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Old 20-02-19, 07:35 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 23rd, ’19

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"It seems that whatever the format, owning copies of our favourite and most treasured music, and playing them over and over again, might just be the best option for our environment." – Sharon George and Deirdre McKay


"Hollywood is now irrelevant." – IAC Chairman Barry Diller






































February 23rd, 2019




Hollywood Tries to Cripple Several Alleged Pirate TV Services in One Lawsuit

"Omniverse" sells illegal streams to several online TV services, lawsuit says.
Jon Brodkin

Most of the major Hollywood movie studios are trying to cripple multiple alleged pirate TV services with a single lawsuit.

The studios last week filed a copyright infringement suit against Omniverse One World Television Inc., which provides streaming video to several online TV services. Omniverse claims to have legal rights to the content, but the studios say it doesn't.

The complaint was filed Thursday in US District Court for the Central District of California by Columbia Pictures, Disney, Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros. The studios previously used lawsuits to shut down the maker of a streaming device called the Dragon Box and another called TickBox. The studios' new lawsuit says that Omniverse supplied content to Dragon Box and to other alleged pirate services that are still operating.

"Defendant Jason DeMeo and his company, Omniverse, stream Plaintiffs' copyrighted movies and television shows without authorization to an already large, and rapidly growing, number of end users," the lawsuit said. "Defendants are not, however, just an infringing, consumer-facing service, akin to Dragon Box. Defendants operate at a higher level in the supply chain of infringing content—recruiting numerous downstream services like Dragon Box into the illicit market and providing them with access to unauthorized streams of copyrighted content. Defendants function as a 'hub' of sorts, with the enlisted downstream services as the 'spokes.' Omniverse's offering is illegal, it is growing, and it undermines the legitimate market for licensed services."

Services using Omniverse content are advertised as "Powered by Omniverse." Besides Dragon Box, they include "SkyStream TV, Flixon TV, and Silicon Dust's HDHomeRun Service," according to the lawsuit.

SkyStream, for example, offers more than 70 live TV channels for $35 a month, while pricier packages, according to the complaint, also include premium channels such as HBO. SkyStream's website says its service "is delivered In Cooperation with Omniverse One World Television."

According to its website, Omniverse "partners with key distributors across the USA to empower end users with the ability to view their favorite TV channels with no contracts, no credit checks, and no long-term obligations."

Omniverse vague about licensing details

A recent Cord Cutters News article that was cited in the lawsuit examined whether Omniverse has the rights to distribute the content. The article said:

“With the flood of services all pointing to Omniverse, it has raised questions about how legal this is. Some of these services seem to operate under different rules than most live-TV streaming services.

According to Omniverse, they acquired rights to some of these channels including the ability to stream outside by a contract that is only one of three such contracts in the United States. When pushed on that contract, Jason [DeMeo] said they could not give too many details or it could help others figure out how to track down the last two contracts like the one they use.

Jason went on to say they are in the process of buying the rights to the other two contracts that would allow others to create similar services. According to Omniverse, once they close on the rights for the other two contracts they promised to be more open about their current contracts.”

But the movie studios' lawsuit alleges that Omniverse has no rights to distribute their video content. While Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube TV, and other legitimate streaming services purchase rights to the content, Omniverse has not, the lawsuit said.

"Plaintiffs have not granted licenses that permit Defendant DeMeo or Omniverse to stream the Copyrighted Works or sublicense streams to whatever counterparty they wish," the complaint said. "These services are unauthorized and compete unfairly with licensed services. They offer premium content (including HBO, Showtime, and other channels) and technical features (such as DVR capabilities and simultaneous streaming to different devices), and compete directly with licensed services, but often at a lower price. Their unfair competitive advantage is attributed directly to Defendants, who provide the downstream services with streaming access to the Copyrighted Works without the licensing obligations that would ordinarily need to be met."

Besides providing content to other services, Omniverse also used to offer its own video device directly to consumers, the complaint said. The device was called the "OmniBox," and it "offered access to hundreds or thousands of live and on-demand channels for less than $25 per month, plus the one-time hardware cost of the OmniBox," the complaint said.

The complaint asks for an injunction shutting the company down and damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work.

We contacted DeMeo today about the lawsuit and will update this article if we get a response.

In a similar case, the studios and Amazon and Netflix have a pending lawsuit against Set TV, which offered a $20-per-month TV service with more than 500 channels. Set TV shut down after the lawsuit was filed.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-lawsuit-says/





How TV Pirates Accidentally Pushed a 25-Year-Old Indie Song to the Top of the Charts in Japan
Hudson Hongo

Last week, an alt-rock mystery puzzled the music press. Almost 25 years after its release, the Dinosaur Jr. song “Over Your Shoulder” appeared at number 18 on Japan’s Hot 100 chart, beating out major new releases like Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings.”

The fuzzy, mournful closer to Dinosaur Jr.’s 1994 album Without a Sound, “Over Your Shoulder” is an unlikely candidate for a hit single. Indeed, it was never released in that format. Stranger still, the track rocketed up Japan’s charts thanks to over eight million video plays—earning the country’s top spot for video streams—despite no YouTube upload of the song having anywhere close to that many views.

Billboard Japan speculated that “Over Your Shoulder” entered the charts by being used as incidental music in other videos, but what videos? And why now? As a viral Pitchfork story put it, “A 25-Year-Old Dinosaur Jr. Song Is a Hit in Japan. Nobody Knows Why.”

Well, some of us now know why, but it doesn’t make the incident—which involves Japanese bad boys, reality TV piracy, and renegade algorithms—any less strange.

Key to Japan’s apparent Dinosaur Jr. resurgence is how Billboard currently calculates hit singles. Six years ago, the company added YouTube plays to the formula of its Hot 100 chart, counting song streams from both official videos and user-generated clips. This has led to some weirdness. In 2017, for instance, The Fader reported that 41 million views of a bizarre YouTube clip featuring Post Malone singing the chorus of “rockstar” over and over again helped put the song at the top of the chart.

In the case of “Over Your Shoulder,” the only obvious connection between it and Japan was “Gachinko Fight Club,” a recurring segment on a variety show called Gachinko! that left the airwaves 15 years ago. The reality TV program purported to show regular “punks” being trained as professional boxers—and often used “Over Your Shoulder” as a musical cue.

According to Takayuki Suzuki, a Japanese entertainment consultant who first noticed the connection on Twitter, the track was featured in most episodes to give a sense of increased “sentiment, distress and emotion.” The show, it should be noted, was enormously popular.

“Highest rating was 32.3% of total household,” Suzuki told Gizmodo. “In terms of rating, 10% is good, 20% is great in Japan.”

Gachinko!’s use of the song back then, however, only partly explains why it’s going viral on YouTube in Japan now. Late last month, a number of Japanese Twitter users began noticing pirated clips of Gachinko Fight Club being recommended on YouTube, through both the site’s suggested videos sidebar and its autoplay feature.

“Anyway everybody’s YouTube recommendation Gachinko Fight Club,” reads a typical tweet from February 2. Many more tweeted about bingeing on pirated uploads of the show on YouTube, often through night.

The algorithm gods, it seems, were smiling on the show—and thus “Over Your Shoulder.” The song, played as brief clips on pirated Gachinko Fight Club marathons, was gaining millions of unlikely streaming hits decades after its release.

“Apparently former members of Gachinko Fight Club recently appeared on TV programs,” user @9mmShort, who tweeted about the recommendations, told Gizmodo. “It may be that many people who saw it watched Gachinko Fight Club on YouTube because it was nostalgic.”

For those wishing to satisfy their Gachinko Fight Club nostalgia, YouTube is pretty much the only option. Suzuki explained there are few TV streaming services in Japan, especially when it comes to older Japanese programming like Gachinko!—which isn’t available on DVD either. “So people search by program name [which] leads to pirate video [on] YouTube,” he said.

Japanese Twitter user @kyabetu_aomori, who told Gizmodo that variety shows are often suggested to them on YouTube, said that they had to repeatedly click “not interested” on Gachinko Fight Club clips to stop the recent flood of recommendations. They said these videos had around 100,000 to 300,000 plays. While they were still around, at least.

Last Monday, social media users in Japan noticed that the Gachinko Fight Club videos were disappearing. “All the videos of Gachinko Fight Club are gone! All deleted by user!” wrote one. As popular as pirated content might be on YouTube, it can also have a short shelf-life.

In the end, no one factor made “Over Your Shoulder” a Billboard hit in Japan. Nearly 25 years ago, it was released. More than 15 years ago, it was used on a Japanese reality show about boxing bad boys. Six years ago, Billboard started counting YouTube plays. And just days ago, YouTube apparently began recommending pirated episodes of that reality show to Japanese users, who seemingly binged it in the thousands, playing “Over Your Shoulder” over and over again in the process.

With those videos deleted, it’s easy to understand Billboard’s confusion, but other recent uploads of Gachinko Fight Club are still on YouTube—where they’re already racking up tens of thousands of views. In a blog post last week, Billboard Japan noted that other older songs from the West were also making unexpected appearances on the chart. As long as Japanese TV fans are relying on YouTube to satisfy their nostalgia, those songs are likely to keep showing up in unexpected places.

One mystery that remains is why YouTube started recommending Gachinko Fight Club to so many users last month. Did the show—as some have speculated—simply reenter the news? Did a pirate suddenly upload the episodes after years of unavailability? Or did YouTube’s algorithm just go nuts for boxing shows this year?

Asked for their own theory about the recommendations, @kyabetu_aomori told Gizmodo, “I have no idea at all.”

Gizmodo reached out to Billboard, YouTube, and Dinosaur Jr.’s management for comment. We will update this story if and when they respond.

Update 2/12/2019 12:49 p.m. ET: In a statement to Gizmodo on Tuesday, Billboard Japan seemingly confirmed the TV piracy explanation, saying it believes the “Over Your Shoulder” plays came from YouTube users binge-watching “a recurring segment from an old terrestrial TV variety program.”

