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Old 19-12-18, 08:16 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 22nd, ’18

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December 22nd, 2018




Unauthorised Subtitle Services to be Blocked: Court Grants Largest Anti-Piracy Injunction

Major ISPs need to block more than 150 domains
Rohan Pearce

The Federal Court has granted an application for the largest anti-piracy injunction so far, ordering Telstra, TPG, Optus, Vocus and Vodafone, as well as the companies’ subsidiaries, to take steps to block their customers from accessing more than 150 domains.

The application was brought by a large group of entertainment companies including Roadshow Films and major movie studios. Other participants included Television Broadcasts (TVB) Limited and its local subsidiary, as well as Australian distributor Madman Entertainment Pty Limited and Tokyo Broadcasting System Television, Inc.

Although the granting of website-blocking injunctions by the Federal Court is now fairly routine, this injunction is unique because it did not just target sites that provide unauthorised streaming or download services.

As well as more conventional pirate sites it targeted Addic7ed, Yifysubtitles, Opensubtitles.org and Subscene, which provide subtitle downloads that can be used with unauthorised copies of films and TV shows.

The application states that the other “target online locations” fall into three main categories.

In some cases they allow users to “view (by a process known as 'streaming') cinematograph films, being motion pictures, television programs or other audio-visual content, on devices connected to the Internet” or “cause copies of those cinematograph films to be downloaded onto the memory of their devices for watching later or enabling others to watch or further copy those cinematograph films”.

Other sites “identify other online locations including (by a process known as ‘linking’)” and those locations allow users to download and stream material.

The group of applicants relied on the literary copyright of screenplays in their evidence to block subtitle sites, backing away from an attempt to claim that their copyright of the subtitles themselves had been infringed.

Next year, it is likely that copyright holders will launch efforts to make Google and potentially other search providers remove links to services associated with piracy from their listings.

Earlier this year the parliament passed laws that expanded the existing anti-piracy scheme from just covering telecommunications providers to also covering search engines.

The types of sites that can be blocked were also expanded by the legislation, allowing so-called ‘cyber locker’ sites and possibly other services that aren’t flagrant in their support of copyright infringement to be targeted.
https://www.computerworld.com.au/art...cy-injunction/





Village Roadshow Donates Millions to Major Parties while Lobbying on Piracy

Contributions appear to peak during major copyright and piracy law debates
Christopher Knaus

Media giant Village Roadshow has donated a staggering $6.7m to Australia’s major political parties while successfully lobbying for tougher piracy laws, analysis shows.

Village Roadshow has been a prolific donor to the Liberals and Labor in the past two decades, and its contributions appear to peak during major debates about Australia’s copyright laws and online piracy.

By far the biggest yearly contribution ($1.2m) was made in 2015-16, at roughly the same time Australia’s parliament passed a major piece of legislation curbing online piracy.

On Wednesday, the Senate passed new powers allowing copyright owners to more easily block overseas piracy websites and force search engines to eliminate blocked pages from their results. The measures were supported by authors, screenwriters and musicians but criticised by Google, digital rights groups and copyright experts, who feared the legislation was so broad that it could threaten more innocent sites, such as meme-generators.

Village, one of the bill’s key backers, refused to tell Guardian Australia how much it donated to the parties in the months leading up to debate. Australia’s weak and sluggish donation disclosure requirements mean their contributions for 2017-18 will remain secret until at least February.

The Queensland University of Technology intellectual property and innovation law expert Matthew Rimmer said that made it impossible for the public to tell how Village may have attempted to influence the process.

“We should have real-time disclosure of donations,” Rimmer, a critic of the bill, said. “We don’t know at the moment whether Roadshow or other copyright owners contributed to the Coalition, ALP, Centre Alliance and the Greens. We don’t know whether ISPs and search engines made political donations to try to stop the bill.”

A Village Roadshow spokeswoman said the company complied with all donation disclosure laws.

“Village Roadshow does not comment on its political donations but would point out that the legislation referred to was passed with bipartisan support,” she said.

The fight against piracy – which has a significant impact on Australia’s creative industries – typically enjoys widespread support in parliament.

The Labor MP Ed Husic offered a rare criticism last month, saying the new measures were unlikely to have any practical impact on piracy. He said no one supported piracy, but accused “bloated, greedy, resistant-to-change rights holders” of failing to reform themselves to better cater to consumers.

Husic alluded to the impact of donations when saying parliament needed to keep the rights of consumers in mind.

“As lawmakers, just because we might get a selfie with Richard Roxburgh — I love Rake as much as anyone else — or a political party gets a donation from a rights holder, does not mean that we should stop looking at how to make the types of reforms that balance the needs of creatives and the needs of producers versus the needs of consumers,” Husic said.

The lobbying expert and University of Melbourne academic George Rennie said donations at the scale of Village Roadshow’s clearly bought access and influence.

“You might say that the policy is reasonable,” Rennie told Guardian Australia. “But it is that ultimate question of what is the reasonable policy that gets up. And the reasonable policy that gets up is almost always really monetarily well-backed.”

In its submission supporting the legislation, Village said despite the 2015 crackdown, search engines such as Google were still helping internet users find pirated content.

“The effects of piracy are shocking to our Australian employment, economy and way of life,” the company said. “The Australian film industry is critical to what we are as Australians.”

But the Australian Digital Alliance, which represents copyright users, said the bill was rushed, flawed and “worryingly broad and vague”. ADA executive director, Jessica Coates, said it potentially allowed for the blocking of innocent sites, including meme-generators.

“Its new ‘primary effect’ test significantly broadens its scope far beyond the piracy sites that were originally envisioned, and runs the risk of enabling the blocking of a large range of innocent and commonly used websites, such as meme-generators, auto-translation services and even VPNs,” Coates said in a statement on Wednesday.

“This is a significant departure from the stated intent of the scheme when it passed in 2015, which was to capture only ‘the worst of the worst’ websites.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australi...ying-on-piracy





ICE Seizes Over 1 Million Websites With No Due Process; Apparently Unaware That Copyright & Trademark Are Different
Mike Masnick

Over the years, we've written an awful lot about asset forfeiture and how it is basically the government stealing shit they want with almost no due process. But the reason we started writing about asset forfeiture was when ICE used that process to seize a bunch of websites based entirely on the claims of the RIAA and MPAA that those websites were distributing copyright-infringing material. It turned out those claims were totally bullshit, leading to ICE eventually agreeing to return a blog over a year after it had been seized, and two others after holding them for over five years.

I'm still perplexed that this story was almost entirely ignored by the media. This was outright censorship by the US government -- the equivalent of seizing a printing press from a publication and holding it based on nothing other than some private party's complaints about the content of their publication. Incredibly, an ICE official, soon after the initial seizures, made the following bold claim:

"People told us that we will fail if we seize these domain names, and that we'll look foolish," said Erik Barnett, assistant deputy director of the US government's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) team, which began conducting Operation In Our Sites last year.

He also stated that none of the seized sites had challenged the seizure, which was literally false. Barnett, in case you're wondering, has moved on to the private sector and is apparently now the Regional Head of Europe for Financial Crime Threat Mitigation for HSBC, a company that was described in a recent article this way:

DRUG cartels, mafia, celebrities and the European aristocracy: when it comes to laundering “dirty money” world giant HSBC is king and proof it may actually be impossible to regulate banks.

[....]

The French-TV made “Banksters” claims HSBC was the go-to bank for “a raft of illegal activities, from money laundering for the mafia, to enabling tax evasion and currency manipulation”.


Right.

ICE's boss at the time of these seizures, John Morton, also made some flabbergasting comments:

We don't have any interest in going after bloggers or discussion boards," he said. "We're not about what is being said by anybody. We're about making sure that the intellectual property laws of the United States, which are clear, are enforced. When somebody spends hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the next movie or a billion dollars to develop the next heart medicine, the innovation and the enterprise that went into that effort is protected as the law provides. It's that simple."

Except it wasn't that simple, as proven by the fact that ICE eventually returned all of those sites. Without getting any sort of apology from Morton. Or any acknowledgement that the 1st Amendment actually bars you from seizing a website. Oh, and if you're wondering, Morton is now the Chief Compliance Officer at Capital One, a company that paid out a $200 million fine for deceptive marketing, and also is viewed as the "least favorite" credit card company... perhaps because it sues more of its customers than any other credit card company.

So, anyway, back to ICE and seizing websites. Even after its total flop in seizing blogs for false accusations of copyright infringement, ICE has gone right on seizing websites, though most of them appear to be focused on seizing sites selling counterfeit goods, rather than blogs and forums discussing music.

Still, it seems notable that in late November, ICE proudly announced that it had seized over a million websites, though frankly, the press release raises a hell of a lot more questions than it answers. First off, it appears that ICE has no clue that copyright and trademark are entirely different things.

More than 1 million copyright-infringing website domain names selling counterfeit automotive parts, electrical components, personal care items and other fake goods were criminally and civilly seized in the past year through the combined efforts of law-enforcement agencies across the world, high-profile industry representatives and anti-counterfeiting associations.

"Copyright infringing website domain names" already is a weird description (were the URLs themselves infringing?) but it's made even weirder by saying that these sites were seized because they were selling counterfeits. Counterfeiting is a trademark issue, not a copyright one. Those laws are entirely different. Shouldn't a government agency in charge of enforcing these things... uh... know the difference?

The ongoing intellectual property enforcement initiative targeting fake websites, dubbed Operation In Our Sites, was facilitated by the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center), a joint-task force agency led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The IPR Center, which stands at the forefront of the U.S. government’s response to IP theft, worked directly with key international law-enforcement authorities and industry organizations representing the electronics sector, luxury brand-name designers, film and entertainment and several entities specializing in apparel and accessories through the major enforcement effort.

Operation In Our Sites is the same one that was named when ICE seized all those sites I mentioned earlier -- in which blogs and discussion forums were seized, with no evidence to back them up, and held by the US government for between one and five years, before finally being handed back to the original owners because no one could ever prove those sites actually broke the law. Seems kinda weird to now tout that same operation as a roaring success.

And, need we remind you that, under the "Operation in Our Sites" banner, ICE once accidentally seized 84,000 sites, denied it for nearly a week and then finally admitted they fucked up? This is the same Operation they're now promoting for seizing one million sites? It's not clear if they include those 84,000 that were done "accidentally" in that total.

Roughly 33,600 website domain names were criminally seized in a collaborative effort between ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Europol, Interpol and police agencies from 26 different countries. Industry partners participating in the operation were fully responsible for civilly seizing 1.21 million domain names and shutting down 2.2 million erroneous ecommerce links featured on social media platforms and third-party marketplaces.

Hmm. "Industry partners" were "fully responsible for civilly seizing" these domain names. Does that mean the US government "seized" them... or that the "industry partners" got the domains. Because if it were the latter... that seems extraordinarily questionable. I know that, in some of those earlier seizures, we found it odd and distasteful that ICE announced the seizures of sites from a Hollywood studio, but it's another thing altogether if the federal government is literally taking domains and handing them to private companies without even a whiff of due process. Even if this just means that the "industry partners" gave ICE a big list, then we're still left with a fairly long list of due process questions. Did ICE really check all 1.21 million domains before having them seized? Considering that they fucked up so badly a few years ago at a time when they merely seized five domains, forgive me for questioning the amount of review that went into 1.21 million.

