unless the government allows Comcast to buy Time Warner Cable (TWC).

Charter Communications plans to buy Bright House Networks for $10.4 billion, but the deal is contingent on Comcast's big merger. That's because Charter itself has a stake in Comcast/TWC; Charter stands to gain 1.4 million subscribers from Time Warner Cable in exchange for $7.3 billion. Comcast would also divest itself of 2.5 million subscribers with the spinoff of a new cable company called GreatLand Connections.

If the Comcast/TWC and Charter/Bright House mergers go through, Charter would end up as the second biggest cable operator in the US behind Comcast.

But all these deals could now be stopped if the Federal Communications Commission or Department of Justice blocks Comcast's purchase of Time Warner Cable. The Charter/Bright House merger "is subject to several conditions, including Charter shareholder approval, the expiration of Time Warner Cable's right of first offer for Bright House, the close of Charter's previously announced transactions with Comcast and regulatory approval," the merger announcement says.

Charter today is the fourth largest cable operator in the country (behind Comcast, TWC, and Cox) with 5.1 million Internet subscribers and 4.3 million pay-TV subscribers. Bright House is the sixth largest cable company with 2.5 million customers who subscribe to one or more of its services in Florida, Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, and California, according to the Charter/Bright House merger announcement.

(Bright House is owned by the Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which is part of Advance Publications. Advance Publications owns Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica.)

Though Advance/Newhouse would give up control of Bright House, it would end up owning 26.3 percent of Charter (or "New Charter," as the announcement calls it). Charter would retain control of the other 73.7 percent.

The government's review of Comcast/Time Warner Cable is expected to last through the middle of this year.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...-charter-deal/





Comcast Recruits Its Beneficiaries to Lobby for Time Warner Deal
Eric Lipton

The letters have come from all around the United States — from the Nutmeg Big Brothers and Big Sisters in Connecticut, the Houston Area Urban League and even the Dan Marino Foundation in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. — some praising the Comcast Corporation, others urging the federal government to stand aside and approve Comcast’s proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable.

The argument has been reinforced by a blitz of academic papers from groups like the International Center for Law and Economics in Portland, Ore. More endorsements have come in from elected officials like Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican of Mississippi, and Fred Crespo, a Democratic state representative in Illinois.

“The merger will not hinder competition but will bring better technology to more consumers,” Mr. Bryant said.

But there is a common element to dozens of these appeals: The senders received money from Comcast in recent years, either as a charitable donation, corporate support or a political contribution, records show.

It is a demonstration of how Comcast, the media conglomerate long known for its aggressive lobbying operation, has enlisted a vast network of allies to press federal regulators to approve the $45 billion transaction, much as it did in 2010 as it sought to acquire NBCUniversal.

But even while Comcast has been busy working to mobilize this support — it had a huge team of 124 federal lobbyists working for it last year — there is growing chatter in Washington that it has been less successful this time in making the public case for its deal.

Several hundred thousand comments have been sent directly or through third parties to the Federal Communications Commission opposing the acquisition, representing a vast majority of those submitted, a review of the files shows, and relatively few members of Congress have signed letters endorsing the transaction, compared with the dozens who signed letters during the NBC review.

“Comcast obviously has a very strong organizational capacity to message,” said Juleanna Glover, a corporate consultant and former lobbyist. “But they have had an extremely hard time coming up with a simple, clean message that advocates of the deal can understand and carry forth.”

David L. Cohen, Comcast’s executive vice president who oversees the company’s sprawling lobbying and public relations program, said in an interview on Friday that he was proud of the job the company had done in campaigning for the deal, as well as documenting for regulators why it made sense.

He did not dispute that many of the voices supporting the deal received donations from Comcast. But he said he was offended by the suggestion that their endorsements had been made in return for the financial help.

“We have never provided financial support to an organization in exchange for support in a transaction,” he said. “Our support is based on the quality of the work they do in the community.”

Comcast said recently that it expected the Justice Department and the F.C.C. to finish their review by the middle of this year, at which time the F.C.C. will vote on the deal.

The analysis by outside policy specialists — in academia, law and technology — is one of the most important parts of the extensive public comment record, because they typically have an intimate understanding of the federal regulations and can raise important points the government must consider.

So while one man from Tallahassee, Fla., simply wrote in to the F.C.C. saying, “This will be a nightmare for consumers!” — obviously in opposition to the deal, Geoffrey A. Manne, executive director of the International Center for Law and Economics, a former law school professor and Microsoft executive, submitted a six-page detailed analysis of the transaction.

“Increased Concentration Does Not Equal Anticompetitive Effect,” Mr. Manne wrote last August, summarizing his submission. He separately wrote pieces in Wired magazine, extolling the virtues of the deal, and through a separate advocacy organization he helps run, called TechFreedom, wrote a blog post that appeared the same day that the deal was announced early last year. Each time, he praised the transaction.

But nowhere in these statements does Mr. Manne directly disclose that Comcast is among a small group of donors that finances his nonprofit group, a fact that Mr. Manne confirmed in response to a question late last week.

“We are no value to our donors or ourselves unless we maintain our independence and academic rigor,” he said, before adding that “maybe there is some subconscious thing there.”

Mr. Manne’s group is hardly alone.

Letters detailing the benefits of the Comcast deal were submitted to the Federal Communications Commission by staff members from Americans for Tax Reform, the American Enterprise Institute, the Institute for Policy Innovation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Free State Foundation and the Center for Individual Freedom, as well as by a professor at a technology program at the University of Pennsylvania, all of which received support from Comcast or its trade association, tax documents and other disclosures reviewed by The New York Times show.

A similar pattern is evident with charities like the Urban League and more than 80 other community groups that supported the media company and that also accepted collectively millions of dollars in donations from the Comcast Foundation over the last five years, documents reviewed by The Times show. The Greater Philadelphia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, for instance, received $95,000 from Comcast over the last three years.

What is clear is that Comcast has tried to make the most of these endorsements. Varsovia Fernandez, the president and chief executive of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, wrote a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, as well as a commentary piece in The Philadelphia Daily News, titled, “Comcast Deserves a Fair Shake.”

The company maintains a list on its website of organizations that have sent in endorsements, and at times issues news releases and sends Twitter messages to make sure they are noticed. The list includes dozens of state and local officials, many of whom have received financial support from Comcast. The company has contributed millions to candidates in state elections in the last four years, including $15,000 to Governor Bryant of Mississippi, whose spokeswoman said his positive words about the company had nothing to do with the donations.

Representative Tony Cárdenas, a California Democrat who is one of the few lawmakers in Washington to take a definitive stand on the deal — he opposes it — said that the relative silence from members of Congress did not surprise him. He said the deal was bad for the country and would result in a single company with too much control over cable television and the Internet.

“Comcast is huge, and they have 130-plus lobbyists running around Washington, who keep reminding you that they are here,” Mr. Cárdenas said. “But this is not a healthy deal.”

Mr. Cohen rejected any suggestion that the deal did not have widespread support among members of Congress. It is just that fewer are directly affected by it, compared with the NBC deal, and Comcast has not pressed as many to provide letters this time, he said.

What matters most, he added, is the legal and technical case that has been made to federal and state regulators. He said he was convinced that they would support the transaction based on its merits.

“We have done an outstanding job of creating an extremely strong record that this transaction should be approved,” he said. “And that is the record the regulators are going to make the decision on.”

In the interview, he also conceded that the widespread complaints about Comcast’s customer service, which the company is trying to address, have probably contributed to the number of people writing in opposing the deal — even though, he said, that is not relevant to the decision. But he attributed most of it to organized efforts by some of Comcast’s corporate rivals, which are helping to finance coalitions to oppose the deal.

“The atmospherics around our customer service clearly stir some antipathy among some consumers,” Mr. Cohen said. “And it does provide a basis for opponents of the transaction to gin up three-sentence, nonsubstantive communications to the F.C.C. saying that they don’t like Comcast or they don’t like Time Warner Cable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/bu...rner-deal.html





Up Against Laws of Physics, Bell Labs Pushes Network Performance
Mikael Ricknäs

By using more spectrum and developing new ways to send multiple channels of data at the same time, researchers at Bell Labs are working to increase bandwidths over fiber, copper and the air.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs celebrated its Nobel Laureates and gave a sneak peek at some of the projects that are part of its vision for networks in 2020 at an event on Wednesday.

Because most network technologies have hit or are very close to the limit of what can be transferred over one channel, increasing speeds is getting more complicated. But Bell Labs President Marcus Weldon is convinced there is still room for major improvements.

Part of Bell Labs’ plan for 5G is a pint-sized base station, or small cell, that can generate its own power by using solar energy or energy harvesting. The power consumption of current equipment has to come down for this to work, according to Weldon.

The base stations will be connected to the rest of the network without wires using massive MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output). MIMO uses multiple antennas at the same time to increase wireless speeds. The massive part comes from the use of 64 antennas that together create 16 beams to connect the base stations.

Bell Labs demoed a working prototype on Wednesday, but the unit is still not as small as Weldon wants.

“We are ironing out all the kinks and proof-of-concept shows it should be possible,” he said.

Bell Labs has also developed a prototype air interface for 5G, called universal filtered OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing).

The air interface sends and receives data in a mobile network, and the technology Bell Labs is working on promises to be more efficient what current 4G networks use. The base stations won’t have to talk as much with connected devices, and vice versa. The reward is better battery life and networks that can handle more devices, which will help regular smartphone users and make the Internet of Things more viable.

The arrival of 5G will have repercussions on other parts of operator networks that have to keep up.

Copper probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when talking about networks of the future. But it still has role to play alongside fiber, according to Weldon.

Operators such as British BT and Telekom Austria are backing G.fast, a new technology that increases broadband over telephone wires to hundreds of megabits per second using more spectrum and advanced measures for getting rid of interference. Building on the advancements in G.fast, Bell Labs can transmit speeds at up 10Gbps. For now, though, it only works over about 30 meters.

Even if copper is far from endangered, fiber will grow increasingly important. Here Bell Labs is working on optical networking technologies that can take advantage of fibers with multiple cores and send 1Tbps of data over each. Just like the cores on processors can handle different tasks, different traffic can be sent down the fiber cores.

However, getting that much data onto one of the cores is very difficult. And squeezing many cores into a fiber can result in interference that has to be removed. Just like the network equipment, the fiber are still being developed. Figuring all this out, and doing it economically, will be as big a challenge as anything previously developed.

