P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Peer to Peer
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 04-07-18, 09:09 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 7th, ’18

Since 2002


































"This is what real net neutrality looks like. And it all happened because people spoke out. You sent emails, called offices, crowdfunded a billboard—all of that was heard. People’s voices trumped company money this time." – Katharine Trendacosta, EFF






































July 7th, 2018




This Fourth of July, US Veterans are Calling on Congress to Restore Net Neutrality

The loss of net neutrality affects all of us. It undermines freedom and opportunity, and puts the interests of elites ahead of all of our basic right to connect.

As a US veteran, these are not the values that I was told I was signing up for when I put on the uniform.

That’s why I’m working with other veterans who are passionate about the open Internet, along with Fight for the Future, to launch VetsForThe.Net, an open letter from US veterans to our elected officials in Congress calling on them to overrule the FCC’s disastrous repeal of net neutrality.

If you’re a US veteran or active service member, please click here to sign the open letter!

If you’re not a US veteran, take a moment think of any friends and family members who are, and forward this to them via email, text, or messenger!

Or click to share the open letter on Twitter or Facebook.

Veterans, military families, and service members rely on the Internet to keep in touch with loved ones overseas and access essential services at home.

The open Internet has allowed American small businesses to thrive, and has created new jobs that veterans urgently need. The loss of net neutrality will allow cable companies to throttle services, censor free speech, and charge new fees that veterans can’t afford.

Our representatives in Congress have the power to restore net neutrality and protect our online freedom. If thousands of us who have served this country speak up, we can make a difference.

If you’re a vet or active service member, go to VetsForThe.Net to sign the open letter!

Everyone else, please forward and share widely. Our goal is to get thousands of veterans signed on to the open letter this week.

Thank you!
-Tim Ellis, VetsForThe.Net

P.S. If you’re part of a veterans group, VFW post, or other organization that wants to endorse the letter, email tim@fightforthefuture.org and let me know!

P.P.S. The link to the open letter is https://vetsforthe.net, please share it everywhere you can and send it directly to any vets or service members you know!
https://medium.com/@fightfortheftr/t...y-acb89ce767b7





California's Net Neutrality Bill Is Strong Again Because You Spoke Out
Katharine Trendacosta

After a hearing that stripped California’s gold standard net neutrality bill of much of its protections, California legislators have negotiated new amendments that restore the vast majority of those protections to the bill. The big ISPs and their money did not defeat the voices of the many, many people who want and need a free and open Internet.

On June 20, the Communications and Conveyance Committee of the California Assembly, after having rejected proposed amendments to move Senator Scott Wiener’s S.B. 822 and Senator Kevin de León’s S.B. 460 forward as a package, also voted to gut S.B. 822's strong net neutrality protections. It was a move that resulted in a hollowed-out version of S.B. 822 that left huge loopholes for ISPs.

Since then, there’s been an outcry from Team Internet in California, making clear how important effective, strong net neutrality protections are. Senator Wiener, Senator de León, Assemblymember Rob Bonta, and Assemblymember Miguel Santiago, the Chair of the Assembly Committee on Communications and Conveyance that voted on the watered-down bill, have all come to an agreement that once again makes California’s proposed legislation the strongest net neutrality bill in the country.

The willingness of Assemblymember Santiago to listen to his constituents’ opinions and realize their needs, as opposed to those of large ISPs like AT&T, is laudable. And the resulting agreement puts California net neutrality back on track.

As was initially proposed by Senator Wiener and Senator de Leon, both net neutrality bills will now become a package. The ban on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization remains—paid prioritization has been a particular target of misleading ISP arguments. The ban on certain kinds of zero rating—the kinds that lead consumers to services that ISPs want them to use rather than giving them choices—also remains. And so does the ban on access fees, which means ISPs will not be able to get around these protections by charging fees at the places where data enters their networks.

This is what real net neutrality looks like. And it all happened because people spoke out. You sent emails, called offices, crowdfunded a billboard—all of that was heard. People’s voices trumped company money this time.

The fight’s not over: these bills still need to be passed by the California legislature and signed by the governor. So keep telling them to vote for S.B. 822.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/0...-you-spoke-out





AT&T Promised Lower Prices after Time Warner Merger—it’s Raising them Instead

Most DirecTV Now prices go up $5 a month, weeks after AT&T bought Time Warner.
Jon Brodkin

AT&T is raising the base price of its DirecTV Now streaming service by $5 per month, despite promising in court that its acquisition of Time Warner Inc. would lower TV prices.

AT&T confirmed the price increase to Ars and said it began informing customers of the increase this past weekend. "The $5 increase will go into effect July 26 for new customers and varies for existing customers based on their billing date," an AT&T spokesperson said.

The $5 increase will affect all DirecTV Now tiers except for a Spanish-language TV package, AT&T told Ars. That means the DirecTV Now packages that currently cost $35, $50, $60, and $70 a month will go up to $40, $55, $65, and $75.

"To continue delivering the best possible streaming experience for both new and existing customers, we're bringing the cost of this service in line with the market—which starts at a $40 price point," AT&T said.
What AT&T told a judge

Just two months ago, AT&T said in a court filing that buying Time Warner would allow it to lower TV prices. The US Department of Justice tried to stop the merger, arguing that it would raise prices for consumers, but a federal judge sided with AT&T. The merger was completed on June 15.

AT&T scoffed at the Justice Department's argument that the merger would raise prices. The telecomm giant wrote in its post-trial brief that the merger will "enabl[e] AT&T and Time Warner to reduce consumer prices."

"The evidence overwhelmingly showed that this merger is likely to enhance competition substantially, because it will enable the merged company to reduce prices, offer innovative video products, and compete more effectively against the increasingly powerful, vertically integrated 'FAANG' [Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google] companies," AT&T told US District Judge Richard Leon in the brief.

"There is no sound evidence from which the Court could fairly conclude that retail pay-TV prices are likely to increase," AT&T said in that same filing.

AT&T's brief pointed out that the Justice Department walked back some of its price claims during the trial. "The government concedes that Turner will not withhold content [from other pay-TV operators], and it concedes that the merged entity will reduce its own consumer pay-TV prices," AT&T wrote.

Price benefits should flow to consumers quickly, AT&T's filing said. "[C]ertain merger efficiencies will begin exerting downward pressure on consumer prices almost immediately [after the merger]" AT&T wrote.

Owning Time Warner gives AT&T more control over how much it pays for the programming it offers to DirecTV customers, because it no longer has to negotiate with a third party for Time Warner content.

"Currently, our ability to bring customers more of what they want has been constrained because we own very little of our own programming and cannot unilaterally determine what content we offer and how consumers may access it," AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told a Senate committee in December 2016 when he was asking the government to approve the merger. "Instead, we have to negotiate those matters with third-party content owners, and in a fast-changing marketplace like video, it is particularly difficult to obtain flexibility to pursue new and untested business models."

AT&T looking for more revenue

When contacted by Ars, AT&T didn't explain why the Time Warner merger didn't prevent the $5 price increase. But the company noted that it is also offering a new $15-per-month streaming service with fewer channels; that service is a free add-on for AT&T mobile customers with unlimited plans.

AT&T last month also removed HBO from one of its unlimited mobile data plans, and the company raised the price of that plan by $5 a month. AT&T also recently raised the "administrative fee" charged to postpaid wireless customers from $0.76 to $1.99 per month, according to BTIG Research.

"AT&T attributed its changes to market forces, but the company may be under pressure to find new sources of revenue after its $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner," CNBC wrote today. "The timing of AT&T's price hikes and fee bumps coincides with the closure of the deal."
https://arstechnica.com/information-...-them-instead/





Kim Dotcom Loses Latest Legal Bid to Avoid US Extradition
Nick Perry

Flamboyant internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom and three of his former colleagues have lost their latest bid to avoid extradition to the U.S. to face criminal charges.

New Zealand's Court of Appeal on Thursday upheld earlier court rulings that found the men were eligible to be handed over to U.S. authorities.

Dotcom's lawyer Ira Rothken said they were disappointed with the judgment and planned to file an appeal with New Zealand's Supreme Court.

"We have now been to three courts each with a different legal analysis," Rothken wrote on Twitter.

The latest decision comes more than six years after U.S. authorities shut down Dotcom's file-sharing website Megaupload and filed charges of conspiracy, racketeering and money laundering against the men. If found guilty, they could face decades in prison.
Megaupload was once one of the internet's most popular sites. U.S. prosecutors say it raked in at least $175 million, mainly from people using it to illegally download songs, television shows and movies.

Dotcom argues that he can't be held responsible for others who chose to use his site for illegal purposes, and that any case against him should have been heard in civil court. He says he never lived in the U.S. or even visited the country and didn't have a company there.

Born in Germany as Kim Schmitz, Dotcom founded Megaupload in 2005. At one point he lived in a Hong Kong hotel, before being granted permanent residency in New Zealand in 2010. He was arrested in New Zealand in 2012 during a dramatic police raid on his mansion and incarcerated for a month before being released on bail.

Since then, Dotcom has released a music album, started another internet file-sharing company called Mega and launched a political party, which unsuccessfully contested the nation's 2014 election.

In addition to Dotcom, who founded Megaupload and was its biggest shareholder, the U.S. is also seeking to extradite former Megaupload officers Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato.
https://www.newstimes.com/business/t...S-13050051.php





Copyright Industries Reveal Their Ultimate Goal: An Internet Where Everything Online Requires A License From Them
Glyn Moody

Yesterday, Mike took apart an extraordinarily weak attempt by the UK's music collection society, PRS for Music, to counter what it claimed were "myths" about the deeply-harmful Article 13 of the proposed EU Copyright Directive. On the same day, the Guardian published a letter from the PRS and related organizations entitled "How the EU can make the internet play fair with musicians". It is essentially a condensed version of the "myth-busting" article, and repeats many of the same fallacious arguments. It also contains some extremely telling passages that are worth highlighting for the insights that they provide into the copyright industries' thinking and ultimate goal. Here is the main thrust of the letter:

This is not about censorship of the internet, as the likes of Google and Facebook would have you believe. The primary focus of this legislation is concerned with whether or not the internet functions as a fair and efficient marketplace -- and currently it doesn't.

Once again, there is no attempt to demonstrate that Article 13 is not about censorship, merely an assertion that it isn't, together with the usual claim that it's all being orchestrated by big US Internet companies. The fact that over two-thirds of a million people have signed an online petition calling for the "censorship machine" of Article 13 to be stopped rather punctures that tired argument.

More interesting is the second sentence, which essentially confirms that for the recording industry, the Copyright Directive -- and, indeed, the Internet itself -- is purely about getting as much money as possible. There is no sense that there are other important aspects -- like encouraging ordinary people to express themselves, and to be creative for the sheer joy of creating, or in order to amuse and engage with friends and strangers. The fact that all these non-commercial uses will be adversely affected by Article 13 is irrelevant to the recording industry, which seems to believe that making a profit takes precedence over everything else. However, even if they choose to ignore this side of the Internet, the signatories of the letter are well-aware that there is a huge backlash against the proposed law precisely because it is a threat to this kind of everyday online use. Attempting to counter this, they go on:

It is important to recognise that article 13 of the proposed EU copyright directive imposes no obligation on users. The obligations relate only to platforms and rightsholders. Contrary to some sensationalist headlines, internet memes will not be affected, as they are already covered by exceptions to copyright, and nothing in the proposed article will allow rightsholders to block the use of them.

Techdirt pointed out yesterday why the first part of that is intellectually dishonest. The Copyright Directive won't impose obligations on users directly, but on the platforms that people use, which amounts to the same thing in practice. The letter then trots out the claim that Internet memes will not be affected, and specifically says this is because they are already covered by EU exceptions to copyright.

This is simply not true. Article 5 of the EU's 2001 Directive on the "harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society" lays down that "Member States may provide for exceptions or limitations", including "for the purpose of caricature, parody or pastiche". However, that is optional, not compulsory. In fact, nineteen EU Member States -- including the EU's most populous country, Germany -- have chosen not to provide an exception for parody. Even assuming that memes would be covered by parody exceptions -- by no means guaranteed -- they are in any case illegal in 19 EU nations.

Licensing is not an option here. There are many diverse sources for the material used in memes, most of which have no kind of organization that could give a license. The only way for online companies to comply with Article 13 would be to block all memes using any kind of pre-existing material in those 19 countries without a parody exception. Worse: because it will be hard to apply different censorship rules for each EU nation, it is likely that the upload filters will block all such memes in the whole EU, erring on the side of caution. It will then be up to the person whose meme has been censored to appeal against that decision, using an as-yet undefined appeals mechanism. The chilling effect this "guilty until proven innocent" approach will have on memes and much else is clear.

The blatant misinformation about whether memes would be blocked is bad enough. But in many ways, the most shocking phrase in the letter is the following:

Actually, article 13 makes it easier for users to create, post and share content online, as it requires platforms to get licences, and rightsholders to ensure these licences cover the acts of all individual users acting in a non-commercial capacity.

There, in black and white, is the end-game that the recording industry is seeking: that every online act of individual users, even the non-commercial ones, on the major platforms must be licensed. But the desire to control the online world, and to dictate who may do what there, is not limited to the recording companies: it's what all the copyright industries want. That can be seen in Article 11 of the Copyright Directive -- the so-called "snippet tax" -- which will require licensing for the use by online sites of even small excerpts of news material.

It's also at the root of the core problem with Article 3 of the proposed EU law. This section deals with the important new field of text and data mining (TDM), which takes existing texts and data, and seeks to extract new information by collating them and analyzing them using powerful computers. The current Copyright Directive text allows TDM to be carried out freely by non-profit research organisations, on material to which they have lawful access. However, companies must pay publishers for a new, additional, license to carry out TDM, even on material they have already licensed for traditional uses like reading. That short-sighted double-licensing approach pretty much guarantees that AI startups, which typically require frictionless access to large amounts of training data, won't choose to set up shop in the EU. But the publishing industry never cares about the collateral damage it inflicts, provided it attains its purely selfish goals.

Although it's rather breathtaking to see the copyright world openly admit that its ultimate aim is to turn the Internet into a space where everything is licensed, we shouldn't be surprised. Back in 2013, Techdirt wrote about the first stages of the EU's revision of its copyright law. One preliminary initiative was called "Licences for Europe", and its stated aim was to "explore the potential and limits of innovative licensing and technological solutions in making EU copyright law and practice fit for the digital age". What we are seeing now in the proposed Copyright Directive is simply a fulfillment of these ambitions, long-cherished by the copyright industries. If you aren't happy about that, now would be a good time to tell the EU Parliament to Save Your Internet. It may be your last chance.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...nse-them.shtml





Wikipedia Italy Goes Dark to Protest EU Copyright Reform

Italian Wikipedia was blacked out on Tuesday in protest at a new EU copyright directive that the online encyclopedia says will restrict internet freedom.

Attempting to access any page on the Italian-language Wikipedia directed users to a statement on the EU's Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, a package of proposed reforms that would extend the rights of publishers to claim copyright fees on even short extracts of material reproduced online – for instance, snippets of news articles that appear under search results.

It would also oblige online platforms to scan all content that users try to upload – to YouTube, for example – and automatically block anything that risks infringing copyright.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, has joined freedom-of-internet activists in opposing the directive, which is to be put to a vote in the EU Parliament this week.