Investigations led by HSI resulted in the removal of copyright-infringing websites that sold counterfeit airbags and integrated sensors, both commodities that present a potential safety hazard. An investigation based in Louisiana led to the seizure of five website domain names – including Chinaseatbelt.com; Airbagpart.com; Chinasafetybelt.com; Fareurope.com; and Far-europe.com – involved in the sale of fake automotive parts. A joint case between HSI and Department of Defense investigative agencies resulted in the removal of PRBlogics.com, a copyright-infringing website offering counterfeit integrated sensors.

Once again, ICE makes it clear that they haven't the slightest clue that copyrights and trademarks are not just separate laws, but that they originate from two totally different parts of the Constitution. None of what's being described as "copyright-infringing" appears to be copyright related. Look, I get it that some people -- often reporters! -- mix up copyrights and trademarks (and patents!), but this is a law enforcement agency of the US government, who actually (for reasons that make no sense at all) has a major role in enforcing intellectual property laws. You'd think that at least they could get this kinda stuff correct.

Oh, and I should be clear: this isn't just ICE in general. This is a special division of ICE specific to "Intellectual Property."

“The IPR Center is committed to supporting enforcement actions that target copyright-infringing websites threatening the health and safety of unsuspecting consumers by offering dangerous counterfeit goods,” said IPR Center Director Alex Khu. “Collaborative efforts with external law enforcement agencies and industry have led to a crackdown on intellectual property theft that negatively impacts economies and funds organizations involved in other criminal activities.”

The "IPR Center" doesn't know the difference between trademarks and copyrights?!? Shouldn't... uh... that be seen as a problem?

Each year, the market is flooded with counterfeit products being sold at stores, on street corners and online. Additionally, criminals have taken advantage of the internet to deceive, sell and ship fake products directly to American consumers. The most popular counterfeit products seized each year include watches, jewelry, handbags, wallets, wearing apparel/accessories, consumer electronics/parts, pharmaceuticals and personal care products.

As we've discussed for years, multiple studies have shown that people buying counterfeit watches, jewelry, handbags, wallets and clothing tend not to be "tricked" into buying these things. Most buy them because it's all they can afford. The studies have shown that many of these purchases are aspirational, in that these people want to buy the real thing, but can't afford it yet. Studies have also shown that the same people who buy these knockoffs frequently will later buy the real thing when they can afford it. In short, these counterfeit purchases rarely result in any harm. The consumer has not been deceived. The trademark holder has not lost any money (and, indeed, may make money in the long run). This just seems to be ICE shutting down websites because it can.

Anyway, this press release is so bizarre, and so devoid of actual information, I've fired off a FOIA request asking for the details of these "seized" domains and the communications with those industry partners. Should ICE ever decide to obey the law and respond to the FOIA, we'll share it here. I wouldn't recommend holding your breath.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...ifferent.shtml





Bing Recommends Piracy Tutorial when Searching for Office 2019

Oh, Bing! Not again!
Catalin Cimpanu

Microsoft is sending users who search for Office 2019 download links via its Bing search engine to a website that teaches them the basics about pirating the company's Office suite.

This happens every time users search for the term "office 2019 download" on Bing. The result is a Bing search card (highlighted search results) that links to a piracy tutorial.

The linked website --crackfullpc.com-- is a step-by-step guide, advising readers on how to obtain and install a "cracked" version of Office 2019.

The steps walk users through downloading and installing uTorrent, a well-known application for downloading torrent files. The site then tells users to download and run a torrent file that will download the pirated version of Office 2019 onto their computer, and then walks the user through installing the pirated version by applying a crack file.

At the time of writing, the links for downloading the torrent for the pirated Office 2019 version are down. The domain for the website where these files are located --dinthatharronhad.info-- doesn't show up as malicious based on a VirusTotal scan.

The links don't point to a file per-se, but for a search query on another site, most likely part of some sort of affiliate scheme. Since the website is down, we can't tell if the pirated version of Office 2019 users might have downloaded from this site in the past is malicious, but all chances are that it is.

Earlier this year, the top ad in Bing for the search term "Google Chrome" redirected users to a fake Google Chrome download page that served a trojanized version of the browser.

Today's Bing card recommendation leading to the piracy tutorial was spotted by Dutch security researcher Jeroen Frijters, who posted his findings on Twitter.

The tweet got some quite of traction, and Microsoft's staff is expected to intervene and clean up Bing's search results in the coming hours, just like they did the last time with the tainted Google Chrome download ad, which also went viral on Twitter before being taken down.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/bing-r...r-office-2019/





Who is Pirating Medical Literature? A Bibliometric Review of 28 Million Sci-Hub Downloads
Brian M Till, Niclas Rudolfson, Saurabh Saluja, Jesudian Gnanaraj, Lubna Samad, David Ljungman, Mark Shrime

Access to the medical literature is essential for both the practice of evidence-based medicine and meaningful contribution to medical sciences. Nonetheless, only 12% of newly published papers are freely accessible online,1 and, as of 2014, only 3 million of the 26•3 million articles indexed on PubMed were available on the site's repository of free materials, PubMed Central.2

Access to paywall-protected literature remains primarily through institutional subscriptions. Such subscriptions are costly and many struggle to afford access. The result is a disparity in access to the medical literature, particularly for those in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs).

In the early 2000s, the rapid expansion of online publication was recognised as an opportunity to iron out these inequities. The WHO-led Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) was developed to offer free access to medical journals for not-for-profit medical facilities and research institutions in some LMICs. Yet knowledge of the programme's existence remains poor, the platform is cumbersome, and there is evidence that access to the highest-impact-factor journals has been restricted.3

The use of illegal online “shadow libraries” such as Sci-Hub has also emerged as a means of accessing scientific literature.4

An analysis of requests to the site logged from September 2015 to January 2016 revealed that Sci-Hub had successfully satisfied 99•3% of queries.5

Due to copyright protections, such sharing remains illegal, and Elsevier, the largest academic publisher, has taken legal action against Sci-Hub, winning a $15 million settlement in US courts.

We aimed to define the proportion of downloads on Sci-Hub that are medical in nature and to consider these data at the national level, evaluating the relation between density of medical literature downloads and scientific output, national income classifications, and indicators of internet penetrance.

We did a bibliometric review of previously compiled Sci-Hub download requests logged between September, 2015, and February, 2016.6

Data points included date, time, country of request, and digital object identifier (DOI). For each DOI, we obtained associated metadata using the CrossRef application programming interface. We obtained statistics on per-country scientific publications from Scimago, and relied on World Bank Development Indicators for income classifications and internet penetrance.

To determine whether articles were published by medical journals, we relied on Elsevier's Scopus classifications. Scopus uses four major categories (health sciences, life sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences) and 27 major subject headings. We deemed journals with at least 50% of classification terms in health sciences (excluding veterinary medicine) to be medical journals.

We sought to control for differences in country size and level of engagement with medical sciences (number of universities, number of scientists per university) using scientific productivity. We divided the number of Sci-Hub queries from each country by the corresponding volume of publications (in the same Scopus categories) attributable to the country during the period.

To analyse the effect of income group, we did linear regressions of logarithmically transformed data with downloads per country publication as the dependent variable. In a second regression, we controlled for internet penetrance. Data and code are available upon request.

Of 27•8 million download queries, 23•2 million were requests for journal articles. We categorised 94% of requests using Scopus terms. 4•7 million requests (22%) were for medical journal articles.

Most queries for medical literature originated in LMICs (3•3 million, 69%). Almost half (2•2 million, 47%) originated in upper-middle income countries (appendix). In absolute numbers, the most frequent countries of origin were India, China, the USA, Brazil, and Iran. When controlling for scientific output, the highest densities came from Peru, Algeria, Ecuador, Morocco and Indonesia (figure).

Compared with those from high-income countries (HICs), downloads per country publication were significantly lower in low-income countries (LICs) (β=−1•20, 95% CI −2•08 to −0•32; p=0•008) and significantly higher in upper-middle-income countries (β=1•06, 95% CI 0•38 to 1•73; p=0•002). After adjusting for internet penetrance, there was no longer a significant difference between HICs and LICs (β=–0•20, 95% CI −1•93 to 1•52; p=0•819), while both lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income countries had significantly more downloads per publication than HICs (β=1•33, 95% CI 0•06 to 2•60; p=0•041 and β=1•48, 95% CI 0•56 to 2•40; p=0•002, respectively; appendix).

Nearly 1 million articles published by medical journals are downloaded on Sci-Hub each month. Although demand for pirated medical literature bridges national income classifications, the density of these downloads differs significantly between HICs and LMICs, with higher rates observed in LMICs.

The highest download densities in this sample are from middle-income countries. There are several probable factors underlying this trend. First, institutions in most upper-middle-income countries do not qualify for HINARI.7

Those in lower-middle-income countries may qualify for a fee-based version of the system depending on a range of factors. This exclusion, when coupled with increasing levels of educational attainment8 and rapidly growing medical industries,9 has probably led to increased demand for medical literature while legal avenues for access remain limited. With efforts undertaken by WHO focused on expanding access in the poorest countries, and with academic publishers focused on the sale of bundled journal packages to library consortia concentrated in high-income states,10 there appears to be a trough in access for middle-income countries.

There are two notable limitations to this research. First, the available metadata limits our classifications to journal of publication rather than the specific content of a downloaded paper. Given the size of our sample, analysis at the level of the individual article is impractical. Second, we have only analysed publications with Scopus classifications. It is possible that this has led to the exclusion of journal articles in lower-profile publications.

Our analysis illuminates the large volume of medical literature being downloaded illegally in nearly all countries of the world. A significant relation exists between the nation of origin and the density of these requests. This continued inequity in legal access to the medical literature demands the attention of both the publishing industry and policymakers.

We declare no competing interests.

Supplementary Material

Download .pdf (.41 MB) Supplementary appendix
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/l...388-7/fulltext





Decentralized File Platforms: Could Blockchain Challenge BitTorrent, Dropbox & Co.?
Mike Dalton

Emerging blockchain platforms offer new ways to store and transfer files. Can these services compete with their traditional counterparts?

One of the advantages provided by blockchain technology is its ability to distribute tasks and duties across a vast network of nodes. For example, Bitcoin has each miner on its network carry out transactions and generate coins. Meanwhile, Ethereum has its nodes execute smart contracts and other code.

Despite its potential, blockchain technology has not become widely recognized for its ability to handle file transfers on a decentralized network. Indeed, blockchain technology does have plenty of potential in this area: common operations such as cloud storage, web hosting, and file sharing can all be facilitated quite efficiently by blockchain technology.

Part of the reason that blockchain technology has not been widely recognized in this area is the fact that existing file sharing/storage services are ubiquitous. Storage services like Google Drive and Dropbox provide plenty of space and offer both free client and paid enterprise solutions. Meanwhile, networks such as BitTorrent provide a decentralized file sharing platform that is already widely used.

As such, if they are to gain a footing in this space, blockchain platforms will have to go beyond data storage, transfer, and retrieval in order to differentiate themselves from traditional solutions. One of the primary ways that blockchain data services are accomplishing this is by providing users with compensation. Additionally, these services will have to provide extremely secure and reliable platforms. Here's a look at three realms related to file sharing and storage and an assessment of the likelihood that blockchain will have an increasing impact.

Cloud Storage

Some blockchain services directly challenge traditional cloud storage platforms by offering competing services. In this case, blockchain technology is used to distribute hosting responsibilities to – and compensate – nodes who provide disk space. Blockchain platforms like Storj and Sia allow anyone to rent out their hard disk space to users who need cloud storage.

