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Old 15-08-18, 06:49 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 18th, ’18

Since 2002


































"It took maybe a minute or so, because I’m a fast typer." – Audrey, Age 11, Vote Hacker


"It’s very possible that the Paramount decree gets overturned." – David Miller






































August 11th, 2018




'Elitist': Angry Book Pirates Hit Back after Author Campaign Sinks Website

OceanofPDF was shut down last week after publishers issued hundreds of takedown notices – but authors have been left dealing with angry users
Alison Flood

Authors have been called elitist by book pirates, after they successfully campaigned to shut down a website that offered free PDFs of thousands of in-copyright books.

OceanofPDF was closed last week after publishers including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins issued hundreds of takedown notices, with several high-profile authors including Philip Pullman and Malorie Blackman raising the issue online. Featuring free downloads of thousands of books, OceanofPDF had stated on its site that it sought to make information “free and accessible to everyone around the globe”, and that it wanted to make books available to people in “many developing countries where … they are literally out of reach to many people”.

Before the site was taken down, one of its founders told the Bookseller that it was run by a team of four who worked based on user requests: “Once we get an email from a user requesting a book that he/she cannot afford/find in the library or if he has lost it, we try to find it on their behalf and upload on our site so that someone in future might also get it.”

Michelle Harrison, who won the Waterstones children’s book prize for her debut novel The Thirteen Treasures, drew attention to OceanofPDF after receiving a Google alert about a free download of her book Unrest. She then downloaded it “in a matter of seconds”.

“I was gobsmacked when I read a statement on the site admitting that reading pirated material wasn’t good because it doesn’t earn authors any money,” Harrison said on Wednesday. “Users of the site were encouraged to ‘leave reviews’ so that the author at least got some benefit!” After she received no reply to an email request to have her books removed, she tried Twitter. “I received a brazen response along the lines of, ‘What if someone already bought the books and lost them, or is travelling and doesn’t want to carry extra weight?’” she said.

After the site was closed down, Harrison shared an email she received from one OceanofPDF user, who called her “unworthy of being an author” and “grossly elitist”.

Michelle Harrison (@MHarrison13)

This is the kind of email you get for speaking out against book piracy. ‘Elitist’? No, I just want to be paid for my work, the same as everyone else. I value my readers, I just wish all readers valued the people who create the books for them. pic.twitter.com/qoBIywVpJ5
August 6, 2018

Similar comments abound across Twitter and Reddit. One user wrote that “writers are the most pretentious pieces of shit I’ve ever seen. I’ll find another way to pirate your books assholes.” Another complained that “reading is becoming one of the most expensive and restrictive hobbies across the globe”, while a third lambasted the “snitches” who took down the website, calling them “anti-poor, classist and exclusionary”. On Reddit, OceanofPDF users were mourning its demise and looking for alternative routes to free ebooks.

“Nurses, doctors, teachers, refuse collectors all work and get paid for it. Authors and illustrators work and are called elitist for wanting the same – to be paid,” former children’s laureate Malorie Blackman tweeted. “Giving our work away for free means no money to pay our bills, live or write/draw. It’s not a hobby, it’s my job.”

Thriller author Steve Cavanagh, whose books have appeared on pirate sites, said that the issue “further highlights the need for properly funded public libraries”.

“When I was growing up I couldn’t afford to buy new books, so I went to the library and if there was a book I really wanted to own I saved for it,” he said. “The real issue is that certain sections of the on-demand culture have a sense of entitlement to content for free … In order to read a pirated PDF you need a computer, e-reader or smartphone and probably access to wifi. My view is that if you can afford to buy an electronic device such as this, you should be able to afford to buy a book.”

Fantasy author Pippa DaCosta has been working to have dozens of her books taken down from a Russian website that has 43 million users. “I understand piracy is tempting and some readers are voracious, devouring many books a day. It can get expensive, but that’s no excuse to steal the ebooks,” she said. “I’m sure fans wouldn’t walk into my house and steal the food off my table, but that’s what pirating feels like.”

On Wednesday, Harrison said that reading the comments from OceanofPDF users “both enraged and saddened me. The sense of entitlement is ingrained into these people’s consciousness.”