"If the proposal were approved, it could become impossible to share a newspaper article on social networks or find it via a search engine," Wikipedia Italy's statement said.

"Wikipedia itself could be forced to shut down."

The Italian Wikipedia community has decided to black out its content in protest, the statement said. The blackout applies to all Wikipedia pages in Italian, whether accessed from Italy or abroad.

It's not clear when the protest, which began on Tuesday morning, will end. MEPs are expected to vote on the proposed directive on Thursday, July 5th.

The Wikimedia Foundation is urging EU residents to contact their representative before then and ask them to vote against the reforms, as several MEPs have already pledged to do.

In the meantime, Wikipedia users in Italy can continue to access the encyclopedia in any language other than Italian, though they'll see a banner alerting them to this week's vote on the directive at the top of every page. One reader also told The Local that Italian-language content remains visible via the Wikipedia app.
https://www.thelocal.it/20180703/wik...rective-reform





European MEPs Vote to Reopen Copyright Debate Over ‘Censorship’ Controversy
Natasha Lomas

A 318-278 majority of MEPs in the European Parliament has just voted to reopen debate around a controversial digital copyright reform proposal — meaning it will now face further debate and scrutiny, rather than be fast-tracked towards becoming law via the standard EU trilogue negotiation process.

Crucially it means MEPs will have the chance to amend the controversial proposals.

Great success: Your protests have worked! The European Parliament has sent the copyright law back to the drawing board. All MEPs will get to vote on #uploadfilters and the #linktax September 10–13. Now let's keep up the pressure to make sure we #SaveYourInternet! pic.twitter.com/VwqAgH0Xs5

— Julia Reda (@Senficon) July 5, 2018

Last month the EU parliament’s legal affairs committee approved the final text of the copyright proposal — including approving its two most controversial articles — kicking off a last ditch effort by groups opposed to what they dub the ‘link tax’ and ‘censorship machines’ to marshal MEPs to reopen debate and be able to amend the proposal.

The copyright reform is controversial largely on account of two articles:

• Article 11 — which proposes to create a neighboring right for snippets of journalistic content in order to target news aggregator business models, like Google News, which publishers have long argued are unfairly profiting from their work.

Similar ancillary copyright laws have previously been enacted in Germany and Spain — and in the latter market, where the licensing requirement was not flexible, Google News closed up shop entirely, leading, say critics, to decreased traffic referrals to Spanish news sites.

• Article 13 — which makes Internet platforms that host large amounts of user-uploaded content directly liable for copyright infringements by their users, and would likely push platforms such as YouTube towards pre-filtering all user generated content at the point of upload, with all the associated potential chilling effects if/when algorithms fail to recognize fair use of a copyrighted work, for instance.

Article 13 is arguably the more controversial element of the two, and it is certainly where opposition campaigning has been fiercest. Though it has strong support from musicians and the music industry who have spent years fighting YouTube, arguing it exploits legal protections around music videos viewed on its service and pays lower royalties than they are due.

In the opposition camp, a broad coalition of digital rights organizations, startup groups, Internet architects, computer scientists, academics and web advocates — including the likes of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Bruce Schneier, Jimmy Wales and Mitch Kapor, who in an open letter last month argued that Article 13 “takes an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users”.

This week several European language versions of Wikipedia also blacked out encyclopedia content in a ‘going dark’ protest against the proposals, though the European Commission has claimed online encyclopedias would not be impacted by Article 13.

A claim that is, however, disputed by opponents…

Wow, the @EU_Commission knows less about what this vote is about than the Wikipedia community. Misquoting the original proposal, which is not the version that will be voted on Thursday, and showing ignorance about amount of 3rd party content on #Wikipedia. https://t.co/qFwnVyFuZT

— Julia Reda (@Senficon) July 3, 2018

An online petition calling for MEPs to vote for the parliament to be able to amend the proposals had gathered more than 850,000 signatures at the time of the vote.

Right ahead of the vote, MEPs heard brief statements in favor and against fast tracking the proposal.

Speaking in favor, MEP Axel Voss — rapporteur on the legal affairs committee which voted in favor of the text last month — said the proposals are intended to end “the exploitation of European artists on the Internet”.

“We’re talking about the major US platforms like Google and Facebook that have been making huge profits at the cost of European creatives. We need to prevent that,” he said. “And I think it is inexplicable how some people want to support this Internet capitalism, while others are calling for America first an abusing data and exploiting our creatives. We should be standing at the side of our European creators, and otherwise there is a risk of creative insolvency.”

“Why would we be against wanting to prevent copyright violations, why would we be against fair remuneration of creatives, and getting these large platforms to take more responsibility,” he added. “The campaign that we’re subject to, from Google, Facebook, that are meeting with children of MEPs — all of this is based on lies. There are no limits being put for individual users, every person can continue to set up links and carry out their uploads with legal certainty.”

Speaking against the proposal being fast-tracked — to allow for what she described as a “broad, fact-based debate” — was MEP Catherine Stihler, rapporteur on the internal market and consumer protection committee, which had joint competency on Article 13 of the proposal but whose position she said had not been taken into account in the text agreed by the (Juri) legal affairs committee, saying their text “does not achieve the needed balance”.

“We are all united in our shared mission to protect artists and cultural diversity in Europe… In our committee we were able to reach a broad compromise that makes meaningful progress on the value gap but at the same time safeguarding the rights of European Internet users, SMEs and startups,” said Stihler.

“There are real concerns about the effect of Article 13 on freedom of expression, raised by experts ranging from the UN special rapporteur David Kaye to the inventor of the world wide web, sir Tim Berners-Lee. And real concerns voiced by our citizens, just yesterday I received a petition signed by almost a million people against the Juri committee mandate. And although there is consensus — and I do believe there is consensus about the goals behind this law — huge controversy still exists about the methods proposed, something’s not right here. We owe it to the experts, stakeholders and citizens to give this directive the full debate necessary to achieve broad support.”

The outcome of today’s vote means copyright lobbyists on both sides of the fence face a busy summer — ahead of debate, the chance for amendments to the text and another vote, now set to take place in the EU parliament in September.

European Consumer Organisation, BEUC, welcomed today’s vote in the parliament.

In a statement, its DG, Monique Goyens, said: “This is a big decision in the fight to prevent large-scale and systematic filtering of online content from becoming the norm. The legislative debate urgently needs re-direction. The Internet must remain a place where consumers can freely share own creations, opinions and ideas. MEPs have a chance to correct a heavily unbalanced report and make copyright work for both consumer and creators.”

In the not at all happy camp: The Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music (Sacem), whose secretary general, David El Sayegh, described it as “a set-back but it is not the end”.

“Sacem remains dedicated to ensuring that creators are recognised and remunerated for the value of their work,” he added in a statement. “We will not be discouraged by today’s decision and will continue to mobilise the support of musicians and music lovers across the world, in the hopes of reaching a fair agreement with these platforms that will safeguard the future of the music industry.

“We are confident that the European Parliament will eventually support a framework that fully acknowledges the rights of creators in the digital landscape of the 21st century.”
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/05/eu...p-controversy/





Switch Pirates Don’t Want You to Pirate their Piracy-Enabling Firmware

But anti-piracy hackers are hacking the piracy hack for themselves.
Kyle Orland

As expected, the unpatchable Nintendo Switch exploit published months ago has now led to the existence of piracy-enabling custom firmware for the system. In an ironic twist, though, the makers of that firmware have introduced anti-piracy code to prevent people from pirating their own work.

While there is a free version Team Xecutor's custom SX OS available online, loading that firmware only allows Switch players to play homebrew software. To load pirated (or "backed up") versions of copyrighted Switch games, you have to buy a licensed copy of SX OS from an authorized reseller.

Trying to load the paid version of SX OS without a valid license leads the firmware to execute a "brick code" path, locking up the system's internal NAND memory behind a password. It's possible to recover your hardware from this "bricked" state, but regaining control can be an opaque process if you don't know what you're doing.

Vulnerability researcher Mike Heskin—who is helping Team ReSwitched in its efforts to develope open source Switch homebrew firmware Atmosphere—discovered and publicized SX OS' piracy protections on his blog and Twitter earlier this week.

"If I worked on cracking the Switch itself, why shouldn't I try to do the same with their product?" Heskin wrote. "It's out there for anyone to grab and has multiple layers of obfuscation, seems like an interesting puzzle to me... I just like to crack DRMs."

In the process, Heskin says he found that the SX OS simply modified much of Team ReSwitched's own code in violation of that firmware's open source license. "Even the code for talking to their license server uses an open-source crypto library so, yes, there are multiple license violations here," he wrote. "However, none of us expected differently, to be honest."

The “cat-and-mouse” game

For its part, Team Xecutor denied any attempts to maliciously damage the consoles of users that try to pirate its product. Speaking to The Verge, a Team Xecutor representative said it was just engaging in "a harmless cat-and-mouse game between aspiring hackers and competing teams... We do not 'brick' any consoles, ever. We do implement inconveniences to safeguard anti-tampering of our SX OS boot file to remain at a competitive advantage. It would simply be bad business to intentionally harm a user’s console."

"Our product has been designed with the greatest possible stability and polish," the Xecutor representative added. "Whenever someone is running our SX OS they can be assured they are running a safe and well-tested product. We cannot guarantee equal functionality and performance when any changes are made and therefore do not support any unauthorized modifications."

Heskin confirmed on Twitter that he's already reversed Xecutor's "brick code" on his guinea pig system and that the piracy protection attempt "didn't hinder in the slightest my progress in cracking the SX OS. Ironically, it had the reverse effect since I was able to observe where and how the next stages are loaded into which in turn allows to improve emulation solutions to further crack the code."

More generally, though, Heskin called piracy "a despicable and toxic practice that goes directly against the morals and values of the homebrew community. It completely discredits our attempts to show companies that we are capable of building positive solutions by modifying their products."

While Nintendo is obviously pushing back against Switch piracy any way it can, it's interesting to see portions of the console hacking community itself trying to prevent piracy on the Switch. If that means helping to enable piracy of the piracy software itself, then, apparently, so be it.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/...ling-firmware/





Film and TV Piracy Fell in France in 2017 but still Cost Country €1.2bn, says Study
Melanie Goodfellow

The pirating of audiovisual content dipped in France in 2017 but still cost the country $1.33b (€1.18b) in lost tax revenue and industry earnings, according to a new study by the French subsidiary of global consultancy and accounting group EY (formally known as Ernst & Young).

The study found the number of people accessing illegal audiovisual content in France each month fell by 8% to 10.6 million in 2017, from 11.6m in 2016.

At the same time, the amount of pirated content accessed each month dipped by 4%, from 17.4 items to 16.8 items in 2017. EY noted, however, while piracy numbers were down and the loss in tax revenue and earnings was 10% lower than in 2016 - when it came in at $152b (€1.35b) - it was still significant.

The French state was “the biggest loser”, missing out on $473m (€408m) in tax revenue in 2017, against $498m (€430m) in 2016, it revealed.

“Even though the illegal consumption of audiovisual content is falling, the loss in earnings, remains significant, particularly for the state,” commented EY associate Bruno Perrin, who led the research.

Within the industry, EY calculated losses of $39m (€35m) for cinema theatres, $170m (€151m) for the SVoD platforms and $374m (€331m) for pay-TV operators.

The study, released June 28, is the second time EY has examined the extent and impact of audiovisual piracy in France. It was conducted in partnership with French anti-piracy association ALPA and was based on research by Paris-based audience measurement company Médiamétrie into the pirating practices and content consumption habits of some 3,000 confirmed content pirates. These were defined as individuals who had illegally downloaded content in the previous 12 months.

Evolution of access to illegal content

While the closure of a number illegal direct download DDL and streaming sites in 2017 – such as zone.telechargement - had helped crack down on peer-to-peer (P2P) piracy, other forms of illegal access to pirate content were growing in popularity, the study revealed. IPTV piracy, using devices such as the KODI box, for example, had doubled over the past year even though its take up was still relatively low in France, in comparison with territories such as the US and the UK.

Overall, streaming was the most common way in which pirates accessed illegal content, accounting for 35% of the illegal market, followed by DDL (16%), P2P (11%), IPTV (13%), card-sharing (6%). In total, 6.6 million consumers accessed illegal content via a streaming site in 2017, against 6.8m in 2016.

Types of content

The study found feature films remained the most popular type of content for pirates, with 94% of those questioned saying they had illegally downloaded a feature, 54% of which were US films. French films were also popular. The research revealed that in March, April, May and November of 2017, French films had been the most pirated content with Ma famille T’ Adore Déjà, Papa Ou Maman 2, Raid Dingue and Valérian And The City Of A Thousand

Planets among the top pirated titles.

By genre, the most popular categories with pirates were comedy (18%), action (15%), fantasy (13%) and animation (11%). Other popular content included premium series and sports, although both formats were less pirated than in 2016.

“We see a significant drop in the pirating of series which is not without a link to the boom in SVoD platforms,” said the report.

The most pirated series were premium titles, where there was a lag between the local and international release. The most pirated series over the summer of 2017, for example, was Game of Thrones, which came out in France just 24 hours after its release in North America.

“This points to the importance the pirates attach to having immediate access to works,” said the report.

Further heavily pirated series included Doctor Who, The Flash and Spiral(Engrenages).

SVoD a key tool in the fight against piracy

The study suggested another key factor in the recent dip in piracy had been the “explosion in the SVoD offering” in France, with Netflix leading the charge.

“Netflix has managed to reel in pirate consumers who weren’t signed up for a legal offering before. In 2017, there were 20% more pirate consumers paying for a Netflix subscription than the year before,” said the study.

In addition to this figure, the study revealed the number of pirate consumers without a subscription to at least one legal service had fallen by 30% over the past year to less than 50% of the pirate consumer pool.

How to fight piracy

The study set forth a number of initiatives to help combat piracy including getting internet service providers and search engines to crack down on piracy activities on their platforms, as well as clamping down on companies that advertise on illegal sites and those which sell hardware, such as KOBI boxes, giving access to pirated content.

It also suggested more needed to be done to educate the public about the cyber-crime risks of accessing illegal content and as well as raise awareness about the downsides and poor ethics of piracy among youngsters and their parents. EY said the onus was also on the content industry to make available a reasonably-priced and easily accessible legal offering.

“Amid the explosion in exclusive and legal content, the access to content can seem prohibitive and complex for enthusiasts who then instead veer towards illegal offers and cancel their subscriptions,” read the report. It warned the fragmentation of the sports rights market in the territory, forcing sports fans to sign-up for several different platforms could encourage consumers to explore illegal platforms.

UK held up as a pioneer in fight against piracy

The report also featured a case study on the UK as a “pioneer in the struggle against piracy”. It heaped praise on initiatives such as the Alliance for Intellectual Property and its cooperation with search engines such as Google and Bing to suppress links to illegal sites; as well as awareness campaigns such as MomentsWorthPayingFor and the 2015 Operation Jasper, aimed at taking illegal content off social media sites. “In France, similar campaigns around authors rights and “the evils” of piracy have not really seen the light of day,” read the report.
https://www.screendaily.com/news/fil...130583.article





Top 10 Pirated Movies From Last Week
Chris Lange

Online streaming has become one of the more popular trends of late, brought about with the advent of Netflix, Hulu and HBO streaming services, just to name a few. However, this trend also has brought an increased wave of online piracy as well.