This provides a few benefits over centralized cloud storage services like Google Drive. Whereas Google can access and take down user files and arbitrarily suspend services, most blockchain platforms make this impossible. Storj and Sia encrypt user data so that peer storage providers cannot view anyone’s data, and they use redundancy to ensure that user data will not be lost even if several nodes decide to stop hosting data.

This model has already gained plenty of attention, partially because Storj and Sia provide crypto tokens to users who rent out space. Renting disk space may seem to be a lucrative option in the face of ever-decreasing mining profitability. Unfortunately, the rewards on hosting platforms are unpredictable and are not very profitable for the average user. Since the economics of storage is always changing, the future of these platforms is not clear.

P2P File Sharing

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing has been active for nearly two decades, and BitTorrent is the gold standard in this area. Unlike cloud storage sites, BitTorrent has been resistant to most attempts to control it. This is because BitTorrent already relies on a decentralized network: peer users upload and download data without the need for any central servers.

As such, a blockchain-based file sharing service would be only minimally different from BitTorrent in many ways. However, blockchain technology may be able to improve on P2P file sharing. Since acquiring BitTorrent, TRON has introduced plans to integrate the BitTorrent protocol with its own blockchain. TRON's upcoming Project Atlas will issue tokens to compensate users who dedicate bandwidth and seed files. Another project called Tribler similarly uses a token system to allow BitTorrent users to pay for faster download speeds.

Although blockchain could improve file sharing incentives, the limitations of P2P file sharing should be noted. As the word “sharing” might suggest, file sharing is not particularly useful for private data backups. P2P file sharing is most effective when files with mass appeal are in high demand. As a result, BitTorrent is largely used to transfer pirated media, especially recent and popular media. Although blockchain platforms that enter the file sharing realm may technically improve the system, these platforms may encounter legal issues if they are not cautious.

Web Hosting

One other area in which the blockchain could make its mark is decentralized web hosting. IPFS is a blockchain-adjacent file system that fills this niche: peer nodes host web data, and a blockchain (or more accurately, a DAG) is used to verify the authenticity of transferred data. This essentially allows regular websites and other web content to be uploaded to a decentralized network and accessed in any standard web browser.

Like cloud storage systems, IPFS provides secure hosting and file access. It allows files to have permissions: although websites can be accessed by the public, some web files are not public. IPFS is also like BitTorrent in that it does not necessarily aim for persistent hosting, meaning that users may have to organize their own networks if they want their data hosting to last.

However, this lack of persistence may change thanks to FileCoin, a blockchain-based incentive layer for IPFS. FileCoin will introduce a market for data hosting and will incentivize IPFS hosts. IPFS has already been successfully used to host popular dApps, block explorers, and messaging systems, and FileCoin’s compensation model will likely promote further use of the IPFS protocol.

Conclusion

File management on the blockchain may involve many different approaches. One unifying feature is the need for each platform to provide a compensation model that successfully attracts and incentivizes hosts. Additionally, compensation alone may not be enough: blockchain services must also offer secure and effective hosting.

However, blockchain file services may need to fill a niche. The systems listed above occupy just a few possible roles: other approaches involve Casper's dApp data storage system and IBM's enterprise-level file transfer system.
https://www.bitrates.com/news/p/dece...dropbox-and-co





Netflix’s Movie Blitz Takes Aim at Hollywood’s Heart
Brooks Barnes

As hundreds of movie buffs waited in line to see Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” at the Telluride Film Festival in August, an S.U.V. rolled up and a tall, tanned man wearing sunglasses stepped out. He smiled and waved before breezing into the theater with his entourage.

“Was that some sort of celebrity?” one ticket holder asked.

Moviegoers may not know Scott Stuber, but he is fast becoming one of the most important — and disruptive — people in the film business. A former Universal Pictures vice chairman, Mr. Stuber, 50, is Netflix’s movie chief. His mandate is to make the streaming service’s original film lineup as formidable as its television operation, which received 112 Emmy nominations this year, the most of any network.

With the rapturously reviewed “Roma,” which arrived on Netflix on Friday, Mr. Stuber has pushed the internet giant into the center of the Oscar race. Mr. Cuarón’s subtle film about life in 1970s Mexico City is likely to give Netflix its first best-picture nomination. To make sure, the company is backing “Roma” with perhaps the most extravagant Academy Awards campaign ever mounted.

But “Roma” is just the start of Mr. Stuber’s cinematic onslaught, one that is forcing old-line studios and multiplex chains to confront a panic-inducing question: Will the streaming company that prompted many people to cut the cable cord now cause people to stop going to theaters? Having disrupted the television and music businesses, the internet is finally threatening the heart of Hollywood.

Mr. Stuber, armed with Netflix’s debt-financed war chest, has films coming from Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, Dee Rees, Guillermo del Toro, Noah Baumbach and the king of spectacle, Michael Bay. “If you’re going to build a great film studio, you have to build it with great filmmakers,” Mr. Stuber said, noting that Hollywood royals — Meryl Streep, Ben Affleck, Eddie Murphy, Sandra Bullock, Dwayne Johnson — had also signed on for Netflix movies.

Mr. Stuber’s operation is set up to supply 55 original films a year, including some with budgets as high as $200 million. Add in documentaries and animated movies, handled by other divisions, and the number of annual Netflix film releases climbs to about 90. To compare, Universal, one of Hollywood’s most prolific traditional studios, releases roughly 30 movies a year.

Until now, moviedom has been relatively protected from the digital forces that have reshaped the rest of media. Most films still arrive in the same way they have for decades: first in theaters, for an exclusive run of about 90 days, and then in homes. Multiplex chains, including AMC and Regal, have fought off efforts to shorten that period. They worry that people will be reluctant to buy tickets if they can see the same film in their living rooms just a few weeks (or days) later.

“Given the marginal profitability of the theatrical business, if you lose 10 percent of the audience — some people stay home — some cinemas go out of business,” said John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, a group whose members believe big screens are part of the very definition of film.

Netflix mostly bypasses theaters. To qualify for awards, a handful of Netflix movies appear simultaneously online and in art theaters in New York and Los Angeles. Pressed by Mr. Stuber, Netflix unveiled a third release model in October, making “Roma” and two other prestige movies available in cinemas first — but only for one to three weeks — and on its service second. Most theaters have refused to comply, although Netflix has cobbled together about 140 theaters in North America for “Roma” and nearly 600 more overseas. (The other two films are “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, which only played in 21 domestic theaters last month; and “Bird Box,” a thriller starring Ms. Bullock, that arrived in four theaters on Thursday.)

Netflix’s newfound attention to theaters is an olive branch to Oscar voters. Heavyweights like Steven Spielberg have chafed at Netflix’s policy of streaming films immediately, suggesting that all of the service’s content should be considered television. But Netflix needs the Oscars and the validation they bring to compete with traditional studios for top talent.

“We’re trying to build a new studio that is exciting for artists,” Mr. Stuber said. “As we do that, it’s important to be open to criticism. When a great artist says, ‘Hey, this doesn’t work,’ then we’d better try to fix it. For some of our filmmakers, that means having a theatrical release and contending for awards.”

Don’t expect Netflix to bend much further, however.

“In a world where consumer choice is driving everything — how we shop, how we order groceries, how we are entertained — we’re trying to get to a place where consumers have theatrical viewing as a choice,” Mr. Stuber said. “But we also think it is critical that, if you don’t have the means or the access or the time to go to a theater, you are still able to see movies without a long wait.”

Mr. Fithian of the theater owners association called Mr. Stuber’s comment about access “absolute hogwash.” He added, “For filmmakers who want to go to Netflix, they are kind of selling their soul — the pot of money versus how they know a movie should be seen.”

Mr. Scorsese disagrees. Netflix adopted his coming mob drama “The Irishman,” starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, after Paramount balked at its cost.

“Some might say, ‘It’s Netflix, it’s not about theatrical, it’s all about streaming,’” Mr. Scorsese said in an email. “To a certain extent that’s true, of course, and, for me, coming from the theatrical era, it feels odd and uncertain — Joel and Ethan and Alfonso Cuarón and Tamara Jenkins would probably say the same. But we’re all making the films as big-screen experiences, and they’re giving us theatrical windows. And, most importantly of all, Scott and his team are actually making our movies, from a place of respect and love for cinema, and that means everything.”

“Roma” was financed and produced by Participant Media, which approached six companies, including traditional ones like Fox Searchlight, as potential distributors. All of them, with the exception of Netflix, Mr. Cuarón said, were concerned about the commercial viability of a black-and-white, subtitled film. “I’m excited about this Netflix distribution model developing,” Mr. Cuarón said. “It will bring back diversity to cinema.”

He added: “I trust Scott. I’ve known him for a long, long, long time.”

Mr. Stuber, who has a mellow, genial style that stands out in monomaniacal Hollywood, is the consummate film industry insider. He got to know Mr. Cuarón in the early 2000s, when Mr. Stuber was a senior executive at Universal and Mr. Cuarón was making “Children of Men” at the studio.

In an interview, Mr. Stuber casually spoke about projects with “Sandy” and “Marty” between sips of golden oolong tea. (That would be Ms. Bullock and Mr. Scorsese.)

Mr. Stuber left his job at Universal in 2005 to become a producer, specializing in bro-culture comedies like “Ted” and “You, Me and Dupree.” Despite a mixed record — his misfires included “A Million Ways to Die in the West” and “Battleship” — he was courted to run Paramount in 2017. Netflix reached out around the same time.

At Netflix, Mr. Stuber has had to bridge the cultural gap between Hollywood, where decisions are made by gut instinct, and his own company, where data and algorithms rule. “It can’t be easy, but Scott seems to be everywhere at once,” said Susanne Bier, who directed “Bird Box.” “I’ll send him a text and there will be a quick text back.”

The Netflix film department has two major groups. One is called Originals, intended to supply about 20 movies a year with budgets of $20 million to $200 million. The Indie group is set up for about 35 films a year, with budgets of up to $20 million; about 75 percent of its output will be genre movies aimed at specific audiences (like the romantic comedy “Kissing Booth,” a summer hit), with the balance dedicated to art-house directors like Nicole Holofcener.

Mr. Stuber has greenlight authority for all Netflix films but delegates some of those decisions.

Mr. Stuber, who is married to Molly Sims, the actress and lifestyle entrepreneur, grew up in Granada Hills, Calif., where his father worked for Lockheed Martin and his mother at an import-export company. He knew no one in Hollywood.

After graduating from the University of Arizona with a film degree (he went there to play baseball), Mr. Stuber got a job at Universal in 1992 as a publicity assistant. His duties included delivering news clippings at 8 a.m. daily to the studio’s all-powerful chief, Lew Wasserman.

After about six months, Mr. Wasserman, apparently impressed by Mr. Stuber’s punctuality, spoke to him for the first time. “He said, ‘Hey kid, what do you want to be when you grow up?’” Mr. Stuber recalled.

The young Mr. Stuber’s quick reply? “You.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/b...hollywood.html





A Year Without Net Neutrality: No Big Changes (Yet)

For now, the battle over net neutrality has moved from the streets to the courts and legislatures.
Klint Finley

It's been one year since the Federal Communications Commission voted to gut its net neutrality rules. The good news is that the internet isn't drastically different than it was before. But that's also the bad news: The net wasn't always so neutral to begin with.

As we predicted last year, broadband providers didn't make any drastic new moves to block or cripple the delivery of content after the FCC's order revoking its Obama-era net neutrality protections took effect in June. That makes perfect sense given the uncertain future of net neutrality protections.