From Billboard Japan:

The Japan Hot 100 incorporates YouTube views within Japan of audio and video assigned with an ISRC code. This includes user-generated clips that utilize authorized audio.

We believe a recurring segment from an old terrestrial TV variety program—which prominently featured Dinosaur Jr.’s “Over Your Shoulder” as well as the non-Japanese tracks that mysteriously appeared on the Japan Hot 100 dated Feb. 11 [tracking date: Jan. 28 to Feb. 3]—went viral due to renewed interest, resulting in users to binge watch YouTube videos of the segment using these songs, racking up significant views to impact the chart.

Some of these user generated clips were then deleted, however new videos keep being re-uploaded which may result in these songs to appear again on this week’s Japan Hot 100, to be posted on Feb. 13.

https://gizmodo.com/how-tv-pirates-a...die-1832532538





Amazon Resets Its Film Operation After Rough Year at Box Office
Brooks Barnes

The film business has chewed up Amazon over the last year and a half.

The trouble started late in 2017, when the tech giant moved into self-distribution. No more would it rely on established Hollywood partners to push its films into theaters. But the box office game is harder than it looks, and Amazon released six flops in a row. Woody Allen’s “Wonder Wheel” cost $25 million to make and took in only $1.4 million in North America. “Beautiful Boy,” based on the best-selling book, cost $23 million and collected $7.6 million.

Now a company that is accustomed to entering markets and making the incumbents shudder is pushing the reset button.

“What we struggled with, I think, was putting too much focus on a narrow prestige lane,” said Jennifer Salke, who took over as the head of Amazon Studios last March after successful stints at NBC and 20th Century Fox Television. “I don’t think we had diverse-enough points of view in the storytelling.”

To that end, Ms. Salke said she had decided that the way forward for Amazon involves different “lanes.” Those include awards-worthy specialty films, including five she bought at the recent Sundance Film Festival, a couple for eye-popping prices; sexual thrillers like “Basic Instinct” (1992) or “Body Heat” (1981), a genre that most studios have abandoned; and films from Blumhouse, the horror studio behind hits like “The Purge.” Ms. Salke also wants to add a pipeline of young-adult films.

Mr. Allen is notably absent from her strategy. “We don’t have any plans to release any Woody Allen movies,” she said, declining to comment further on the filmmaker, who is suing Amazon for backing out of a four-movie deal because of a renewed focus on allegations of sexual abuse against him.

Amazon is now striving, at least to start, to roll out about 30 original movies a year. Budgets will range from a few million dollars up to $50 million or more. But not all of those movies will be released in theaters. For instance, the “sexy date-night movies,” to use Ms. Salke’s description, will go directly to Prime Video, Amazon’s streaming service. (Look for them on Saturday nights starting this summer.) The scary Blumhouse movies — eight have been ordered — will also skip theaters.

“Some will be thriller-y, some will have a foot in horror, some will be more serious drama,” said Jeremy Gold, who runs Blumhouse TV with Marci Wiseman. “We see this as a critical next step in building an ongoing relationship between Amazon and Blumhouse.”

Amazon emphasized that it would continue to give about 10 movies a year exclusive runs in theaters. Coming up: “The Aeronauts,” starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as hot air balloon adventurers, and “Late Night,” a comedy starring Emma Thompson as a late-night talk-show host who hires her only female staff writer, played by Mindy Kaling.

Even so, Amazon may start to shorten the period of exclusivity given to theater owners for some films so it can bring them to Prime Video more quickly.

“It’s really about creating that right marketing campaign, right distribution plan for each movie, allowing us to break through the cultural noise and really resonating with customers,” said Matt Newman, one of three executives Ms. Salke has named as film co-chiefs. The others are Julie Rapaport, who will focus on wide-appeal movies, and Ted Hope, who has overseen Amazon’s art films since 2015.

That stance could frustrate multiplex chains, which insist on a 90-day period of exclusivity, worrying that moviegoers will be reluctant to buy tickets if they know they can catch the same film just a few weeks later in their living rooms. AMC and Regal, for instance, have refused to show Netflix’s “Roma” because Netflix offered only 21 days of exclusivity.

Amazon’s first foray into the movie business was Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq,” a 2015 comedic drama that received strong reviews but did not sell many tickets. Amazon teamed with an established film company, Roadside Attractions, to release it. Amazon and Roadside reteamed the next year and found an art-house hit in the bleak drama “Manchester by the Sea,” which took in $48 million in North America and received six Oscar nominations, winning two, including best actor for Casey Affleck. “The Big Sick,” a comedy released in 2017 in partnership with Lionsgate, collected about $43 million and received an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay.

Not bad for a newbie.

But Amazon’s track record soured as it pushed toward self-distribution. Its first effort was “Wonder Wheel,” which was undoubtedly hurt by renewed scrutiny of allegations that Mr. Allen molested his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow in 1992. Mr. Allen has steadfastly denied the claims and was not charged. Amazon also financed Mr. Allen’s next film, “A Rainy Day in New York,” but has refused to release it, prompting Mr. Allen to sue.

Amazon’s movie operation has recently shown signs of life. Sitting in her office at the historic Culver Studios, which serves as Amazon’s entertainment headquarters, Ms. Salke noted that the company’s most recent film release, “Cold War,” a foreign-language romance, received three Oscar nominations. “Cold War” has sold $3.6 million in tickets, a decent total for a foreign film. “We really think it’ll also do well when it reaches Prime Video,” Ms. Salke said.

When Ms. Salke arrived at Amazon, her first priority was performing triage on the company’s television business. “Transparent,” the studio’s marquee hit at the time, was in disarray because of the departure of its star, Jeffrey Tambor, who was fired after a sexual-harassment investigation. (He maintained his innocence.) Ms. Salke had inherited another hit, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” from her predecessor, Roy Price, who was ousted after a sexual harassment scandal of his own. But she needed to quickly jump-start the rest of Amazon’s television business to catch up to a fast-moving Netflix, an insurgent Apple and a Disney-powered Hulu.

With Amazon’s television assembly line in much better shape — Ms. Salke has made deals with creators like Jordan Peele to bring shows to the service — she is now looking more intently at the studio’s film operation.

“It’s not about volume and endless scroll,” she said, in a clear reference to Netflix, which unfurls roughly 90 original movies annually, including documentaries. “The curated approach is the only way to go for us. Quality over quantity.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/b...fer-salke.html





“Hollywood is now irrelevant,” says IAC Chairman Barry Diller

Diller, the former CEO of Paramount and Fox, talks about the diminished power of movie studios and why “Netflix has won this game” on the latest Recode Decode.
Eric Johnson

Before he became a tech mogul, IAC and Expedia Group chairman Barry Diller was a media mogul, working in executive roles at ABC, Paramount, and Fox. But now, he says, the people who used to have all the power in the entertainment business have a lot less.

“Hollywood is now irrelevant,” Diller said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “... It was these six movie companies essentially were able to extend their hegemony into everything else. It didn’t matter that they started it. When it got big enough, they got to buy it. For the first time, they ain’t buying anything. Meaning they’re not buying Netflix. They are not buying Amazon.”

“In other words, it used to be if you could get your hands on a movie studio, you were sitting at a table with only five other people,” he added. “And so that table dominated media worldwide. That’s over.”

On the new podcast, Diller praised Disney CEO Bob Iger as a “superb executive,” but predicted Disney would only do “okay in streaming” when it launches its streaming service Disney Plus later this year. In general, he advised, “those who chase Netflix are fools.”

“Netflix has won this game,” he said. “I mean, short of some existential event, it is Netflix’s. No one can get, I believe, to their level of subscribers, which gives them real dominance.”

And that includes its closest rival Amazon Prime, which isn’t designed to bid as aggressively on tomorrow’s media stars as Netflix is.

“Amazon’s model is saying, ‘If you join Prime, we’re giving you things,’” Diller said. “‘So our job is to get you to join Prime. If we can get you to do that by giving you Black Panther, or whatever, or The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, then great.’ But that model, to people in the entertainment business, is like, ‘Oh my god, how did that happen?’”

You can listen to Recode Decode wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Overcast.

Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Kara’s conversation with Barry.
https://www.recode.net/2019/2/18/182...cast-interview





Canadian Telecom Giant Bell Wanted NAFTA to Ban Some VPNs

Bell wanted the privacy tools—which can also be used to access geo-blocked media—to be made unlawful under NAFTA.
Jordan Pearson

Bell, one of Canada’s “big three” telecom companies, asked the Canadian government to seek rules that would make some VPN services illegal ahead of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations.

Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, are tools that obfuscate internet traffic so that internet service providers and other snoops can’t easily decipher your browsing habits.

VPNs are a pillar of privacy-conscious internet usage, and are regularly used by journalists, researchers, and citizens seeking to circumvent censorship in places such as China. VPNs may also be used to circumvent geo-blocked content—say, to access regional Netflix content by pretending you’re based in a country other than the one you’re in. Netflix has recently cracked down on the use of VPNs in this manner.

Anja Karadeglija, the editor of telecom news outlet the Wire Report, obtained Bell’s NAFTA submission from July 2017 via an access to information request, and shared it with Motherboard.

In its submission, Bell argued that Canadians accessing content from a US service with a VPN “unjustly enriches the US service, which has not paid for the Canadian rights” but nonetheless makes that content available to Canadians. Bell’s media arm reportedly spends millions on content for it streaming service, Crave TV, which allows Canadians to stream content from American networks such as HBO and Showtime.

“Canada should seek rules in NAFTA that require each party to explicitly make it unlawful to offer a VPN service used for the purpose of circumventing copyright, to allow rightsholders to enforce this rule, and to confirm that it is a violation of copyright if a service effectively makes content widely available in territories in which it does not own the copyright due to an ineffective or insufficiently robust geo-targeting system,” the submission stated.