“As usual in physics, you don’t get something for nothing,” said Weldon.
http://www.itworld.com/article/29075...rformance.html





Why 'Zero Rating' is the New Battleground in Net Neutrality Debate

ISPs may choose to exempt some web activity from data usage caps
Peter Nowak

The term "zero rating" may conjure thoughts of a movie or album review – a score a critic might assign to a terrible effort.

But it's also an internet pricing strategy and the latest battleground in the net neutrality debate.

Zero rating enables internet service providers to give customers a reprieve on broadband or mobile data caps for certain internet uses. While most online activity, such as web browsing, counts against your cap, a service provider might decide to exempt a specific video streaming or messaging app from your monthly limits.

In one way, zero rating is indeed like a bad movie: it's getting poor reviews.

"It's an attempt to perpetuate the cable TV model in the open internet context," says Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and a former telecommunications advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama. "It puts the gatekeeper firmly in control of what applications reach consumers the most successfully."

Many internet providers are trying to establish zero rating as their preferred business models. There were at least 92 zero-rated services in the developed world as of November, according to Finnish consultancy Rewheel.

Of those, 36 mobile phone operators were exempting their own video services from usage caps and 10 were doing so for their cloud storage offerings. Third-party applications such as YouTube, HBO Go, Spotify and Facebook got the special treatment in just a handful of cases.

No outright bans in Canada, U.S.

Canada has been part of the trend. Bell and Videotron were both zero-rating chosen mobile video services until a decision by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) earlier this year ordered them to stop.

Videotron has discontinued the practice and Bell has until April 29 to follow suit. The company had its request for a stay of execution denied last week, but is still asking a court to overturn the ruling.

Participating companies say zero rating is beneficial for consumers because it gives them access to services they couldn't otherwise get or afford.

"Consumers will end up losing access to a service they really value, or pay more for that service," Bell's chief regulatory officer, Mirko Bibic, said in a BNN interview. "Consumers don't benefit when prices go up or when innovative services stop being offered."

Regulators in both Canada and the U.S. have stopped short of outright bans on zero-rated services, but have signaled that such practices will be closely scrutinized.

In Canada, the CRTC has essentially banned carriers from zero rating their own services, but it remains open to the practice being applied to third-party applications.

The Dutch response

The Federal Communications Commission is taking a similar approach in the U.S. with recently issued net neutrality rules.

Officials say zero rating by carriers of their own services, or of third-party applications for a fee, will likely run afoul of the rules. Zero-rating third-party services with no charges to the providers, however, may be found acceptable.

A few countries have taken a more hardline stance, with the Netherlands, Slovenia and Chile explicitly banning zero rating.

Dutch policy makers were initially considering light-touch net neutrality rules that would have allowed the practice. They changed their mind after KPN, a major wireless carrier, proposed a new plan that would have allowed subscribers to pay five to 10 euros for unlimited usage of messaging services.

Competing carriers Vodafone and T-Mobile liked the idea and quickly announced plans to copy it.

"By that time, all political parties in parliament had aligned themselves behind strong net neutrality rules," says Rudolf van der Berg, policy analyst at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

"It was clear to all parties that normal competition rules wouldn't be strong enough to counter this type of tacit cooperation between the operators."

The Dutch ban has been good news for consumers, according to Rewheel. Faced with the possibility that subscribers wouldn't be able to use its mobile video services because of restrictive caps, KPN doubled its data limits while keeping prices the same.

A Netflix betrayal?

At the other end of the spectrum, there are countries without zero-rating rules, which are forcing companies normally identified as champions of net neutrality into making compromises.

Netflix, for example, recently came under criticism for announcing zero-rating deals with ISPs in Australia. Some saw the move as a betrayal, given that Netflix has lobbied fiercely for strong net neutrality rules in the United States.

The company admits to having to fight fire with fire, given the prevalent zero rating in both mobile and wired broadband in Australia. Several competing streaming services there are exempted from usage caps.

"Zero rating isn't great for consumers, as it has the potential to distort consumer choice in favour of choices selected by an ISP," Netflix spokesman Cliff Edwards says. "We'll push back against such efforts, but we won't put our service or our members at a disadvantage."

Not all internet companies find zero rating distasteful. Facebook, for one, is leading a movement called "Internet.org," which seeks to connect mobile phone users in developing countries to its social network for free. The idea is that Facebook can act as a sort of gateway drug.

"If we can provide people with access to these services, then they'll discover other content they want and begin to use and understand the broader internet," says a Facebook white paper on the issue.

The net effect for consumers?

Some policy experts don't like the idea. While it looks altruistic on its face and provides some benefits to users, its main payoffs still go to big companies.

"It allows you onto a piece of the internet, but not onto the whole thing. People aren't technically blocked, but they're blocked by the business model. It's an economic boundary," says Catherine Middleton, Canada Research Chair in Communication Technologies in the Information Society at Ryerson University.

Ultimately, zero rating is likely to exist only where artificial internet scarcity is imposed in the form of usage caps.

Canada is one of the most restrictive countries by that measure, with some of the highest per-gigabyte mobile data costs in the developed world, according to Rewheel. A 2GB service from Bell, for example, costs $45 a month, while a comparable amount of data costs $24 in the United Kingdom or $8 in Finland.

Canada also has the fourth-highest prevalence of data caps in wired broadband among 34 developed nations, after New Zealand, Iceland and Australia, according to OECD statistics from 2012. About 90 per cent of Canadian plans had explicit caps, compared to the OECD average of 68 per cent.

A total ban on zero rating by regulators could force internet providers to raise their caps significantly, as the Dutch example illustrates, says Harvard's Crawford.

"They would be trying to offer as much capacity to users as possible. The net effect for consumers is positive where zero rating is absent."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/why-...bate-1.3015070





Kevin Crull, Bell Media President, Abruptly Leaves Job After News Censorship Attempt
Sunny Freeman

Bell Media president Kevin Crull will leave his post immediately, parent company BCE Inc. said Thursday in an announcement that referred to Crull’s intrusion into CTV and BNN’s news coverage of an unfavourable regulatory decision.

“Kevin Crull departs Bell with our thanks for his contributions to our customers and shareholders," said George Cope, president and CEO of Bell Canada.

"However, the independence of Bell Media's news operations is of paramount importance to our company and to all Canadians. There can be no doubt that Bell will always uphold the journalistic standards that have made CTV the most trusted brand in Canadian news," Cope said.

The senior executive’s abrupt departure comes less than two weeks after he apologized for meddling into the editorial decisions of Bell-owned networks CTV and BNN during their coverage of a CRTC decision mandating more choice in cable TV.

Crull said in late March that he had learned a valuable lesson and was wrong to attempt to influence the networks’ journalism and that he "apologized to the team directly for this mistake.''

The statement came the same day a Globe and Mail report said Crull told journalists not to allot airtime to CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais following an initial interview with him.

Blais took the rare step of issuing a public rebuke to the company after the report emerged and reminded Bell of its duty not to interfere with journalistic affairs.

The CRTC had just announced its decision to allow “pick and pay” cable packages that give consumers more flexibility in choosing their channels.

The company has appointed Mary Ann Turk to replace Crull as president of Bell Media. She was formerly the company's group president of media sales, local TV and radio. Bell Media also shuffled a number of other senior management positions in the wake of Crull’s departure.

BCE is Canada’s largest telecommunications company and owns cable, Internet, home and cell phone services as well as television, radio and digital media assets.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/04...n_7035896.html





Google in Talks with Mobile Operators for Cheap Overseas Calls

It is understood that Google aims to create a global network that will cost the same to use for calls, texts and data no matter where a customer is located
Christopher Williams

Google is in talks towards a deal with Hutchison Whampoa, the owner of the mobile operator Three, that will allow Americans to use their phones abroad at no extra cost, industry sources have disclosed.

The two giants are discussing a wholesale access agreement that would become an important part of Google’s planned attempt to shake-up the US mobile market with its own network.

It is understood that Google aims to create a global network that will cost the same to use for calls, texts and data no matter where a customer is located. By linking up with Hutchison, it could gain wholesale access to mobile service in the UK, Ireland, Italy and several more countries where the Hong Kong conglomerate owns mobile networks.

Sources said Hutchison was a natural partner for Google in the plan, because it has also sought to eliminate roaming charges for Three customers.

Google announced its plans to launch a mobile network last month. It will not build mobile masts but rely on wholesale deals to use existing infrastructure both at home and abroad.

The company described it as a “small scale” project. Industry analysts expect Google to use its network to put pressure on the pricing of America’s biggest mobile operators, AT&T and Verizon, who enjoy higher profit margins than their European counterparts.

It could also use the project to encourage operators to invest in new technology to improve mobile coverage via Wi-Fi networks.

Google has adopted a similar strategy in the US fixed-line telecoms market with Google Fiber, its project to build fibre optic networks in cities where there has been a lack of investment in internet infrastructure. It Nexus range of own-brand smartphones is similarly seen as a way to influence hardware manufacturers.

Sources said Google was has no plans to to offer a mobile network to British consumers and is unlikely to for the foreseeable future. The European telecoms market is relatively competitive and roaming charges are already on their way to being abolished by regulators.

Google and Three declined to comment.

Though Google’s plans are believed to be modest, a serious move by Google or Apple to enter the mobile market would be feared by the telecoms industry.

It is already resisting Apple’s attempts to do away with SIM cards and replace them with software that allows iPad owners to select any available network, weakening relationships between mobile operators and customers.

Apple also has patents on technology that would remove the customer choice and automatically switch between the best networks and prices, a system that if implemented could further undermine mobile operators.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/1...eas-calls.html





Judge: Mississippi Investigation of Google Likely Violates 1st Amendment

Hood's 79-page subpoena, involving piracy and other issues, went too far.
Joe Mullin

An investigation of Google by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood was halted earlier this month when a federal judge in Hood's home state granted Google's motion for an injunction.

Now, US District Judge Henry Wingate has published an opinion laying out his reasoning for siding with Google. In a 25-page order, Wingate found "significant evidence of bad faith" on Hood's part.

In particular, Wingate said some of Hood's remarks at a conference of attorney generals were overly threatening. According to a transcript submitted by Google, Hood said:

I told [Google] if you don’t work with us to make some of these changes that we’ve been suggesting since November, then I’m going to call on my colleagues to issue civil investigative demands or subpoenas to get some of these documents that we think we show that they have, in fact, manipulated their algorithm to allow for these search of some of these pirating sites to pop up.