State attorneys general, net neutrality advocates, and industry groups representing companies like Facebook and Netflix are locked in a legal battle against the FCC over the new rules. Meanwhile, the Senate approved legislation that would restore the FCC rules if it’s also passed by the House and signed by President Trump. It’s a long shot, but since Congress extended its session, supporters have until at least December 21 to push the legislation through. Also, multiple states, including California, have passed their own net neutrality protections. Whether the state-level rules will survive legal challenge is an open question. The US Department of Justice sued California immediately after Governor Jerry Brown signed the state’s bill, and the law is now on hold pending the litigation over the FCC rules.

Any egregious violations of the principles of net neutrality by broadband providers would provide ammunition to advocates who want the old rules restored. So expect the status quo to continue for a bit longer. Netflix, Hulu, and Skype will keep working. But even under the status quo, not all traffic is handled equally.

Even while the Obama-era net neutrality rules were in effect in 2017, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon began offering "unlimited" plans that put video in a slow lane. AT&T and T-Mobile limit video speeds on their entry-level unlimited plans to 1.5 Mbps, which is only enough to stream DVD-quality video. Both companies charge extra to stream at full high-definition rates. Verizon's most expensive plan allows video streaming with a resolution of only 720p on smartphones; if you want to watch a 1080p movie on Verizon's network, you'll need to do it from a tablet.

Hobbling the delivery of all video across the board isn’t a worst-case scenario for the end of net neutrality, since it doesn’t necessarily give one video provider an advantage over any other. But selling internet plans with slow lanes for specific types of content might have violated the old FCC rules, which specified that “if a broadband provider degraded the delivery of a particular application,” it would “violate the bright-line no-throttling rule.” Likewise, California’s law, if it goes into effect, will forbid broadband providers from degrading entire classes of applications.

Besides, data collected by researchers at Northeastern University from volunteers using apps that test connection speeds show that the carriers don't always apply these video speed limits evenly. David Choffnes, who leads the Northeastern University research, says Verizon throttles YouTube but doesn't throttle the video service Vimeo. It’s not clear if the different treatment between video providers is deliberate or if carriers are simply not identifying some video traffic. The carriers didn’t comment on how they handle video.

Data gathered by the researchers also showed that Sprint slows Skype connections for some users, primarily on Android phones, but Choffnes says the group wasn’t able to reproduce the behavior in their lab. Sprint didn't respond to our request to comment, but the company denied throttling Skype to Bloomberg last month.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon didn’t answer questions about whether their mobile plans violated FCC rules. But Verizon told Ars Technica last year that it believed its practices were "reasonable network management."

The news isn't all bad. A report by OpenSignal found that mobile data speeds had increased this year. Speeds should only improve as 5G networks roll out in coming years. And according to the Northeastern research, home broadband providers like Comcast and Charter don't throttle video. But the dream of a truly neutral net hasn’t yet been realized.
https://www.wired.com/story/year-wit...g-changes-yet/





FCC Fines Swarm $900,000 for Unauthorized Satellite Launch
David Shepardson

Swarm Technologies Inc will pay a $900,000 fine for launching and operating four small experimental communications satellites that risked “satellite collisions” and threatened “critical commercial and government satellite operations,” the Federal Communications Commission said on Thursday.

The California-based start-up founded by former Google and Apple engineers in 2016 also agreed to enhanced FCC oversight and a requirement of pre-launch notices to the FCC for three years.

Swarm launched the satellites in India last January after the FCC rejected its application to deploy and operate them, citing concerns about the company’s tracking ability.

It said Swarm had unlawfully transmitted signals between earth stations in the state of Georgia and the satellites for over a week. The investigation also found that Swarm performed unauthorized weather balloon-to-ground station tests and other unauthorized equipment tests prior to the satellites’ launch.

Swarm aims to provide low-cost space-based internet service and plans eventually to use a constellation of 100 satellites.

Swarm won permission in August from the FCC to reactivate the satellites and said then it is “fully committed to complying with all regulations and has been working closely with the FCC,” noting that its satellites are “100 percent trackable.”

Swarm co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Sara Spangelo said in a statement on Thursday that the company accepts the FCC decision “and appreciates the FCC’s ongoing support for Swarm’s mission.”

Earlier this month, SpaceX launched three more satellites for Swarm on a Falcon 9 rocket after winning FCC approval.

FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the size of the penalty “is probably not significant enough to deter future behavior, but the negative press coverage is likely to prevent this company and others from attempting to do this again.”

O’Rielly said an initial fine negotiated by FCC staff was rejected by some commissioners, which led to reopening settlement talks.

Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Dan Grebler
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKCN1OJ2WT





Charter Communications Agrees to Nine-Figure New York Settlement
Paul Schott

New York Attorney Gen. Barbara Underwood announced a $174 million settlement with Charter Communications on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018.

Charter Communications will pay approximately $174 million to settle charges that it misled internet subscribers in New York, including a record eight-figure payout to consumers, the state’s attorney general announced Tuesday.

The settlement resolves a 2017 lawsuit filed by the attorney general’s office alleging that the state’s largest internet service provider denied customers reliable and fast internet service that it had promised. The $62.5 million in direct refunds to consumers is believed to represent the largest such payment by an ISP in the U.S.

“This settlement should serve as a wake-up call to any company serving New York consumers: fulfill your promises, or pay the price,” New York state Attorney Gen. Barbara Underwood said in a statement. “Not only is this the largest-ever consumer payout by an internet service provider, returning tens of millions of dollars to New Yorkers who were ripped off and providing additional streaming and premium channels as restitution — but it also sets a new standard for how internet providers should fairly market their services.”

A message left Tuesday for a Charter spokesman was not immediately returned.

The settlement includes direct restitution of $62.5 million for more than 700,000 active subscribers, who will each receive between $75 and $150, as well as streaming services and premium channels, with a retail value of over $100 million, at no charge for approximately 2.2 million active subscribers.

In addition, Charter will be required to implement a number of reforms, including the requirement to describe internet speeds as “wired” and prove them through regular testing.

Charter has faced intense scrutiny of its operations in New York operations since its $55 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable in 2016.

In July, the state’s Public Service Commission announced it would revoke its approval of the merger and fined Charter another $1 million.

The commission has accused Charter of consistently failing to meet deadlines, trying to avoid commitments to rural communities, carrying out unsafe field practices and making misleading statements about its performance and compliance requirements.

Charter has disputed the commission’s allegations and has said that it has extended the reach of its broadband network to more than 86,000 New York homes and businesses since the PSC approved the merger.

Company shares closed Tuesday at about $306, down about 1 percent from their Monday finish.
https://www.newstimes.com/business/a...w-13476326.php





AT&T’s Silence on 5G Speeds Screams ‘Stay Away for Now’
Jeremy Horwitz

AT&T may be meeting its self-imposed deadline to launch “5G” service in 12 cities this week, but based on what the company has said — and not said — I can only conclude that its 5G network isn’t actually ready for prime time. Yet.

The problem is straightforward: As of today, 5G’s only benefit over 4G is speed, and AT&T has gone silent on the speed of its 5G network. Verizon promised 300Mbps to 1Gbps speeds before launching its 5G home broadband network in October, then exceeded its minimum guarantees. By contrast, AT&T made no commitment to network speeds (or latency) in its 5G launch press release, nor does it offer performance estimates in its consumer 5G web pages.

Seeking to quantify the network’s performance, I reached out to the normally responsive AT&T to ask about a report that its 5G+ network would have real-world speeds of 140Mbps, despite theoretical peak speeds that have alternately been pegged at 979Mbps or 1.2Gbps, depending on the source. There was no response.

The lack of speed details is a terrible sign, especially because AT&T now says that its first 5G device — Netgear’s Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot — runs on “5G+,” the fastest part of its 5G network, which is being built for “innovation zones in select locations.” That’s apparently AT&T’s new marketing explanation for high-bandwidth millimeter wave 5G, which its consumer 5G page now implicitly suggests won’t be offered nationwide.

If AT&T’s real-world 5G speeds are indeed only 140Mbps, it’s about to have a very rocky launch. To put that number in context, I was personally able to hit 150Mbps during testing of both the iPhone XR and iPhone XS this fall — on T-Mobile’s existing 4G network, without leaving my neighborhood for one of AT&T’s 12 selected 5G cities. And the latest Qualcomm-powered Android phones are capable of achieving even faster peak speeds with the right cell towers.

You can be certain that AT&T would be crowing right now if had brag-worthy speeds. After all, it has 12 cities’ worth of customers to pitch on 5G service, which it says will start at a hefty $70 per month for only 15GB of data. But it’s instead planning to spend “at least 90 days” giving away Nighthawk hotspots and 5G service for free to certain early adopters. Then it will actually start selling the device and service next spring.

From my perspective, this all adds up to an unfortunate conclusion. Despite AT&T’s claim that tomorrow it will be “the first and only company in the U.S. to offer a mobile 5G device over a commercial, standards-based mobile 5G network,” the launch doesn’t sound “commercial” to me. Giving away “5G+” hardware and service without any speed promises sounds like a punt: a 90-day test with results (hopefully including data caps and pricing) to be re-evaluated next year.

Given how physically large the Nighthawk 5G Hotspot is, the only reason I’d even consider participating in AT&T’s test would be that it’s free. Even then, I might be just as well off with the performance of the T-Mobile phone I can fit in my pocket. So now it’s up to AT&T to demonstrate that there’s more to be gained from its 5G network than “first” bragging rights — both for consumers, and for itself.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/20/a...-away-for-now/





AT&T Will Put a Fake 5G Logo On its 4G LTE Phones
Jacob Kastrenakes

AT&T customers will start to see a 5G logo appear in the corner of their smartphone next year — not because they’re using a 5G phone connected to a 5G network, but because AT&T is going to start pretending its most advanced 4G LTE tech is 5G.

According to FierceWireless, AT&T will display an icon reading “5G E” on newer phones that are connected to LTE in markets where the carrier has deployed a handful of speed boosting — but still definitively 4G — technologies. The “E,” displayed smaller than the rest of the logo, refers to “5G Evolution,” the carrier’s term for networks that aren’t quite 5G but are still faster than traditional LTE.

If this sounds sadly familiar, it’s because AT&T pulled this exact same stunt during the transition to LTE. The company rolled out a speed-boosting 3G tech called HSPA+, then got all of its phone partners — even Apple! — to show a “4G” logo when on that kind of connection.

It’s an intentionally confusing and borderline deceptive move designed to win the coming advertising wars around 5G. By “upgrading” a bunch of customers’ phones to “5G” now, AT&T will have a multitude of people using a “5G” network months, if not more than a year, before everyone else.

Technically, the “E” in the “5G E” icon will offer a degree of clarification. But I’m not banking on many people knowing that “E” is somehow supposed to indicate “this isn’t actual 5G.” In a blog post yesterday, T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray wrote that AT&T was “duping customers into thinking they’re getting something they’re not.” The “E” is easy to miss, too, judging by a mockup AT&T sent out.

AT&T told FierceWireless that the “5G E” logo would initially come to “a handful of devices, with more devices showing the indicator in spring 2019.” It wasn’t stated how many devices or which devices would show the icon, beyond it being “the latest Android devices.”