It’s unclear how it could be determined if a VPN service was being used to get around copyright. We also don’t know if Bell still wants VPNs used for this purpose to be made illegal. Bell spokespeople didn’t respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

When NAFTA negotiations failed, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) took its place and doesn’t include Bell’s VPN ask.

Last January, Fair Play Canada, a coalition of Canadian media companies and cultural organizations including Bell’s media arm, asked the government to institute a process for blocking access to websites deemed to be engaged in piracy. The coalition’s demand was ultimately denied.

In its NAFTA submission, Bell argued that the government should explore options to deal with piracy “such as the site-blocking regimes required in Europe.” In 2014, the UK’s internet filter was found to block one in five websites in the country.

Fair Play Canada made no mention of VPNs. However, University of Ottawa internet law professor Michael Geist predicted at the time that Fair Play’s plan would likely expand into seeking to block access to VPNs.

“This is precisely the concern that was raised in the context of the Bell coalition blocking system given fears it would expand to multi-use services such as VPNs just as a growing number of Internet users are turning to the technology to better safeguard their privacy and prevent online tracking,” Geist wrote in a blog post on Monday.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...les-censorship





OnionShare 2 Released: Tor-Powered File Sharing
Martin Brinkmann

The initial version of OnionShare launched in 2017 for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It featured options to share files anonymously using the Tor network using a simple but effective interface.

Files would remain on the local computer as they were shared from it directly. While that meant that the local computer had to be on to allow others to download the files, it ensured that the files would not be hosted by third-parties.

OnionShare 2 was released in February 2019. The new version introduces several new features, public mode, anonymous Dropbox support, or support for new onion addresses.

OnionShare connects to the Tor network when you launch it; this should happen automatically. The application displays the settings if the connection attempt is unsuccessful so that you may change connection related preferences and try the connection again.

The main interface has been updated visually and functionality-wise.

You may drag and drop files or folders that you want to share or use the add button instead. Another option provided right there is to switch to the "receive files" tab to enable receive mode. Enabling the mode gives other users options to upload files to the system OnionShare 2 is run on.

The application displays an address that these other users need to use to send files to the device.

Sharing works the other way round. Activate the "start sharing" button once you have added one or multiple files that you want to share.

OnionShare displays the secret address then which you need to share. The new address format that OnionShare 2 uses is more secure than the previous one. An address like http://ct47fkr5xvym7s2jjmso6lqysqvsp...ting-swampland is more secure than addresses like http://elx57ue5uyfplgva.onion/tug-rentable that used the old format.

Contacts need to use the Tor browser or other Tor programs to load the address and download the files. The application stops the sharing automatically after the files have been downloaded once. You may stop the behavior in the options by removing the checkmark from "stop sharing after files have been sent".

The program indicates that you are sharing files. You may click on the transfer button to display the transfer history.

OnionShare 2 supports a number of extra features that extend the functionality significantly. One of the new features is public mode which you enable in the preferences.

Public mode complements receive mode when you disable the "stop sharing after files have been sent" option. OnionShare 2 uses a security feature that disables the server automatically when it identifies 20 attempts to guess the two-word passphrase of the address.

Say you tweet the address to share files permanently. Anyone could simply attack the sharing by trying different passphrases in the end to force the server to turn off itself after 20 invalid attempts. Public mode ignores these and makes sure that the server stays online.

Another new feature is the option to run an anonymous dropbox. The mode works similarly to receive mode but you use a persistent address for it. Check the option in the preferences to make sure that the address does not change between sessions.

You could run this on a server, e.g. a headless Linux server, so that anyone may upload files to it at any time of the day.
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/02/21/on...-file-sharing/





Google Backtracks on Chrome Modifications that Would have Crippled Ad Blockers

Google changes stance on upcoming Chrome Manifest V3 changes as benchmark shows they lied about performance hit.
Catalin Cimpanu

A study analyzing the performance of Chrome ad blocker extensions published on Friday has proven wrong claims made by Google developers last month, when a controversy broke out surrounding their decision to modify the Chrome browser in such a way that would have eventually killed off ad blockers and many other extensions.

The study, carried out by the team behind the Ghostery ad blocker, found that ad blockers had sub-millisecond impact on Chrome's network requests that could hardly be called a performance hit.

Hours after the Ghostery team published its study and benchmark results, the Chrome team backtracked on their planned modifications.

At the root of Ghostery's benchmark into ad blocker performance stands Manifest V3, a new standard for developing Chrome extensions that Google announced last October.

The long-winded document contained many new rules about what Chrome functions and APIs an extension should use. One of the modifications was for extensions that needed to intercept and work with network requests. Google wanted extension developers to use the new DeclarativeNetRequest API instead of the older webRequest API.

This new API came with limitations that put a muzzle on the number of network requests an extension could access. It took some time before ad blocker developers caught on to what this meant, but when they did, all hell broke loose, with both extension developers and regular users accusing the browser maker of trying to kill third-party ad blockers for the detriment of Chrome's new built-in ad blocker (which wouldn't be impacted).

Chrome engineers justified the change by citing the performance impact of not having a maximum value for the number of network requests an extension could access.

But the Ghostery team disagreed with this assessment.

"This work [referring to the study] was motivated by one of the claims formulated in the Manifest V3 proposal of the Chromium project: 'the extension then performs arbitrary (and potentially very slow) JavaScript', talking about content-blockers' ability to process all network requests," said Cliqz, the company behind the Ghostery ad blocker.

"From the measurements, we do not think this claim holds, as all popular content-blockers are already very efficient and should not incur any noticeable slow-down for users," they added.

Their study --which analyzed the network performance of ad blockers such as uBlock Origin, Adblock Plus, Brave, DuckDuckGo and Cliqz'z Ghostery-- found sub-millisecond median decision times per request, showing quite the opposite of what the Chrome team claimed.

Following the publication of this study, Google engineers made it official on a Google Groups posting hours later, announcing a relaxation of the Manifest V3 changes that would have impacted ad blockers.

"Another clarification is that the webRequest API is not going to be fully removed as part of Manifest V3," said Chrome engineer Devlin Cronin [emphasis his].

"The extensions ecosystem on Chrome is vibrant and varied, and enables myriad use cases that would otherwise be impossible," Cronin added. "We are committed to preserving that ecosystem and ensuring that users can continue to customize the Chrome browser to meet their needs. This includes continuing to support extensions, including content blockers, developer tools, accessibility features, and many others. It is not, nor has it ever been, our goal to prevent or break content blocking."

Chrome's decision to ship the ad-blocker-breaking features was doomed from the start. Regular users have grown attached to their ad blockers, and for obvious reasons. Ad blockers may come with some sort of performance impact, but they also have benefits, which haven't gone unnoticed by end users.

A May 2018 study from the same Ghostery team found that pages tend to load up to twice as fast when using an ad blocker.

Another study released this week by software engineer Patrick Hulce showed that advertising code accounts for the largest chunk of the JavaScript execution tasks performed by a browser --giving users a good reason to block them.

A DebugBear study from December 2018 also showed that ad blockers don't impact Chrome performance as much as people think, with other extensions bringing a bigger hit to CPU consumption, page download size, and user experience.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google...d-ad-blockers/





'Google, this is Bogus as Hell' — One of the Fathers of the Internet Blasts Google for how Chromecast Behaves on his Home Network
Julie Bort

• Internet pioneer Paul Vixie publicly ranted about Google this week after he bought a Chromecast device and tried to stream videos to his TV over his home network.
• The Chromecast was trying to do something Vixie hadn’t allowed any device on his home network to do: blab about his network to an outside entity, in this case, to Google.
• It led to an ironic situation where the streaming stick was trying to circumvent some of the very internet technologies that Vixie helped to invent.
• Of course Vixie found a way to outsmart the Chromecast, for now, and he explained to Business Insider why he got so ticked off.

“Google, this is bogus as hell,” Paul Vixie ranted on Internet Engineering Task Force mail list this week. The IETF mail list is where the people who create the internet’s technologies converse.

The post was noticed because Paul Vixie is an Internet Hall of Fame engineer known for his pioneering work on the modern Domain Name Service (DNS).

And it is how Google was using DNS in its Chromecast Ultra streaming device that ticked him off.

DNS turns the words you type into your browser, like businessinsider.com, in the numerical internet address that computers use to find webpages, videos or whatnot and deliver them to your device. Home networks typically use their ISP’s DNS server, unless a network professional, like the guy who invented DNS, has told the network to use a different one. Google offers a free public DNS server to the world, too, at address 8.8.8.8.

Not only did Vixie help create the modern version of DNS, he’s also known for making it secure. He co-created the first internet reputation system to blacklist bad actors, the Real-time Blackhole List (RBL). And then he went on to found the first anti-spam organisation, MAPS (for “Mail Abuse Prevention System”) as a nonprofit.

He’s one of reasons we can safely use the internet today for everything from our banking to our jobs.

No way, Google

Vixie wanted to enjoy the fruits of his internet-inventing labors in a perfectly ordinary manner: streaming YouTube to his TV.

So he bought a Google Chromecast. But when he went to set it up, he found it doing something no device in his network is allowed to do: It wouldn’t use his own, private DNS server. It would only use Google’s public server.

He was miffed. Chromecast was telling the father of DNS that he couldn’t control the DNS it would use, so Chromecast would choose for itself.

Vixie wasn’t going to have it.

“No, this device I’ve paid for, will NOT be allowed to send you any information, other than what I personally approve, which will never include DNS traffic. If you don’t like that deal, buy it back from me and I’ll find some other video appliance that doesn’t twist my arm,” Vixie wrote publicly to Google.

It’s a “data leak”

We reached out to Vixie and asked him why he was so ticked off. What’s the big deal if Google Chromecast uses Google’s own DNS?

This wasn’t about fearing that Google would be able to spy on him. “They have no power to do [that] kind of rerouting or hijacking,” he said.

But he was concerned that it was giving an outsider a peek at which devices he uses on his network, something he doesn’t allow. In this case, the device is telling Google that he’s got a Chromecast Ultra.