In his order, Wingate sided with Google on every significant point, finding that the company is likely to prevail on claims that Hood's wide-ranging investigation violated Google's 1st and 4th Amendment rights. Hood's concerns about piracy on Google are likely to fail, since enforcing copyright is the domain of the federal government. Similarly, Hood's concerns that Google searches lead to illegal sales of prescription drugs are preempted by the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.

"Google has submitted competent evidence showing that the Attorney General issued the subpoena in retaliation for Google’s likely protected speech, namely its publication of content created by third-parties," wrote Wingate.

The lawsuit proceeds as scheduled from here. For now, Google has only won a "preliminary injunction" that will stop the investigation from proceeding until Wingate makes a final decision.

Hood's investigation became closely scrutinized last year after press reports revealed that it was encouraged, and partly funded, by the Motion Picture Association of America. MPAA lawyers wrote drafts of subpoenas intended to be used by the AGs.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...1st-amendment/





Online Test-Takers Feel Anti-Cheating Software’s Uneasy Glare
Natasha Singer

Before Betsy Chao, a senior here at Rutgers University, could take midterm exams in her online courses this semester, her instructors sent emails directing students to download Proctortrack, a new anti-cheating technology.

“You have to put your face up to it and you put your knuckles up to it,” Ms. Chao said recently, explaining how the program uses webcams to scan students’ features and verify their identities before the test.

Once her exam started, Ms. Chao said, a red warning band appeared on the computer screen indicating that Proctortrack was monitoring her computer and recording video of her. To constantly remind her that she was being watched, the program also showed a live image of her in miniature on her screen.

Even for an undergraduate raised in a culture of selfies and Skype, Ms. Chao found the system intrusive. “I felt it was sort of excessive,” she said.

As universities and colleges around the country expand their online course offerings, many administrators are introducing new technologies to deter cheating. The oversight, administrators say, is crucial to demonstrating the legitimacy of an online degree to students and their prospective employers.

Some schools use software that prevents students from opening apps or web browsers during online exams. Others employ services with live exam proctors who monitor students remotely over webcams.

But the rise of Proctortrack and other automated student analysis services like it have raised questions about where to draw the line, and whether the new systems are fair and accurate.

The University of North Texas Health Science Center, for instance, is partway through a two-year pilot test of Proctortrack involving the 160 students enrolled in its online public health master’s degree program.

“If you are going to offer online learning, you need to find ways to ensure the integrity of the course, the test-taking and the degree,” said Jeff Carlton, a university spokesman. “For us, this is high-stakes.”

These schools are not simply trying to protect the academic integrity of their brands. They are seeking to stay competitive in a rapidly expanding industry. The market for online higher education could reach $32 billion in the United States this year, up from $25 billion in 2012, according to estimates from Eduventures, a research firm in Boston.

And the increased oversight of test-taking only intensifies a college experience that is monitored and analyzed more than ever. More than 3,500 institutions of higher learning, for instance, use an automated plagiarism detection system called Turnitin, which scans students’ papers for copied passages. And at Utah Valley University in Orem, the school developed its own early warning system, called Stoplight, which uses academic and demographic details about students to predict their likelihood of passing specific courses; as part of the program, professors receive class lists that color-code each student as green, yellow or red.

Proctortrack works along similar lines. The software, developed by Verificient Technologies, is marketed as “the world’s first automated remote proctoring solution.” Although some schools are still evaluating Proctortrack, Rutgers has already deployed it among several thousand students, the company said.

Tim Dutta, Verificient’s chief executive, said his company’s chief technology officer came up with the idea for the service after he worked on a project for the Transportation Security Administration which involved scanning airport security video footage for abnormal facial expressions. Proctortrack uses algorithms to detect unusual student behavior — like talking to someone off-screen — that could constitute cheating. Then it categorizes each student as having high or low “integrity.”

Mr. Dutta said the program was not so much intended to identify cheaters as to authenticate the identity of students enrolled in online courses.

“We are really about ensuring the integrity of that online credential,” he said.

Proctortrack, however, seems to impose more onerous strictures on students than a live proctor would. Among other things, it requires students to sit upright and remain directly in front of their webcams at all times, according to guidelines posted on the company’s site.

“Changes in lighting can flag your test for a violation,” the guidelines say. And, “Even stretching, looking away, or leaning down to pick up your pencil could flag your test.”

Once students finish their exams, their instructors can log on to a server to review video clips of the incidents the system has flagged as possible infractions.

Jeffrey Alan Johnson, assistant director of institutional effectiveness and planning at Utah Valley University, compared Proctortrack’s approach to a controversial T.S.A. airport security screening program intended to identify terrorists; the government’s list of suspicious behavior included gazing down and excessive yawning, according to a document obtained by The Intercept.

“We are seeing similar things with Proctortrack,” said Mr. Johnson, who has conducted research on information technologies and social justice. “It’s built on this belief that human behavior can be reduced to an algorithm and, if you deviate from that behavior, it’s a problem.”

Peter Gambino, a Rutgers sophomore, first heard about Proctortrack after he had enrolled in an online music theory course. His professor emailed the class saying that Proctortrack was “a brand-new requirement this semester” for certain online courses and that students would have to pay a fee of $37 to use it.

Mr. Gambino said he would not have taken the course had Rutgers informed students of the details in advance.

“It would be a much different thing if this surveillance was being imposed on anyone other than the students, effectively with no notice,” Mr. Gambino said. “I’m pretty sure that teachers would quit outright if they had to grade papers in the privacy of their own homes and be monitored and be forced to pay for it out of their own pocket.”

Ms. Chao even started a petition on Change.org asking Rutgers to rescind the program. Two days later, a university spokesman told a local New Jersey newspaper that Proctortrack was not mandatory for students.

Ms. Chao said administrators had since offered to provide her with a live human proctor for a fee of $40 per exam. But seeing as she is taking two online courses with both midterm and final exams, she said the $160 proctoring fee — on top of the $100 tuition surcharge the school imposes for each online course — would be cost-prohibitive for her.

Rutgers itself seemed to disavow responsibility for the administrators who originally required students to use Proctortrack.

“From an institutional point of view, use specifically of Proctortrack is not mandatory, and traditional face-to-face proctoring has been an acceptable alternative all along,” Richard Novak, Rutgers’ vice president for continuing studies and distance education, said in an email. As for charging privacy-minded students a higher fee for live proctors, he wrote, “This decision was made by the academic unit charging the fee.”

In hopes of alleviating students’ concerns, Verificient recently posted a pledge on its blog saying that Proctortrack did not share students’ data with third parties; that it typically deleted students’ data after 30 to 60 days; and that students could remove the software from their computers once they had uploaded their test data.

But the company has not changed its privacy policy — which states that it may unilaterally amend its policies at any time and that it may disclose users’ personal information to third-party service providers or in the event of a company merger, sale or bankruptcy.

Students like Ms. Chao say they hope university administrators will consider the civil liberties implications of emergent tracking technologies, not just the expediency.

“They are trying to make recording students a regular part of online courses,” Ms. Chao said. “You don’t know what new norms are going to be established for what privacy is.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/te...asy-glare.html





Court Mulls Revealing Secret Government Plan to Cut Cell Phone Service

Feds: SOP 303 mobile-phone kill-switch policy would endanger public if disclosed.
David Kravets

A federal appeals court is asking the Obama administration to explain why the government should be allowed to keep secret its plan to shutter mobile phone service during "critical emergencies."

The Department of Homeland Security came up with the plan—known as Standing Operating Procedure 303—after cellular phones were used to detonate explosives targeting a London public transportation system.

SOP 303 is a powerful tool in the digital age, and it spells out a "unified voluntary process for the orderly shut-down and restoration of wireless services during critical emergencies such as the threat of radio-activated improvised explosive devices."

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in February sided with the government and ruled that the policy did not need to be disclosed under a Freedom of Information Act request from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The court agreed with the government's citation of a FOIA exemption that precludes disclosure if doing so "could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual."

EPIC asked the court to revisit its ruling, arguing that the decision, "if left in place, would create an untethered 'national security' exemption'" in FOIA law. On Friday, the court ordered the government to respond—a move that suggests the appellate court might rehear the case.

EPIC originally asked for the document in 2011 in the wake of the shut down of mobile phone service in the San Francisco Bay Area subway system during a protest. The government withheld the information, EPIC sued and won, but the government then appealed and prevailed.

In its petition for rehearing, EPIC argued that the appellate court's decision "created a catch-all provision that would allow federal agencies to routinely withhold records subject to disclosure where the agency merely asserts a speculative security risk."

Under the direction of the so-called National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, SOP 303 allows for the shutting down of wireless networks "within a localized area, such as a tunnel or bridge, and within an entire metropolitan area."

There have been no publicly disclosed instances when SOP 303 has been invoked, but the telecoms have agreed to shutter service when SOP 303 is invoked.

Local governments, however, have the power to shutter wireless service regardless of SOP 303.

The last known time mobile phone service was cut by a government agency was the San Francisco example from 2011. That's when the Bay Area Rapid Transit System took heat for disabling service to quell a protest in four downtown San Francisco stations. The three-hour outage was done after BART cut service without the assistance of the telcos.

In the aftermath, BART produced a new policy that said service could only be cut off when "there is strong evidence of imminent unlawful activity that threatens the safety of district passengers, employees, and other members of the public."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...-phone-service





Why is the Internet Association Giving an Award to a Pro-NSA Net-Neutrality Opponent?
Eric Geller

A major Internet-freedom alliance is preparing to reward one of the most powerful opponents of net neutrality in the United States Congress.

The Internet Association—which counts tech giants like Amazon, Etsy, Facebook, Google, Reddit, and Twitter among its members—announced on March 20 that it would award House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) with its Congressional Internet Freedom Award.

Net neutrality supporter Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will also receive the award at the second-annual ceremony on April 14, while longtime Internet-freedom champion Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Internet Association's decision to celebrate Rep. McCarthy, the second most powerful House Republican after Speaker John Boehner, is curious given McCarthy's stances on Internet-freedom issues that run counter to those of many open-Internet advocates. For one thing, the California congressman is an avowed opponent of net neutrality. In May 2014, as the Federal Communications Commission debated new net neutrality rules, McCarthy—then the House Majority Whip, the chamber's third-highest-ranking member—signed a House GOP letter to the FCC warning that Title II regulation represented "a counterproductive effort to even further regulate the Internet."