FierceWireless guesses that “potentially millions” of people could see the new logo, with AT&T’s 5G Evolution network available in over 400 markets by the end of 2018. Given that real 5G will be rare and limited for the next year or more, this tiny little branding change could lead to a great deal of misunderstanding around the state of the next-generation wireless technology.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/21/...t-fake-network





CenturyLink Blocked its Customers’ Internet Access in Order to Show an Ad

Utah customers were booted offline until they acknowledged security software ad.
Jon Brodkin

CenturyLink briefly disabled the Internet connections of customers in Utah last week and allowed them back online only after they acknowledged an offer to purchase filtering software.

CenturyLink falsely claimed that it was required to do so by a Utah state law that says ISPs must notify customers "of the ability to block material harmful to minors." In fact, the new law requires only that ISPs notify customers of their filtering software options "in a conspicuous manner"; it does not say that the ISPs must disable Internet access until consumers acknowledge the notification. The law even says that ISPs may make the notification "with a consumer's bill," which shouldn't disable anyone's Internet access.

Coincidentally, CenturyLink's blocking of customer Internet access occurred days before the one-year anniversary of the Federal Communications Commission repeal of net neutrality rules, which prohibited blocking and throttling of Internet access.

"Just had CenturyLink block my Internet and then inject this page into my browser... to advertise their paid filtering software to me," software engineer and Utah resident Rich Snapp tweeted on December 9. "Clicking OK on the notice then restored my Internet... this is NOT okay!"

Just had @CenturyLink block my internet and then inject this page into my browser (dns spoofing I think) to advertise their paid filtering software to me. Clicking OK on the notice then restored my internet... this is NOT okay! pic.twitter.com/NtCZUeJF8I

— Rich Snapp (@Snapwich) December 9, 2018

“Your Internet service has been fully restored”

Snapp's Internet access went out while he was watching streaming video via his Amazon Fire TV device. Since he wasn't sitting in front of his computer, it wasn't immediately obvious why his whole Internet connection went offline, he wrote in a blog post Thursday.

"After trying to debug the issue for a bit with no success I went to my computer, which was still connected to my ISP, but was also experiencing a strange lack of Internet," Snapp wrote. "Eventually I turned to a Google search on my phone only to be immediately greeted with an official looking notice."

That's when he saw this message from CenturyLink, informing him that he could buy filtering software:

"At first glance I was worried that I had somehow been redirected to a malicious website and that this was some kind of phishing attempt... After all, I didn't navigate here," Snapp wrote. "I attempted to do another search but still ended up at this same notice. I considered the idea that maybe my ISP had detected some kind of threat coming from my network and that's why I was seeing this official looking page."

Snapp eventually clicked "OK" on the CenturyLink message, and his Internet came back. A new message from CenturyLink appeared, saying, "Your Internet service has been fully restored. If you are unable to access the Internet within 5 minutes, please power your modem off [for] at least 30 seconds."

State senator: No requirement to block access

Other Utah-based CenturyLink customers complained about the temporary blocking on Twitter and Reddit. A CenturyLink spokesperson responded to a query from Utah-based news site KSL.com, saying, "As a result of the new law, all CenturyLink high-speed Internet customers in Utah must acknowledge a pop-up notice, which provides information about the availability of filtering software, in order to access the Internet."

But as we previously noted, that isn't what the law says. The law states that ISPs may provide the notice either "by electronic communication," "with a consumer's bill," "or in another conspicuous manner," and does not require ISPs to disable Internet access until customers acknowledge the message.

Bill sponsor Todd Weiler, a Republican state senator, confirmed on Twitter that the law "did not require that—and no other ISP has done that to comply with the law. They were only required to notify customers of options via email or with an invoice."

ISPs have "had all year to comply," and most had already done so, Weiler continued. For example, "AT&T sent [the required notice] with a monthly invoice," Weiler wrote.

We contacted CenturyLink this morning and asked if the company simply misunderstood the law. In response, a CenturyLink spokesperson acknowledged that the law provides several options for compliance but defended the ISP's decision to temporarily block Internet access. CenturyLink's statement to Ars is as follows:

“The intent of the Utah state legislation is to ensure that Utah internet consumers are aware of content filtering options to protect minors. The statute provides for various options, but the method of notification is to be conspicuous to ensure the message is read. We felt, given the gravity surrounding the protection of this most vulnerable population, the most conspicuous method of notification is a pop-up. CenturyLink did not engage in DNS hijacking and the pop-up message is being used to adhere to state law.”

The message was sent only to residential customers, CenturyLink also said.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...w-required-it/





Turning Off Facebook Location Tracking Doesn't Stop It From Tracking Your Location
Kashmir Hill

Aleksandra Korolova has turned off Facebook’s access to her location in every way that she can. She has turned off location history in the Facebook app and told her iPhone that she “Never” wants the app to get her location. She doesn’t “check-in” to places and doesn’t list her current city on her profile.

Despite all this, she constantly sees location-based ads on Facebook. She sees ads targeted at “people who live near Santa Monica” (where she lives) and at “people who live or were recently near Los Angeles” (where she works as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California). When she traveled to Glacier National Park, she saw an ad for activities in Montana, and when she went on a work trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, she saw an ad for a ceramics school there.

Facebook was continuing to track Korolova’s location for ads despite her signaling in all the ways that she could that she didn’t want Facebook doing that.

This was especially perturbing for Korolova, as she recounts on Medium, because she has studied the privacy harms that come from Facebook advertising, including how it could be previously used to gather data about an individual’s likes, estimated income and interests (for which she and her co-author Irfan Faizullabhoy got a $2,000 bug bounty from Facebook), and how it can currently be used to target ads at a single house or building, if, say, an anti-choice group wanted to target women at a Planned Parenthood with an ad for baby clothes.

Korolova thought Facebook must be getting her location information from the IP addresses she used to log in from, which Facebook says it collects for security purposes. (It wouldn’t be the first time Facebook used information gathered for security purposes for advertising ones; advertisers can target Facebook users with the phone number they provided for two-factor protection of their account.) As the New York Times recently reported, lots of apps are tracking users’ movements with surprising granularity. The Times suggested turning off location services in your phone’s privacy settings to stop the tracking, but even then the apps can still get location information, by looking at the wifi network you use or your IP address.

When asked about this, Facebook said that’s exactly what it’s doing and that it considers this a completely normal thing to do and that users should know this will happen if they closely read various Facebook websites.

“Facebook does not use WiFi data to determine your location for ads if you have Location Services turned off,” said a Facebook spokesperson by email. “We do use IP and other information such as check-ins and current city from your profile. We explain this to people, including in our Privacy Basics site and on the About Facebook Ads site.”

On Privacy Basics, Facebook gives advice for “how to manage your privacy” with regards to location but says that regardless of what you do, Facebook can still “understand your location using things like... information about your Internet connection.” This is reiterated on the “About Facebook Ads” site that says that ads might be based on your location which is garnered from “where you connect to the Internet” among other things.

Strangely, back in 2014, Facebook told businesses in a blog post that “people have control over the recent location information they share with Facebook and will only see ads based on their recent location if location services are enabled on their phone.” Apparently, that policy has changed. (Facebook said it would update this old post.)

Hey, maybe this is to be expected. You need an IP address to use the internet and, by the nature of how the internet works, you reveal it to an app or a website when you use them (though you can hide your IP address by using one provided by the Tor browser or a VPN). There are various companies that specialize in mapping the locations of IP addresses, and while it can sometimes be wildly inaccurate, an IP address will give you a rough approximation of your whereabouts, such as the state, city or zip code you are currently in. Many websites use IP address-derived location to personalize their offerings, and many advertisers use it to show targeted online ads. It means showing you ads for restaurants in San Francisco if you live there instead of ads for restaurants in New York. In that context, Facebook using this information to do the same thing is not terribly unusual.

“There is no way for people to opt out of using location for ads entirely,” said a Facebook spokesperson by email. “We use city and zip level location which we collect from IP addresses and other information such as check-ins and current city from your profile to ensure we are providing people with a good service—from ensuring they see Facebook in the right language, to making sure that they are shown nearby events and ads for businesses that are local to them.”

The question is whether Facebook should be held to a higher standard given its one-on-one relationship with its users. Should users be able to tell Facebook, ‘Hey, I don’t want you tracking my location for ad purposes’? And then should Facebook not let advertisers target those people based on their locations? Kolokova thinks that should be the case.

“The locations that a person visits and lives in reveal a great deal about them,” she writes on Medium. “Their surreptitious collection and use in ad targeting can pave the way to ads that are harmful, target people when they are vulnerable or enable harassment and discrimination.”

At this point, Facebook disagrees. It feels IP address is a rough approximation of location that is forgivable to use. To avoid this, you could stop using the Facebook app on your phone (where IP addresses tend to be more precisely mapped) or use a VPN when you log into Facebook. Or, of course, there’s always the option to quit Facebook altogether.

If you don’t mind Facebook knowing your location, and you have “location services” turned on for the app in your phone, know that Facebook is tracking you very closely! In a page for advertisers about tracking who has gone into a store after seeing an ad for it on Facebook, Facebook says “we can use these customers’ Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signatures to pinpoint their locations even more accurately” and “location updates can occur even when the Facebook app is closed.”

If you don’t mind that, cool! If you do, you might want to revisit your Facebook location settings.
https://gizmodo.com/turning-off-face...t-f-1831149148





Walt Mossberg, Veteran Technology Journalist, Quits Facebook
Daniel Victor

Walt Mossberg is far from alone in giving up on Facebook. But as a leading technology journalist who has spent decades chronicling the impact of Silicon Valley’s policies, his exit from the social network speaks louder than most.

Mr. Mossberg, a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, The Verge and Recode, said on Monday he would be deactivating his Facebook account, along with the Facebook-owned Messenger and Instagram apps.

“I am doing this — after being on Facebook for nearly 12 years — because my own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point where I’m no longer comfortable here,” he wrote on Facebook.

While Mr. Mossberg didn’t list any specific complaints on Monday, his history of public writing left little doubt that his ire was aimed largely at the company’s policies and actions on user privacy. He declined to comment when reached by email.

But in his Facebook post, he stopped short of suggesting others follow his lead.

“This is a decision I am making just for myself,” he said. “If the company or the service change significantly for the better, in my view, or become effectively regulated, I may resume regular use.”

Mr. Mossberg, who retired from writing weekly columns last year but has continued offering commentary on Twitter, has been covering technology since he lugged around his 1977 Radio Shack laptop. He has personally grilled top executives of tech companies, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, on their privacy policies.

He is working on a book, set to be published next autumn, about how the tech industry has transformed in the last four decades.

“To me, the tech revolution has been a net positive, and I don’t think it’s a close call,” he told The Verge in October 2017. “But there have been unintended consequences, like elections and harassment. The two things tie together in the headlong rush to do the next thing with no one asking questions along the way. We’ve never stopped to catch a breath.”

Mr. Mossberg has argued that the government should take an active role in protecting the internet, and that Facebook has “a direct responsibility to get rid of fake news.”

The company has, for years, stood under a cascade of questions — including some from Congress about how it has mishandled user data. It has disclosed a failure to monitor device makers after granting them access to personal data, admitted a bug changed the privacy settings of millions of users and allowed outsiders to access private photos. In more severe examples, Cambridge Analytica, a third-party firm, harvested data from users without their knowledge or consent, and a breach in September allowed hackers to fully access the accounts of tens of millions of users.

Facebook did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/t...-facebook.html





Indian Government to Intercept, Monitor, and Decrypt Citizens’ Computers
Manish Singh

The Indian government has authorized 10 central agencies to intercept, monitor, and decrypt data on any computer, sending a shock wave through citizens and privacy watchdogs.