Pirating online content has been a problem in recent years, costing studios millions of dollars in lost ticket sales and media providers streaming revenue. In 2016, the Motion Picture Association of America said that nearly $1 billion worth of pirated movies and TV shows were downloaded.

One of the more popular mediums for downloading and watching content is BitTorrent, which operates as a peer-to-peer file-sharing service. It is capable of distributing a massive amount of data over the internet.

Although it is widely known that many files are shared and downloaded illegally over this service, it still manages to operate. Authorities use the site as well to track some users who don’t hide their IP addresses via a proxy and nab them for illegally distributing or downloading this content.

24/7 Wall St. has taken a look at some of the more popular movies that were pirated this past week. These are the top 10 most pirated movies of the past week on BitTorrent:

1. Rampage
2. Ready Player One
3. Blockers
4. Escape Plan 2: Hades
5. A Quiet Place
6. Avengers: Infinity War
7. Tomb Raider
8. Truth or Dare
9. Pacific Rim: Uprising
10. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

https://247wallst.com/media/2018/07/...-last-week-22/





File Sharing Site The Pirate Bay Hit with New Cryptojacking Claims
Ed Drake

The Pirate Bay (TPB), a peer-to-peer file sharing platform, has reportedly redeployed its cryptojacking script, which harnesses processing power from the site’s visitors to mine cryptocurrencies.

The site previously experimented with cryptojacking in September 2017. Now, according to TorrentFreak, TPB has decided to run the technique again—this time at a higher max CPU share. It’s unclear at present to what extent the script will prove to be an issue in practice, although some notable members of TPB forum appear to be less worried about its use.

One of the popular file-sharing sites on the Internet, TPB will use the script to automatically commandeer surplus processing power from those visiting its site, which in turn will be used to mine Monero in a background process.

At the time of their initial tests, the file sharing site said the script would use a maximum of 20-30% excess user processing power to generate revenue for them. However, according to initial findings, users are reporting as much as 90% being used with the new script, with some hardware reportedly overheating as a result of using the site.

The move is thought to be primarily in search of revenues lost from ad sales, with TPB rumoured to be suffering disproportionately with users running ad blockers.

The TPB community is already critical of the move, specifically on the secretive nature of the rollout, and the lack of an opt-out from using the script. However, some senior members of the community, such as forum super moderator ‘Sid’ have said the problems may be overstated.

Sid suggested individuals are only mining in short bursts, during the time it takes for source magnet links. This, he suggested, was unlikely to be noticeable, and certainly not harmful to the user’s hardware.

“The time it takes to download a torrent is completely and utterly irrelevant,” the so-called “TPB supermod” wrote in the forum. “All you require from TPB is a magnet link. Open the site. Find a torrent. Click the magnet link. Close the site. End of miner. If you are ever on TPB for more than 5 minutes or so you’re doing it wrong.And if you’re ever on TPB without an ad blocker you’re doing it doubly wrong.”

Cryptojacking is gaining in popularity online, as a method of monetizing websites with significant traffic. As an alternative to advertising, cryptojacking scripts allow site owners to generate revenue mining cryptocurrency like Monero, to maintain an ad-free service or offset the effects of ad-blocking software.
https://coingeek.com/file-sharing-si...acking-claims/





Pirate Bay SHUTDOWN: End Nearing for Torrent Site? Shock Claims as Major Outage Hits

PIRATE BAY fans have been put on alert about the future of the world’s most popular torrent download portal.
Dion Dassanayake

Pirate Bay has suffered a major outage this week with lengthy server downtime

Pirate Bay has been dubbed “the galaxy’s most resilient BitTorrent” site but recently has been experiencing major server issues.

Last week The Pirate Bay went down with a “bad gateway” error screen appearing across the entire torrent site.

And while it did return online, this week The Pirate Bay went down again for several days.

The same CloudFlare error message popped up when users of the leading torrent site tried to access it.

For long-term visitors of The Pirate Bay this would have been a familiar sight.

In the past year The Pirate Bay has gone down on numerous occasions, with each time the same “bad gateway” error message popping up.

During the latest outage The Pirate Bay was still accessible for torrent downloaders using the popular Tor browser.

While The Pirate Bay is back online now, it’s unclear what’s been causing these separate outages.

And one expert has given a startling verdict on what the future holds for The Pirate Bay.

Tech journalist Blayne Slabbert has claimed that piracy sites have an “uncertain future” which is underlined by the repeated Pirate Bay outages.

In an opinion piece online, Slabbert said the future is “not looking good” for piracy downloading sites.

A combination of the ongoing piracy crackdown, The Pirate Bay’s repeated downtime and the affordable price of streaming led Slabbert to this conclusion.

In a post on the Stuff New Zealand website, Slabbert said: “Despite large fines and jail time for the founders, The Pirate Bay fights on.
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style...rs-down-outage





Best Buy To Stop Selling CDs Entirely

Starting Sunday, Best Buy will no longer sell CDs at its stores.

According to a report from Billboard, the arrest of CD sales will happen nationwide.

Due to digital streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and others, CD sales have been falling in recent years.

Best Buy’s CD sales have recently only brought in about $40 million annually.

Interestingly, though, Best Buy will continue to sell vinyl records for the next two years.
https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2018...-cds-entirely/





Newspaper Shooting Shows Widening Use of Facial Recognition by Authorities
Cade Metz and Natasha Singer

When the police apprehended a suspect for the shootings at The Capital Gazette’s newsroom in Annapolis, Md., on Thursday, he refused to divulge his name. So the authorities identified the man, Jarrod Ramos, using a different method: facial recognition technology.

The revelation shone a spotlight on just how easily and how quickly officials can pinpoint suspects using a technology that is increasingly pervasive in law enforcement. Over the past few years, facial recognition has been quietly adopted by the authorities across the United States — including at the local policing level — and become part of the standard law enforcement toolkit.

Sixteen states let the Federal Bureau of Investigation use the technology to compare the faces of suspected criminals to driver’s license and ID photos, according to a report from the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology. And thanks to recent improvements to facial recognition by some of the world’s largest tech companies, its influence in policing is likely to grow.

“Face recognition is one of the most important developments in crime fighting since the discovery of fingerprinting in the 19th century,” said Joseph J. Atick, a pioneer in face recognition technology and executive chairman of ID4Africa, which works with African governments to institute national identification systems. “It’s hard to imagine a police department in the United States with more than 10 to 15 cops in it that does not have access to face recognition.”

The use of the technology in the Capital Gazette shooting comes amid a broader debate about facial recognition’s role in policing. Proponents see it as a powerful tool for catching criminals, but civil liberties experts have warned that it can be an instrument of mass surveillance that threatens people’s ability to anonymously go about their business.

That debate has heated up as tech companies like Amazon have recently drawn criticism for providing facial recognition technology to law enforcement agencies. Last month, more than two dozen civil rights organizations asked Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition system — called Rekognition — to the authorities.

The civil rights groups argued that Rekognition was overly powerful — according to Amazon’s web site, it can not only track individuals, it can also detect “up to 100 faces in challenging crowded photos,” as well as license plates captured by traffic cameras. That means the system could potentially ensnare many ordinary citizens, rather than being limited only to people committing crimes.

In the case of the Capital Gazette shooting, police did not use facial recognition in a way that violated people’s privacy, according to experts in the technology. They noted that the police were merely confirming the identity of a suspect whom they already had in custody, as opposed to trying to find a criminal in an enormous database of people.

Timothy Altomare, chief of the Anne Arundel County Police Department in Maryland, said on Friday that the police used the Maryland Image Repository System to identify Mr. Ramos when he did not cooperate with investigators. They initially tried to learn Mr. Ramos’s identity through his fingerprints, he said. But with the fingerprint identification moving slowly, they quickly switched to facial recognition.

Specifically, a photo of Mr. Ramos was sent to the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, which searched the repository of driver’s license photos and mug shots to find a match, said Mr. Altomare.

“We would have been much longer in identifying him and being able to push forward,” Mr. Altomare said about why the image system was used.

The progression of facial recognition technology has been rapid. Computing systems can now examine a photo or video footage of a face and match it to an image in an existing database of faces, all with an accuracy that rivals human sight, something that was not possible just five years ago. These systems also typically scan databases far quicker than human analysts.

Even in the technology’s earliest days, it piqued the interest of intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials. American military and intelligence agencies used facial recognition for years in Iraq and Afghanistan to identify potential terrorists. More recently, it has caught on at dozens of police departments around the United States to pursue drug dealers, prostitutes and other conventional criminal suspects.

That adoption is likely to accelerate as more companies — such as Amazon, NEC and Cognitec — widen their facial recognition offerings. The hardware and software that underpins the technology has also become less expensive, pushing myriad start-ups and other companies to enter the market.

Police departments and individuals can even build similar technology on their own with relative ease.

“If a police department hired me for a summer internship, I could cook them up a decent face recognition algorithm — not that I am offering my services,” said Jonathan Frankle, an artificial intelligence researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped write a study of face recognition technology at the Georgetown Law Center for Privacy and Technology.

Questions about privacy and concerns about potential misuse of facial recognition are also likely to increase, especially as the systems require a large database of images that faces can be matched against. The F.B.I. has a database that spans 400 million images, according to a recent report from the General Accounting Office. The Maryland Image Repository System contains millions of images from motor vehicle records.

Many local law enforcement agencies may run criminal searches against state databases of driver’s license photos, involving millions of citizens in a kind of government surveillance they didn’t sign up for, said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization.

“People who are in a driver’s license database did not agree to be part of a criminal search every time the police are looking for a suspect,” Ms. Lynch said. “A civil photograph should not be subject to search for criminal purposes.”

One added concern is that face recognition systems sometimes make mistakes, matching an image to the wrong person. “Depending on how good your image is, the accuracy can vary wildly,” Mr. Frankle said.

That’s especially so when photos are taken by overhead security cameras, which do not always provide a clear and straightforward image. Even in good conditions, face recognition technology fails at least part of the time. And those failures may increase as databases of potential suspects grow and there are more chances of mistaken outcomes, said Mr. Frankle.

“The accuracy of these systems depends on so many things, including the size of your database,” said Mr. Frankle. “The technology may get worse as the database gets bigger.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/b...cognition.html





Facial Recognition to be Deployed by Police Across London, Sparking Human Rights Concerns

The Independent on the scene as police trial controversial new technology
Lizzie Dearden

Millions of people face the prospect of being scanned by police facial recognition technology that has sparked human rights concerns.

The controversial software, which officers use to identify suspects, has been found to be “staggeringly inaccurate”, while campaigners have branded its use a violation of privacy.

But Britain’s largest police force is set to expand a trial across six locations in London over the coming months.

Police leaders claimed officers make the decision to act on potential matches with police records and images that do not spark an alert are immediately deleted.

But last month The Independent revealed the Metropolitan Police’s software was returning “false positives” – images of people who were not on a police database – in 98 per cent of alerts.

The technology, which has previously been used at Notting Hill Carnival and Remembrance Sunday services, was used on thousands of shoppers in Stratford, east London.

Scotland Yard said the Stratford operation would be “overt” and that members of the public passing the cameras would be handed leaflets, but The Independent did not observe any information being proactively given out.

The majority of those passing through a line of police officers straddling a bridge appeared not to see posters saying facial recognition technology was being used through the throngs of shoppers.

Sophia Pharaoh said she felt “uncomfortable” knowing the software was in use at the busy intersection, which sits between two shopping centres near Stratford Tube and railway station, adding: “It’s an invasion of privacy and there’s no way around it.”

Maya, a local resident who did not want her surname published, said she understood why police were trialling the new technology amid a nationwide rise in violent crime, but continued: “If they are doing that, people need to be aware of the reasons behind it. People need to understand what’s going on.”

Her boyfriend, Zee, believed facial recognition could make London safer but said: “If they are using it people should know, and they’re not aware. Hopefully it will bring benefits – the last thing we want to hear about is another murder or stabbing.”

Stratford, which was the site of major regeneration projects ahead of the London 2012 Olympics, has suffered a string of violent attacks, fights and robberies mirroring a wider uptick in violence.

In March a 21-year-old man was stabbed to death in the Stratford Centre and in September, another man was knifed during a “mass brawl” at neighbouring Westfield.

Shopper Kinga Denko said she was frightened by acid attacks and stabbings in the area and welcomed the trial of facial recognition, adding: “Police to do something to stop this.”

Footage from two cameras in Stratford were scanned live by the facial recognition software, which flagged up alerts to officers monitoring the system at the scene and deciding whether to detain potential “matches” to 12.5 million images on the Police National Database.

Detective Superintendent Bernie Galopin, the lead on facial recognition for London’s Metropolitan Police, said the operation was targeting wanted suspects to help reduce violent crime and make the area safer.

“It allows us to deal with persons that are wanted by police where traditional methods may have failed,” he told The Independent, after statistics showed police were failing to solve 63 per cent of knife crimes committed against under-25s.

“In this area there are concerns about the level of violence and this is just one of the methods we are using to reduce it.”

Det Supt Galopin said the Met was assessing how effective facial recognition was at tackling different challenges in British policing, which is currently being stretched by budget cuts, falling officer numbers, rising demand and the terror threat.

“There’s opportunity for this to grow but the key is getting the right balance with legal and regulatory issues and people’s rights,” he added. “I think when the public know a lot more about it they will be reassured. We can knit this into the systems we’ve got and it can be a really powerful tool.

“I believe strongly that what we’re doing is right and appropriate.”

The officer said police were currently applying pre-existing legislation, codes of practice and legal principles to facial recognition but said he would welcome “more cohesive” regulation.

Hannah Couchman, an advocacy and policy officer at Liberty who monitored the trial in Stratford, described the technology as “lawless”.

“There’s no dedicated legislation, there’s no guidance, there’s no good practice,” she said. “It’s staggeringly inaccurate and this sort of technology has been shown in America has shown to be actively biased and misidentify women and black people.

“Liberty believes the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society.”

Liberty has threatened legal action against South Wales Police over its facial recognition programme, while campaign group Big Brother Watch is attempting a case against the Met.

The latest trial came as the government announced the creation of a new oversight and advisory board for facial recognition in law enforcement, which could be expanded to ports, airports, custody suites and police mobile devices.

The Home Office’s strategy on biometrics, which also include fingerprints and DNA, said the board would make recommendations on policy changes and oversight arrangements for technology that is currently being purchased ad hoc by police forces.

Baroness Williams of Trafford, a Home Office minister, said: “Biometric data plays a vital role in keeping people safe from crime and terrorism – but we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-a8422056.html





UK Reveals Plan for a Centralized Biometric Database That Sounds Like an Absolute Nightmare
Sidney Fussell

The UK government’s Home Office released a report this week announcing plans for a forthcoming centralized biometric database of its citizens, compiling DNA, fingerprint, face, and possibly even voice data for law enforcement to access and share, according to the Telegraph. In addition to helping local police solve crimes, the Home Office report also proposes using the centralized database for vetting migrants at borders and verifying Visa applications. Pushback has been swift, as civil rights groups argue that face recognition is faulty, dubiously legal, and often collected without public consent.