“It’s a data leak – I don’t allow application-level DNS queries to leave my network, because I don’t want any outsider to know which device or application here asked which DNS question,” he told us.

He’s also sure that Google has very deliberately hardwired its own DNS server into the Chromecast device, not allowing anyone to change that setting.

To be fair to Google, there are valid, not-evil reasons why the company would do this.

For one, the typical homeowner isn’t an internet genius. If their internet-provider’s DNS server was having issues and Chromecast didnt work, people would blame the device and go to Google’s support people.

And maybe there’s a worry that cable-company internet providers don’t want people streaming to their TVs. Cutting them out is one way to sidestep them. (This is what net neutrality is about and the current White House administration has given much power to the cable companies/ISPs in the area.)

“Their motives are not obvious,” Vixie said of Google. “It’s obviously their intent to ignore my DNS settings, not an oversight of any kind.”

Since Vixie is an internet genius, he’s been able to trick Chromecast into thinking it’s using Google’s DNS service. If that ever changes, he’ll get rid of the streaming stick, he says.

“As I often said back in the late 1990’s when running MAPS, the first anti-spam company, after co-inventing the RBL, the first distributed reputation system: ‘My network, my rules,'” he told us.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/p...omecast-2019-2





Google Says the Built-In Microphone it Never Told Nest users About was 'Never Supposed to be a Secret'
Nick Bastone

• In early February, Google announced that Assistant would work with its home security and alarm system, Nest Secure.
• The problem: Users didn't know a microphone existed on their Nest security devices to begin with.
• On Tuesday, a Google representative told Business Insider the company had made an "error."
• "The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs," the person said. "That was an error on our part."

In early February, Google announced that its home security and alarm system Nest Secure would be getting an update. Users, the company said, could now enable its virtual-assistant technology, Google Assistant.

The problem: Nest users didn't know a microphone existed on their security device to begin with.

The existence of a microphone on the Nest Guard, which is the alarm, keypad, and motion-sensor component in the Nest Secure offering, was never disclosed in any of the product material for the device.

On Tuesday, a Google representative told Business Insider the company had made an "error."

"The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs," the person said. "That was an error on our part."

Google says "the microphone has never been on and is only activated when users specifically enable the option."

It also said the microphone was originally included in the Nest Guard for the possibility of adding new security features down the line, like the ability to detect broken glass.

Still, even if Google included the microphone in its Nest Guard device for future updates — like its Assistant integration — the news comes as consumers have grown increasingly wary of major tech companies and their commitment to consumer privacy.

For Google, the revelation is particularly problematic and brings to mind previous privacy controversies, such as the 2010 incident in which the company acknowledged that its fleet of Street View cars "accidentally" collected personal data transmitted over consumers' unsecured WiFi networks, including emails.

Google bought Nest — which was initially known for its smart thermostat device — back in 2014 for $3.2 billion. It became a standalone company in 2015 when Google reorganized as Alphabet, but in February 2018 it was brought back into Google under the leadership of the head hardware exec Rick Osterloh.

Today, Nest offers a variety of Internet of Things products including smoke detectors, video doorbells, and security cameras.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nest...-secret-2019-2





How Did the Police Know You Were Near a Crime Scene? Google Told Them
Tony Webster

The suspects in an Eden Prairie home invasion last October wore gloves, dressed in black, and covered their faces with masks. But despite their efforts to remain unseen, a trail of evidence was left behind — not at the crime scene, but with Google.

Knowing the Silicon Valley giant held a trove of consumer mobile phone location data, investigators got a Hennepin County judge to sign a "reverse location" search warrant ordering Google to identify the locations of cellphones that had been near the crime scene in Eden Prairie, and near two food markets the victims owned in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The scope of the warrant was so expansive in time and geography that it had the potential to gather data on tens of thousands of Minnesotans.

The technique has caught the attention of civil liberties lawyers who worry such warrants — deployed increasingly by police in the Twin Cities and around the country — are a digital dragnet ripe for abuse, and that judges may not realize the technical details or broad scope of the searches they're authorizing.

"What is so problematic is that it can scoop up completely innocent people who are in an area for legitimate reasons, and who should not be treated as suspects," said Teresa Nelson, legal director of the ACLU of Minnesota.

A reverse location search warrant differs from a traditional search warrant in that it doesn't identify a suspect and establish probable cause to ask for evidence of a suspect's crimes. Instead, it asks for information about everyone in an area at a certain time, working backwards to identify a suspect.

Law enforcement officials say it's a promising new technique, especially in cases involving strings of robberies or burglaries, and that the process has been crafted to preserve privacy.

Following news reports of use of the practice in North Carolina, Virginia, and Maine, police departments in Minnesota have followed suit, obtaining at least 22 reverse location warrants since August in cases ranging from aggravated robberies and shootings to the theft of $650 worth of tires in an overnight retail store break-in.

'Some judges would be alarmed'

Eden Prairie police officials won't talk about their use of the reverse location warrant in the home invasion case. But court documents show the broad scope of what they sought and how they pursued it.

Law enforcement responded to a 911 call last October from an Eden Prairie woman who had just been robbed in her home. Her husband, Oukham Oudavanh, 63, suffered a heart attack and died at the scene, and the suspects made off with $50,000 belonging to the couple's popular food markets, Shuang Hur in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Police wanted Google to identify all mobile devices in the area of the crime scene over a 6-hour time window. They also wanted location data for every cellphone in dense, urban areas surrounding the food market businesses over a 33-hour window.

On a map, it's easy to visualize how expansive this warrant request was. Anyone who passed through University and Dale avenues between Oct. 6 and 7 would be included.

But the judge wasn't given a map.

The warrant application did not spell out plainly the area covered by the warrant, what was inside the targeted areas, or how the areas were related to the crime at all. It used only technical language, specifying geographical coordinates of the target areas, also called "geofences."

The judge approved the warrant application in about 10 minutes.

"Most human beings can't interpret large strings of numbers and GPS coordinates without a map to illustrate them, and judges are no exception," said Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney for the national American Civil Liberties Union.

"Understanding how these geographical areas are targeted is completely central to determining whether these searches are constitutional," said Wessler, who argued a landmark cellphone location data case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

"In some cases, I think some judges would be alarmed if they were told exactly what they're signing off to here," said Ryan Pacyga, an attorney representing one of the accused defendants in the Eden Prairie home invasion case.

Police said privacy would be preserved through a two-step process where Google would first anonymously assign an identification number linked with each device's serial number when turning over the records. If a device's location, movement, or timing established probable cause, investigators could go back to court and get a second warrant ordering Google to reveal the name of the cellphone's owner.

Wessler says this process is better than nothing, but it's not a foolproof way to protect privacy, especially when a target area covers homes or offices.

"These kind of searches raise serious concerns about overbreadth, and affect the privacy rights of lots of people who live or work nearby," said Wessler.

Investigators reviewed the Google data and found a mobile device that appeared to be in the rear of the victims' home. The data showed the device then moved to locations "generally between 13-20 meters," roughly 42 to 65 feet, from the victims' Wi-Fi hotspot, before disappearing from the map as the 911 call came in. A judge then ordered Google to identify the device's owner, and provide a bigger data capture of the person's movements.

But by that point, police had already developed suspects without Google's help, based on vehicle descriptions and a confidential informant, they said in court filings. Three weeks after serving the second search warrant on Google, they arrested three suspects, who now face federal charges.

Police believe the suspects were responsible for a string of burglaries, so if the phone was one of the suspect's, police would now have months of location data from that Google account that would potentially place them at the scene of each one.

'Violating trust'

The Eden Prairie detectives knew what most Google users should: that in exchange for the use of Google's devices and free services, users agree to let Google look over their shoulders.

"[A] high percentage of the population regularly carries and uses a cellular phone," wrote a detective in one of these search warrant applications. "Google monitors its customers' activities and location through its free apps and services in order to provide more timely responses to queries and for targeted advertising ... [t]he services may be actively in use or running in the background on the device without the user's knowledge."

Google's lengthy user agreement does specify that any data Google keeps may be provided to police in response to a legal demand. But the process by which a user consents to the data collection isn't always clear.

"Google is sitting on an incredible amount of highly sensitive location data about millions and millions of people," said the ACLU's Wessler. "Some of that location data people may understand they're sharing with Google. And other parts of it, people almost certainly do not."

Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems collect location information using built-in GPS chips, and by scanning for nearby Wi-Fi networks, cell towers, and Bluetooth signals to build a crowdsourced database of location information to help the devices quickly figure out where they are.

But while Apple's location data processing is anonymous, two hard-to-find settings— "Location History" and "Web and App Activity" — allow Google to keep track of everything their users search, and everywhere they go. It affects all Android users, and iPhone or iPad users with apps like Google Maps installed on their device.

An Associated Press investigation last year revealed that even with these settings disabled, Google continued to collect and store users' location data.

Google is now facing a class action lawsuit from consumers who say the company intentionally complicates the opt-out process. The company filed a motion to dismiss the legal action, pointing to its user legal agreement.

Consumers use technology and generate location data because they want to have some useful service that an app or device is providing, not because they want to share that information with a third party or the government, said Jennifer Lynch, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization in San Francisco.

"Our democracy is based on the idea that you can engage in private activity without the government monitoring your every move," said Lynch. "It feels like what the government is doing here is violating the inherent trust that we have with our devices."

Wessler and other civil liberties experts are concerned that geolocation data in the hands of police could be easy to abuse, generating broad warrants the framers of the Constitution worried about when they wrote the Fourth Amendment, which protects against illegal searches and seizures.

"Courts haven't addressed whether these kinds of searches just sweep too far," said Wessler, "It's an open question whether the Fourth Amendment ever allows police to gather up information about an unknown, potentially large number of bystanders in an effort to identify one unknown suspect."

Asked about Google's handling of these types of warrants, and whether Google is clear enough with users in disclosing how data is stored and shared, Google's communications manager Genevieve Wong Park sent a link to a webpage noting that Google "frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don't follow the correct process."