Narendra Modi’s government late Thursday broadened the scope of Section 69 of the nation’s IT Act, 2000 to require a subscriber, service provider, or any person in charge of a computer to “extend all facilities and technical assistance to the agencies.” Failure to comply with the agencies could result in seven years of imprisonment and an unspecified fine.

In a clarification posted today, the Ministry of Home Affairs said each case of interception, monitoring, and decryption is to be approved by the competent authority, which is the Union Home Secretary.

The agencies that have been authorized with this new power are the Intelligence Bureau, Narcotics Control Bureau, Enforcement Directorate, Central Board of Direct Taxes, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, Central Bureau of Investigation, National Investigation Agency, Research and Analysis Wing, Directorate of Signal Intelligence (in service areas of J-K, North East, and Assam), and Delhi Police.

Explaining the rationale behind the order, India’s IT minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, said the measure was undertaken in the interests of national security. He added that some form of “tapping” has already been going on in the country for a number of years and that the new order would help bring structure to that process. “Always remember one thing,” he said in a televised interview. “Even in the case of a particular individual, the interception order shall not be effective unless affirmed by the Home Secretary.”

Apprehension among citizens

The Internet Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit organization that protects the online rights of citizens in India, cautioned that the order goes beyond telephone tapping. It includes looking at content streams and might even involve breaking encryption in some cases. “Imagine your search queries on Google over [a number of] years being demanded — mixed with your WhatsApp metadata, who you talk to, when, and how much [and add] layers of data streams from emails + Facebook,” the group said.

“To us, this order is unconstitutional and in breach of the telephone tapping guidelines, the Privacy Judgement, and the Aadhaar Judgement,” it asserted, adding that it was working with volunteers and lawyers to further scrutinize the order.

Opposition political parties also expressed concern about the order. “From Modi sarkar [Hindi for government] to stalker sarkar, clearly the string of losses has left the BJP government desperate for information,” the Congress political party said. Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram added, “If anybody is going to monitor the computer, including your computer, that is the Orwellian state. George Orwell is around the corner. It is condemnable.”

This is overbroad, has a chilling effect and is liable to be struck down in toto: still amazing how many government actions on online regulation have been straight up, ex-facie unconstitutional. https://t.co/nOhI8vA2Tx

— Karuna Nundy (@karunanundy) December 21, 2018


IT Minister Prasad lashed out at the opposition, asking whether they believe the government should not do anything to halt the proliferation of terrorist activities, which he alleged are being conducted on the internet.

VentureBeat has reached out to Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon for comment and will update if we hear back. Microsoft declined to comment.

Global issue

This move by the Indian government comes days after the Australian government, in a global first, took a stricter approach to the way communications service are handled within its borders. Earlier this month, the Australian parliament passed laws giving police and security agencies in the nation the power to access messages on encrypted platforms. The government said it is taking this step in an effort to combat terrorism and other crime.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/21/i...ens-computers/





Russia 'Meddled in All Big Social Media' Around US Election

Russia used every major social media platform to try to influence the 2016 US election, a report claims.

New research says YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram and PayPal - as well as Facebook and Twitter - were leveraged to spread propaganda.

The report, released today by the US Senate, exposes the scale of Russian disinformation efforts.

Its authors criticise the "belated and unco-ordinated response" by tech firms.

The report was put together by University of Oxford's Computational Propaganda Project and the social network analysis firm Graphika.

It is the first analysis of millions of social media posts provided by Twitter, Google and Facebook to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

While Facebook and Twitter have previously disclosed Russian interference, little has been known about the use of other platforms.

The report suggests YouTube, Tumblr, PayPal and Google+ were all affected, with Russia adapting techniques from digital marketing to target audiences across multiple channels.

"It's a whole family of social media sites," says Philip N Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute. "We think the goal was to make the campaigns seem more legitimate."

The research details a vast campaign spearheaded by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) - a Russian company that has been described by the United States Intelligence Community as a troll farm with ties to the Russian government.

The report says Russia had a particular focus on targeting conservatives with posts on immigration, race and gun rights.

There were also efforts to undermine the voting power of left-leaning African-American citizens, by spreading misinformation about the electoral process.

Another report, also released today by the Senate, by the research firm New Knowledge, similarly highlights Russia's efforts to target African-Americans.

It explains how Russia's IRA were focused on "developing Black audiences and recruiting Black Americans as assets," which included encouraging activists to stage rallies.

One IRA campaign highlighted in the Oxford and Graphika paper, Black Matters US, existed across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and PayPal. These various accounts would promote each other's posts and events.

When Facebook suspended the group on its platform, the group's Twitter account complained about the move and accused the social network of "supporting white supremacy".

"What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party - and specifically Donald Trump," the report says.

"Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting."

While the data used by the researchers was provided by Facebook, Twitter and Google, their findings criticise the "belated and uncoordinated response" from these companies to Russia's disinformation campaign.

The researchers highlight details that could have led internet companies to detect interference earlier, such as the use of the Russian rouble to buy advertisements and internet signatures relating to the IRA's base of operations.

The BBC has asked Russia's Embassy in the UK for comment.

The IRA was among the three companies indicted earlier this year, as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Twelve of the agency's employees faced indictment charges, as well as its alleged financier, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

"Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and co-ordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike," the report says.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46590890





US Treasury Sanctions Russians for Hacking and Election Meddling

This includes election interference and anti-doping agency hacks.
Jon Fingas

The US government isn't done taking action against Russians accused of hacking and interference campaigns. The Treasury Department has leveled sanctions against 16 current and former GRU intelligence officers (some of whom were targeted in earlier indictments) for their involvement in multiple campaigns against the US, including the Democratic National Committee hacks, World Anti-Doping Agency hacks and election meddling efforts.

The targets include Elena Khusyaynova, the primary accountant for the Project Lakhta influence campaign that included the Internet Research Agency. The sanctions also target associated entities like the Federal News Agency.

As with the indictments, the sanctions will only have a limited effect. The measure blocks all property and interests from these people that might be in US jurisdictions, and Americans are "generally prohibited" from conducting transactions with them. The targets live in Russia, though, and it's doubtful that they'll travel to countries where the sanctions will hit them. This is more a symbolic gesture than one intended to curb Russian hacks and manipulation atttemps.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/19/...sian-officers/





ACLU to Feds: Your “Hacking Presents a Unique Threat to Individual Privacy”

Lawsuit: Are there "protocols governing hacking?"
Cyrus Farivar

The American Civil Liberties Union, along with Privacy International, a similar organization based in the United Kingdom, have now sued 11 federal agencies, demanding records about how those agencies engage in what is often called "lawful hacking."

The activist groups filed Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and nine others. None responded in a substantive way.

"Law enforcement use of hacking presents a unique threat to individual privacy," the ACLU argues in its lawsuit, which was filed Friday in federal court in New York state.

"Hacking can be used to obtain volumes of personal information about individuals that would never previously have been available to law enforcement."

In recent years, there have been a few instances when the public has learned about the government's attempts to hack websites, including its pursuit of Freedom Hosting, a Tor-hidden hosting firm, back in 2013.

Last year, federal prosecutors dropped charges in at least two child-porn cases connected to a notorious Tor-hidden site, Playpen. As Ars has previously reported, in order to unmask Playpen's users, federal authorities seized and operated the site for 13 days before closing it down. During that period, the FBI deployed a Tor exploit that allowed them to uncover those users' real IP addresses. The use of Tor, which obscures and anonymizes IP addresses and browser user agents, makes tracking individuals online significantly more difficult. With the exploit, it became extremely easy for suspects to be identified and located.

The DOJ has called this exploit a "network investigative technique" (NIT), while many security experts have referred to it as "malware." The source code of that particular exploit has been classified, making it all but impossible for the public to know precisely how it works.

Due to this secrecy, lawmakers have a hard time adequately vetting how these tools work.

As the ACLU further argues :

For example, the public does not know when law enforcement agencies believe they can use hacking without obtaining a warrant or other judicial authorization. The public does not even know whether many of the defendant agencies have internal rules or protocols governing hacking. Without more information, the public is not able to exercise meaningful democratic oversight of this new and intrusive law enforcement capability. Even criminal defendants may not be fully aware of whether the government has engaged in hacking to search their devices, nor the scope and process of those searches. This degree of secrecy creates significant opportunities for misuse and abuse.

The FBI did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...idual-privacy/





Man Sues Feds after Being Detained for Refusing to Unlock his Phone at Airport

"Please call a lawyer for me!" Haisam Elsharkawi shouted at LAX while being detained.
Cyrus Farivar

A Southern California man has become the latest person to sue the federal government over what he says is an unconstitutional search of his phone at the Los Angeles International Airport.

According to his lawsuit, which was recently filed in federal court in Los Angeles, Haisam Elsharkawi had arrived at LAX on February 9, 2017 and was headed to Saudi Arabia to go on a hajj, the Muslim religious pilgrimage.

After clearing the security checkpoint, Elsharkawi, an American citizen, was pulled aside from the Turkish Airlines boarding line by a Customs and Border Protection officer, who began questioning him about how much cash he was carrying and where he was going. Elsharkawi complied with the officer’s inquiries and dutifully followed him to a nearby table.

"As the questioning continued and became increasingly aggressive, Mr. Elsharkawi asked if there was a problem and whether he needed an attorney," the complaint states. "Officer Rivas then accused Mr. Elsharkawi of hiding something because of his request for an attorney."

Soon after, another agent, Officer Rodriguez, began searching Elsharkawi’s pockets and discovered his phone. Rodriguez asked Elsharkawi to unlock his phone, which he declined to do. He then also refused to answer further questions without having an attorney present.

Another officer told Elsharkawi that he was not under arrest and as such had no right to an attorney—at which point he asked to be released.

“Someone help”

When that request was ignored, another agent, Officer Rivas, began rifling through Elsharkawi’s carry-on bag for a second time.

The complaint continues:

Mr. Elsharkawi asked for his phone back to make a call. Officer Rodriguez responded by stating that Mr. Elsharkawi had an attitude, was obviously racist, and had a problem with the uniform of CBP officers. Officer Rodriguez told Mr. Elsharkawi to put his hands behind his back, and handcuffed him.

Officer Rodriguez, along with two other CBP officers, then began pulling Mr. Elsharkawi into an elevator.

At this point, Mr. Elsharkawi feared for his safety. He turned to a nearby flight attendant and yelled to her, "Please call a lawyer for me!"

When Mr. Elsharkawi was taken into the elevator and reached another floor of the airport, he again loudly yelled out, "Someone help, someone call a lawyer for me. They said I’m not under arrest even though I’m handcuffed and they are taking me somewhere that I don’t know and will not let me have a lawyer."

Officer Rodriguez then pushed Mr. Elsharkawi’s arms up to his neck, to the point that Mr. Elsharkawi feared they would break.

One of the CBP officers stated that Mr. Elsharkawi was causing a lot of problems, and recommended taking him downstairs.

Elsharkawi was taken to a holding cell and was eventually brought before a supervisor named Officer Stevenson. Stevenson explained that the agents were "just protecting the country" and that all he had to do was unlock his phone.

Again, Elsharkawi declined. This back-and-forth went on for some time, as new agents continued to search his bag.

"The officers expressed no interest in searching his iPad, despite seeing it and removing it while searching his bags," the lawsuit continues.

Yet another officer entered the scene, identified in the civil complaint as "Officer Jennifer," who again began questioning Elsharkawi.

Eventually, after some back-and-forth, Elsharkawi "felt he had no choice but to acquiesce and unlocked his phone."