Following the FCC's Feb. 26 vote to reclassify the Internet as a public utility, McCarthy called the agency's new rules "government overreach." He said the FCC's decision was "discouraging and risks the freedom of a system that puts instant info [and] communication at millions of fingertips."

McCarthy also supports the U.S. intelligence community's efforts to weaken hardware and software encryption by forcing companies to put backdoors in their products. In June 2014, he voted against an amendment to prohibit the NSA from operating backdoor surveillance programs.

That amendment, which passed 293-123, was introduced by Rep. Lofgren, alongside whom McCarthy is about to be fęted by the Internet Association. (At press time, Lofgren's office had not responded to a request for comment.) A similar amendment failed in the Senate, meaning that the prohibition never became law. If it had been enacted, Lofgren's amendment would also have forbade the National Security Agency from accessing the communications of American citizens without a warrant.

Rep. McCarthy's office did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the majority leader's Internet-policy record.

Noah Theran, a spokesman for the Internet Association, disputed the notion that awarding McCarthy undermined the group's activism on issues where they disagree with the congressman.

"Issues important to the Internet do not cut along traditional party lines," Theran told the Daily Dot in an email. "When evaluating the awardees, we looked at the totality of a legislator's record."

Theran pointed to the role McCarthy played in advancing a key tech-industry priority: patent reform. Under McCarthy's floor leadership, the House passed the Innovation Act 325-91 in December 2013. Tech companies hope that the bill, which is designed to cut back on frivolous lawsuits from so-called "patent trolls," will soon pass the Senate.

Spokespeople from Facebook, Google, and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment about whether they agreed with the Internet Association's decision.

In a statement, Internet Association President and CEO Michael Beckerman said that the three members of Congress receiving awards "all understand and champion the critical role the Internet industry plays in our economy."

The rest of the Internet freedom community did not seem to share that assessment of McCarthy.

"This award is absurd," said Charlie Furman, a campaigner with open-Internet group Fight for the Future, in an email. "Representative McCarthy is trying to turn the Internet into a nightmare of Comcast-enforced slow lanes and has repeatedly voted to let the NSA continue vacuuming up everyone's data."

Theran would not address how the Internet Association could still effectively criticize McCarthy on issues like net neutrality and encryption after naming him an Internet-freedom champion, promising only that the group would "continue to educate lawmakers on our positions and advocate on behalf of our members."

"The Internet Association has and will continue to advocate for strong net neutrality rules and believes that Internet companies have a duty to ensure the security and privacy of user data," Theran said, "which is why government access to user data should be rule-bound, transparent, and tailored."

Furman, whose group has been at the forefront of grassroots efforts to pressure lawmakers on surveillance reform, called McCarthy's record "literally the opposite of protecting Internet freedom."

The controversial decision to celebrate one of Congress' highest-ranking opponents of key open-Internet priorities marks a strange twist in the nascent political activities of the Internet Association, which launched in late July 2012. The group has a political action committee, but it has not yet donated to candidates. Theran said the group planned to begin donating during the 2016 campaign cycle.
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/kev...freedom-award/





Snowden Journalist Visits U., Says Goal of the NSA is to ‘Eliminate all Private Communications’
Nate Carlisle

Everyone has something to hide, says the man who has been publishing secret National Security Agency documents.

Why else would someone lock the bedroom or bathroom door? Use passwords to protect their social media accounts? Or why would they tell their spouses or psychiatrists things they wouldn't tell others?

"Even if you think that you're the kind of person who does not have things to hide, just living in a world where you think you're being watched and recorded it changes your behavior from being a free individual," journalist and privacy advocate Glenn Greenwald told a crowd Tuesday at the University of Utah.

The 48-year-old, who worked to publish the documents leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden, spoke for about 40 minutes and took questions for 20 minutes more about privacy and Snowden.

Greenwald said the most shocking thing he's found in the tens of thousands of NSA documents published so far has been the NSA's motto: Collect it all.

"It's not, like, 'Collect a lot of it,' or even, like, 'Collect all the terrorist communications,' " Greenwald said. "It's like saying the goal of the NSA is to eliminate all private communications."

He contended this impedes Americans' freedom: If people are being monitored, they aren't as creative and don't think as freely.

Also, the decisions to collect the data and store it was done with no public discussion. Greenwald said that in free societies, government officials have an expectation of transparency and citizens have an expectation of privacy.

Tyrannical societies have an opposite system.

"I would submit, and I don't think that it's in dispute, that we are far closer to the tyrannical model than we are the free model," Greenwald said.

Greenwald also discussed the NSA's Utah Data Center, located in Bluffdale. He pointed to NSA documents from 2009 and 2010 saying the agency had a problem storing all the data it was collecting.

The Utah Data Center helps solve that problem, Greenwald said.

In a meeting with reporters before his speech, Greenwald said the data center has an "ominous role in the surveillance state."

"The better [the government's] capacity for storage, and the more space they have to do it the longer they can keep the data," Greenwald said.

The data center isn't Utah's only NSA connection. The U. for decades has received grants from the NSA to study mathematics, computing and related fields, and the NSA has visited the U. to recruit linguists.

In his meeting with reporters, Greenwald took a nuanced stance on a university's relationship with the NSA. Not speaking about the U. specifically, Greenwald said a university should not impede research or fail to cooperate with an agency just because the campus administration may not like the agency.

But Greenwald also warned against giving too much campus access to a government agency just because it provides research funding.

"That sort of subverts the concept of universities," he said.

In June 2013, Greenwald met with Snowden. Snowden subsequently gave Greenwald perhaps hundreds of thousands of pages — the exact number has never been disclosed — from the NSA.

The documents have slowly been released through Greenwald's former employer, The Guardian newspaper, and his new enterprise, The Intercept, as well as news outlets across the world. They have revealed not just what the NSA collects but how it has partnered with foreign governments and private companies.

Greenwald said the U.S. government, though it has often warned of publishing the material, has never pointed to someone being hurt by them. He believes his work has had a positive impact.

He pointed to how companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Apple have reduced their cooperation with the NSA and in some cases begun encrypting more of their products for fear of losing customers.

"What has actually happened in terms of impact is so much better than our best case scenario," Greenwald said.

Greenwald was invited to campus as part of Secrecy Week, where students learn about government surveillance.

U. English professor Matthew Potolsky, who organized the weeklong discussion, said some students have expressed the opinion that they trust the government to protect them.

"And then there are those who are more suspicious," Potolsky said.

The university is paying Greenwald $5,000, according to an invoice The Tribune obtained through a records request.

The New York-born former attorney said he's received support from people on both the left and right of American politics. Some of the Congressmen he's met have told him, he said, they learned more about the NSA programs from his articles than they did sitting on committees with NSA oversight.

Greenwald also told the crowd — which nearly filled the 263-seat auditorium at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts — about an NSA in-house magazine included in the documents. In one issue, an NSA official, apparently speaking freely, told an interviewer that the NSA relationships with foreign governments don't change based on the outcomes of those countries' elections because very few people in those government know of the partnership.

"Think about that kind of secrecy," Greenwald said. "What it really means is you have a government inside of a government."
http://www.sltrib.com/home/2331830-1...s-ominous-role





There’s a Massive, Illicit Bust of Edward Snowden Stuck to a War Monument in Brooklyn
Bucky Turco

While most people slept, a trio of artists and some helpers installed a bust of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in Brooklyn on Monday morning. The group, which allowed ANIMAL to exclusively document the installation on the condition that we hide their identities, hauled the 100-pound sculpture into Fort Greene Park and up its hilly terrain just before dawn. They fused it to part of the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, a memorial to Revolutionary War soldiers. As of press time, the sculpture was still there.

The idea for the Snowden tribute was conceived about a year ago by two New York City-based artists with a history of pulling off notable public interventions. They linked up with a renowned sculptor on the West Coast who was sympathetic to their cause. The artists admit that Snowden probably wouldn’t approve of the project, since he never wanted the leaks to be about him, but they hope he’d understand why they did it. In a statement about the project, which they have entitled, “Prison Ship Martyrs Monument 2.0,” they wrote:

Fort Greene’s Prison Ship Martyrs Monument is a memorial to American POWs who lost their lives during the Revolutionary War. We have updated this monument to highlight those who sacrifice their safety in the fight against modern-day tyrannies. It would be a dishonor to those memorialized here to not laud those who protect the ideals they fought for, as Edward Snowden has by bringing the NSA’s 4th-Amendment-violating surveillance programs to light. All too often, figures who strive to uphold these ideals have been cast as criminals rather than in bronze.

Our goal is to bring a renewed vitality to the space and prompt even more visitors to ponder the sacrifices made for their freedoms. We hope this inspires them to reflect upon the responsibility we all bear to ensure our liberties exist long into the future.


In 2013, the Snowden leaks exposed an expansive, covert surveillance program that spied on U.S. citizens, residents and even persons abroad, the likes of which the world had never before seen. While activists and a number of journalists have hailed Snowden as a hero, conservatives and politicians have called him a “coward” and a “traitor.” Snowden sought asylum in Moscow, where he remains in exile.

The artists said they’re dismayed that despite the trove of damning evidence the leaks exposed, the public has largely moved on from the story and no substantial actions have been taken against the NSA. “There’s a media landscape that has painted him as a criminal,” said one of the two New York artists. “You need something theatrical and large to counterbalance the Fox News-iness of the texture of the conversation out there.” At first, the pair thought about making a full-size statue of the former NSA contractor, but were later talked down from that idea by the sculptor. He recommended a bust.

Measuring 4-feet tall, Snowden’s head was placed atop one of the four columns that lie at the monument’s edge, above the eagles. The bust is made of hydrocal, a high quality sculpting material that’s commonly used in places like Las Vegas to create Roman-looking things, castles and other mega props casinos incorporate into their facades. Seeing it up close, you could never tell that you were looking at a plaster-like substance. In fact, over a dozen people walking their dogs passed by the new bust on Monday morning without noticing the unsanctioned piece. Both the color and design of the bust expertly matches the existing sculptures there, from its bronze patina finish to Snowden’s hair — which mimics the texture of the feather on the eagle. The artists also added letters spelling out Snowden’s name in an official-looking font befitting of a monument.