The Home Office’s “Biometrics Strategy” report, commissioned four years ago but released this week, makes a series of recommendations for how the UK government should collect, analyze, and regulate biometric data. Police, immigration, and passport agencies already collect DNA, face, and fingerprint data—the government’s face database has 12.5 million people, the Telegraph reported—but this would be the first time the UK centralizes it. The Home Office caused a scandal in April when an official said it would be too expensive to remove innocent people from its criminal face databases of mugshots.

“The implementation of a single biometrics platform will remove duplication and costly or inefficient workarounds in operational delivery,” the report reads. “This platform is not a new data set, rather a technical platform through which existing data can be more efficiently dealt with. This will also make it easier to use biometric data more widely across the Home Office, operational bodies such as police forces and the National Crime Agency, other Government Departments and international partners. By bringing these together, HOB will deliver biometric services that will enable greater operational efficiency, flexibility, integration and automation.”

As in the US, without tangible federal regulation, there are many opportunities for the misuse of biometric data. What does it mean when the Home Office says its collection of biometric data will be “lawful,” when the laws themselves remain unclear on how to ethically collect, store, or share biometric data?

“In addition to addressing concerns with the oversight of facial biometric applications, we will develop options to simplify and extend governance and oversight of biometrics through consultation with stakeholders over the next 12 months,” reads the report.

Norman Lamb, Chair of the UK’s Science and Technology Committee, criticized the report, saying it only delays real policymaking on the issue.

“The ‘Strategy’ seems to boil down to setting up an advisory ‘board’ to suggest policy recommendations to Government,” the Telegraph quotes Lamb as saying, “rather than telling us what actions the Government will take and, just as importantly, what outcomes it wants to avoid.”

A centralized, government biometric database is a nightmare scenario for many in the privacy space. Police have access to CCTV cameras embedded throughout public spaces, drones that can avoid detection and track people, and even face recognition designed to pinpoint individuals in large crowds. Without any obstacles, the Home Office can essentially grant itself the right to end anonymity.

Big Brother Watch, a UK-based anti-surveillance group, released a report in May detailing a staggering 90% false positive rate for face recognition in Wales. The group has rallied against police use of face recognition in the UK and the recent bid to collect and use voice data.

“Clearly, the potential for the growth of a gargantuan facial recognition system is a real risk, and arguably would be the natural destination for this technology, if we so uncritically accept its use now.”
https://gizmodo.com/uk-reveals-plan-...-th-1827237848





UK Launches National Dashcam Database for Snitching on Bad Drivers

Drivers in England and Wales can now ever-so-politely report you to the fuzz.
Claire Reilly

Drivers in England and Wales now have a direct line to police for ratting on their fellow motorists, thanks to a new national dash cam database.

The National Dash Cam Safety Portal, run by UK dashcam manufacturer Nextbase, lets drivers upload footage from their dashcam to a single database and send it directly to police, the BBC reports.

Drivers can choose their region of England or Wales and send footage of accidents or illegal behaviour on the road directly to local police, as well as sending a witness statement that can then be used in court.

"While the benefits to motorists of this groundbreaking portal are clear, this convenience extends to police forces," Superintendent Paul Moxley, of West Mercia Police, told the BBC. "A process which previously took hours can now be reduced to a matter of minutes."

While dashcams were once a gadget for professional drivers (and Russian motorists wanting to go viral online), they're quickly gaining popularity as a means for drivers to record their activity on the road and access instant evidence of incidents for police and insurance firms.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/u...n-bad-drivers/





Forced Labor Is the Backbone of the World’s Electronics Industry

Poor people around the world are streaming into Malaysia in search of factory work. Once they arrive, they often find only hardship.
Ariel Ramchandani

Malaysia bills itself as “heaven for foreign companies.” Since the 1970s, the Southeast Asian nation has drawn 5,000 foreign firms from more than 40 countries to set up facilities in parts of the country specially set aside for business development. The electronics industry—the country’s largest manufacturing sector, which makes everything from semiconductors to TVs to computer keyboards—accounts for over 36 percent of the country’s exports and a quarter of its employment, according to the country’s manufacturing-development agency. United States electronics companies have invested billions in their Malaysian operations to date.

The results are plain. In Kuala Lumpur cranes stretch outward among the gleaming towers in a perpetual construction boom powered by foreign investment. The streets are spotless and well policed, the water is clean, and the politics are relatively stable. Consumers around the world benefit from products like mobile devices, circuit boards, and LED screens.

At the heart of this economic success are migrant workers. From Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines, Indonesia, and India, they arrive at Kuala Lumpur International Airport by the scoreful, papers in hand, hoping for a better life. Estimates of the number of foreign workers in Malaysia vary widely, from the government’s count of almost 1.8 million to perhaps twice as many, which would amount to a quarter of the country’s workforce. Migrant-worker advocates estimate one-third of those workers are undocumented.

Many foreign workers believe “Malaysia is the land of milk and honey,” said Joseph Paul Maliamauv, of Tenaganita, a workers’-rights organization, when I met him at the group’s office in Petaling Jaya, a suburb on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. “They come out there, and think the streets are paved with gold.”

But upon arrival, migrants find this paradise doesn’t extend to them. Malaysia is “a booming economy and one of the most developed economies, multicultural and multinational, with a huge amount of foreign investment,” said David Welsh of the Solidarity Center, an affiliate of the labor group AFL-CIO, when I met him in Kuala Lumpur. “But in a region plagued with human-rights abuses and labor abuses, Malaysia is in many ways transparently the regional leader.”

Malaysia provides a window into a troubling part of the global economy that makes the whole system work, one that touches and connects practically every part of the world and billions of people: a flow of humans that shapes lives, creates the world’s things, and is built on the availability of a massive, inexpensive, and flexible labor supply. In Malaysia, it’s possible to see what maintains that flow: the recruitment strategies that bring workers to factories, the government policies that are so ineffective at protecting workers, the struggle to improve working conditions up and down supply chains, and the global political and economic realities that sustain the demand for cheap, unremitting work.

In 2014, the watchdog organization Verité released a study on migrant workers in the electronics sector in Malaysia. Among a sample of more than 400 foreign electronics workers, at least 32 percent were, by Verité’s definition, forced to work against their will. According to the report, “these results suggest that forced labor is present in the Malaysian electronics industry in more than isolated incidents, and can indeed be characterized as widespread.”

That same year, the U.S. State Department ranked Malaysia “Tier 3” in its annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, the worst rating possible, alongside countries such as Iran and North Korea. This rating is reserved for countries that commit egregious human-rights abuses. The next year the country was upgraded to a “Tier 2 Watch List” country, and then a full-fledged Tier 2 country in 2017—upgrades that many felt were unwarranted, especially because in 2015 graves of upwards of 130 suspected human-trafficking victims were found at the country’s border with Thailand. “It made a mockery,” Shawn MacDonald, the CEO of Verité, said of the State Department's revision. Malaysia had “literally done nothing—if anything a slide backwards.”

Welsh and others said that the upgrade was widely assumed to be because of a side agreement, part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), between the United States and Malaysia that would give workers more rights. MacDonald alleges that the U.S. improved Malaysia’s ranking because of the country’s “very, very adamant” support for the TPP. The TPP fell apart (bringing the side agreement down with it), but nevertheless the State Department upgraded the ranking, one of the best ways to encourage improvement on the human-rights front.

American State Department workers in Malaysia who contributed to the trafficking report “were very upset” at the upgrade, Charles Santiago, a member of parliament for Klang, an area near Kuala Lumpur, told me over lunch. “Really upset.”

“I went to the State Department and simply said, ‘You guys should be embarrassed. You have done a disservice to your own government.’” (The State Department told me that a new TIP report was imminent, and that it would withhold comment until the next report was released.)

Still, Malaysia has made some improvements, at least on paper. According to Jodie Mitra, from the International Labour Organization, the UN’s labor-standards agency, the government’s efforts to address human-trafficking issues have “improved, as we note increasing trafficking investigations, prosecutions, and convictions.” But, Mitra told me via email, “enforcement and implementation efforts … need to be strengthened as abusive labour practices of migrant workers that may amount to forced labour continue to exist.”

When I visited Malaysia in April, the country’s election was looming; party flags, especially the blue and white scales of the Barisan Nasional, the ruling coalition, hung in rows off the front of practically every building, it seemed. Everyone said it would be business as usual, that despite the scandals that plagued then-Prime Minister Najib Razak, whose party had been in power for 60 years, gerrymandering would ensure that he continued to hold power. But in May, at age 92, Najib’s mentor and the country’s former leader, Mahathir Mohamad, became prime minister.

The new regime is made up of a center-left coalition that includes the Democratic Action Party (DAP), Santiago’s party. “I can tell you there’s been direct reach-out at the highest levels to members of parliament asking what priorities should be to provide road maps of priority issues,” Welsh said. The Labor Consistency Plan—the workers’-rights reforms that had been discussed during the TPP negotiations—is back on the table. And yet, advocates aren’t wholly pleased with the new regime. Against the wishes of the DAP, the government announced the end of a rehiring program for foreign workers at the end of May, which will remove legal protections from hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers. (The country has tried to address the problem in the past by either granting large numbers of illegal workers amnesty or trying to deport undocumented workers.) “The government has not yet established its strategies on labor migration,” said Catherine Laws, a technical officer at the ILO.

Still, the election results might be the impetus to move forward, to build a system of worker protections where there had before been none. The absence of strong labor laws presents an enormous opportunity, said Welsh.

There are many ways for a migrant worker to become trapped in a forced-labor situation, in which a worker has no recourse if work conditions are poor or he or she is not being paid. But the problem typically begins at recruitment, the kickoff to a cycle of debt and bondage that can trap people for years and decades. The Verité study found that 92 percent of foreign workers paid recruitment fees to get their jobs, often exceeding what’s standard in the industry (one month’s wages). The money often goes to both a recruiter in Malaysia and in the worker’s home country. These fees are due well before the worker leaves his or her home country, and often plunge an entire family into debt.

This was the case for Novita Marbun, a worker from Medan, Indonesia, whom I spoke with. When Marbun originally came to Malaysia at the age of 19, she paid 1,500 ringgit—the equivalent of about $375 —to get her job, much more than she makes in a month. Her parents took out a 15-year loan on their house to help pay the fee and other costs of her trip. The money she makes now only covers daily expenses and feeding her son, who is still in Indonesia, but she cannot get enough hours to make enough to help her parents. “I can’t save more money,” she said. As MacDonald puts it, “The system is designed to make the most poor pay the costs of recruitment.”

Workers coming from rural regions around Asia can amass large amounts of debt just in an effort to get to a big city where they can get recruited. Anne Beatrice, of the North South Initiative (NSI), an organization based in Kuala Lumpur that supports workers both in their home countries and when they come to Malaysia, told me that by the time a Nepali worker reaches the capital city of Kathmandu, she typically has already procured a sub-agent in her home village, sometimes at great expense to her family. When she reaches the city, she has already invested so much it can feel like it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t like the look of the recruiter or the contract, or the recruiter substitutes the contract before she gets on the plane. “Recruiters have sub-sub-sub-recruiters and sub-sub-sub-agents,” said Sumitha Shaanthinni, a lawyer who works with migrants. “The recruiter doesn’t go to the village; the sub-agent goes to the village.”

Once she arrives in Malaysia the charges continue to accrue. Workers can find themselves paying for a levy for a work permit (a cost which now the law has shifted to the employer, at least in theory), as well as fees for housing and their visa. Although it is against the law, many employers also confiscate and hold workers’ passports in order to keep them from leaving an untenable situation. (Recruiters have their own costs to cover—often some that are less above-board than others. Maliamauv, of Tenaganita, describes a situation in which government officials provide recruiters with more work permits than there are jobs available. How a recruiter “got that bid, those jobs on paper, you need to guess. Paid a bribe.”)

Migrants in Malaysia do not usually enter illegally, labor advocates told me. It’s not “people climbing over fences. Most of them come documented,” said Maliamauv. Instead, workers find themselves undocumented when they flee a job, or their employment contract is not renewed, since their visas are tied to their employers. And being undocumented means a worker is at risk of being deported during a raid, and that they have no protections against exorbitant fees when their recruiter gets them another job.

“After you pay the levy deduction, the passport deduction, and the shelter deduction, your salary is so low,” said Beatrice. The contract doesn’t mention these other charges, and what workers are left with is often not enough. When the workers complain, an agent will encourage them to do the job, or, said Beatrice, the agent says, “‘Leave the job, I will find you another place.’ [The workers] don’t realize they can’t do it, and will become undocumented.”

Once settled in, undocumented or not, workers face very difficult living conditions. When I spoke with Manjoj Chapagain, a translator and migrant worker, he had just come from taking Malay doctors around a migrant-worker camp near the city of Petaling Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur. Five or six thousand workers live in the camp, by his estimation. He said the doctors were “very surprised” by the living conditions, in which 20 people can sometimes share a 1,000-square-foot house, with 10 sleeping there at night and 10 in the morning, as they rotate in and out for different work shifts. There’s no clean drinking water and no plumbing. “The doctors had never seen this kind of mess and kind of smell,” he told me. These living conditions can further place workers in a precarious situation, as they are not allowed to stay in Malaysia if they contract certain diseases, such as hepatitis, according to Maliamauv.

Often workers fall ill “because the living conditions are so bad,” Maliamauv said. Female workers are also frequently sent home if they get pregnant. According to the Nepali embassy, 386 Nepali workers died in Malaysia in 2016. By the embassy’s count, about 300 on average have died per year since 2005. The cause of death isn’t always determined, and unexpected deaths can be extremely hard financially on their families, who are left with the debt to recruiters but no earnings, to say nothing of the emotional toll.

The treatment of workers is not uniformly bad across companies and sectors. Well-known multinational companies, many of which are monitored by watchdog groups here and abroad, tend to have better track records. The problems come further down in the supply chains. “The big corporations, the multinational companies, I don’t think have a problem much,” Shaanthinni said. “They mostly comply with the code of conduct that they have and don’t deduct wages or keep the passports, things like that. But their supply chains do that. How much they are monitoring [that] is another question altogether.”

Many companies emphasize that they push their supply chains to function at the same standard that they do. And many major electronics brands say on their websites that they expect companies in their supply chains to comply with both legal standards and human-rights standards. However, supply chains are complicated, with factories of varying sizes, employers who are often recruiters, and, in Malaysia, worker protections that are both weak and inadequately enforced.

Since 2004, many companies have looked to a watchdog organization, the Responsible Business Alliance (formerly the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition, or EICC) to help them monitor their supply chains. Bob Mitchell, from the RBA, told me that the organization relies on “diversity in approaches to addressing endemic issues in supply chains,” because the problems are so complex.

“The further you get down, the less leverage you have as a company or an individual company,” Mitchell said. RBA works to harness the power of the brand names to pressure the downstream suppliers. But some lawyers and workers’-rights advocates say this approach has not improved the situation, in part because of the lack of transparency from companies about which suppliers are in their supply chains. Even the companies that have prioritized treating their workers well, such as Patagonia, still struggle with the further reaches of their supply chains.

And of course, many workers do not know where the fruits of their labor end up either. “If you are going to produce a small component, sometimes you don’t even know what the component is,” Shaanthinni said. “If it is a screw, how are they going to know? … Lower down, they provide the metal. You say, ‘What’s your job?,’” and the worker answers, “‘Oh, I cut metal.’ How am I going to know what company it is going to?”
https://www.theatlantic.com/business...ronics/563873/





Dell to Return to Public Trading, but Still in Its Founder’s Hands
Michael J. de la Merced

When Michael S. Dell took his namesake technology company private in 2013, he said that doing so would give him the freedom to prepare it for a future that stretched well beyond personal computers.