Officer Jennifer began searching his phone and asked Elsharkawi about his eBay and Amazon accounts, and "where he got merchandise for his e-commerce business, and what swap meets he frequents. Officer Jennifer also commented that Mr. Elsharkawi had a lot of apps and a lot of unread emails on his phone."

A rare occurrence

Lawyers for Elsharkawi believe that his phone was imaged.

A recent report issued by the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General found that some USB sticks containing data copied from electronic devices searched at the border "had not been deleted after the searches were completed."

According to CBP’s own figures sent to Ars in March 2017, the agency searched nearly 24,000 devices during fiscal year 2016, up from nearly 5,000 a year earlier. 2017 reached more than 29,000 "inbound travelers." However, the agency maintains that such inspections are exceedingly rare.

It is not clear how many outbound travelers, like Elsharkawi, were subjected to such searches.

Federal authorities do not need a warrant to examine a phone or a computer seized at the border. They rely on what’s known as the "border doctrine"—the legal idea that warrants are not required to conduct a search at the border. This legal theory has been generally recognized by courts, even in recent years.

Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

UPDATE 3:02pm ET: "We are unable to comment on matters under litigation," emailed Stephanie Malin, a CBP spokeswoman.

She provided Ars with a lengthy statement referring to inbound travelers, which does not appear to be applicable to this lawsuit.

As she concluded:

Additional information on electronic searches are found in the links below as well as the policy directive.

https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/fi...-tearsheet.pdf

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/fi..._devices.pd f

https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/fi...-Compliant.pdf

https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/...cbp_laptop.pdf

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ne-at-airport/





3D-Printed Heads Let Hackers – and Cops – Unlock Your Phone
Zack Whittaker

There’s a lot you can make with a 3D printer: from prosthetics, corneas, and firearms — even an Olympic-standard luge.

You can even 3D print a life-size replica of a human head — and not just for Hollywood. Forbes reporter Thomas Brewster commissioned a 3D printed model of his own head to test the face unlocking systems on a range of phones — four Android models and an iPhone X.

Bad news if you’re an Android user: only the iPhone X defended against the attack.

Gone, it seems, are the days of the trusty passcode, which many still find cumbersome, fiddly, and inconvenient — especially when you unlock your phone dozens of times a day. Phone makers are taking to the more convenient unlock methods. Even if Google’s latest Pixel 3 shunned facial recognition, many Android models — including popular Samsung devices — are relying more on your facial biometrics. In its latest models, Apple effectively killed its fingerprint-reading Touch ID in favor of its newer Face ID.

But that poses a problem for your data if a mere 3D-printed model can trick your phone into giving up your secrets. That makes life much easier for hackers, who have no rulebook to go from. But what about the police or the feds, who do?

It’s no secret that biometrics — your fingerprints and your face — aren’t protected under the Fifth Amendment. That means police can’t compel you to give up your passcode, but they can forcibly depress your fingerprint to unlock your phone, or hold it to your face while you’re looking at it. And the police know it — it happens more often than you might realize.

But there’s also little in the way of stopping police from 3D printing or replicating a set of biometrics to break into a phone.

“Legally, it’s no different from using fingerprints to unlock a device,” said Orin Kerr, professor at USC Gould School of Law, in an email. “The government needs to get the biometric unlocking information somehow,” by either the finger pattern shape or the head shape, he said.

Although a warrant “wouldn’t necessarily be a requirement” to get the biometric data, one would be needed to use the data to unlock a device, he said.

Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at the Project On Government Oversight, said it was doable but isn’t the most practical or cost-effective way for cops to get access to phone data.

“A situation where you couldn’t get the actual person but could use a 3D print model may exist,” he said. “I think the big threat is that a system where anyone — cops or criminals — can get into your phone by holding your face up to it is a system with serious security limits.”

The FBI alone has thousands of devices in its custody — even after admitting the number of encrypted devices is far lower than first reported. With the ubiquitous nature of surveillance, now even more powerful with high-resolution cameras and facial recognition software, it’s easier than ever for police to obtain our biometric data as we go about our everyday lives.

Those cheering on the “death of the password” might want to think again. They’re still the only thing that’s keeping your data safe from the law.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/16/3d...-cops-hackers/





Amazon Error Allowed Alexa User to Eavesdrop on Another Home

A user of Amazon’s (AMZN.O) Alexa voice assistant in Germany got access to more than a thousand recordings from another user because of “a human error” by the company.

The customer had asked to listen back to recordings of his own activities made by Alexa but he was also able to access 1,700 audio files from a stranger when Amazon sent him a link, German trade publication c’t reported.

“This unfortunate case was the result of a human error and an isolated single case,” an Amazon spokesman said on Thursday.

The first customer had initially got no reply when he told Amazon about the access to the other recordings, the report said. The files were then deleted from the link provided by Amazon but he had already downloaded them on to his computer, added the report from c’t, part of German tech publisher Heise.

“We resolved the issue with the two customers involved and took measures to further optimize our processes. As a precautionary measure we contacted the relevant authorities”, the Amazon spokesman added.

On the recordings, a man and a female companion could be overheard in his home and the magazine was able to identify and contact him through the recorded information, according to the report.

Reporting by Arno Schuetze; Editing by Keith Weir
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a...-idUSKCN1OJ15J





50 Years On, We’re Living the Reality First Shown at the “Mother of All Demos”

Douglas Engelbart changed computer history forever on December 9, 1968.
Cyrus Farivar

A half century ago, computer history took a giant leap when Douglas Engelbart—then a mid-career 43-year-old engineer at Stanford Research Institute in the heart of Silicon Valley—gave what has come to be known as the "mother of all demos."

On December 9, 1968 at a computer conference in San Francisco, Engelbart showed off the first inklings of numerous technologies that we all now take for granted: video conferencing, a modern desktop-style user interface, word processing, hypertext, the mouse, collaborative editing, among many others.

Even before his famous demonstration, Engelbart outlined his vision of the future more than a half-century ago in his historic 1962 paper, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework."

To open the 90-minute-long presentation, Engelbart posited a question that almost seems trivial to us in the early 21st century: "If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and was instantly responsible—responsive—to every action you had, how much value would you derive from that?"

Of course at that time, computers were vast behemoths that were light-years away from the pocket-sized devices that have practically become an extension of ourselves.

Engelbart, who passed away in 2013, was inspired by a now-legendary essay published in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, physicist who had been in charge of the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II.

That essay, "As We May Think," speculated on a "future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library." It was this essay that stuck with a young Engelbart—then a Navy technician stationed in the Philippines—for more than two decades.

By 1968, Engelbart had created what he called the "oN-Line System," or NLS, a proto-Intranet. The ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet itself, would not be established until late the following year.

Five years later, in 1973, Xerox debuted the Alto, considered to be the first modern personal computer. That, in turn served as the inspiration for both the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, and the rest, clearly, is history.

"Doug and [J.C.R. Licklider] were two of our farthest seeing visionaries," Vint Cerf, the co-creator of the TCP/IP protocol, told Ars in July 2013.

"Doug's NLS was as close to Vannever Bush's vision of Memex as you could get in the 1960s. He had a keen sense of the way in which computers could augment human capacity to think. Much of what transpired at Xerox PARC owes its origins to Doug and the people who created NLS with him. The [Web] is a manifestation of some of what he imagined or hoped although his aspirations exceeded even that in terms of human and computer partnerships."

In 2015, Stanford University hosted "The Demo," a work of musical theater inspired by this occasion.

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California is hosting a few events related to the anniversary—one is scheduled for later in the week, on December 12.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...-of-all-demos/





Ambient Computing is in the Air

A massive convergence of technologies will enable us to use computers and the internet without really using them.
Mike Elgan

Everybody’s talking about ambient computing. And there is so much to talk about.

But with all this chatter comes confusion. People disagree on what ambient computing is, how it works and what it’s for.

So let’s bring clarity to this muddled and confused concept.

Ambient computing: Both hype and happening

First and foremost, ambient computing is not a technology.

When you talk about, say, “internet computing” or “wireless computing,” you’re talking about a very specific set of technologies, protocols, standards and devices.

Ambient computing isn’t like that. It’s not specific. But it does point to a profound shift in how business operates, how we get things done and, ultimately, human culture.

Future-focused companies in Silicon Valley are already jumping on the “ambient” buzzword.

Andy Rubin decided to name his Essential smartphone’s operating system the Ambient OS. (The company didn’t succeed.)

Samsung named its smart home operating system Project Ambience, but that’s really just putting a forward spin on home automation.

A recent book called Beneath a Surface, by Brad Sams, is about Microsoft’s plans. In the book. Sams claims that Microsoft is working on a dedicated ambient computing device he says will be able to sense the presence of the user and respond accordingly.

The device will fall under Surface branding and will be designed to fix what’s broken about the smartphone experience, without itself being considered a smartphone.

(Rumors suggest that Microsoft is working on a Cortana-powered speaker to replace meeting-room conference call systems, and some have called this an ambient computing device.)

Time will tell.

In fact, the ambient computing buzzword has been around since the 1990s. But until recently, it’s been more aspirational than accurate.

Here’s how to understand ambient computing.

At the dawn of the personal computing revolution, people “operated” a computer. They sat down and did computing — often programming. Later, with the application explosion, operators became “users.” People used computers for purposes other than programming or operating a computer — like balancing their checkbooks or playing video games.

All computing uses so far have required a cognitive shift from doing something in the real world to operating or using a computer.

Ambient computing changes all that, because it involves using a computer without consciously or deliberately or explicitly “using” a computer.

The most rudimentary ambient devices I can think of are the ones that lets you use motion control to turn on a light or open a door. These have been with us for decades, but as basic and common appliances they help us understand the future of the ambient computing revolution.

A motion system uses a specialized sensor to perceive human activity. When you walk up to the grocery store door or enter a room, the sensor perceives your presence and activates the door or the light or whatever. In this way, you’re “using” the door or the light without using it. You can ignore it. The desired effect simply happens.

Motion control systems tend to be ambient, but they’re usually not computing devices.

Smart speakers like the Echo are among the first ambient computing devices most people have encountered.

Consider the subtle shift from using something like Siri on a smartphone — the only way to use virtual assistants a few years ago — to the use of a smart speaker like the Amazon Echo.

To use Siri on a smartphone is to “use” a smartphone. To use Amazon Echo is to “talk to the room.”

Another is the smart thermostat trend. The latest thermostats pay attention to how users set the temperature — as well as the time of day and whether anyone is in the house. And they use AI to adjust the temperature accordingly. Eventually, you can stop “using” the thermostat altogether. It seems as if the AI is controlling the temperature, but in fact the user is — without consciously using the device.

Now imagine the basic concept of motion-controlled doors and lights, smart speakers and smart thermostats on steroids — by which I mean advanced sensors, AI and technologies such as image recognition, voice recognition and machine learning.
OK, but what is the definition of ‘ambient computing’?

Broad hardware computing platform descriptions have long ended with where the hardware rests when you’re using it — desktop, laptop, handheld, wearable.

Ambient means it’s “in the air” — the location of the device matters less. In fact, with ambient computing, the user doesn’t even have to know anything about the devices to use them.

Ambient computing is really the combination and evolution of voice and in-the-air gesture interfaces, speech recognition, the internet of things, cloud computing, wearable computing, the quantified self, augmented reality, haptics and, above all, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Yes, that sounds like a list of all the technologies. But what defines ambient computing is the effect on users.