While it was very important that the piece be more than just a prop or paper mache effigy, the artists didn’t want to damage the surface that the bust would be bound to, either. After some debate, they decided on an adhesive that would firmly hold the head in place, yet could be removed without marring the monument.

The materials needed to create a bust of this type cost thousands of dollars, and the pair ponied up the cash. It then took a little over six months to sculpt, mold, cast and ship to New York. Had the sculptor charged market rates, he said it would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. “The amount of work that goes into this kind of stuff, it’s easily a 30 grand project,” said the 30-something sculptor. “If it were bronze, it could be a $100,000 piece of artwork, maybe more.”

The artists are fully aware of the bust’s inevitable destruction and have left themselves a few options, including one that involves deploying an army of mini-Snowden heads. “We have a full size mold that can be poured again and its been 3D rendered, so we have the ability to print smaller ones at scale,” they said.
http://animalnewyork.com/2015/theres...t-in-brooklyn/





As Encryption Spreads, U.S. Grapples with Clash Between Privacy, Security
Ellen Nakashima and Barton Gellman

For months, federal law enforcement agencies and industry have been deadlocked on a highly contentious issue: Should tech companies be obliged to guarantee government access to encrypted data on smartphones and other digital devices, and is that even possible without compromising the security of law-abiding customers?

Recently, the head of the National Security Agency provided a rare hint of what some U.S. officials think might be a technical solution. Why not, suggested Adm. Michael S. Rogers, require technology companies to create a digital key that could open any smartphone or other locked device to obtain text messages or photos, but divide the key into pieces so that no one person or agency alone could decide to use it?

“I don’t want a back door,” Rogers, the director of the nation’s top electronic spy agency, said during a speech at Princeton University, using a tech industry term for covert measures to bypass device security. “I want a front door. And I want the front door to have multiple locks. Big locks.”

Law enforcement and intelligence officials have been warning that the growing use of encryption could seriously hinder criminal and national security investigations. But the White House, which is preparing a report for President Obama on the issue, is still weighing a range of options, including whether authorities have other ways to get the data they need rather than compelling companies through regulatory or legislative action.

The task is not easy. Those taking part in the debate have polarized views, with advocates of default commercial encryption finding little common ground with government officials who see increasing peril as the technology becomes widespread on mobile phones and on text messaging apps.

Apple catalyzed the public debate in September when it announced that one of the world’s most popular smartphones would come equipped with a unique digital key that can be used only by its owner. Even if presented with a warrant, Apple could no longer unlock an iPhone that runs its latest operating system.

Hailed as a victory for consumer privacy and security, the development dismayed law enforcement officials, who said it threatens what they describe as a #centuries-old social compact in which the government, with a warrant based on probable cause, may seize evidence relevant to criminal investigations.

“What we’re concerned about is the technology risks” bringing the country to a point where the smartphone owner alone, who may be a criminal or terrorist, has control of the data, Deputy Assistant Attorney General David Bitkower said at a recent panel on encryption hosted by the nonprofit Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee. That, he said, has not been the “standard American principle for the last couple of hundred years.”

Tech industry officials and privacy advocates take a different view. “I don’t believe that law enforcement has an absolute right to gain access to every way in which two people may choose to communicate,” said Marc Zwillinger, an attorney working for tech companies on encryption-related matters and a former Justice Department official. “And I don’t think our Founding Fathers would think so, either. The fact that the Constitution offers a process for obtaining a search warrant where there is probable cause is not support for the notion that it should be illegal to make an unbreakable lock. These are two distinct concepts.”

The increasing use of encrypted storage extends well beyond the iPhone or the similar option that Google offers — though not by default — on new versions of its Android operating system. Windows and Apple offer simple settings to encrypt the contents of personal computers, and several cloud storage companies encrypt the data they host with keys known only to their customers.

The Obama administration says it is not seeking to weaken the security tools themselves. “There’s no scenario in which we don’t want really strong encryption,” President Obama said in an interview with the online tech news outlet Re/Code in February. “I lean probably further in the direction of strong encryption than some do inside of law enforcement. But I am sympathetic to law enforcement, because I know the kind of pressure they’re under to keep us safe. And it’s not as black and white as it’s sometimes portrayed.”

Until Rogers’s remarks, U.S. officials had declined to say how they believed they could guarantee government access to a locked device without introducing security flaws that others could also find.

Academic and industry experts, including Yahoo’s chief of information security, Alex Stamos, say law enforcement is asking for the impossible. Any means of bypassing encryption, they say, is by definition a weakness that hackers and foreign spy agencies may exploit.

The split-key approach is just one of the options being studied by the White House as senior policy officials weigh the needs of companies and consumers as well as law enforcement — and try to determine how imminent the latter’s problem is. With input from the FBI, intelligence community and the departments of Justice, State, Commerce and Homeland Security, they are assessing regulatory and legislative approaches, among others.

The White House is also considering options that avoid having the company or a third party hold a key. One possibility, for example, might have a judge direct a company to set up a mirror account so that law enforcement conducting a criminal investigation is able to read text messages shortly after they have been sent. For encrypted photos, the judge might order the company to back up the suspect’s data to a company server when the phone is on and the data is unencrypted. Technologists say there are still issues with these approaches, and companies probably would resist them.

White House aides aim to report to Obama this month, though the date could slip. “We want to give the president a sense of what the art of the possible is,” said a senior administration official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. “We want to enable him to make some decisions and strategic choices about this very critical issue that has so many strategic implications, not just for our cybersecurity but for law enforcement and national security, economic competitiveness overseas, foreign relations, privacy and consumer security.”

A central issue in the policy debate is trust, said Lance J. Hoffmann, founder of George Washington University’s Cyberspace Security Policy and Research Institute. “It’s who do you trust with your data? Do you want to default to the government? To the company? Or to the individual? If you make a hybrid, how do you make the trade-off?”

The odds of passing a new law appear slim, given a divided Congress and the increased attention to privacy in the aftermath of leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. There are bills pending to ban government back doors into communications devices. So far, there is no legislation proposed by the government or lawmakers to require Internet and tech firms to make their services and devices wiretap-ready.

“There is zero chance of any domestic restrictions on encryption absent a catastrophic event which clearly could have been stopped if the government had been able to break some encryption,” said Michael Vatis, a senior Justice Department cyber-official in the Clinton administration and a partner at Steptoe and Johnson. “That is the only way I could even imagine any restriction on encryption being passed by Congress.”

Even if Congress passed such a law, it could not bind device-makers and software engineers overseas. Privacy advocates said strong encryption technology is now sufficiently widespread that it is effectively beyond the reach of government control.

That is what Britain is discovering: It has a law that would require any telecom company to give the government access to data, but the law cannot be used to compel foreign firms that lack encryption keys to create them, legal experts said.

The debate in some ways harks back to the “cryptowars” of the 1990s, when the Clinton administration proposed having the government hold a decryption key “in escrow” for law enforcement seeking to wiretap encrypted voice calls. The proposal had its origins in the nuclear bunker where, to avoid the risk of a rogue actor launching a nuclear weapon, the government required two people, each holding part of a key, to put their parts together to unlock the weapon.

The government lost, primarily on policy grounds. “Fundamentally, what bothered me, and I think many people, is the notion that you don’t have a right to try to protect your communications but are forced to trust a third party over which you have no control,” said Whitfield Diffie, a pioneer of public-key cryptography who was part of the opposition that killed the proposal.

The debate now differs in at least one key respect: its global reach. Today, demand for data security transcends borders, as does law enforcement’s desire to obtain the data. Countries including the United Kingdom, Australia and China have passed or are contemplating laws seeking government access to communications similar to that sought by U.S. authorities.

The split-key approach floated by Rogers is a variant on that old approach and is intended to resolve some of the policy objections. Storing a master key in pieces would reduce the risk from hackers. A court could oversee the access.

But some technologists still see difficulties. The technique requires a complex set of separate boxes or systems to carry the keys, recombine them and destroy the new key once it has been used. “Get any part of that wrong,” said Johns Hopkins University cryptologist Matthew Green, “and all your guarantees go out the window.”

Officials say that if default encryption of e-mails, photos and text messages becomes the norm without the company holding a key, it could, as Bitkower said, render a warrant “no better than a piece of paper.”

Neither Bitkower nor FBI Director James B. Comey, who also has been vocal about the problem, has been able to cite a case in which locked data thwarted a prosecution. But they have offered examples of how the data are crucial to convicting a person.

Bitkower cited a case in Miami in December in which a long-haul trucker kidnapped his girlfriend, held her in his truck, drove her from state to state and repeatedly sexually assaulted her. She eventually escaped and pressed charges for sexual assault and kidnapping. His defense, Bitkower said, was that she engaged in consensual sex. As it turned out, the trucker had video-recorded his assault, and the phone did not have device encryption enabled. Law enforcement agents were able to get a warrant and retrieve the video. It “revealed in quite disturbing fashion that this was not consensual,” Bitkower said. The jury convicted the trucker.

Officials and former agents say there will be cases in which crimes will go unsolved because the data was unattainable because only the phone owner held the key. “I just look at the number of cases I had where, if the bad guy was using one of these [locked] devices, we never would have caught him,” said Timothy P. Ryan, a former FBI supervisory special agent who now leads Kroll Associates’ cyber-investigations practice.

But, he said, “I think the genie’s out of the bottle on this one.”

Some experts say the challenge of device encryption may be diminished if law enforcement can compel a suspect to unlock his phone. But, they add, doing so may raise Fifth Amendment issues of self-incrimination in some cases.

Encryption of phone calls is the harder challenge and the one that agencies such as the NSA, which needs to hear what targets are saying rather than gather evidence for a prosecution, are more concerned about. Brute-force decryption is difficult and time-consuming, and getting #covert access through manufacturers requires a level of specificity and access that is not often available, intelligence officials say.

“The basic question is, is it possible to design a completely secure system” to hold a master key available to the U.S. government but not adversaries, said Donna Dodson, chief cyber#security adviser at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technologies. “There’s no way to do this where you don’t have unintentional vulnerabilities.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...4ff_story.html





The Whitehouse’s New Executive Order On Cyber Crime is (Unfortunately) No Joke
Nadia Kayyali and Kurt Opsahl

On the morning of April 1st, the Whitehouse issued a new executive order (EO) that asserts that malicious “cyber-enabled activities” are a national threat, declares a national emergency, and establishes sanctions and other consequences for individuals and entities. While computer and information security is certainly very important, this EO could dangerously backfire, and chill the very security research that is necessary to protect people from malicious attacks.