Having drastically expanded Dell into a huge one-stop technology shop for businesses, he and his financial partner, the investment firm Silver Lake, plan to bring the company back to the public markets — albeit in a complicated fashion that keeps them firmly in control.

Mr. Dell and Silver Lake are expected to announce as early as Monday that they have struck a $21.7 billion deal to buy out investors in a special class of shares created in 2016 to help Dell buy the networking company EMC. That stock effectively tracks the performance of Dell’s 82 percent stake in VMware, the fast-growing network software company that Dell inherited when it bought EMC. (The other 18 percent of VMware is publicly traded as a different stock.)

The deal, which was approved by the boards of Dell and VMware on Sunday evening, would simplify the stock structure of Dell and its publicly traded subsidiary. But it would also mark the return of Dell to the public markets, with a twist: The special shares held by Mr. Dell and Silver Lake would give them more votes than other investors.

The transaction represents in some ways the culmination of a nearly $100 billion bet by Mr. Dell and Silver Lake that, away from the harsh glare of public markets, they could retool a company best-known for making personal computers and traditional servers for an age of smartphones and cloud computing. Not only does Dell still supply the machines that sit on the desks inside many office buildings, it has also found a ready market selling equipment and software to the kinds of networked computing services that were once thought to spell its end.

“We’ve completely transformed our company and become a key leader in huge segments of the industry,” Mr. Dell said in a telephone interview.

It was an expensive wager, with Mr. Dell and Silver Lake spending roughly $25 billion to take Dell private, and then $67 billion to buy EMC — a transaction that created a kind of one-stop shop for hardware and software needed by companies to run their businesses.

“This has been the largest, most complex and successful integration in the history of the technology industry,” Egon Durban, the Silver Lake managing partner who has worked closely with Mr. Dell, said in an interview.

But that bet has paid off in many ways.

Dell has increased its share of both the PC and the server markets. The research firm IDC estimated that Dell’s worldwide server revenue jumped more than 50 percent in the first quarter, taking the top spot from the longtime sector leader Hewlett Packard as it sells more equipment to cloud service providers. Dell also moved into the top spot in United States PC shipments in the first quarter, according to estimates by the research firm Gartner.

“In 2012, people were saying the PC was dead. It wasn’t,” Mr. Dell said. “Three years ago, people were saying that everything’s going to the public cloud. Turns out that was completely wrong, too.”

And Mr. Dell has pushed the company into newer areas, like internet-connected devices and artificial intelligence.

With much of the transformation work done, Dell’s owners are ready to make the company public once again.

Under the terms of the deal, Dell will offer either $109 a share in cash or 1.3665 shares of newly issued Class C stock in itself for each share of the tracking stock, known by its ticker, DVMT. The cash portion of the transaction will come from an $11 billion special dividend that VMware will issue to all its shareholders — $9 billion of which will go to Dell.

The transaction would help simplify what has been a complicated stock structure. If the deal is approved by shareholders of the DVMT stock, there will be only two publicly traded types of shares tied to Dell: Dell’s Class C shares and the regular shares in VMware.

Some DVMT shareholders — including Carl C. Icahn, the billionaire who bitterly fought Mr. Dell’s 2013 deal to take his company private — may fight for more money. But Mr. Dell and Mr. Durban pointed out that DVMT shares, although trading well below VMware’s own publicly traded stock, have more than doubled during their existence. The new offer is 29 percent higher than where DVMT shares closed on Friday.

While the transaction would return Dell to the public markets, the new stock structure would leave Mr. Dell with a free hand to keep making changes in the company to adapt to new trends.

“I believe we’ve accomplished what we set out to do in evolving the business,” Mr. Dell said. “But the work of evolving a company is never done.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/b...al-vmware.html





How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Secret Government Phone Tracker to Find Him

And how it might change what cops can do with our smartphones.
Cyrus Farivar

On a warm summer’s day in 2008, police spotted a man walking outside his apartment in Santa Clara, California, one of the many bedroom communities spread across Silicon Valley. Undercover FBI officers saw him outside the building and began following him on foot, radioing to their colleagues nearby. The man saw the agents, and so he began to walk quickly. They followed suit.

After months of tracking him via sting bank accounts and confidential informants, the officers had their man. He had told the apartment complex’s manager that he was Steven Travis Brawner, software engineer: a profile that fit right in with many other tenants in the area. But at the time of his arrest, officers didn’t know his real name: After watching his activities at a distance, they called him simply the “Hacker.” Between 2005 and 2008, federal investigators believed that the Hacker and two other men filed over 1,900 fake tax returns online, yielding $4 million sent to over 170 bank accounts.

The Hacker was found out through the warrantless use of a secretive surveillance technology known as a stingray, which snoops on cell phones. Stingrays, or cell-site simulators, act as false cell phone towers that trick phones into giving up their location. They have become yet another tool in many agencies’ toolbox, and their use has expanded with little oversight—and no public knowledge that they were even being used until the Hacker went on an obsessive quest to find out just how law enforcement tracked him that summer day. When he tugged on that thread, he found out something else: that police might be tracking a lot more than we even know on our phones, often without the warrants that are usually needed for comparable methods of invasive surveillance.

The Hacker began breathing more heavily. He may have thought about heading toward the nearby train station, which would take him out of town, or perhaps towards the San Jose International Airport, just three miles away. The Hacker couldn’t be sure if there were cops following him, or if he was just being paranoid. But as soon as he saw the marked Santa Clara Police Department cars, he knew the truth, and he started running.

But the Hacker didn’t get far. He was quickly surrounded, arrested and searched. The police found the key to the Hacker’s apartment. Later, after police obtained a warrant to search his apartment, they found there a folding chair and a folding table that served as a desk. There was no other furniture—his bed was a cot. Law enforcement also found his Verizon Wireless mobile Internet AirCard, and false driver’s licenses with the names “Steven Travis Brawner,” “Patrick Stout” and more. A 2010 FBI press release later stated that the agency also “seized a laptop and multiple hard drives, $116,340 in cash, over $208,000 in gold coins, approximately $10,000 in silver coins, false identification documents, false identification manufacturing equipment, and surveillance equipment.”

Investigators identified the Hacker, via his fingerprints, as Daniel Rigmaiden, previously convicted of state-level misdemeanors. According to an Internal Revenue Service special agent’s search warrant, Rigmaiden’s computer also included “email regarding leaving the United States for the country of Dominica . . . [and] documents regarding obtaining citizenship in other countries; emails regarding paying off Dominican officials to get Dominican birth certificates and passports; and a Belize residency guide.”

Rigmaiden’s case dates back several years. In 2007 and early 2008, the IRS identified a bank account at Compass Bank in Phoenix that was receiving fraudulent tax refunds under an LLC as being involved in the possible scheme.

Rigmaiden’s indictment was initially sealed, pending cooperation with a federal investigation. But from the start, Rigmaiden declined to cooperate, and moved to represent himself (after firing three attorneys), and the case was subsequently unsealed in 2009.

“The question is what’s the law that governs its use?” Eric King, a longtime London-based privacy activist, said when I asked him about the stingray. “We know that the police have them and we know that the police use them, not that they’ve ever admitted it, and have done so for 10 years. They refuse to engage, they refuse to say that they bought them. We need a public debate around this sort of stuff.”

That debate is very slowly starting to happen. And that is due, in large part, to Rigmaiden’s unlikely exposure of the stingray.

***

Rigmaiden found out about fraudulent tax return schemes in the mid-2000s. He quickly figured out that tax returns are largely voluntary. The IRS simply doesn’t have enough agents and auditors to do a thorough check of everyone. Most IRS personnel do the best they can, but a few slip through the cracks. This meant that Rigmaiden could file a fake tax return for someone who had died, and pocket the refund. He would file dozens at a time, sometimes more, before one would come back with money. His first successful one netted $9,000. “I was going to make a million and then I was going to stop,” he said. (He told WNYC’s podcast Note to Self in 2015 that he was planning on leaving the country after making the million dollars.)

In late 2007, Rigmaiden moved to Santa Clara. The city, then as now, is home to students and lots of tech workers. He had a comfortable life in an urban area, and lived near a train station and airport should he need to make a quick getaway. But he knew that the longer he stayed in one place, the more exposed to law enforcement he would be. Unbeknownst to the fraudster, federal prosecutors in Arizona—one of the places where he had stashed his money—filed a sealed indictment against Rigmaiden on July 23, 2008.

By the time he was arrested, Rigmaiden had made about $500,000. After Rigmaiden was arrested in California, he was quickly transported to the Florence Correctional Center, about 65 miles southeast of Phoenix. Despite being incarcerated, Rigmaiden could not sit still. He knew that he had been careful. He had used multiple fake identities, with fake documents, and paid in cash. How could law enforcement have not only found him out, but found him in his own apartment, where hardly anyone knew he lived?

Rigmaiden thought there might be something that the government wasn’t telling him—there might be some secret surveillance tool afoot. He tried pressing his federal public defenders to listen, but they wouldn’t. Within two months, he’d fired one of his lawyers, and then another. In essence, he didn’t feel that they were technically sophisticated enough to be able to help him get the answers he needed. Eventually, the accused fraudster got permission to represent himself (pro se), a legally risky move.

Once he was representing himself, he was allowed to use the law library for five hours a day (up from the usual three hours a week). It became a full-time job, immersing himself in legal procedures—but it was likely the most productive way to spend his time behind bars. Fortunately, at the beginning, a fellow inmate and disbarred attorney helped him out with some of the basics, including general court procedure, how to draft a motion and correct legal citation. By October 2009, Rigmaiden had received boxes and boxes (over 14,000 pages in total) of criminal discovery that would help him understand how the government planned to prosecute its case. In the penultimate box, he saw the word “stingray” in a set of notes.

As a prisoner, he wasn’t allowed Internet access, but sometimes a “case manager,” a sort of guidance counselor, could be convinced to run online searches for inmates who were pursuing legal research. Though this process, Rigmaiden located a Harris Corporation brochure with the StingRay name. Bingo. The device advertised various types of cellular interception.

Although Rigmaiden was pro se, he had a shadow counsel, or a lawyer who was ready to step in if the pro se defendant wished to take on formal counsel. That lawyer had a paralegal, a man named Dan Colmerauer. Rigmaiden could call Colmerauer from a jailhouse pay phone and ask him to run Google searches for him, and tell him the results by phone. Then Colmerauer would print those webpages, and put them in the mail to Rigmaiden, who in turn would have to make handwritten notes about which links to follow and mail that back to Colmerauer. It’s how he found out everything he knew about stingrays.

While StingRay is a trademark, stingray has since become so ubiquitous in law enforcement and national security circles as to also often act as the catch-all generic term—like Kleenex or Xerox. A stingray acts as a fake cell tower and forces cell phones and other mobile devices using a cell network (like Rigmaiden’s AirCard, which provided his laptop with Internet access) to communicate with it rather than with a bona fide mobile network. Stingrays are big boxes—roughly the size of a laser printer—like something out of a 1950s-era switchboard, with all kinds of knobs and dials and readouts. Stingrays can easily be hidden inside a police surveillance van or another nearby location.

All of our cell phones rely on a network of towers and antennas that relay our signal back to the network and then connect us to the person that we’re communicating with. As we move across a city, mobile networks seamlessly hand off our call from one tower to the next, usually providing an uninterrupted call. But in order for the system to work, the mobile phone provider needs to know where the phone actually is so that it can direct a signal to it. It does so by sending a short message to the phone nearly constantly—in industry terminology this is known as a ping. The message basically is asking the phone: “Are you there?” And your phone responds: “Yes, I’m here.” (Think of it as roughly the mobile phone version of the children’s swimming pool game Marco Polo.) If your phone cannot receive a ping, it cannot receive service. The bottom line is, if your phone can receive service, then the mobile provider (and possibly the cops, too) know where you are.

Rigmaiden eventually pieced together the story of his capture. Police found him by tracking his Internet Protocol (IP) address online first, and then taking it to Verizon Wireless, the Internet service provider connected with the account. Verizon provided records that showed that the AirCard associated with the IP address was transmitting through certain cell towers in certain parts of Santa Clara. Likely by using a stingray, the police found the exact block of apartments where Rigmaiden lived.

This tracking technology is even more invasive than law enforcement presenting a court order for location data to a mobile phone provider, because rather than have the government provide a court order for a company to hand over data, the stingray simply eliminates the middleman. The government, armed with its own stingray, can simply pluck the phone’s location (and possibly the contents of calls, text messages or any other unencrypted data being transmitted at the time, depending on the configuration) directly out of the air.

The Harris Corporation, a longstanding American military contractor, won’t say exactly how stingrays work, or exactly who it’s selling to, but it’s safe to say that it’s selling to lots of federal agencies and, by extension, local law enforcement. The company’s 2017 annual financial report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows that in recent years Harris has increased its sales of surveillance equipment and related tactical radio systems. It works with not only the U.S. military and law enforcement, but also Canada, Australia, Poland and Brazil, among other countries. The company has profited over $1.8 billion from fiscal year 2013 through 2017.

A 2008 price list shows that its StingRays, KingFish and related devices sell for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. But like everything else in the tech world, they’re getting cheaper, smaller and better all the time.

Like many other enforcement tools, the federal government has used grants to encourage local law enforcement to acquire stingrays in the name of fighting terrorism. But, as the Rigmaiden case shows, over time, particularly as these tools become cheaper and more commonplace—they’re used to bust criminal suspects like him.

So far, judges and courts are not in universal agreement over whether locating a person or device, as the stingray helps to do, should require a warrant. Stingrays don’t necessarily mean that conversation will be picked up, so wiretap laws, which require warrants, don’t apply. In most cases, police officers would need at least a “pen register” court order, named for a kind of technology that allows police to get call logs. The pen register court order has lesser standards than a warrant: Rather than requiring that officers show probable cause, a pen register court order requires that law enforcement only needs relevance to an ongoing investigation. But stingrays are more invasive than pen registers, and as Rigmaiden’s case would show, law enforcement didn’t have any kind of specified protocol about what it needs to do to use this new technology.

As 2010 rolled around, Rigmaiden decided that he needed allies. He began sending his case details and research file out to various privacy and civil liberties organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). There were likely two major red flags that led to him being ignored—he was representing himself without the benefit of counsel, and believed that the government had used some secret surveillance tool against him. They likely thought he was totally nuts—despite the fact that there was already some evidence that the police were using phones as tracking devices. None of the organizations ever responded.

One of the people Rigmaiden sent his file to was Christopher Soghoian, a bearded and ambitious privacy researcher. At the time, Soghoian was a computer science doctoral student always looking for another way to push the envelope, as well as discover how surveillance was actually being conducted in the real world. Years earlier, as a first-year doctoral student at Indiana University, Soghoian figured out by futzing around with Facebook which of his classmates likely moonlighted at local strip clubs. In 2009 and 2010, Soghoian worked at the Federal Trade Commission, and at one point used his government ID to get into a security industry trade show and made a surreptitious recording of Sprint executives bragging about how they’d handed over customers’ GPS information to law enforcement eight million times in a single year. In short, Soghoian was the perfect match for Rigmaiden.