Court records do suggest Google resisted the scope of the Eden Prairie warrant before eventually complying, but the specifics aren't clear.

Eden Prairie Police Captain Bill Wyffels said that "gathering digital evidence may include executing search warrants for location data possessed by Google or any one of the many other companies that store location data," but he declined comment on the home invasion case. The Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office, prosecuting the case, declined to comment on its investigative techniques.

Brooklyn Park has also tapped Google for location data. While the company rejected some early versions of the police department's warrants when they didn't agree with the language, "they've been really good to work with," said Mark Bruley, the city's deputy police chief.

Judges are the firewall

One Brooklyn Park case illustrates the difficulty judges face when analyzing these types of warrants.

Police got a reverse location search warrant last August to try to find a suspect in a string of March nighttime break-ins of a bar, hair salon, and gas station, all burglarized in a distinctive way.

The geofences were quite narrow, and for a one-hour period of time. A judge signed the warrant, and Google complied.

There was a match, but not a great one. Police said it was near the gas station, but not the bar or hair salon, and the data point wasn't very accurate.

"Google locations and their accuracies should not be used in a definite way," read a study from a team of forensic data scientists last year. The research found that while Google's data could usually place someone in the general whereabouts of an area, some conditions resulted in Google overestimating its accuracy 93 percent of the time.

In this case, Google told police the device was "within a 52 meter radius," roughly 170 feet, of the gas station.

With that large a circle, a judge would have no way to know for sure if the device was the burglar, someone buying fuel, the business owner's phone or tablet kept inside, or someone just driving down the road. Still, the device was spotted at 2:29 a.m. and 2:54 a.m., while the burglary was at 2:47 a.m.

It presented a tough probable cause analysis, and police were asking for a lot: the identity of the phone's owner, billing information, phone numbers, and two months' of their web browsing history and location data. Google was also put under a non-disclosure order, restricted from telling the user that this information would be divulged for at least six months.

No map was provided in the application to illustrate the area or accuracy level to the judge. This warrant was also issued within about 10 minutes of the detective requesting it.

Google responded to the warrant, court records show. Earlier this week, more than two months after Google presumably identified that phone's owner, police said the case was still active, with no arrests.

Asked earlier this week whether that suggests Brooklyn Park police got a data dump on the wrong person, Bruley cautioned against assuming that, saying that investigations take time. On Thursday, Bruley said police have closed the investigation, because Google ultimately could not track the data point.

"We got a warrant signed by a judge. The judge also believed that it was appropriate to the case," Bruley said. He noted that even if it did target the wrong person, "it doesn't mean they're going to get convicted or arrested, it just gives the detective a look at who could be involved."

Brooklyn Park appears to be the first agency in Minnesota to have used the reverse location search warrant method.

Bruley said detectives learned about the potential value of the practice and how to write the warrant applications at an August training seminar held by ZetX, an Arizona-based company that teaches police about cellphone investigations, and sells software called TRAX that generates legal documents and maps cellphone data to assist in analysis. The company holds trainings all across the country.

Material from the U.S. Department of Justice was presented, said Bruley, including suggested language for use in these types of warrants.

When Google provides location data in response to one of these warrants, police "put that location data into the software and then map out a 'profile of life' of where they go, where they travel, and where they were the night of the crime," Bruley said.

The week after detectives attended the ZetX training in the Twin Cities, they wrote up their first three reverse location search warrants. By the next month, they had a dozen, each ordering Google to turn over information on devices located in the vicinity of crimes.

Brooklyn Park Police provided case records indicating that an arrest was made in just one of the cases which used a reverse location search warrant. The complaint said they ultimately identified the burglary suspect through a fingerprint match on a door handle.

The agency also began using the practice to look for suspects in older cases, obtaining a search warrant last September to order Google to examine location data in a 2013 shooting homicide. So far, the case remains open.

Over the past month, Eden Prairie and Brooklyn Park police have used the warrants in cases to find suspects who stole a pickup truck, broke into a Fleet Farm store to steal tires, robbed a restaurant at gunpoint, and to attempt identifying the suspect of a sexual assault.

Edina police also obtained one such warrant, seeking to identify a suspect who lured a pizza delivery driver into a dead-end neighborhood before robbing him.

About four minutes after the detective signed the application — which included no map of the targeted area — the judge approved it. Google provided the data on Dec. 12, but the case remains open with no arrests.

In recent cases, judges appear to have authorized police to skip the second step of judicial review, allowing investigators to pick the map points they considered "relevant to the investigation," and go back to Google directly.

Civil liberties experts interviewed for this story all agreed that judges are the crucial firewall in this process.

That means it's important judges understand what they are signing.

Of the 22 reverse location search warrants issued in Hennepin County, only three times did the warrant applications include map demonstrating the geographic area being targeted by the warrant. And yet, the time difference between an officer signing a warrant request, and a judge approving it, was sometimes just a few minutes.

The Fourth Judicial District Court, serving Hennepin County, was given the details of this story and asked about its warrant approval procedures.

"Judges cannot comment on their decisions or orders outside of the official court record," said Spenser Bickett, the district court's communications specialist, who worked with Chief Judge Ivy Bernhardson to respond to this story.

When asked about the warrant signature timestamps, Bickett responded, "The previous statement is our response to your questions."

Bernhardson authorized five of the warrants referenced in this story.

Technology outruns the law?

At the state level, there are worries that the law simply can't keep pace with the speed of technology change.

"State law doesn't really contemplate granting a broad warrant for every electronic device that has been in an area where a crime has been committed," the Minnesota ACLU's Nelson said.

In 2014, the Minnesota Legislature passed a law prohibiting state and local agencies from obtaining the location information of an electronic device without a "tracking warrant."

While a tracking warrant is used to broadly follow where one person goes, Bruley said reverse location search warrants are "a bit of a fishing expedition to look at and capture potential suspects that [visited a location] at a very specific and narrow time."

Don Gemberling, an attorney who managed data practices issues at the Minnesota Department of Administration for more than 30 years, pointed to another consequence of these data sweeps: once the investigation is closed, all the data law enforcement collects become public information.

"That's probably something that we're going to have to navigate in the near future," said Bruley. He said all the data are saved as part of case files.

Wessler also expressed concern about law enforcement holding on to data irrelevant to the crime. "There should be a total prohibition on police dipping back into that data in any future investigations," he said.

Rep. John Lesch, DFL-St. Paul, chair of the Minnesota House Judiciary Finance and Civil Law Division, and Rep. Peggy Scott, R-Andover, who chaired the Legislative Commission on Data Practices last year, were surprised to hear about these types of warrants.

"The capabilities of technology are getting such that I don't know how the average legislator can track it, and keep up with it," said Scott.

She said she wants law enforcement to catch criminals, but that the government use of these types of technologies is "teetering on the line of our constitutional rights."

Lesch said the topic should be discussed at the Legislature, and he expressed frustration regarding law enforcement's use of new technologies and practices before legislators could set boundaries.

"I suspect even if we forged a coalition of folks with enough concerns to put forth some alternative, that the technology is going to change in five years," said Lesch, "But it doesn't mean we don't try."

Bruley, whose department has used reverse location search warrants more than any Minnesota agency so far, acknowledged the privacy concerns are real and that law enforcement must work with lawmakers to balance the needs of community members and police.

"Those protections should exist. We strongly support them, and furthering the conversation makes sense," said Bruley, "This does appear to be a great tool for us to use at the moment, but it does have to be used correctly."
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/0...earch-warrants





The Final Version of the EU's Copyright Directive Is the Worst One Yet
Cory Doctorow

Despite ringing denunciations from small EU tech businesses, giant EU entertainment companies, artists' groups, technical experts, and human rights experts, and the largest body of concerned citizens in EU history, the EU has concluded its "trilogues" on the new Copyright Directive, striking a deal that—amazingly—is worse than any in the Directive's sordid history.

Take Action

Stop Article 13

Goodbye, protections for artists and scientists

The Copyright Directive was always a grab bag of updates to EU copyright rules—which are long overdue for an overhaul, given that it's been 18 years since the last set of rules were ratified. Some of its clauses gave artists and scientists much-needed protections: artists were to be protected from the worst ripoffs by entertainment companies, and scientists could use copyrighted works as raw material for various kinds of data analysis and scholarship.

Both of these clauses have now been gutted to the point of uselessness, leaving the giant entertainment companies with unchecked power to exploit creators and arbitrarily hold back scientific research.

Having dispensed with some of the most positive versions of the Directive, the trilogues have also managed to make the (unbelievably dreadful) bad components of the Directive even worse.

A dim future for every made-in-the-EU platform, service and online community

Under the final text, any online community, platform or service that has existed for three or more years, or is making €10,000,001/year or more, is responsible for ensuring that no user ever posts anything that infringes copyright, even momentarily. This is impossible, and the closest any service can come to it is spending hundreds of millions of euros to develop automated copyright filters. Those filters will subject all communications of every European to interception and arbitrary censorship if a black-box algorithm decides their text, pictures, sounds or videos are a match for a known copyrighted work. They are a gift to fraudsters and criminals, to say nothing of censors, both government and private.

These filters are unaffordable by all but the largest tech companies, all based in the USA, and the only way Europe's homegrown tech sector can avoid the obligation to deploy them is to stay under ten million euros per year in revenue, and also shut down after three years.

America's Big Tech companies would certainly prefer not to have to install these filters, but the possibility of being able to grow unchecked, without having to contend with European competitors, is a pretty good second prize (which is why some of the biggest US tech companies have secretly lobbied for filters).

Amazingly, the tiny, useless exceptions in Article 13 are too generous for the entertainment industry lobby, and so politicians have given them a gift to ease the pain: under the final text, every online community, service or platform is required to make "best efforts" to license anything their users might conceivably upload, meaning that they have to buy virtually anything any copyright holder offers to sell them, at any price, on pain of being liable for infringement if a user later uploads that work.