We wish we could say it was a very well-orchestrated April Fool’s joke, it appears the Whitehouse was serious. The order is yet another example of bad responses to very real security concerns. It comes at the same time as Congress is considering the White House’s proposal for fundamentally flawed cybersecurity legislation.

That perhaps shouldn’t be surprising, since so far, D.C.’s approach to cybersecurity hasn’t encouraged better security through a better understanding of the threats we face (something security experts internationally have pointed out is necessary). Instead of encouraging critical security research into vulnerabilities, or creating a better way to disclose vulnerabilities, this order could actually discourage that research.

The most pernicious provision, Section 1(ii)(B), allows the Secretary of the Treasury, “in consultation with” the Attorney General and Secretary of State, to make a determination that an person or entity has “materially … provided … technological support for, or goods or services in support of any” of these malicious attacks.

While that may sound good on its face, the fact is that the order is dangerously overbroad. That’s because tools that can be used for malicious attacks are also vital for defense. For example, penetration testing is the process of attempting to gain access to computer systems, without credentials like a username. It’s a vital step in finding system vulnerabilities and fixing them before malicious attackers do. Security researchers often publish tools, and provide support for them, to help with this testing. Could the eo be used to issue sanctions against security researchers who make and distribute these tools? On its face, the answer is…maybe.

To be sure, President Obama has said that “this executive order [does not] target the legitimate cybersecurity research community or professionals who help companies improve their cybersecurity.” But assurances like this are not enough. Essentially, with these words, Obama asks us to trust the Executive, without substantial oversight, to be able to make decisions about the property and rights of people who may not have much recourse once that decision has been made, and who may well not get prior notice before the hammer comes down. Unfortunately, the Department of Justice has used anti-hacking laws far too aggressively to gain that trust.

As several security researchers who spoke up against similarly problematic terms in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act recently pointed out in an amicus brief:

Quote:
There are relatively few sources of pressure to fix design defects, whether they be in wiring, websites, or cars. The government is not set up to test every possible product or website for defects before its release, nor should it be; in addition, those defects in electronic systems that might be uncovered by the government (for instance, during an unrelated investigation) are often not released, due to internal policies. Findings by industry groups are often kept quiet, under the assumption that such defects will never come to light—just as in Grimshaw (the Ford Pinto case). The part of society that consistently serves the public interest by finding and publicizing defects that will harm consumers is the external consumer safety research community, whether those defects be in consumer products or consumer websites.
It’s clear that security researchers play an essential function. It was researchers (not the government) who discovered and conscientiously spread the news about Heartbleed, Shellshock, and POODLE, three major vulnerabilities discovered in 2014. Those researchers should not have to question whether or not they will be subject to sanctions.

To make matters worse, while most of the provisions specify that they apply to activity taking place outside of or mostly outside of the US, Section 1(ii)(B) has no such limitation. We have concerns about how the order applies to everyone. But this section also brings up constitutional due process concerns. That is, if it were to apply to people protected by the U.S. Constitution, it could violate the Fifth Amendment right to due process.

As we’ve had to point out repeatedly in the discussions about reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, unclear laws, prosecutorial (or in this case, Executive Branch) discretion, coupled with draconian penalties are not the answer to computer crime.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/0...nately-no-joke





US, European Police Take Down Highly Elusive Botnet Known as Beebone

Botnet provided a captive audience of backdoored PCs to online criminals.
Dan Goodin

US and European police have shut down a botnet that provided a captive audience of backdoored PCs to criminals who were looking for an easy way to quickly install malware on large numbers of computers.

The takedown of the Beebone botnet is something of a coup because the underlying malware was so resistant to detection. Polymorphic downloader software at the heart of the malicious program updated itself as many as 19 times a day. Beebone also relied on a pair of programs that re-downloaded each other, acting as an insurance policy should one of them be removed, authorities told the Associated Press. "From a techie's perspective, they made it as difficult as they possibly could for us," a Europol advisory told the news organization.

The takedown was a joint operation that involved the US FBI, Europol's European Cybercrime Center, and private security groups including Kaspersky Lab, Shadowserver, and McAfee.

According to Europol, initial figures showed that Beebone had infected about 12,000 computers. That's a relatively small number since some botnets commandeer millions of end-user devices. Officials said there are likely many more Beebone victims. There are more than five million unique samples of the underlying downloader worm, known as W32/Worm-AAEH, with more than 205,000 samples taken from 23,000 systems in 2013 and 2014. The infected computers are spread across more than 195 countries, with the US reporting the biggest number of compromises, followed by Japan, India, and Taiwan. Infections were also hard to eradicate because the malware blocked connections to antivirus websites.

The takedown was carried out by "sinkholing" the Beebone command-and-control network. Sinkholing is the process of seizing all domain names and IP addresses used to centrally control the infected machines. The whitehats performing the takedown set up their own command channel that prevented the computers from downloading malware updates or participating in any other botnet activities. To be fully free of the Beebone menace, infected computers still must be disinfected using AV software or, better yet, by having their hard drives wiped and operating systems reinstalled. Authorities are in the process of contacting Internet service providers and computer emergency response teams around the world to help identify and contact individual victims.

Beebone's demise is just the latest internationally coordinated takedown of a botnet. Previous takedowns have affected Grum, which was the world's number-three spam-delivering botnet when it was brought down in 2012; a year later, the ZeroAccess botnet that infected two million PCs and cost search engines $2.7 million per month; and last year's Gameover ZeuS trojan that helped spread the CryptoLocker ransomware. In February, authorities cracked down on Ramnit, which had infected more than 3.2 million computers.

The string of takedowns is encouraging because they demonstrate the growing ability of police and private industry to launch highly coordinated operations that can sever large, international criminal operations from the Internet in a single stroke. Then again, the steady stream of actions underscores the persistence of the botnet menace that can only be kept in check with still more enforcement.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015...wn-as-beebone/





Anonabox Recalls 350 ‘Privacy’ Routers for Security Flaws
Andy Greenberg

The project to build a tiny, anonymity-focused router known as Anonabox has overcome plenty of hurdles to get to market: critics who pointed to gaping flaws in its promised security, others who argued that it was a mere repackaging of stock Chinese hardware, and eventually Kickstarter’s decision to freeze its $600,000 fundraising campaign. But even after a second, more successful fundraiser, its acquisition by a larger tech firm, and the milestone of shipping the first batches of routers to customers, it turns out that Anonabox should have listened more closely to its detractors.

Late last month, Anonabox began contacting the first round of customers who bought its tiny, $100 privacy gadget to warn them of serious security flaws in the device, and to offer to ship them a more secure replacement free of charge. While the miniature routers do direct all of a user’s Internet traffic over Tor as promised, the company has confirmed to WIRED that its first batch lacked basic password protection, with no way to keep out unwanted users in Wi-Fi range. And worse yet, the faulty Anonaboxes have another bug that would allow those Wi-Fi intruders to completely hijack the device, snooping on or recording all of a user’s traffic.

To be clear, password protection is a basic feature of any Wi-Fi router, from the high-end to the very cheap—not to mention one that promises total anonymity. That an ostensibly privacy-focused router lacked that fundamental protection is an incredible oversight.

The two flaws combined make the effected devices “downright dangerous to use,” says the security researcher and consultant who uncovered them, Lars Thomsen. “This is worse than not using any privacy device at all. Anyone in range can listen to your traffic without you noticing,” Thomsen says. “Anyone can gain access to the device and install a sniffer to capture all that traffic.”

The company has confirmed to WIRED that its first batch of routers lacked basic password protection.

The company’s new CEO Marc Lewis, who was brought in to lead the project by Anonabox’s new parent company Sochule Incorporate, insists that Anonabox’s replacement scheme is merely a “free upgrade.” But we’re calling it a “recall”: In its current state, Anonabox gives users the privacy of Tor, but leaves them vulnerable to any eavesdropper in Wi-Fi range. Given the severity of the device’s security gaffes, affected users should treat the company’s warning as the product recall that it is, and replace their Anonaboxes immediately.

Anonabox has emphasized, however, that only a small number of its earliest devices were shipped with the security problems: 350 out of the 1,500 or so sold as part of Anonabox’s Indiegogo campaign. At the time of publication, 137 of those devices have since been replaced. Since that initial batch, Anonabox says that it’s patched the flaws in later devices.

“Prior to Sochule Inc’s acquisition of Anonabox and completely out of our control, a number of the first batches of Anonaboxes were shipped without a password for the Wi-Fi,” reads an email sent to customers of the insecure routers starting late last month. “Anyone that has received an Anonabox device without a password may ship their device back in good working order for a new Anonabox device…We will immediately escalate your order to the front of the line for processing, return shipment, and a new Anonabox device w/ the Wi-Fi enabled WPA2-PSK encryption.”

Anonabox has been criticized for its security flaws since the project first went public in October. Its promise of an easy hardware tool for anonymizing all of a user’s online activities helped the project blow past its initial fundraising goal of $7,500 to reach more than $600,000 of funding in just days. But critics soon pointed out that, based on an audit of Anonabox’s open source code, the device didn’t enable password protection of its Wi-Fi network by default. One researcher was able to crack its hard-coded root password—which was “developer!” in all devices—so that any nearby wireless attacker could take control of the device.

Then, Kickstarter pulled Anonabox’s campaign due to what it described as false claims about the project’s custom-designed hardware. But Anonabox relaunched on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo, raising more than $82,000, and in March was acquired by Sochule, a tech parent company that controls several other small startups, mostly in social media.

Given the severity of the device's security gaffes, affected users should treat the company's warning as the product recall that it is, and replace their Anonaboxes immediately.

Anonabox’s current security problems arose on Sunday night, when Thomsen posted an analysis of an Anonabox he had purchased. In some ways, the bugs he found were even worse than the ones attacked before it shipped. Thomsen’s Anonabox not only had no Wi-Fi password by default, but it wouldn’t let the user set one. Its root password was now “admin,” allowing anyone in Wi-Fi range who could guess that word full control. “It was my fourth guess,” says Thomsen.