On Monday April 11, 2011, while visiting the offices of the EFF in San Francisco, Soghoian received an unsolicited e-mail from Colmerauer.

Dear Mr. Sohoian[sic],
Daniel Rigmaiden instructed me to e-mail you the attached Memorandum. This is in regard to cell phone tracking and locating. He thinks it may be of interest to you but you may have to read past the introduction before understanding why. If you want the exhibits please e-mail Dan Colmerauer at screenwriter2@earthlink.net and make said request. Dictated but not read.

Daniel Rigmaiden


Soghoian tried to get other lawyers that he knew interested, but they saw the extensive pro se filings as a huge red flag. Lots of people think they’re being surveilled by the government with secret technology, but hardly anyone can prove it. Soghoian didn’t dismiss it out of hand. “My reaction wasn’t, ‘what is this strange device,’” Soghoian told The Verge in 2016. “It was, ‘oh I read about this in graduate school.’ But I read about it as a thing that was possible, not a thing that the police . . . were using.” But the grad student was skeptical.

Still, Soghoian asked Colmerauer to send what he had. What Soghoian received back was a 200-page “meticulously researched” document that had been originally handwritten in a jailhouse library.

Soghoian understood how to get lawmakers’ attention—through the media and advocacy organizations. He eventually sent it on to a friendly Wall Street Journal reporter, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, as she was boarding a plane bound for Las Vegas, where she was going to attend the 2011 DEF CON, the annual hacker conference. On September 22, 2011, Valentino-DeVries’ story hit the paper: “‘Stingray’ Phone Tracker Fuels Constitutional Clash.” (It was her first front-page story for the Journal.)

This was also the first time that a major American media outlet had reported on the issue, and likely how many lawmakers first heard about the device that had already been in use for years. In short, Rigmaiden unveiled a new chapter in the story of sophisticated surveillance to the public—citizens, journalists, lawyers, judges—that law enforcement had already known for years, mostly without telling anyone.

***

In February 2012, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a FOIA request, which resulted in a lawsuit. Its efforts definitively showed that government law enforcement agencies have not been completely upfront about using stingrays when they asked federal magistrate judges for permission to conduct electronic surveillance. In fact, search warrants have generally not been used at all. Most police applications of this era seeking judicial authorization for a stingray did not even mention the name of the device, nor did they describe how it worked.

The Rigmaiden story in the Journal hadn’t only grabbed the attention of journalists, but also the attention of lawyers. One lawyer, Linda Lye of the ACLU of Northern California, took particular notice. Lye was new to the ACLU, having largely focused on labor and civil rights issues in her previous decade as an attorney. Quickly, Lye pushed the federal court in San Francisco to unseal the court orders that had authorized the initial use of the stingray against Rigmaiden, as it was unclear from the Arizona case (where the prosecution against Rigmaiden was unfolding) what the order specifically authorized the government to do.

“What on Earth was this technology?” she told me years later. “It seemed that there would be all kinds of novel and troubling issues. What sort of court authorization was being obtained? How widespread was it? It was also just a very unlikely story.”

Initially what drew her in wasn’t the technology itself, but the fact that the government was keeping “novel surveillance orders” a secret. In October 2012, Lye and other ACLU and EFF attorneys decided that they would formally jump into the case, not as Rigmaiden’s lawyer, but rather as amici, or “friends of the court”—in this case, attorneys who were not party to a case but could file a brief to articulate the broader social concerns it raised. They wrote to the court, noting that this case would “likely result in the first decision to address the constitutional implications” of stingrays.

In early May 2013, the judge ruled in the government’s favor on the issue that Lye raised in court, finding that Rigmaiden lacked a “reasonable expectation of privacy” while shrouded under multiple false identities—after all, his AirCard, his apartment and postboxes that he paid for were all done under fake names.

By late January 2014, Rigmaiden and federal prosecutors reached a plea deal: He’d plead guilty and prosecutors would recommend that he be given a sentence of time served. The agreement was signed on April 9, 2014.

While the Rigmaiden case wound down, Soghoian (who had joined the ACLU as its chief technologist) and his colleagues were just getting started. The ACLU, along with other privacy groups, including EPIC and the EFF, spearheaded efforts to speak publicly, file record requests, sue and campaign for meaningful legislative reform.

Several months later, in April 2015, the New York Civil Liberties Union (the New York State chapter of the ACLU) managed to do what no one else could: successfully sue to obtain an unredacted copy of the NDA that the FBI had law enforcement agencies sign when they acquired stingrays. In essence, the document explained that due to the authorization granted by the Federal Communications Commission to the Harris Corporation, any law enforcement agency had to sign an NDA with the FBI. The six-page letter essentially said that agencies that acquired stingrays could not talk about them “in any manner including but not limited to: press releases, in court documents, during judicial hearings, or during other public forums or proceedings.”

In May 2015, the FBI issued a bizarre public statement saying that despite the NDA’s language to the contrary, it “should not be construed to prevent a law enforcement officer from disclosing to the court or a prosecutor the fact that this technology was used in a particular case.”

Later that same month, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed a bill that passed both houses of the state legislature specifically requiring that law enforcement seek a warrant before using a stingray. Rigmaiden worked on the drafting of this bill with Jared Friend of the ACLU of Washington. (Before its passage, Soghoian even testified in support of the bill.) Months later, California followed suit, with its comprehensive California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which, among other things, also required a warrant for stingray use.

But the most prominent change regarding stingrays came in September 2015, when the DOJ said it would require a warrant in most situations in which a stingray is used. The policy, which took effect the day it was announced (September 3, 2015), applied to numerous agencies, including the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the Drug Enforcement Administration; and the U.S. Marshals Service, among others.

The new state laws and federal policies came as a result of dogged activism by the ACLU and other privacy groups, which all stemmed from Rigmaiden’s case. After all, it was Rigmaiden who had initially reached out to Soghoian and presented him with a 200-page memo on a technology that few outside the government had known about. “It was the most well-researched memo I’d ever seen on this technology,” Soghoian later told WNYC. “Written by a guy rotting in jail.”

Now that lawyers know what to look for and how to challenge them, some of those efforts have been successful. Notably, in March 2016 a state appellate court in Maryland took local law enforcement to task, and ruled unequivocally: “We determine that cell phone users have an objectively reasonable expectation that their cell phones will not be used as real-time tracking devices through the direct and active interference of law enforcement.” The three-judge panel in the State of Maryland v. Andrews case also noted that such a non-disclosure agreement is “inimical to the constitutional principles we revere.”

In other words, judges now seem to be resoundingly echoing the 1967-era Supreme Court language—“reasonable expectation of privacy”—of a landmark privacy case known as Katz v. United States, finding that the use of a stingray does require a warrant. But as of this writing, no cases challenging the use of stingrays have reached the Supreme Court, so this legal theory hasn’t been cemented just yet, as stingrays continue to be used in everyday law enforcement.

What these judges have realized is that there is now a turning point with respect to smartphones: We carry them with us and they hold all of our secrets. No wonder the police find them valuable during an investigation. But should the police need to get a warrant to find our phones? And what other opportunities for high-tech, low-oversight surveillance might they offer in the future?
https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...tingray-218588





An Expensive Lesson — Judge Slams Tacoma for Not Releasing Stingray Records

"The City upon receiving a request for documents must first do an adequate search…"
Cyrus Farivar

A judge in Washington state has excoriated the Tacoma Police Department for withholding public records pertaining to its use of cell-site simulators, also known as stingrays.

Back in 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington state sued the TPD on behalf of four community leaders, arguing that the department has not adequately responded to their public records requests concerning the use of stingrays, which included asking for a blank form authorizing its use.

"The [Public Records Act] establishes a positive duty to disclose public records unless they fall within specific exemptions," Judge G. Helen Whitener wrote in her Monday opinion.

"This mandates that the City, upon receiving a request for documents, must first do an adequate search and then must produce the documents requested if there is not an exemption. The PRA does not require the City to analyze the reasons why the document is requested or to determine the relevance of the documents requested even if they are blank forms. The blank form taken in context of the other forms may have meaning to the requestor, and it is not for the City to analyze its relevance. To adopt the City's interpretation of the PRA would defeat the broad mandate of the PRA to allow access to public records not covered by and exemption."

The lawsuit was filed nine months after Washington imposed a new warrant requirement for stingray use in the state and about 15 months after local Pierce County judges imposed stricter guidelines for their use.

As Ars has reported for years, stingrays are in use by both local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide. The devices determine a target phone's location by spoofing or simulating a cell tower. Mobile phones in range of the stingray then connect to it and exchange data with the device as they would with a real cell tower.

Once deployed, stingrays intercept data from the target phone along with information from other phones within the vicinity—up to and including full calls and text messages. At times, police have falsely claimed that information gathered from a stingray has instead come from a confidential informant.

"This is a win for everyone in Washington who believes police must be accountable to the people they serve," said Elder Toney Montgomery, one of the Plaintiffs in the suit, as quoted in a statement released by the ACLU of Washington. "For people in communities of color especially, police surveillance is a critical issue—our communities have long been disproportionately targeted for surveillance."

Judge Whitener ordered that the city must pay over $182,000 for "violations" of the state's PRA and over $109,000 in attorneys' fees.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ngray-records/





Facebook Acknowledges it Shared User Data with Dozens of Companies

The social network had agreements with 61 companies, ranging from AOL to UPS to dating app Hinge.
Steven Musil

Facebook has admitted providing dozens of tech companies with special access to user data after publicly saying it restricted such access in 2015.

Facebook continued sharing information with 61 hardware and software makers after it said it discontinued the practice in May 2015, the social networking giant acknowledged in 747 pages of documents delivered to Congress late Friday. The documents were in response to hundreds of questions posed to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by members of Congress in April.

Facebook said it granted a special "one-time" six-month extension to companies that ranged from AOL to package-delivery service United Parcel Service to dating app Hinge so they could come into compliance with the social network's new privacy policy and create their own versions of Facebook for their devices. Data shared without users' knowledge included friends' names, genders and birth dates.

"We engaged companies to build integrations for a variety of devices, operating systems and other products where we and our partners wanted to offer people a way to receive Facebook or Facebook experiences," the company said in the documents. "These integrations were built by our partners, for our users, but approved by Facebook."

Facebook's documents also said it had discovered that five other companies "theoretically could have accessed limited friends' data" as a result of a beta test.

Facebook said in the documents it has ended 38 of the partnerships and plans to discontinue seven more by the end of July.

The disclosure was part of Facebook's second attempt to address questions posed to Zuckerberg in April by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In June, the social network released its written responses to some of the committee's questions, many of which Zuckerberg responded to during that hearing by saying he'd have his team "get back to" lawmakers with answers.

Zuckerberg's testimony before both the Senate and House in April came as the social network deal with a scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, a digital consultancy that had ties to the Trump presidential campaign. Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed personal information on up to 87 million Facebook users, prompting a backlash that raised questions about whether Facebook can be trusted to protect the personal information of its 2 billion users.

The company has also been in the hot seat for not doing enough to prevent abuse from Russian trolls that posted misinformation and divisive content on the platform. The Russian activity was part of a program to meddle in the US presidential election and sow discord among voters.

Lawmakers in particular raised concerns over Facebook giving Huawei special access to user data, particularly with Huawei, a company perennially in the crosshairs of the US government for security reasons.

The controversy erupted in June when the New York Times reported that Facebook had agreements to provide access to large amounts of user data to at least 60 different device makers -- including companies like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and BlackBerry.

In a test, a New York Times reporter logged into Facebook using a 2013 BlackBerry device, using an account with roughly 550 friends, monitoring the data requested and received. Through a BlackBerry app called The Hub, the device was able to acquire "identifying information" for up to 295,000 Facebook users.

Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request for comment but has previously said it's taking actions to make sure the Cambridge Analytica data exploit doesn't happen again. Zuckerberg said Facebook will investigate all apps that have access to large amounts of data, and restrict developers' data access even further.
https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-a...-of-companies/





Tech’s ‘Dirty Secret’: The App Developers Sifting Through Your Gmail

Software developers scan hundreds of millions of emails of users who sign up for email-based services
Douglas MacMillan

Google said a year ago it would stop its computers from scanning the inboxes of Gmail users for information to personalize advertisements, saying it wanted users to “remain confident that Google will keep privacy and security paramount.”

But the internet giant continues to let hundreds of outside software developers scan the inboxes of millions of Gmail users who signed up for email-based services offering shopping price comparisons, automated travel-itinerary planners or other tools. Google does little to police those developers, who train their computers—and, in some cases, employees—to read their users’ emails, a Wall Street Journal examination has found.

One of those companies is Return Path Inc., which collects data for marketers by scanning the inboxes of more than two million people who have signed up for one of the free apps in Return Path’s partner network using a Gmail, Microsoft Corp. or Yahoo email address. Computers normally do the scanning, analyzing about 100 million emails a day. At one point about two years ago, Return Path employees read about 8,000 unredacted emails to help train the company’s software, people familiar with the episode say.

In another case, employees of Edison Software, another Gmail developer that makes a mobile app for reading and organizing email, personally reviewed the emails of hundreds of users to build a new feature, says Mikael Berner, the company’s CEO.

Letting employees read user emails has become “common practice” for companies that collect this type of data, says Thede Loder, the former chief technology officer at eDataSource Inc., a rival to Return Path. He says engineers at eDataSource occasionally reviewed emails when building and improving software algorithms.

“Some people might consider that to be a dirty secret,” says Mr. Loder. “It’s kind of reality.”

Neither Return Path nor Edison asked users specifically whether it could read their emails. Both companies say the practice is covered by their user agreements, and that they used strict protocols for the employees who read emails. eDataSource says it previously allowed employees to read some email data but recently ended that practice to better protect user privacy.

Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., GOOGL 1.14% says it provides data only to outside developers it has vetted and to whom users have explicitly granted permission to access email. Google’s own employees read emails only “in very specific cases where you ask us to and give consent, or where we need to for security purposes, such as investigating a bug or abuse,” the company said in a written statement.

This examination of email data privacy is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former employees of email app makers and data companies. The latitude outside developers have in handling user data shows how even as Google and other tech giants have touted efforts to tighten privacy, they have left the door open to others with different oversight practices.

Facebook Inc. for years let outside developers gain access to its users’ data. That practice, which Facebook has said it stopped by 2015, spawned a scandal when the social-media giant this year said it suspected one developer of selling data on tens of millions of users to a research firm with ties to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. The episode led to renewed scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators in the U.S. and Europe over how internet companies protect user information.

There is no indication that Return Path, Edison or other developers of Gmail add-ons have misused data in that fashion. Nevertheless, privacy advocates and many tech industry executives say opening access to email data risks similar leaks.

For companies that want data for marketing and other purposes, tapping into email is attractive because it contains shopping histories, travel itineraries, financial records and personal communications. Data-mining companies commonly use free apps and services to hook users into giving up access to their inboxes without clearly stating what data they collect and what they are doing with it, according to current and former employees of these companies.

Gmail is especially valuable as the world’s dominant email service, with 1.4 billion users. Nearly two-thirds of all active email users globally have a Gmail account, according to comScore , and Gmail has more users than the next 25 largest email providers combined. The data miners generally have access to other email services besides Gmail, including those from Microsoft and Verizon Communications Inc.’s Oath unit, formed after the company acquired email pioneer Yahoo. Those are the next two largest email providers, according to comScore.