News that you're not allowed to discuss

Article 11, which allows news sites to decide who can link to their stories and charge for permission to do so, has also been worsened. The final text clarifies that any link that contains more than "single words or very short extracts" from a news story must be licensed, with no exceptions for noncommercial users, nonprofit projects, or even personal websites with ads or other income sources, no matter how small.

Will Members of the European Parliament dare to vote for this?

Now that the Directive has emerged from the Trilogue, it will head to the European Parliament for a vote for the whole body, either during the March 25-28 session or the April 15-18 session—with elections scheduled in May.

These elections are critical: the Members of the European Parliament are going to be fighting an election right after voting on this Directive, which is already the most unpopular legislative effort in European history, and that's before the public gets wind of these latest changes.

Let's get real: no EU political party will be able to campaign for votes on the strength of passing the Copyright Directive—but plenty of parties will be able to drum up support to throw out the parties that defied the will of voters and risked the destruction of the Internet as we know it to pour a few million Euros into the coffers of media companies and newspaper proprietors—after those companies told them not to.

There's never been a moment where your voice mattered more

Watch this space. We will be working with allies across the EU to make this upcoming Parliamentary vote into an issue that every Member of the European Parliament is well-informed on, and we're going to make sure that every MEP knows that the voters of Europe are watching them and taking note of how they vote.

All that it takes is for you to speak up. Over four million Internet users have signed the petition against the Directive. If you can do that, you can pick up the phone and call your MEP. Tell them why you’re against the Directive, what it means for you, and what you expect your representatives to do in the forthcoming plenary vote. It really is the last chance to make your voice heard.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/0...-worst-one-yet





The Worst Possible Version of the EU Copyright Directive Has Sparked a German Uprising
Cory Doctorow

Last week's publication of the final draft of the new EU Copyright Directive baffled and infuriated almost everyone, including the massive entertainment companies that lobbied for it in the first place; the artists' groups who endorsed it only to have their interests stripped out of the final document; and the millions and millions of Europeans who had publicly called on lawmakers to fix grave deficiencies in the earlier drafts, only to find these deficiencies made even worse.

Take Action

Stop Article 13

Thankfully, Europeans aren't taking this lying down. With the final vote expected to come during the March 25-28 session, mere weeks before European elections, European activists are pouring the pressure onto their Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), letting them know that their vote on this dreadful mess will be on everyone's mind during the election campaigns.

The epicenter of the uprising is Germany, which is only fitting, given that German MEP Axel Voss is almost singlehandedly responsible for poisoning the Directive with rules that will lead to mass surveillance and mass censorship, not to mention undermining much of Europe's tech sector.

The German Consumer Association were swift to condemn the Directive, stating: "The reform of copyright law in this form does not benefit anyone, let alone consumers. MEPs are now obliged to do so. Since the outcome of the trilogue falls short of the EU Parliament's positions at key points, they should refuse to give their consent."

A viral video of Axel Voss being confronted by activists has been picked up by politicians campaigning against Voss's Christian Democratic Party in the upcoming elections, spreading to Germany's top TV personalities, like Jan Böhmermann.

Things are just getting started. On Saturday, with just two days of organizing, hundreds of Europeans marched on the streets of Cologne against Article 13. A day of action—March 23, just before the first possible voting date for MEPs—is being planned, with EU-wide events.

In the meantime, the petition to save Europe from the Directive—already the largest in EU history—keeps racking up more signatures, and is on track to be the largest petition in the history of the world.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/0...erman-uprising





House Bill Requires Pornography Filter on all Phones, Computers Purchased in Kansas
Tim Carpenter

Two bills introduced in the Kansas House on Wednesday generate funding for human trafficking programs by requiring all new internet-capable telephones or computers sold in the state to feature anti-pornography software and by mandating adult entertainment businesses charge a special admissions tax.

Sabetha Rep. Randy Garber sponsored legislation requiring the software installations and dictating purchasers would have to pay a $20 fee to the state, and whatever cost was assessed by retail stores, to remove filters for "obscene" material. No one under 18 would be allowed to have filter software deleted.

"It's to protect children," Garber, a Republican, said in an interview. "What it would do is any X-rated pornography stuff would be filtered. It would be on all purchases going forward. Why wouldn't anybody like this?"

He said it wouldn't be surprising if the bill, if adopted as law, generated legal challenges. He said marketers of technology equipment could be expected to oppose the bill as state government overreach into private business transactions. Free speech organizations say this type of legislation would be unconstitutional.

Revenue derived from both of Garber's bills would be deposited in a fund controlled by Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt to reduce the incidence of human trafficking.

Rep. Tim Hodge, a North Newton Democrat, said the scourge of human trafficking was an obvious challenge, but the bill proposed by Garber to require filters on all new devices tied to the internet was improper.

"Part of being an adult is not legislating morality," Hodge said. "If Randy Garber wants to crawl into everybody's bedroom, that is more creepy than the activity he is trying to prevent. I thought we still lived in America. We all took an oath to uphold the Constitution."

Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning, R-Overland Park, said he hadn't reviewed the House bill blocking obscene material. "At first blush, it's probably too intrusive," he said.

Under House Bill 2319, the state of Kansas would declare a "distributor shall not manufacture, sell, offer for sale, lease or distribute to a consumer any product or service that makes content available accessible on the internet unless such product or service contains an active and operating technology protection measure."

Companies involved in distributing internet-ready devices would be required to maintain a website or telephone hotline for consumers to report unblocked obscene content. Individuals who request deletion of blocking technology, according to the bill, must be given a written warning "regarding the potential danger of deactivating the technology protection measure." There is no limit to the amount a merchant could charge for the one-time deactivation fee.

Garber also sponsored House Bill 2323, which would impose a $3 door charge at strip clubs, bookstores, theaters or any other business catering to consumers of adult entertainment. The businesses would on a monthly basis report the total number of customers and make the appropriate tax payment. Violation of the law would be punishable with a $1,000 fine and up to six months in jail.

A separate bill introduced in the Kansas Senate would impose a $5 entrance fee on adult-oriented businesses.

"It's kind of sad we have this problem. We're a free nation. With freedom comes responsibility. Sometimes we don't exercise (it) the way we should," Garber said.

The Media Coalition, a First Amendment advocacy organization in New York City, said this type of law would be unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union indicated government couldn't impose filtering software on people or businesses. Forcing the maker or seller of devices to provide a written warning about dangers of sexually explicit speech is unconstitutional, the coalition said.

Joyce Grover, executive director of the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence, said she had mixed feelings about the proposed legislation.

The state's investment in programs to deal with human trafficking is insufficient, she said. On the other hand, she said, political activists had joined the fight against human trafficking for the purpose of advancing policy more directly related to standards of obscenity.

"The human trafficking work for many years has been usurped by a group that is anti-porn and anti-prostitution. I'm not saying that both of those things don't have serious damaging results, but it is sort of repackaging this," she said.
https://www.cjonline.com/news/201902...ased-in-kansas





How an Investigation of Fake FCC Comments Snared a Prominent D.C. Media Firm
Dell Cameron and Jason Prechtel

Millions of records that the FCC’s top lawyer once fought to hold back from state law enforcement officials now serve as key evidence in a year-long probe into cases of Americans being impersonated during the agency’s latest net neutrality proceeding. Analysis of the data would lead investigators last fall to consider, as one of many potential sources of fraud, the owner of an influential Washington, D.C., newspaper, whose advocacy business may have served as a pipeline for one of the most notorious of all fake comments.

In May 2017, dozens of Americans came forward with claims that their identities had been used, without their consent, in a campaign to inundate the Federal Communications Commission with public comments critical of the Obama-era policy. Some told reporters that they’d never heard of net neutrality. Twenty seven signed an open letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai demanding a response. A year on, each of their names and addresses are still displayed on the federal agency’s website, right above, as the letter puts it, “a political statement that we did not sign onto.”

What was most curious, however, is that each of these people had supposedly submitted the very same comment; a veritable word salad of telecom industry talking points. In particular, the comment was a rebuke of the Obama administration’s exercise of “unprecedented regulatory power” in pursuit of net neutrality, a policy which it accused of “smothering innovation, damaging the American economy, and obstructing job creation.”

Internal FCC logs reviewed by Gizmodo for the first time offer clues as to why the matching comments led investigators in October to the doorstep of CQ Roll Call, a company that, while running an august newsroom in the nation’s capital, is also in the business of helping lobbyists construct digital “grassroots” campaigns aimed at influencing policymakers, and specifically, those controlling the FCC’s rulemaking process.

“To put it simply, there is evidence in the FCC’s files that fraud has occurred.”

The logs, obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, document in exhaustive detail each time an organization such as CQ—the advocacy side of the company—submitted a comment using the FCC’s API system. What’s more, they include the IP addresses of the uploaders themselves, as well as timestamps that record, down to the millisecond, precisely when floods of comments came pouring in from any given source.

While it’s FCC policy to accept and help manually upload spreadsheets containing batches of comments collected by virtually anyone, it also offers access to an API system that give groups like CQ, Fight for the Future, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation the ability to create their own submission pages that feed directly into the agency’s Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS). The API, which helped funnel millions of comments to the agency in 2017, is maintained by the General Services Administration (GSA).

Last week, the GSA turned over the API logs in response to a records request from a reporter who had sued it and the FCC to pry them loose.

On review, they are the same records that the FCC refused to provide the New York attorney general’s office in December 2017, while claiming the state’s chief legal officer had no authority “to investigate a federal agency’s rulemaking process,” or otherwise compel the production of any materials. According to a December 2017 letter, the FCC’s general counsel had further argued that releasing the records (and in particular, any IP addresses) would “invade the personal privacy of legitimate commenters, and be overly burdensome to the agency.”