Thomsen isn’t an entirely objective critic: He’s previously worked on a competing, anonymity-focused router known as Cloak that failed to meet its Kickstarter goal. But Steve Lord, a UK-based penetration tester and founder of the security conference 44Con, reviewed Thomsen’s findings and agrees that anyone using that version of the Anonabox is at “extreme risk.”

“This is what happens when you combine amateur hour with money,” says Lord. “It’s not surprising Anonabox is trying to recall it and cover their tracks. It’s a total train wreck.”

Anonabox’s founder August Germar and CEO Marc Lewis also confirmed Thomsen’s findings in a phone interview with WIRED. They pointed out that the company had been aware of the problems for weeks. Anonabox started emailing affected users on March 23, and sent out a press release meant to address the issue on April 1. But that release stated only that Anonabox was adding new security features. It didn’t explicitly state that some Anonabox devices have a security problem or that they should be replaced.

Lewis says that Anonabox has learned its lesson, and is now enlisting outside security consultants to review its products. And in the meantime, he argues that Sochule has done everything it can to patch Anonabox’s bugs. “The very first thing we did when we acquired the company was put the password on there,” Lewis says. “We took over a shitstorm of [public relations], and we’re trying to put best practices in place.”
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/anonabox-recall/





China Deploys New Weapon for Online Censorship in Form of ‘Great Cannon’
Andrea Peterson

China has moved beyond censoring Internet content seen by its own citizens to using a new cyberweapon researchers have dubbed "the Great Cannon" to silence critics around the world, according to a report released Friday.

The first use of this capability was a weeks-long attack against Web sites that offer tools to help users evade Chinese censorship. By sending crippling amounts of Web traffic, the attacks attempted to knock offline the anti-censorship site GreatFire as well as GitHub, a San Francisco-based Web service that is popular with programmers.

"This is very much an escalation," said Bill Marczak, one of the authors of the report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. While China long has used the Great Firewall - as its censorship system is called - to block users within the country from accessing news stories or other information it deems inappropriate, the recent attack reached beyond international borders and effectively blocked a wide range of content for Web users around the world.

China took control of millions of Web browsers and used them to send a flood of traffic to GreatFire, according to an earlier report from the non-profit, and later to GitHub.

But the type of assault used against the sites, known as a distributed denial of service attack or DDoS, represents only a small fraction of the possible uses of this tool, according to the Citizen Lab. The Great Cannon likely could also be used to deliver malicious code to any computer visiting a Web site based in China that does not use encryption to protect the privacy of its users.

China has become more brazen about attempting to block what its citizens see online under President Xi Jinping, who is trying to promote domestic stability, according to Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow James A. Lewis. "Getting control over the Internet and information is a big priority for the Chinese - they're going after things they used to tolerate, and you're seeing a general clampdown," he said.

The recent attacks against GreatFire and GitHub appear to show that the country is willing to put ideological control over other goals such as the economic success of its tech sector, which could be damaged by censorship efforts, said Sarah McKune, another of the report authors.

The U.S. government has expressed concern about the recent attacks. "Malicious cyber actors who target critical infrastructure, U.S. companies, and U.S. consumers are a threat to the national security and the economy of the United States, and we are particularly concerned about activity that is intended to restrict the ability of users around the world to access information," State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach said in a statement.

"In this case, the attackers appeared to have leveraged Internet infrastructure located in China to overwhelm Web sites in the United States," Gerlach said. U.S. officials have asked China to investigate the incidents, he said.

The Chinese Embassy did not directly respond to questions about the Citizen Lab report or the attacks on GreatFire and GitHub. China supports the development of "Internet news communications" and "at the same time guarantees the citizens' freedom of speech," Embassy spokesman Zhu Haiquan said in a statement.

"China firmly opposes and combats any form of cyberattack in accordance with law," Haiquan said. "We hope that instead of making accusations without solid evidence, all relevant parties can take a more constructive attitude and work together to address cyberissues."

Previous analyses of the recent attacks suggested they originated from the Great Firewall. But the Citizen Lab says the Great Cannon is a separate offensive device, albeit one that shares many similarities with the Great Firewall.

The Great Cannon appears to work by altering un-encrypted traffic as it crosses borders with China, according to the researchers.

It exists in the same part of Chinese Internet infrastructure as the Great Firewall and shares some computer code with it. The effect of the attack could be detected across different Chinese Internet service providers, suggesting government involvement in the attack, according to the researchers.

"There's no other reasonable explanation for the technical findings here than that this was an attack launched by the Chinese government," according to McKune, adding that questions remain about which parts of the government were aware of or involved in the Great Cannon's development and use.

Revelations about U.S. government surveillance programs in recent years may have also given China more confidence about acting aggressively in cyberspace, McKune said. The Great Cannon's ability to insert malicious code into Web traffic is similar to the capabilities of a National Security Agency program known as Quantum, which was disclosed by former government contractor Edward Snowden, she said.

The most effective way to defuse the Great Cannon is to encrypt more Web traffic, according to the Citizen Lab researchers.

"We are now in a world where any unencrypted traffic seen by an adversary is not just an information leak, but a weakness they can exploit," said Nicholas Weaver, another report author. The only defense is universal encryption, he said.

The Chinese government is aware that combating the spread of encryption software is an important part of controlling their citizens online activities, according to Citizen Lab. Earlier this year, China pushed a proposal that would have required foreign tech companies to hand over the keys that secure their encryption systems in order to operate in the country -- although it has reportedly since put it on hold.

Craig Timberg contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...searchers-say/





Michigan Micro Mote (M3) Makes History

Michigan Micro Mote (M3), the world’s smallest computer, is taking its place among other revolutionary accomplishments in the history of computing at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Measuring in at less than a half a centimeter, it didn't take a truck to transport the computers from their home in Ann Arbor, MI. In fact, nearly 150 of these computers fit inside a single thimble.

The M3 is a fully autonomous computing system that acts as a smart sensing system. It is the achievement of Michigan faculty members David Blaauw, Dennis Sylvester, David Wentzloff, Prabal Dutta and several key graduate students over the years, some of whom have already founded companies to exploit key aspects of the technology. These devices are helping usher in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), where people are connected to things and other people through the cloud.

In the IoT world, size and power are everything. The computers have to be small in order to sense the world around us without being intrusive, and they have to run on extremely low power to match their size.

The Michigan Micro Mote constitutes the first complete, operational computer system measuring as small as two millimeters across. “To be "complete," a computer system must have an input of data, the ability to process that data - meaning process and store it, make decisions about what to do next – and ultimately, the ability to output the data.” Prof. Blaauw explained. “The sensors are the input and the radios are the output. The other key to being a complete computer is the ability to supply its own power.”

The Michigan Micro Mote contains solar cells that power the battery with ambient light, including indoor rooms with no natural sunlight, allowing the computers to run perpetually.

This line of “smart dust” devices includes computers equipped with imagers (with motion detection), temperature sensors, and pressure sensors. They are the culmination of work initiated by Blaauw and Sylvester on very low-power processing for millimeter-scale systems.

An Astonishing Lack of Power

A key breakthrough in the size/power matchup came with the Phoenix processor in 2008. The Phoenix processor is miniscule at 915 x 915µm2, and boasts ultra-low operating voltage and a unique standby mode that results in an average power consumption of only 500pW. (Consider that 1pW is the average power consumption of a single human cell.)

Blaauw explained why Phoenix’s extreme energy efficiency is so important: “As you shrink down in size, the percentage of the system tends to be dominated by the battery. It’s actually not hard to make chips small, but it is hard to make them low power. We could have very small chips, but we’d still end up with really large batteries.”

With the M3, engineers at Michigan are the first to accomplish energy neutrality via indoor energy harvesting in a wireless system of its size. With a 1mm2 solar cell producing 20nW, the device can harvest enough energy under ambient light to run perpetually. The device’s standby power consumption is 2nA. That’s about a million times less power than the average mobile phone consumes while on standby, or the comparative difference between the thickness of a sheet of paper and the length of a football field.

M3 Versatility

There are currently three different systems in the M3 family, focusing on several different applications: sensing temperature, pressure, and taking images.

The Michigan Micro Mote is built in stacked layers which are able to communicate through a specially-designed universal interface protocol called MBus.

Each M3 computer contains the following layers:

• solar cell and optical communication photo cell
• harvester control electronics layer
• radio layer
• sensor interface layer (temp sensor and capacitive interface electronics)
• layer with capacitors for stabilizing the power supplies (“decap” layer)
• processor + memory + power regulation layer
• battery
• optional layer for pressure sensor, imager, etc.

By simply exchanging one layer with another, a new sensing system is achieved. This design methodology greatly reduces the cost of manufacturing.

The current pinnacle of the project is an imaging system that packs visual imaging, ultra-low power motion detection, wireless communications, battery, power management, solar harvesting, processor and memory into a package measuring a mere 2 x 4 x 4mm3.

Wireless Communication

Currently, all of the M3 computers can collect and transmit data as far as 2 meters, about the width of a cubicle. At that range these computers can monitor a room for motion or anomalies in pressure and temperature, all while communicating that data to a base station.

The sensors activate on their own to take periodic measurements and then log that data until it is sent. Operating at extremely low power during the "sleep" time is one of the many keys to the success of this technology.

“Down the road we want these sensors to be able to talk to one another,” says Blaauw, “and we’re currently working to extend their range to about 20m.”

A stumbling block to extending the range of these devices is the antenna size and accompanying increase in power needed to communicate long distances. Prof. Wentzloff is leading the effort to increase the ability of the M3 to communicate over longer distances.

In recent work, Wentzloff and his group achieved wireless communication from the M3 with temperature sensor to a base station up to 7m away. The complete sensor node is energy autonomous with a 2mm, 2μAh battery and an integrated solar cell.

M3 Applications

The first generation of Phoenix-based sensors were developed for implantable medical devices. The sensor system included a MEMS pressure sensor that could be deployed to monitor intraocular pressure in glaucoma patients and intracranial pressure in trauma victims. The latter application would replace the current method of inserting a wire into the skull, which leaves the patient vulnerable to infection.

Researchers and companies around the world are figuring out new ways to use these mini-computer sensing devices every day. The Michigan team is aiding in the process by sending the M3 to interested researchers, as well as responding to the most intriguing projects that come their way. Michigan has been inundated with requests to use these devices in applications from monitoring concrete and oil wells to researching the behavior of snails.