What makes ambient computing ambient is that you don’t explicitly shift your activity or mindset to act as a “user.” It’s just there, guiding and nudging you along as you accomplish things in life.

Ambient computing devices will operate invisibly in the background. They’ll identify, monitor and listen to us and respond to our perceived needs and habits.

So a good working definition of ambient computing is “computing that happens in the background without the active participation of the user.”

Ambient computing is not a separate group of technologies, but instead any technologies that enable you to use computers and the internet without actively using them.

In 20 years, the idea of picking up a device or sitting down at a computer to actively use it will seem quaintly antiquated. All computing will be ambient — all around us all the time, whispering in our ear, augmenting the real world through our prescription eyeglasses and car windshields, perceiving our emotions and desires and taking action in the background to help us reach our business goals and live a better life.

Between now and then we’ll all ride together on a very interesting journey from computers we actively use to computing resources increasingly acting in the background for us.

We’re also going to be flooded and overwhelmed by the “ambient computing” hype as, I predict, it will become one of the most overused and abused marketing buzzwords ever. Within the next year or two, “ambient computing” will be slapped on every kind of IT product, business service and integrated solution. Most of the time, the buzzword won’t really tell you all that much.

Ambient computing is both a very big deal (it will change our relationship with intelligent machines forever) and also really no big deal (it’s just part of the continuing evolution of user interfaces that has existed since the beginning of computing—the machines work harder to understand and help us and we work less hard to take advantage of them).

So get excited about ambient computing. But don’t believe the hype.
https://www.computerworld.com/articl...n-the-air.html





Manhole Covers Serve as Antennas Expanding Wireless Network Coverage

Manhole antenna solution offers glimpse into 5G strategies for signal propagation
Dexter Johnson

The inconvenient truth of future 5G networks is that their increased high-speed bandwidth, and the use of the millimeter wave spectrum (the radio spectrum above 30 gigahertz) to achieve it, comes at a price: Those radio signals barely propagate around the corners of buildings.

To overcome this issue, the strategy has been a combination of small cells with massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas to increase coverage. Small cell deployment will be so extensive that the Small Cell Forum predicts 5G small cell will overtake 4G small cells by 2024. The total installed base of 5G or multimode small cells will reach 13.1 million by 2025, constituting more than one-third of the total small cells in use.

So, how do you manage to get all of these small cells dispersed throughout a city landscape where buildings are everywhere and there’s little open space for signals to travel?

Engineers at Vodafone, headquartered in the United Kingdom, have come up with an ingenious solution: make manhole covers do double duty as antennas for mobile communications. This clever solution manages to avoid all the troubling issues that had worried many observers about the proliferation of small cells. It eliminates traffic disruptions from street construction, and there are no antennas awkwardly placed on buildings, marring the appearance of a neighborhood.

This solution is currently being used for existing 4G networks, but Vodafone engineers believe this could be a solution for future 5G networks as well. “The manholes do provide an opportunity to deliver solutions in dense urban environments,” said James Grayling, senior network deployment manager, Vodafone UK.

While there is a possibility that the manhole covers could be used for 5G networks—and Vodafone gives a fair amount of credence to the connection in their press release—a Vodafone spokesperson remained noncommittal as to whether this will indeed be a part of Vodafone’s overall 5G strategy.

“We envisage that we may be able to use the manhole coverage solutions for 5G rollout going forward but this is still to be decided,” said Ally Stevens, a network media relations manager for Vodafone UK.

Nonetheless, Grayling did reveal some of the manhole antennas’ impressive capabilities. “The antenna currently being used has a frequency range of 1695 megahertz to 2690 Mhz, and is being used with 4G where download speeds of up to 195 megabits per second can be achieved,” said Grayling.

While it may seem that the big metal manhole covers would interfere with signals, Grayling insists that is not the case.

“The manhole does not interfere with the mobile signals, although there is a small level of power loss caused by the manhole,” said Grayling. “This is taken into account when designing where we want to deploy such solutions.”

It’s not yet clear how extensive the deployment of the special manhole covers will be. When asked whether there was any number of manhole antennas they were targeting to be put out into the field, Vodafone’s spokespeople demurred. “We are in the process of identifying assets in our fixed network that can be best utilized to meet the needs of the mobile network,” was all Grayling would say in response.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/...twork-coverage





1980s Amiga has been Running the AC and Heat in 19 Schools for 30 Years
Ryan Whitwam

The Grand Rapids Public School district took a big step into the future back in the 1980s when it used money from an energy bond to purchase a Commodore Amiga computer. The Amiga, which replaced a computer the size of a refrigerator, was set up to control heat and air conditioning at the district’s 19 schools. It has been doing that job tirelessly for the last 30 years. How long do you think you could keep a modern laptop working? Four or five years? Maybe?

The Amiga uses an unusual 1200-bit modem and a wireless radio signal to communicate with the 19 buildings. Each building reports temperature and the status of its heating and cooling systems. The computer can then toggle boilers, spin up fans, activate AC compressors, and so on. The frequency used by the archaic communication system overlaps with maintenance works’ radios, which can sometimes cause interference with the system. When that happens, everyone has to turn off their walkie talkies for 15 or 20 minutes.

While the system has been in service all these years, it hasn’t always been a smooth ride. The monitor, mouse, and keyboard have all broken at one time or another. Replacement parts aren’t easy to find, but luckily spares have popped up on eBay. The original system was programmed by a high school student in the ’80s, and he’s the only one who knows how to fix software glitches. Luckily, he still lives in the area.

The district hopes to replace the old Amiga with a modern environmental control system soon if an upcoming bond measure is passed by voters. It’ll cost about $1.5 to 2 million to replace the Amiga, but it works. For the moment.
https://www.geek.com/news/commodore-...years-1625147/





For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain

A beloved Robert Frost poem is among the many creations that are (finally) losing their protections in 2019
Glenn Fleishman

“Whose woods these are, I think I”—whoa! We can’t quote any more of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” because it is still under copyright as this magazine goes to press. But come January 1, 2019, we, you, and everyone in America will be able to quote it at length on any platform.

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, all works first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain. It has been 21 years since the last mass expiration of copyright in the U.S.

That deluge of works includes not just “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which appeared first in the New Republic in 1923, but hundreds of thousands of books, musical compositions, paintings, poems, photographs and films. After January 1, any record label can issue a dubstep version of the 1923 hit “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” any middle school can produce Theodore Pratt’s stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and any historian can publish Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis with her own extensive annotations. Any artist can create and sell a feminist response to Marcel Duchamp’s seminal Dadaist piece, The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) and any filmmaker can remake Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Ten Commandments and post it on YouTube.

“The public domain has been frozen in time for 20 years, and we’re reaching the 20-year thaw,” says Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The release is unprecedented, and its impact on culture and creativity could be huge. We have never seen such a mass entry into the public domain in the digital age. The last one—in 1998, when 1922 slipped its copyright bond—predated Google. “We have shortchanged a generation,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. “The 20th century is largely missing from the internet.”

For academics fearful of quoting from copyrighted texts, teachers who may be violating the law with every photocopy, and modern-day artists in search of inspiration, the event is a cause for celebration. For those who dread seeing Frost’s immortal ode to winter used in an ad for snow tires, “Public Domain Day,” as it is sometimes known, will be less joyful. Despite that, even fierce advocates for copyright agree that, after 95 years, it is time to release these works. “There comes a point when a creative work belongs to history as much as to its author and her heirs,” said Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild.

* * *

We can blame Mickey Mouse for the long wait. In 1998, Disney was one of the loudest in a choir of corporate voices advocating for longer copyright protections. At the time, all works published before January 1, 1978, were entitled to copyright protection for 75 years; all author’s works published on or after that date were under copyright for the lifetime of the creator, plus 50 years. Steamboat Willie, featuring Mickey Mouse’s first appearance on screen, in 1928, was set to enter the public domain in 2004. At the urging of Disney and others, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, named for the late singer, songwriter and California representative, adding 20 years to the copyright term. Mickey would be protected until 2024—and no copyrighted work would enter the public domain again until 2019, creating a bizarre 20-year hiatus between the release of works from 1922 and those from 1923.

This hole in history was accidental, but it occurred at a remarkable moment. The novelist Willa Cather called 1922 the year “the world broke in two,” the start of a great literary, artistic and cultural upheaval. In 1922, Ulysses by James Joyce and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” were published, and the Harlem Renaissance blossomed with the arrival of Claude McKay’s poetry in Harlem Shadows. For two decades those works have been in the public domain, enabling artists, critics and others to burnish that notable year to a high gloss in our historical memory. In comparison, 1923 can feel dull.

But that was the year Noël Coward staged his first musical, the hit London Calling!, and Jean Toomer came out with his breakthrough novel about African-American life, Cane. Because access to these and other works from the year has been limited, our understanding of the tumultuous 1920s is skewed. That will begin to change January 1, when digital compendia such as the Internet Archive, Google Books and HathiTrust will make tens of thousands of books available, with more to follow. They and others will also add heaps of newspapers, magazines, movies and other materials.

Much the same will happen every January 1 until 2073, revealing long-overlooked works from the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, World War II and beyond. (After 2073, works published by authors who died seven decades earlier will expire each year.) “We’re going to open these time capsules on a yearly basis...and potentially have our understanding of that year and all the contents change,” said Paul Saint-Amour, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and editor of Modernism and Copyright.

“We can’t predict what uses people are going to make of the work we make available,” said Mike Furlough, executive director of HathiTrust. “And that’s what makes that so exciting,”

* * *

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” How refreshing it is to quote freely from another iconic Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken,” published in his poetry collection Mountain Interval in 1916. Its copyright expired in 1992 and that has made all the difference. The poem has inspired lyrics from Bruce Hornsby, Melissa Etheridge and George Strait, and its phrases have been used to sell cars, careers, computers and countless dorm room posters that feature the final lines as an exhortation to individualism that the poet likely never intended.

On January 1, HathiTrust will publish Frost’s collection New Hampshire, including “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” online and it will finally be available for anyone to adapt. Perhaps no one is more bemused by that prospect than the composer Eric Whitacre. In 1999, believing the poem had already entered the public domain (the last-minute copyright extension prevented that), Whitacre accepted a commission to turn it into a choral piece. After just two performances, Whitacre said, Frost’s publisher and the Frost estate shut him down, refusing to license the work. Whitacre eventually produced a different version of the work, titled “Sleep,” with lyrics written for it by the poet Charles Anthony Silvestri. He is now considering releasing the work in its original form. “All I wanted to do,” Whitacre said, “is illuminate the original poem with music.”

1923 Skidoo

When that year's copyright skedaddles, you'll have instant access to countless titles, including these overlooked gems

• “The Vanishing American” in Ladies’ Home Journal
By Zane Grey
One of the first literary critiques of the treatment of Native Americans; harsher than the later novel and silent film.

• A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House
By Jessie Conrad
A peek into the life of author Joseph Conrad via his wife’s recipe collection.

• Our American Adventure
By Arthur Conan Doyle
The creator of Sherlock Holmes recounts his popular (and controversial) lecture tour in support of Modern Spiritualism.

• The Chip Woman’s Fortune By Willis Richardson
The first drama by an African-American author produced on Broadway; a one-act story of a family in financial straits.

• “Nebraska” in The Nation
By Willa Cather
She laments the cultural and economic homogenization in her beloved state.

• The Real Story of a Bootlegger
By Anonymous
The purportedly honest account of life as a criminal under the 18th Amendment: “Prohibition made me a millionaire.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-...ain-180971016/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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