Oath says access to email data is considered “on a case-by-case basis” and requires “express consent” from users. A Microsoft spokeswoman says it is committed to protecting customers’ privacy and that its terms of use for developers prohibit accessing customer data without consent, and provide guidelines for how data can and can’t be used. Neither company’s privacy or developer policies mention allowing people to see user data.

Google’s developer agreement prohibits exposing a user’s private data to anyone else “without explicit opt-in consent from that user.” Its rules also bar app developers from making permanent copies of user data and storing them in a database.

Developers say Google does little to enforce those policies. “I have not seen any evidence of human review” by Google employees, says Zvi Band, the co-founder of Contactually, an email app for real-estate agents. He says Contactually has never had employees review emails with their own eyes.

Google said it manually reviews every developer and application requesting access to Gmail. The company checks the domain name of the sender to look for anyone who has a history of abusing Google policies, and reads the privacy policies to make sure they are clear. “If we ever run into areas where disclosures and practices are unclear, Google takes quick action with the developer,” a spokesman said.

Google says it lets any user revoke access to apps at any point. Business users of Gmail can also restrict access to certain email apps to the employees in their organization, the company said, “ensuring that only apps that have been vetted and are trusted by their organization are used.”

Google has contended with privacy concerns since it launched Gmail in 2004. The company’s software scanned email messages and sold ads across the top of inboxes related to their content. That year, 31 privacy and consumer groups sent a letter to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin saying the practice “violates the implicit trust of an email service provider.” Google responded that other email providers were already using computers to scan email to protect against spam and hackers, and that showing ads helped offset the cost of its free service.

While some users complained the ads were creepy, people signed up for Gmail in droves.

Between 2010 and 2016, Google faced at least three lawsuits, brought by student users of Google apps as well as a broader set of email users, who accused it of violating federal wiretapping laws. Google, in its legal defense, emphasized that its privacy policy for Gmail said that “no human reads your email to target ads or related information to you without your consent.” Google settled one of the lawsuits; the other two were dismissed.

In 2014, Google said it would stop scanning Gmail inboxes of student, business and government users. In June of last year, it said it was halting all Gmail scanning for ads.

Meanwhile, Google in 2014 started promoting Gmail as a platform for developers to leverage the contents of users’ email to develop apps for such productivity tasks as scheduling meetings. A new Gmail version launched this spring adds a link next to inboxes to a curated menu of 34 add-ons, including one that offers to track users’ outgoing emails to report whether recipients open them.

Google says apps make Gmail more useful. Turning Gmail into a platform emulates Microsoft’s Windows and Apple Inc.’s iPhone, which attracted outside developers to make their software more useful to corporate users.

Google doesn’t disclose how many apps have access to Gmail. The total number of email apps in the top two mobile app stores, for Apple’s iOS and Android, jumped to 379 last year, from 142 five years earlier, according to researcher App Annie. Most can link to Gmail and other major providers.

Almost anyone can build an app that connects to Gmail accounts using Google’s software called an application programming interface, or API. When Gmail users open one of these apps, they are shown a button asking permission to access their inbox. If they click it, Google grants the developer a key to access the entire contents of their inbox, including the ability to read the contents of messages and send and delete individual messages on their behalf. Microsoft also offers API tools for email.

With Gmail, the developers who get this access range from one-person startups to large corporations, and their processes for protecting data privacy vary.

Return Path, based in New York, gains access to inboxes when users sign up for one of its apps or one of the 163 apps offered by Return Path’s partners. Return Path gives the app makers software tools for managing email data in return for letting it peer into their users’ inboxes.

Return Path’s system is designed to check if commercial emails are read by their intended recipients. It provides customers including Overstock.com Inc. a dashboard where they can see which of their marketing messages reached the most customers. Overstock didn’t respond to a request for comment.

From Google’s Privacy Policy

The company’s privacy policy stipulates when it shares personal information:

We do not share your personal information with companies, organizations, or individuals outside of Google except in the following cases:

With your consent

We’ll share personal information outside of Google when we have your consent. For example, if you use Google Home to request a ride from a ride-sharing service, we’ll get your permission before sharing your address with that service. We’ll ask for your explicit consent to share any sensitive personal information.

Google’s Complete Privacy Policy

Marketers can view screenshots of some actual emails—with names and addresses stripped out—to see what their competitors are sending. Return Path says it doesn’t let marketers target emails specifically to users.

Navideh Forghani, 34 years old, of Phoenix, signed up this year for Earny Inc., a tool that compares receipts in inboxes to prices across the web. When Earny finds a better price for items its users purchase, it automatically contacts the sellers and obtains refunds for the difference, which it shares with the users.

Earny had a partnership with Return Path, which connected its computer scanners to Ms. Forghani’s email and began collecting and processing all of the new messages that arrived in her inbox. Ms. Forghani says she didn’t read Earny’s privacy policy closely and has never heard of Return Path. “It is definitely concerning,” she says of the information collection.

Matt Blumberg, Return Path’s chief executive, says users are given clear notice that their email will be monitored. All of Return Path’s partner apps mention the email monitoring on their websites, he says, and Earny’s privacy policy states that Return Path would “have access to your information and will be permitted to use that information according to their own privacy policy.”

Oded Vakrat, Earny’s CEO, says his company doesn’t sell or share data with any outside companies. Earny users can opt out of Return Path’s email monitoring, he says. “We are actively looking for ways to improve and go above and beyond with how we communicate our privacy policy,” he says.

Return Path says its computers are supposed to strip out personal emails from what it sends into its system by examining senders’ domain names and searching for specific words, such as “grandma.” The computers are supposed to delete such emails.

In 2016, Return Path discovered its algorithm was mislabeling many personal emails as commercial, according to a person familiar with the matter. That meant millions of personal messages that should have been deleted were passing through to Return Path’s servers, the person says.

To correct the problem, Return Path assigned two data analysts to spend several days reading 8,000 emails and manually labeling each one, the person says. The data helped train the company’s computers to better distinguish between personal and commercial emails.

Return Path declined to comment on details of the incident, but said it sometimes lets employees see emails when fixing problems with its algorithms. The company uses “extreme caution” to safeguard privacy by limiting access to a few engineers and data scientists and deleting all data after the work is completed, says Mr. Blumberg.

Jules Polonetsky, CEO of the nonprofit Future of Privacy Forum, says he thinks users want to know specifically whether humans are reviewing their data, and that apps should explain that clearly.

At Edison Software, based in San Jose, Calif., executives and engineers developing a new feature to suggest “smart replies” based on emails’ content initially used their own emails for the process, but there wasn’t enough data to train the algorithm, says Mr. Berner, the CEO.

Two of its artificial-intelligence engineers signed agreements not to share anything they read, Mr. Berner says. Then, working on machines that prevented them from downloading information to other devices, they read the personal email messages of hundreds of users—with user information already redacted—along with the system’s suggested replies, manually indicating whether each made sense.

Neither Return Path nor Edison mentions the possibility of humans viewing users’ emails in their privacy policies.

Mr. Berner says he believes Edison’s privacy policy covers this practice by telling users the company collects and stores personal messages to improve its artificial-intelligence algorithms. Edison users can opt out of data collection, he says. The practice, he says, is similar to a telephone company technician listening to a phone line to make sure it is working.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/techs-d...ail-1530544442





Yes, Your Phone is Spying on You and these Researchers Proved it
Andy Meek

It surely says something about the dark side of technology that as time goes on, many of us are increasingly likely to believe the worst of what’s alleged about our devices. That we’re being used, manipulated, spied on, listened to, watched, taken advantage of in service of selling ads — even if evidence is presented to the contrary.

Some academics at Northeastern University recently set out to look into one such long-held assumption, the zombie conspiracy which no one ever seems to be able to kill over whether our phones are secretly listening to us to know which ads to present to us. A conspiracy that no less than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to swat down himself when he was grilled by Congress earlier this year.

What the researchers found: Your phone probably isn’t spying you. At least, not like that.

The study looked at 17,260 Android apps and specifically paid attention to the media files being sent from them. As Business Insider summarizes it, “The researchers found no instance in which these apps turned on the phone’s microphone unprompted and sent audio. But they did find that some apps were sending screen recordings and screenshots to third parties.”

Or — we’re all worried about the wrong kind of spying.

This is the kind of news headline that taps into a disaffection among tech users that’s built on such an emotional components that the facts of the matter almost don’t, well, matter. It’s the same with the recent headline about third parties reading your Gmail; Cambridge Analytica; and so many others. The average user sees in all of this, the core truth they latch on to — I’m being taken advantage of, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Back to the new study, which researchers will present the results of next month at the Privacy Enhancing Technology Symposium Conference in Barcelona. Gizmodo drills down and pulls out examples like that of junk food delivery app GoPuff, which the site describes as monitoring user interactions with the app and sending them to a mobile analytics company called Appsee.

GoPuff’s privacy policy didn’t say anything about doing that, even though it’s common for developers to lean on analytics companies like that. Once GoPuff was asked about it — naturally — they updated their policy to mention “Personally Identifiable Information” being given to Appsee.

That’s the way it goes with everything, not just tech, right? Money talks, and the other stuff walks.

We should also add — the Northeastern researchers didn’t fully debunk the whole eavesdropping thing. It’s just that they didn’t find evidence of it happening, which is not the same thing.

From the researchers: “Our study reveals several alarming privacy risks in the Android app ecosystem, including apps that over-provision their media permissions and apps that share image and video data with other parties in unexpected ways, without user knowledge or consent. We also identify a previously unreported privacy risk that arises from third party libraries that record and upload screenshots and videos of the screen without informing the user. This can occur without needing any permissions from the user.”
https://bgr.com/2018/07/04/apps-not-...earchers-find/





Samsung Phones are Spontaneously Texting Users’ Photos to Random Contacts Without their Permission

Protect the nudes
Ashley Carman

Bad news for Samsung phone owners: some devices are randomly sending your camera roll photos to your contacts without permission. As first spotted by Gizmodo, users are complaining about the issue on Reddit and the company’s official forums. One user says his phone sent all his photos to his girlfriend. The messages are being sent through Samsung’s default texting app Samsung Messages. According to reports, the Messages app does not even show users that files have been sent; many just find out after they get a response from the recipient of the random photos sent to them.

A Samsung spokesperson tells The Verge it’s “aware of the reports” and that its technical teams are “looking into it.” The forums indicate that Galaxy S9 and S9+ devices are affected, but may not be the only ones afflicted with the bug. Samsung is encouraging those experiencing this issue to call the company directly at 1-800-SAMSUNG.

Some users are speculating that this issue has to do with the push of RCS messaging updates, including T-Mobile, which is the carrier for at least one of the affected phones. T-Mobile just issued its RCS update this week, starting with the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. The messaging standard is supposed to make texting look more like chatting in a modern messaging app, complete with read receipts and typing indicators. When reached for comment, a T-Mobile spokesperson told The Verge to “check in with Samsung on this, it’s not a T-Mobile issue.”

For now, Samsung owners can revoke Samsung Message’s permissions to access storage to avoid the bug from sending their files out in the wild.
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbrea...pdate-messages





NSO Group Employee Allegedly Stole Company’s Powerful Spyware for Personal Profit

NSO sells its potent iPhone malware to governments, including Mexico and the United Arabs Emirates. But according to a newly released indictment, a disgruntled employee stole the company's code and tried to sell it for $50 million worth of cryptocurrency. Joseph Cox

NSO Group sells some of the most potent, off-the-shelf malware for remotely breaking into smartphones. Some versions allow a law enforcement or intelligence agency to steal essentially all meaningful data from an iPhone with no interaction from the target. Others just require the victim to click one link in a carefully crafted text message, before giving up their contacts, emails, social media messages, GPS location, and much more.

NSO only sells its tools to government agencies, but a newly released, explosive indictment alleges that a company employee stole NSO’s spyware product, dubbed Pegasus, and tried to sell it to non-authorized parties for $50 million worth of cryptocurrency.

These capabilities “are estimated at hundreds of millions of [US] dollars,” a translated version of the indictment reads. Several Israeli outlets were the first to report on and upload the indictment. The news shows a danger often highlighted by critics of the malware industry: that hacking tools or exploits typically reserved for law enforcement or intelligence agencies may fall into other hands.

Omri Lavie, the co-founder of NSO, told Motherboard in an online chat “no comment.”

Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, and which has exposed abuses of NSO's products, told Motherboard in an email "The commercial spyware industry as a whole is new, lucrative and powerful, but also immature, largely unregulated, lacking in professional conduct, and prone to abuse. Theft and illicit sale of powerful surveillance technologies will happen in such circumstances, and provides yet another example of the need for greater regulatory control over the industry."

NSO has faced serious controversy for repeatedly providing phone spying tools to governments that went on to abuse them. In Mexico, authorities used NSO’s malware to spy on journalists and human rights activists. In the United Arab Emirates, the government targeted prominent activist and political dissident Ahmed Mansoor with Pegasus. According to Amnesty International, Mansoor was recently given a 10 year prison term.

According to the indictment, the unnamed employee started work as a senior programmer at NSO last year. As part of his job, the employee had access to NSO’s product and its source code, the document adds.

NSO’s computers have systems in place to stop employees attaching external storage devices to company computers. But the employee searched the internet for ways to disable those protections, turned them off, and then stole a cache of data, the document reads.

That cache includes NSO’s product source code, “which allows exposure and a full understanding of how the system operates” and “cyber capabilities.”

Shortly before the alleged theft, managers called the employee into a meeting, as the company was considering firing him, the document says.

After stealing the bevvy of powerful malware, the employee allegedly took to the so-called dark net to try and sell the code for $50 million in cryptocurrencies such as Monero, Zcash, and Verge, the indictment adds. The document says the defendant created an account on the Mail2Tor email service. The defendant also allegedly searched Google for ways to sell cyber capabilities, and who to sell them to.

That cache includes NSO’s product source code, “which allows exposure and a full understanding of how the system operates” and “cyber capabilities.”

A potential customer engaged the employee, who was now posing as a hacker that had penetrated NSO’s systems, but reported the attempted sale back to NSO. Then in collaboration with NSO, the customer asked the defendant for more details. Days later, police raided the employee’s apartment, the document adds.

The indictment says that the defendant’s alleged actions have harmed the security of Israel, in part, because it could have “caused the collapse of NSO.”

The document says that, during the period relevant to the indictment, NSO employed around 500 workers and its market value was estimated at some $900 million. In May, Reuters reported that US surveillance giant Verint was in talks to buy NSO in a deal worth about $1 billion.

Verint did not respond to a request for comment. Francisco Partners, the global equity firm which currently owns most of NSO, did not respond either.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...web-50-million





How Smart TVs in Millions of U.S. Homes Track More Than What’s on Tonight
Sapna Maheshwari

The growing concern over online data and user privacy has been focused on tech giants like Facebook and devices like smartphones. But people’s data is also increasingly being vacuumed right out of their living rooms via their televisions, sometimes without their knowledge.

In recent years, data companies have harnessed new technology to immediately identify what people are watching on internet-connected TVs, then using that information to send targeted advertisements to other devices in their homes. Marketers, forever hungry to get their products in front of the people most likely to buy them, have eagerly embraced such practices. But the companies watching what people watch have also faced scrutiny from regulators and privacy advocates over how transparent they are being with users.