One key application for this line of smart sensors lies in personal security and information. Numerous specks of technology could be discretely placed to invisibly monitor a home, business, or personal device.

"We found that a lot of people were very interested in these devices, and that's why we went with the modular or stacked approach." Blaauw explained. "It's the key aspect of our design. If you need a different sensing modality you take out one sensor and replace it with another - like mix and match tinker toys."

Tech Transfer

The first to appear, Ambiq Micro (2010), develops energy efficient microcontrollers built around millimeter-scale chips. Ambiq, founded by Dr. Scott Hanson, Prof. David Blaauw and Prof. Dennis Sylvester, seeks a world of ubiquitous computing, and its tiny controllers are a step in that direction. Ambiq's technology is an example of embedded intelligent sensors expanding the Internet of Things.

PsiKick was founded in 2012 by Prof. David Wentzloff, Prof. Benton Calhoun of the University of Virginia, and Brendan Richardson. PsiKick is commercializing their own line of ultra-low power systems-on-a-chip. Their systems are capable of harvesting energy from vibration, thermal gradients, solar, radiofrequency and piezo actuation. One of PsiKick’s first demonstrations was an EKG monitoring sensor powered by body heat.

CubeWorks was founded in 2013 by Michigan researchers Dr. ZhiYoong Foo, Dr. Gyouho Kim, and Dr. Yoonmyung Lee; and faculty, David Blaauw, David Wentzloff, Dennis Sylvester, and Prabal Dutta. M3 itself is the core technology of this company. The goal of CubeWorks is to deliver a true “smart dust” to open up the next generation of computing paradigm, accelerating massive-scale realization of Internet of Things.

The Future

The door has been opened to a completely new class of computing with seemingly limitless applications. Worldwide exploration of this research is being aided by the dissemination of hundreds of Michigan Micro Motes for trials in innovative applications. In the meantime, the Michigan team continues to redefine computer technology ahead of the IoT curve as they collaborate with industry, the Kellogg Eye Center, the U-M Medical School, and colleagues here at Michigan and around the world.
https://www.eecs.umich.edu/eecs/abou...icro-Mote.html





At Least One State has a (Fiber) Backbone

Who’s on track to get citizens high-speed Internet? Hint: it’s the only state with the word “connect” in its name.
Susan Crawford

Maybe you remember Sir Boss, aka Hank Morgan, the leading character in one of Samuel Clemens’s, aka Mark Twain’s, most famous books. He begins his story this way: “I am an an American. I was born and reared in Hartford, Connecticut. So I am a Yankee of the Yankees — and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment.”

The book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, is (among many other things) a close look at the sweeping technological change Clemens/Twain saw happening around him in late-19th century Hartford. The country was industrializing, and Hank was an industrial innovator. He had learned to make “guns, revolvers, cannons, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery,” and “if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one — and do it as easy as rolling off a log,” Hank says.

Twain was clearly tickled by the deep practicality of Connecticut natives. And that practical ingenuity is still on display in Connecticut, which is poised to become the first “Gigabit State” in the country.

Talk about your labor-saving, productivity-enhancing inventions — dozens of Connecticut towns are now on a path towards installing wholesale fiber networks connecting all homes and businesses. And those flinty Yankees won’t be paying for the installation of these open access networks themselves, because fiber, with its predictable up-front cost and steady returns, is an excellent longterm investment for private companies. Meanwhile, any ISP will be able to use these networks to sell service directly to homes and businesses.

Result: world-class connectivity at low prices for Connecticut residents in towns across the state — including in rural areas where getting online is a struggle. As Elin Katz, the Consumer Counsel of the State of Connecticut, puts it, “It’s like building the road — and anyone can drive their cars on it.”

Let’s roll the story back, just as Twain might have done. By mid-2014, Connecticut had some powerful regulatory assets on its side to smooth the way for private sources of fiber investment. For starters, Connecticut is the one state in the country that has fixed the unbelievably difficult issue of attaching wires to poles. Rather than letting pole owners hold up every requestor by creating delays and making demands for special payments (seriously: pole-attachment scuffles are the long-running soap operas of telecom), Connecticut requires pole owners to obey a Single Pole Administrator, adhere to uniform pricing agreements, and act to make way for new wires in a set time. Dramatic stuff. And Connecticut already had passed a statute giving municipalities the right to use a part of a pole, or “gain,” for any purpose. These two elements made Connecticut an extremely attractive place to string a network.

So after a win at the poles, Connecticut steamed ahead. First the Connecticut Technology Council — the statewide chamber of commerce for high tech — held a listening tour over the summer of 2014 in Hartford, New Haven, and Stamford. Demand for fiber was clearly high: businesses were clamoring for it. Then, in September 2014, the state issued a Request for Quotation aimed at eliciting interest from private investors in creating leading gigabit fiber networks in commercial corridors and residential areas to “foster innovation, drive job creation, and stimulate economic growth.”

Here’s the key: The whole state would get a chance to be on board. If it worked, at least one of the fifty states in our union would have gigabit fiber — a clear, positive way to claim a state is “open for business.” All 169 towns in Connecticut were invited to join the RFQ by appending their own, individual descriptions of what their town could provide a private investor — expedited permitting, say, or a place to stage equipment. (Having many towns join in would be a win-win: as a group the towns would have more bargaining heft than any town acting alone, while a private provider would be able to lower its per-unit costs by operating at scale.)

Interest on the part of Connecticut towns in participating was so strong that the deadline for jumping on board was extended. In the end, forty-six municipalities representing more than half the population of the state were part of the RFQ when it went out. And private parties jumped in turn to respond — because Connecticut had those valuable regulatory assets on its side. Poles!

Right now the towns are considering the RFQ responses that were received by the state in January. Any entity that has the cash to string the wires in the first place — say, an investment bank — will be reaping steady, reliable returns for the next thirty years. It’s a great investment. And the plan puts Connecticut, that practical home of Yankee ingenuity and can-do labor-saving devices, on the global fiber map.

The incumbent cable and telcos are not standing idly by. The New England Cable Television Association, NECTA (essentially speaking for Comcast) has fired at the plan, variously claiming that (a) the state already has adequate capacity, so no one needs a gig, (b) if gig networks are needed, they’ve already been built, (c) if new networks are built via the Connecticut plan (a plan supported by the four largest cities in the state as well as 42 other towns), taxpayers will have to pay for them. None of this is true. As one online commenter on a NECTA op-ed puts it, “This guy is saying that the cable companies are your friend. Friends like them we don’t need.”

The Connecticut Yankee does some time-traveling in Twain’s book, as you may remember. He’s taken in hand by a local and describes the scene to us:

“We saw a far-away town sleeping in a valley by a winding river; and beyond it on a hill, a vast gray fortress, with towers and turrets, the first I had ever seen out of a picture.

‘Bridgeport?’ said I, pointing.

‘Camelot,’ said he.”

This time around, the roles can be reversed: our fiber Camelot might just be Bridgeport.
https://medium.com/backchannel/the-f...e-5a084dc2b544





'Three Strikes' Anti-Piracy Scheme Launched in Wake of Dallas Buyers Club Threat

The telecommunications industry will give alleged illegal downloaders of movies, music and TV shows 'three strikes" before dobbing them in to copyright owners - although is it too late for downloaders of Dallas Buyers Club?
David Ramli

Consumer advocates have warned that the telecommunications industry's "three strikes" scheme designed to catch illegal downloaders of movies, music and TV shows will pave the way for Australian internet users to be hit with "extortionate" fines.

The telco industry's lobby group, Communications Alliance, submitted the final version of its Copyright Notice Scheme Code 2015 to the Australian Communications and Media Authority for approval on Wednesday afternoon – less than 24 hours after iiNet and M2 Group were forced to hand over the personal details of 4736 customers to Voltage Pictures, which owns the copyright to Hollywood film Dallas Buyers Club.

Under the new system, copyright owners would create lists of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that belong to alleged illicit downloaders. This will be cross-checked against the IP addresses of all Australian internet providers and warning letters will be sent to users by the relevant telco.

If a user gets three warning letters, or "strikes", in a 12-month period, telcos will help copyright owners identify them for potential legal action after a hearing in a prescribed court. Up to 200,000 notices can be processed and sent each year.

But users can ask for a review of the finding, which will be conducted by an independent adjudication panel.

"The scheme contains strong safeguards against any threat to the privacy of internet users," Communications Alliance, which is the telco industry body responsible for the new code, said. "[It] has a strong emphasis on public education and does not contain explicit sanctions against internet users.

Not affected

"The operation of the code and the notice scheme are not affected in any way by the recent Federal Court decision on preliminary discovery in the Dallas Buyers Club case."

Internet service providers are hoping the introduction of this scheme will prevent the federal government creating new laws that will make telcos responsible for unauthorised downloading by their customers.

But Choice campaigns manager Erin Turner said the consumer body would prefer Parliament come up with new laws because there would be more public scrutiny in the process.

"This code is not a gentle education scheme, it's actually a pathway to legal action," she said. "We're quite worried that if anyone was taken to court for piracy, given that most people are uploading and downloading, they'd see quite large penalties.

"Legal action is a time-intensive exercise, so we'd expect a lot of people would settle with copyright holders, even if they haven't downloaded what they're accused of. We've seen things like $675,000 penalties in the US for downloading 30 songs, so these are life-destroying levels of fines."

Instead, she called on copyright holders to offer content at the same time and prices around the world, so that Australians are treated equally.

The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) is the peak body for telco users. Its policy officer Xavier O'Halloran agreed the new system would streamline the process for copyright holders to send speculative invoices, which are letters that demand money.

Independent advice

"We'd strongly recommend users [who get letters] seek independent legal advice right away, because the way these letters have been structured is they tend to use bullying tactics and make claims for amounts of money that are way beyond what any court would consider reasonable in Australia," he said.

ACCAN wants the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman to become the independent body that watches over claims and for all user information to be deleted within 24 months of it being stored.

Copyright owners have been lobbying the federal government to introduce tough new laws that would crack down on telcos and their customers to stop the illicit downloading of movies.

The code will be lodged with the Australian Communications and Media Authority on Wednesday and will be independently evaluated 18 months after it begins.

An ACMA spokesman said the body would assess if the scheme met the requirements for registration under Part 6 of the Telecommunications Act. It was too soon to give any indication of when it would be approved.
http://www.theage.com.au/business/me...10-1mgjyd.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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