Yet the agency’s efforts at stonewalling proved inevitably futile. New York’s Bureau of Internet and Technology would ultimately obtain the API logs—likely, according to the statements of former New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman, from the FCC’s own inspector general, whose work is intentionally segregated from other offices at the agency.

Armed with both legal and technical expertise, the bureau’s investigators would comb the data and eventually produce multiple leads in its investigation of potential state violations, including criminal impersonation under New York law.

“Unprecedented regulatory power”

The millions of public comments amassed by the FCC about net neutrality over the summer of 2017 are only one facet of process known as “notice and comment” rulemaking. Under federal law, whenever the FCC intends to set forth new, legally binding rules, it is required to give notice. It must then, for no fewer than 30 days, allow the public to comment in response.

In contrast to the 3.9 million comments received during the debate over the Open Internet Order, which led to the adoption of federal net neutrality rules four years ago, the Trump administration’s effort to repeal those rules, known as the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, brought in over 22 million.

As of October 2018, investigators in New York had isolated a batch of roughly 9.35 million comments, which they had deemed suspicious and potentially attributed to Americans whose names had been used without their permission.

The investigations into the fake comments largely stem from reports published almost simultaneously on May 10, 2017, by Gizmodo, Verge, and ZDNet, all of which focused on identical comments that were submitted to the FCC several hundred thousand times. The language used in the comments—which are now suspected of having been uploaded using CQ’s software—was eventually traced back to a conservative nonprofit called the Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF).

The comment reads in full:

“The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation. I urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory overreach of the internet known as Title II and restore the bipartisan light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the internet to flourish for more than 20 years.”

Founded in 1998, CFIF is a reportedly a dark-money group whose early roots lie in defending Big Tobacco, but which supported the repeal of net neutrality more recently and has campaigned aggressively against state laws requiring political groups like itself to disclose the sources of its funding. Along with CQ, the group is among the 14 entities subpoenaed by the New York attorney general last fall, as first reported by former BuzzFeed reporter Kevin Collier in October.

As late as last February, CFIF President Jeffrey Mazzella praised the FCC’s rollback of the Title II classification of broadband service underlying net neutrality in the Daily Caller, labeling the policy an “unprecedented power grab by the Obama administration,” which, he claimed, upended “two decades of bipartisan consensus for light-touch regulation of the internet sector.”

Notably, Mazzella’s article was coauthored with David Williams, president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA), another group subpoenaed in New York. Comments linked to TPA appear to have been submitted by the same individual who aided another group known as Free Our Internet, whose comments were ascribed to Americans who told Gizmodo their identities had been stolen.

Attempting to confirm or disprove the alleged link between CQ and CFIF, Gizmodo initiated its own review of the API data logs last week, focusing on comments from dozens of people who claim they were impersonated online. Emails previously obtained under FOIA, which show conversations between FCC officials and CQ’s chief technology officer, Dan Germain, who now serves as a FiscalNote senior VP overseeing research and development, provided additional context regarding the company’s operations.

The Center for Individual Freedom and FiscalNote, which purchased CQ Roll Call in August 2018, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Germain, however, was interviewed by Gizmodo twice in 2017, and served up various insights into how the company had amassed and delivered “millions of comments” to the FCC.

Analysis of API logs

While Germain declined to identify any of CQ’s clients “without explicit permission,” timestamps contained in the API logs reveal an unmistakable correlation between the use of CQ’s API key and numerous identical comments containing CFIF’s text about former President Obama’s “unprecedented regulatory power.”

APIs are a ubiquitous part of the internet and power user interactions with everything from Google to Grindr. To control access to them, APIs are usually given a “key” system, which produces long, unique strings of characters, not dissimilar to a password. This enables system administrators to give explicit access to an individual or company and track how the keys are being used.

The FCC is the only agency whose public commenting system uses API keys issued by Data.gov, a branch of the General Services Administration.

The purpose of GSA’s system is to “make it easier for agencies to release and manage” data while offering a variety of ways to track and analyze its use, according to its website. As many as 19 federal agencies rely on the Data.gov API for a variety of purposes, including the FCC, which specifically promotes it as a way to deliver public comments in bulk.

“Sometimes they don’t remember until we read the actual message and then they light up in full support of it!”

While some identifying information in the logs is fully or partially redacted, they contain the following data: timestamps of every instance an API submission was made; the IP addresses of every individual who requested API keys; the IP addresses of the servers used by them to submit comments; and standard number codes that indicate whether a comment submission was successful.

But while the logs detail precisely when comments were submitted and by whom, they do not contain the actual comments themselves, nor the names of the individuals to whom they’re attributed. Nor do the logs, which span roughly 7-months, indicate to which specific FCC docket a comment was submitted. Because of this, the timestamps are pivotal to pairing specific comments with the API keys used to submit them.

By comparing the API logs to comment data that the FCC had already made publicly available, Gizmodo found more than a dozen comments containing CFIF’s boilerplate language that were registered within milliseconds of CQ’s key being used.

A comment by Cynthia Duby of Desert Hot Springs, California, regarding Obama’s “unprecedented regulatory power,” for example, was registered by the comment system fractions of a second after CQ used its key on May 11, 2017. (The timestamp on Duby’s comment reads, “16:33:09.794,” while the Data.gov API logs show CQ submitting a comment at “16:33:09:0.16.”)

API data logs show a comment submitted by CQ Roll Call at “2017-05-11T16:33:09.016Z,” milliseconds before Cynthia Duby’s comment about “unprecedented regulatory power” was registered by the FCC comment system.

The timestamps on the comment data and API data rarely if ever sync perfectly. The disparity—at most two seconds, but more often much shorter—could be explained by server latency, or the fraction of time that passes after a message is sent but before it’s received by a server.

Duby is one of the 24 people who signed the open letter in May 2017 demanding that her comment be removed by the FCC. Of 14 others who said their names were “used to file comments we did not make,” Gizmodo was able to duplicate the experiment 12 times. In each successful case, the comments were received by the FCC while CQ’s API key was in use, with the logs reflecting deviations in the timestamps roughly equivalent to the blink of an eye. (For reasons unclear, two of the signatories’ comments could not be located.)

Ariehl Kimbrough, another apparent condemnor of “unprecedented regulatory power,” told Gimzodo in May 2017, that not only had she not submitted the comment bearing her name and address, but that she had never even heard the phrase “net neutrality.”

The FCC data shows the comment attributed to Kimbrough was received on May 9, 2017, at 7:31pm. As with the signatories of the open letter, the API data shows that a key assigned to CQ Roll Call was, at that very moment, in the process of uploading a batch of comments. The timestamps are within one-tenth of a second apart.

In response to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, whose researchers spoke to some 7,800 people who had claimed their names had been used without consent in various agency dockets, an FCC spokesperson said comments from the general public are “generally not substantive, so thus have no impact on a rulemaking.” They added: “We err on the side of keeping the public record open and do not have the resources to investigate every comment that is filed.”

Only when it was politically advantageous did FCC Chairman Ajit Pai speak to the impact of the fake comments on the process.

In December, while attacking what he called “overheated rhetoric about net neutrality,” the chairman claimed in an FCC memo that as many as “half-million comments” supporting net neutrality had been “submitted from Russian e-mail addresses” and that “nearly eight million comments” had been filed using email accounts “associated with FakeMailGenerator.com.”

The FCC did not respond to a request for comment.

“Millions of comments”

Prior to CQ becoming a subject of interest in an ongoing criminal investigation, Germain explained at length that his company had created a platform specifically to direct comments to the FCC and that it had been operational since at least 2016.

“Before we submit these comments (via the API) we remove any bad or questionable submissions,” he told Gizmodo. “On a technical level, a few of the things we do include running the email address through an email validator, eliminate duplicate records with the same email address, and remove multiple submissions from the same IP address.”

If CQ found comments that appeared particularly questionable, he said, the company would call the individual and inquire whether they submitted it. “Sometimes they don’t remember until we read the actual message,” he said, “and then they light up in full support of it!”

In emails to FCC from April 2017, Germain explains that CQ is seeking to deliver “about 250,000 comments per day,” and that it would need to “set up multiple servers to the API simultaneously to meet the needs” of its clients. Whereas many of the groups responsible for uploading millions of comments requested only one or two API keys, logs show that CQ, over a period of several months, requested no fewer than 114.

Registered between April 28 and August 14 that year, the keys linked to the company—by email account or IP address or both—contributed nearly 2.1 million API submissions. This includes a nearly month-long gap between mid-May and mid-June. A query for the CFIF comment about “unprecedented regulatory power” reveals an overlapping gap that aligns with the periods in which CQ Roll Call is shown to have made API post requests.

Above all, Germain stressed that its advocacy business was entirely separate from its news products. “The newsrooms of both CQ and Roll Call have editorial independence and have no involvement in the creation or management of our advocacy tools,” he said, adding: “They certainly would not know what our advocacy customers were doing with our tools.”

Incidentally, one of Roll Call’s reporters was physically accosted by security officials while trying to ask questions of Republican FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly following a May 2017, hearing about the net neutrality rules.

Beyond CQ, 12 additional entities were likewise subpoenaed by the New York attorney general, including Free Our Internet, an organization founded by a former Trump campaign statewide director; and Ethan Eilon, a GOP consultant, whose firm, Conservative Connector, received more than $31 million from the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee during 2016 election.

With patterns of repetitive text and timestamps consistently formatted across the data, it’s possible that API submissions and FCC comments can be easily matched with a reasonably high degree of confidence. If a culprit is eventually found, it will likely be as a result of intense analysis of the API data, aided by the sloppiness of uploaders who left their digital fingerprints all over it.

At an agency with a recent history of covering up minor technical flaws with disproportionately large lies, the attempt by top FCC officials to prevent law enforcement from examining its logs only serves to cast further doubt and suspicion on the agency’s motives, and its future ability to conduct rule-making processes within the spirit of the law.

Saying the agency’s failure to investigate this “corrupted record” would ultimately undermine its ability to “seek public input in the digital age,” FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel reached the conclusion more than a year ago that the data so closely guarded by her Republican colleagues would ultimately prove central to solving this mystery.