Samba TV is one of the bigger companies that track viewer information to make personalized show recommendations. The company said it collected viewing data from 13.5 million smart TVs in the United States, and it has raised $40 million in venture funding from investors including Time Warner Cable, the cable operator Liberty Global and the billionaire Mark Cuban.

Samba TV has struck deals with roughly a dozen TV brands — including Sony, Sharp, TCL and Philips — to place its software on certain sets. When people set up their TVs, a screen urges them to enable a service called Samba Interactive TV, saying it recommends shows and provides special offers “by cleverly recognizing onscreen content.” But the screen, which contains the enable button, does not detail how much information Samba TV collects to make those recommendations.

Samba TV declined to provide recent statistics, but one of its executives said at the end of 2016 that more than 90 percent of people opted in.

Once enabled, Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV on a second-by-second basis, essentially reading pixels to identify network shows and ads, as well as programs on Netflix and HBO and even video games played on the TV. Samba TV has even offered advertisers the ability to base their targeting on whether people watch conservative or liberal media outlets and which party’s presidential debate they watched.

The big draw for advertisers — which have included Citi and JetBlue in the past, and now Expedia — is that Samba TV can also identify other devices in the home that share the TV’s internet connection.

Samba TV, which says it has adhered to privacy guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission, does not directly sell its data. Instead, advertisers can pay the company to direct ads to other gadgets in a home after their TV commercials play, or one from a rival airs. Advertisers can also add to their websites a tag from Samba TV that allows them to determine if people visit after watching one of their commercials.

If it sounds a lot like the internet — a company with little name recognition tracking your behavior, then slicing and dicing it to sell ads — that’s the point. But consumers do not typically expect the so-called idiot box to be a savant.

“It’s still not intuitive that the box maker or the software embedded by the box maker is going to be doing this,” said Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy and technology policy at the advocacy group Consumers Union and a former policy director at the Federal Trade Commission. “I’d like to see companies do a better job of making that clear and explaining the value proposition to consumers.”

About 45 percent of TV households in the United States had at least one smart TV at the end of 2017, IHS Markit data showed. Samba TV, which is based in San Francisco and has about 250 employees, competes against several companies, including Inscape, the data arm of the consumer electronics maker Vizio, and a start-up called Alphonso.

It can be a cutthroat business. Samba has sued Alphonso for patent infringement. Last year, Vizio paid $2.2 million to settle claims by the Federal Trade Commission and the state of New Jersey that it was collecting and selling viewing data from millions of smart TVs without the knowledge or consent of set owners. In December, The New York Times reported that Alphonso was using gaming apps to gain access to smartphone microphones and listen for audio signals in TV ads and shows.

Samba TV’s language is clear, said Bill Daddi, a spokesman. “Each version has clearly identified that we use technology to recognize what’s onscreen, to create benefit for the consumer as well as Samba, its partners and advertisers,” he added.

Still, David Kitchen, a software engineer in London, said he was startled to learn how Samba TV worked after encountering its opt-in screen during a software update on his Sony Bravia set.

The opt-in read: “Interact with your favorite shows. Get recommendations based on the content you love. Connect your devices for exclusive content and special offers. By cleverly recognizing onscreen content, Samba Interactive TV lets you engage with your TV in a whole new way.”

The language prompted Mr. Kitchen to research Samba TV’s data collection and raise concerns online about its practices.

Enabling the service meant that consumers agreed to Samba TV’s terms of service and privacy policy, the opt-in screen said. But consumers couldn’t read those unless they went online or clicked through to another screen on the TV. The privacy policy, which provided more details about the information collected through the software, was more than 4,000 words, and the terms exceeded 6,500 words.

“The thing that really struck me was this seems like quite an enormous ask for what seems like a silly, trivial feature,” Mr. Kitchen said. “You appear to opt into a discovery-recommendation service, but what you’re really opting into is pervasive monitoring on your TV.”

Ashwin Navin, Samba TV’s chief executive, said that the company’s use of data for advertising is made clear through the reference to “special offers,” and that the opt-in language “is meant to be as simple as it possibly can be.”

“It’s pretty upfront about the fact that this is what the software does — it reads what’s on the screen to drive recommendations and special offers,” Mr. Navin said. “We’ve taken an abundance of caution to put consumers in control of the data and give them disclosure on what we use the data for.”

Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said few people review the fine print in their zeal to set up new televisions. He said the notice should also describe Samba TV’s “device map,” which matches TV content to mobile gadgets, according to a document on its website, and can help the company track users “in their office, in line at the food truck and on the road as they travel.”

Mr. Brookman of the Consumers Union, who reviewed the opt-in screen, said the trade-off was not clear for consumers. “Maybe the interactive features are so fantastic that they don’t mind that the company’s logging all the stuff that they’re watching, but I don’t think that’s evident from this,” he said.

Citi and JetBlue, which appear in some Samba TV marketing materials, said they stopped working with the company in 2016 but not before publicly endorsing its effectiveness. JetBlue hailed in a news release the increase in site visits driven by syncing its online ads with TV ads, while Christine DiLandro, a marketing director at Citi, joined Mr. Navin at an industry event at the end of 2015. In a video of the event, Ms. DiLandro described the ability to target people with digital ads after the company’s TV commercials aired as “a little magical.”

The Times is among the websites that allow advertisers to use data from Samba to track if people who see their ads visit their websites, but a Times spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy, said that the company did that “simply as a matter of convenience for our clients” and that it was not an endorsement of Samba TV’s technology.

Companies like Samba TV are also a boon for TV makers, whose profit margins from selling sets can be slim. Samba TV essentially pays companies like Sony to include its software. Samba TV said “our business model does subsidize a small piece of the television hardware,” though it declined to provide further details.

Smart TV companies aren’t subject to the stricter rules and regulations regarding viewing data that have traditionally applied to cable companies, helping fuel “this rise of weird ways to figure out what someone’s watching,” said Jonathan Mayer, an assistant professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University and a former technology adviser at the Federal Communications Commission.

The smart TV companies are overseen by the Federal Trade Commission, Mr. Mayer said, meaning that “as long as you’re truthful to consumers, even if you make it really hard to exercise choices or don’t offer choices at all, you probably don’t have much of a legal issue.”

Mr. Daddi said the trade commission had held up Samba TV as “an exemplary model of data privacy and opt-in policies,” pointing to its participation in a smart TV workshop the agency held in late 2016. A commission spokeswoman said that it invited a diverse array of panelists to events and that “an invitation to participate in an F.T.C. event does not convey an endorsement of that company or organization.” She added that the agency does not “endorse or bless companies’ practices.”

Mr. Daddi added: “We have millions of viewers who have explicitly opted into our service and have continued to use it for years. So it is a fair argument to make that far more consumers are satisfied with Samba than surprised by it.”

Some worry, more broadly, about the TV industry’s increasing ability to use and share information about what people are watching with the internet ad ecosystem.

"I think people have rebelled to the online targeted ad experience,” Mr. Brookman said, “and I think they wouldn’t necessarily expect that from their TV.”

Kevin Roose contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/b...-tracking.html





German Police Accused of Carrying Out Some Pretty Stupid Raids
Catalin Cimpanu

Two privacy-focused organizations have accused today German police of carrying out raids at their offices and members' private homes on some pretty shoddy reasoning that makes no sense and hints at the police's abuse of power.

The first of these organizations is Zwiebelfreunde, a non-profit group based in Dresden that runs Tor relay servers and supports privacy and anonymity projects by providing legal and financial help.

One of the ways it helps these projects includes collecting donations from European users into its bank account and then relaying the raised money to overseas projects.

Police search Zwiebelfreunde HQ, members home

Today, members of the Zwiebelfreunde project revealed that German police had raided their Dresden office and the homes of three members located in the cities of Augsburg, Jena, and Berlin.

The raids took place on June 20, and police told Zwiebelfreunde members they were in relation to the RiseUp project, a provider of anonymous XMPP and email services.

Officers told members that they were looking for information on the owner of a RiseUp email address. Officers said the owner of that email address registered a site (named Krawalltouristen - translated as Ruckus Tourist) on which it organized protests against the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party convention in Augsburg, and called for physical violence against the group.

Naturally, police were looking for the man behind those threats.

A pretty glaring flaw in the police's logic

But the Zwiebelfreunde group claims police went about it the wrong way. Instead of going after the RiseUp project, they went after their organization instead.

"We have nothing to do with Riseup’s infrastructure," said the Zwiebelfreunde group today in a blog post. "During the raids, the police forces clearly gave the impression that they knew we had nothing to do with either Riseup or the 'ruckus tourist' blog."

Members of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), a famous German organization whose members are mostly security researchers and hardware hackers, put the things in perspective as for why the searches were so ludicrous.

The state prosecutor’s office in Munich has apparently been operating on the mistaken assumption that everyone even tangentially connected to Riseup would be able to provide information on any e-mail account registered there, including that of the alleged illegal website.
[...]
The mere presence of an e-mail address at a large free provider on a website has caused law enforcement authorities to deduce that a German association that helps raise funds for this provider must be connected to this website somehow. Although Zwiebelfreunde clearly has nothing to do with the operation of this provider, they were suspected anyway. That these searches and seizures were ordered by the Bavarian police shows either forensic incompetence at a very advanced stage, malicious intent or both.
[...]
With such contrived reasoning, almost anyone could be searched if the anonymous website had been operated by people with a Gmail address. As a consequence of this clearly nonsensical attempt at logic, those involved in this as witnesses and their families have had to endure abjectly disproportional intrusions into their homes.


Police also seized data relating to Tails project

Yet, despite the flaw in logic that even police officers were aware, the home searches continued. According to Zwiebelfreunde, police seized electronic equipment from members, such as smartphones, laptops, PCs, GnuPG Smartcards/Yubikeys, hard drives, etc.
Zwiebelfreunde says police overreached when they seized this equipment as most of it was the property of members and their family, and not the organization.

Furthermore, police also overreached and broke their own search warrant when they confiscated legal and financial documents.

"Apart from encrypted media, they had the legal right to seize documents related to our Riseup bank account starting from January 2018," the group said.

"Despite our protests, they additionally seized all printed documents relating to our own and partner projects since the inception of the association in 2011," Zwiebelfreunde said, revealing that police collected data outside their initial scope.

"If you have ever donated to Torservers, or Tails or Riseup via a European bank transaction, your data is very likely now in the hands of the German police," Zwiebelfreunde members said. This includes IBAN account number, name of the account holder, donation amount and date.

Zwiebelfreunde says it tried to get back the documents and equipment that were collected illegally but German police refused to return the seized items. German police also refused all inquiries for additional comment from German media.

"This is a textbook example of how easy the fundamental rights of completely innocent citizens and their families can be violated as a result of artificially constructed evidence chains, no matter how ridiculous. To be drawn into this as a witness on the basis of such patently unsustainable reasoning is questionable to say the least. The recent introduction of draconian Bavarian laws governing police authority has clearly led to a culture where those responsible no longer feel bound by any sense of proportionality of their actions," says Frank Rieger, speaker for the Chaos Computer Clubs (CCC).

Police take revenge on CCC

But things didn't end here. In a blog post today, the CCC claims that soon after their members provided logistical support for Zwiebelfreunde members, German police decided "on their own accord" to extend the search to CCC premises.

According to the CCC, police searched its OpenLab in Augsburg, where they found hackers and computer experts working on electronic boards, surrounded by equipment and chemical substances needed to create such custom boards.

The CCC explains what happened on that day:

After interpreting the contents of a whiteboard as a bomb making manual, the officers then went on to accuse random people present at the hackerspace of plotting a bombing attack. Three people were arrested on the spot and the hackerspace was subsequently searched without a court order and without any witnesses.

The police seized objects from OpenLab and used force to open locked cabinets holding member data and bank records. It has to be assumed that this information was copied and that the rights of members and supporters of both associations were violated.


German media reported the three CCC members who were arrested were later released on the same day without being charged.

"Just like with the initial suspicion with regard to the board members of Zwiebelfreunde, the subsequent suspicions with regard to explosives are incompetent, malicious or both," the CCC says.

"The suspicion of 'preparation of a explosive attack' is a grave and direct threat to the operation of a hackerspace - family-friendly OpenLab is open to visitors almost every day.

"If the mere possession of basic chemical knowledge is a cause for suspicion then pretty soon teenagers will have to hide their chemistry books from nosy cops.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...-stupid-raids/





Reddit's Case for Anonymity on the Internet

The site’s head claims that the policy of not collecting personal information allows people to be “more true to themselves.”
Rachel Gutman

Reddit, the self-described “front page of the internet,” may have a key tool in its arsenal as Americans begin to question their relationship with social media: anonymity. According to Steve Huffman, the site’s co-founder and CEO, “privacy is built into Reddit.”

All that’s required to create an account and post on any of Reddit’s 1.2 million forums is an email address, a username, and a password. You don’t need to tell the company your birthday, your gender, or even your real name. As Huffman put it on Thursday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, “Reddit doesn’t want the burden of personal information ... and is not selling personal information.”

Huffman argued that anonymity on Reddit actually makes using the site “more like a conversation one has in real life” than other exchanges on the internet. “When people detach from their real-world identities, they can be more authentic, more true to themselves,” he claimed.

Huffman gave as an example a subreddit called StillTrying, a forum for couples who have had trouble conceiving children. He posited that such a community wouldn’t exist on other platforms. At least one such group does, in fact, exist on Facebook—or at least did in 2015—but, unlike StillTrying, it was visible only to members. Everything on Reddit is visible to anyone with an internet connection, so it’s conceivable that Reddit could be a resource to a greater number of people than groups on other sites.

Unlike many other anonymous social networks, including Whisper and the now-defunct Yik Yak, the namelessness of Reddit does have its limits. Redditors maintain one consistent identity through their usernames, with an associated score called “karma” that tells other users how often they’ve been upvoted or downvoted—essentially a proxy for how informative, trustworthy, and civil the community has found them in the past. “People care about their reputations on Reddit,” Huffman said on Thursday. “There’s some stake to it.” He said that, in general, these reputations motivate Redditors to keep their posts more civil than the comment sections of other sites, which he called “toxic,” “agro,” and “off-putting.”

Reddit’s favoring of aliases over actual personal information could help it avoid data-breach scandals like those that have befallen Facebook, Yahoo, and Equifax in recent years, or tap into users’ most sensitive identities. But it also undeniably introduces vulnerabilities into the site. Reddit is notorious for hosting trolls and bullies. (Huffman himself once told The New Yorker, “I consider myself a troll at heart.”) A subpar Reddit karma score may not be enough to deter some would-be harassers, especially those posting mostly in groups filled with like-minded users who are happy to upvote offensive content.

“We are extremely proud to have created this enriching experience where people can be themselves,” Huffman said. The question is whether these anonymous online personas are really the selves we want to be.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...ticity/564071/



































Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

June 30th, June 23rd, June 16th, June 9th, June 2nd

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
- Hugo Black
__________________
Thanks For Sharing
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 30th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-07-11 06:58 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 16th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-07-11 06:43 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 9th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 06-07-11 05:36 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 30th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-01-10 07:49 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 5th, '09 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 02-12-09 08:32 AM






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 10:44 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)