“To put it simply, there is evidence in the FCC’s files that fraud has occurred,” she said, “and the FCC is telling law enforcement and victims of identity theft that it is not going to help.”

The New York attorney general’s office declined to comment for this story citing an ongoing investigation.
https://gizmodo.com/how-an-investiga...rom-1832788658





Cord Cutting Hits Another Record With More Bad News For Cable

Over 850,000 pay TV customers dropped service in the fourth quarter, which could be a new record.
Aaron Pressman

The rate of consumers dropping their cable and satellite TV packages hit the highest level ever in the last three months of 2018. And for the first time in a few years, the losses weren’t more than offset by people signing up for Internet TV subscriptions.

The total number of pay TV subscribers dropped 4.1% from a year earlier, the highest rate of decline since the trend of cord cutting emerged in 2010, analysts at MoffettNathanson Research reported on Friday. About 985,000 more customers dropped cable or satellite in the quarter than signed up for new service industrywide.

The huge drop didn’t surprise report author and longtime cable analyst Craig Moffett, however. “That the satellite operators are dead men walking has been obvious to all for some time, and the cable operators, while actually not doing all that badly in video, have made clear that they increasingly view their core business to be broadband, not video,” he writes. “It may not be an overstatement to say that the pay TV business as we know it is beginning to unravel.”

One big change from a year ago that prompted Moffett’s more dire assessment was the fate of cable channel packages offered over the Internet. Most providers, like Google’s (googl, +0.98%) YouTube TV and AT&T’s (t, +0.91%) DirecTV Now, had to raise prices last year to account for higher costs charged by cable programmers, so subscriber growth has slowed. The number of additional people who signed up for the Internet packages totaled 740,000 in the fourth quarter, down from a 900,000 gain a year earlier. At year-end, about 7.6 million people subscribed to one of the offerings, the firm said.

The cable bundle has become increasingly unappealing as consumers have turned to more flexible and less expensive video offerings, from services like Netflix (nflx, +1.66%) and Hulu that feature traditional TV and movie formats, to shorter programming from YouTube, Facebook, and others. The cord-cutting trend, which started decades ago with consumers dropping landline phones for mobile numbers, is even starting to hit Internet service. It’s also prompting more people to go back to using an antenna to pick up free TV broadcast over the air.

The 4.1% rate of decline in the fourth quarter is an increase from 3.4% in the same period of 2017 and 2% a year before that. The trend is consistent with other sources. For example, 79% of households paid for traditional cable or satellite service in last year’s annual survey by the Leichtman Research Group, down from 84% four years earlier and the all-time peak of 88% in 2010.
http://fortune.com/2019/02/22/cord-c...tflix-comcast/





Industry Claims That Cord Cutting Would Be A Fad Aren't Looking So Hot
Karl Bode

Remember when the cable industry used to pretend that cord cutting wasn't real? Or perhaps you remember that once the industry was actually willing to admit it was a real trend, they'd claim it was only something being done by losers living in their parents' basement?

Or perhaps you'll remember the cable and broadcast industry claims that cord cutting was just a temporary phenomenon that would go away once the housing markets stabilized and Millennials started procreating? Or how companies like ESPN routinely claimed that warnings about the trend were an unimportant fiction that should be ignored?

Good times.

While there are still a few sector analysts and executives here and there who'll bizarrely try to downplay one of the biggest trends in TV industry history, the numbers keep making it harder and harder to keep one's head buried a foot below ground. Last year, for example, once again saw one of the highest defection rates of traditional TV subscribers in recent memory. According to Wall Street analysts, the top pay TV providers lost 2.5 million subscribers last year alone:

Ironically the two companies that actually tried to adapt to the cord cutting trend suffered the worst losses. Both AT&T and Dish have launched DirecTV Now and Sling TV, respectively, in a bid to try and at least hoover up a few of these fleeing customers with their own streaming services. That's something to be applauded, especially since huge swaths of the sector have simply responded by doubling down on terrible ideas (from raising rates to fighting against real cable box competition). But even with adaptation, users are still fleeing to other alternatives (Amazon, Hulu, Netflix) instead.

It's not going to be getting any easier for entrenched pay TV providers, especially the ones that stubbornly refuse to compete on price. The streaming market will soon face a new rival in the form of Apple's and Disney's new Disney+ streaming service, which will be the exclusive home of most Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, and Disney children's' programming:

"The clear implication is that year-over-year subscriber trends for programmers that improved throughout 2018 are set to worsen again in 2019,” Greenfield wrote. The analyst is widely known as bearish on the pay-TV sector, frequently using the hashtag #goodluckbundle in his commentary (as he did in Wednesday’s post). The cord-cutting problem promises to grow even more exacerbated as new subscription-streaming services from Disney (Disney+), WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal hit the market starting later this year. Those will via for consumers’ entertainment dollars against SVOD players like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video."

So if companies like AT&T and Dish are actually trying to adapt to reality, why are they seeing such major departures? Many of these users were on unrealistically cheap discounted promotions intended to drive adoption that ended. And some users were frustrated by the a price hike by AT&T in the wake of its latest megamerger with Time Warner. New streaming companies are also actually good at customer service, something the cable and broadband industry hasn't been able to get a handle on for the better part of a generation.

Between tight margins and an ocean of new arrivals, it's going to be pretty hard for the cable industry to make anywhere near the same profits they were used to during the heyday of cable TV. But that's generally how competition works. And you shouldn't feel too badly for the Comcasts of the world, since their solution will simply be to jack up the cost of broadband, where competition is far weaker. Still, there's a subset of executives who still seem to somehow believe they're owed a permanent position of dominance without having to work for it. That delusion is falling apart more quickly than most of them expected.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...g-so-hot.shtml





How Streaming Music Could be Harming the Planet

The plastic and packaging that comes with CDs and vinyl makes them seem worse for the environment, but the popularity of music streaming services may be polluting in other ways.
Sharon George and Deirdre McKay

Streaming is the most popular way people listen to music, but old formats like cassettes and vinyl have both seen an increase in sales in recent years. In fact, vinyl has seen a remarkable sales increase of 1,427% since 2007, selling around around four million LPs in 2018 in the UK alone. Since the popularity of vinyl shows no signs of stopping soon, this means that more non-recyclable discs will be manufactured – which could have a negative impact on the environment.

Although album covers are generally made of recyclable cardboard, records were originally made of shellac, before non-recyclable vinyl was used as a replacement. Shellac is a natural resin secreted by the female Kerria lacca bug, which was scraped from trees to produce gramophone records. Since shellac isn’t derived from fossil fuels, its carbon footprint was lower than that of modern records.

Shellac records were brittle and prone to damage from water and alcohol though, so PVC plastic records were developed as a more durable alternative. In ideal conditions, with low oxygen and without movement, discarded PVC is likely to take centuries to decompose. The environmental conditions of most landfill sites – which have varying soil acidity and temperatures – can cause discarded PVC albums to leach plasticisers (solvents added to plastics to make them more flexible and resilient). They may even outlive the site itself or escape into the environment as pollutants.

Modern records typically contain around 135g of PVC material with a carbon footprint of 0.5kg of carbon dioxide (based on 3.4kg of CO₂ per 1kg of PVC). Sales of 4.1m records would produce 1.9 thousand tonnes of CO₂ – not taking transport and packaging into account. That is the entire carbon footprint of almost 400 people per year.

In the 80s, records were replaced by CDs, which promised durability and better sound quality. CDs are made of layered polycarbonate and aluminium, which has slightly less environmental impact than PVC, and are manufactured using less materials than records. However, CDs can’t be recycled because they’re made of mixed materials, which are difficult and uneconomical to separate into their component parts for recycling. CDs were also encased in fragile polycarbonate cases, which, despite being a single material, aren’t widely recycled. They also aren’t as indestructible as many people first thought, so scratched and damaged disks often ended up in landfills.

While high-quality CDs could last for 50 to 100 years under ideal conditions, this isn’t true for many low-quality, cheap CDs. These were easily damaged by direct exposure to sunlight and heat, warped by fast-changing temperatures, gravity, scratches, fingerprints and smudges – subsequently resulting in them getting thrown out.

Current digital technology, however, gives us flawless music quality without physical deterioration. Music is easy to copy and upload, and can be streamed online without downloading. Since our digital music is less tangible than vinyl or CDs, surely it must be more environmentally friendly?

Even though new formats are material-free, that doesn’t mean they don’t have an environmental impact. The electronic files we download are stored on active, cooled servers. The information is then retrieved and transmitted across the network to a router, which is transferred by wi-fi to our electronic devices. This happens every time we stream a track, which costs energy.

Once vinyl or a CD is purchased, it can be played over and over again, the only carbon cost coming from running the record player. However, if we listen to our streamed music using a hi-fi sound system it’s estimated to use 107 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, costing about £15.00 to run. A CD player uses 34.7 kilowatt hours a year and costs £5 to run.

So, which is the greener option? It depends on many things, including how many times you listen to your music. If you only listen to a track a couple of times, then streaming is the best option. If you listen repeatedly, a physical copy is best – streaming an album over the internet more than 27 times will likely use more energy than it takes to produce and manufacture a CD.

If you want to reduce your impact on the environment, then vintage vinyl could be a great physical option. For online music, local storage on phones, computers or local network drives keeps the data closer to the user and will reduce the need for streaming over distance from remote severs across a power-hungry network.

In a world where more and more of our economy and social relations happen online, records, and other vintage music formats, buck that trend. Instead, the record revival shows us what we want to see in our media and material world more widely – experiences that hold their value and, with loving care, endure. Older music formats have a sense of importance and permanence attached to them, belonging to us in a way that our virtual purchases simply don’t.

It seems that whatever the format, owning copies of our favourite and most treasured music, and playing them over and over again, might just be the best option for our environment.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2019...climate-change

















Until next week,

- js.



















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