“I fail to understand why people don’t apply the same rules to taking a digital file without permission as they would to a physical copy in a bookshop. I guess the entitlement stems from having so much that is instantly available. It just doesn’t seem to occur to some people to go without or save up for a book they can’t afford,” she said. “Some of the users, particularly in countries such as India, claim they can’t use libraries as they have none, or they’re too far away. Perhaps the only way forward is something like Spotify for books ... while OceanofPDF has gone for now, piracy is never going away.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...mpaign-website





Facebook Bans The Sale of Kodi Boxes & Jailbroken Streaming Players
Luke Bouma

Latin woman looking disappointed at her laptopscreen, sitting behind her desk at the office.Recently there has been a slow move to crack down on the sale of the so-called Kodi Boxes and devices described. Now Facebook is moving to ban anything that comes with Kodi installed or is described as a jailbroken streaming player.

Back in May 2017, Facebook moved to ban these devices with a rule that said they banned “products or items that facilitate or encourage unauthorized access to digital media.” Now Facebook has made it very clear that they do not want Kodi boxes being sold on Facebook with a newly updated rule that bans the sale of any device that comes with “KODI installed.” From the wording, this would include Kodi devices that do not come preloaded with 3rd party piracy add-ons.

Here is everything now listed as banned on Facebook under the Digital Media tab:

• Promoting the sale or use of streaming devices with KODI installed
• Jailbroken or loaded devices
• Jamming or descrambling devices
• Wiretapping devices

Facebook did say they will allow the sale of add-on equipment for KODI devices such as keyboard and remotes. Yet the sale of anything with Kodi installed is now officially banned on Facebook no matter if it is promoting piracy or not.

Well, you will likely still find these boxes being listed for sale on local for sale groups on Facebook this does mean you will probably not see them listed for sale anymore through ads. At least not with Kodi being clearly pushed in the ad. This rule change though will mean people selling these devices in local for sale groups could face having their accounts banned from Facebook.
https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/face...aming-players/





Who Killed the Great American Cable-TV Bundle?

Insiders know the cable bundle, after generating more than $1.8 trillion, has been murdered. They don’t agree on the prime suspects.
Gerry Smith

Every minute, another six people cut the cord.

The reason American consumers are abandoning their cable subscriptions is not a mystery: It’s expensive, and cheaper online alternatives are everywhere. But who exactly is responsible for the slow demise of the original way Americans paid for television? That’s a far trickier question. The answer can be traced to a few decisions in recent years that have set the stage for this extraordinarily lucrative and long-lived business model to unravel: licensing reruns to Netflix Inc., shelling out billions for sports rights, introducing slimmer bundles, and failing to promote a Netflix killer called TV Everywhere.

The TV bundle with hundreds of channels, which took off in the 1990s and was ubiquitous in U.S. homes at the start of this century, has fallen from 100 million to 95 million subscribers in the past five years. This quarter, pay-TV giants such as Comcast, Charter, Dish, and AT&T saw an additional 744,000 subscribers disappear.

This steady decline is the driving force behind a series of blockbuster mergers reshaping the media landscape, such as AT&T buying Time Warner, Walt Disney acquiring much of Fox, and Comcast pursuing Sky. Entertainment companies, nervously watching their business model waste away like a slowly melting glacier, are deciding they need to get larger and expand globally to compete with deep-pocketed rivals like Netflix—or sell.

The TV industry isn’t suffering financially, however, because it keeps raising prices on the remaining customers. The average pay-TV customer today spends $106.20 a month, up 44 percent from 2011, according to Leichtman Research Group. Since 1980 cable, satellite, and phone companies have generated $1.8 trillion in revenue from selling TV service, according to Kagan, a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Revenue last year was $116 billion.

But many believe a reckoning for the cable bundle has arrived.

“You’ve got high prices, big bundles, and broadband,” said Warren Schlichting, group president of Sling TV, which has more than 2 million people paying for an online service that starts at $25 and offers about 30 channels. “At some stage, the consumer is going to revolt.”

We interviewed about 20 current and former industry executives and analysts to understand why traditional television has started losing its foothold in America’s living rooms. Some blamed their peers for decisions that made cable too pricey or opened the door to online competition, and many declined to be identified for fear of angering business associates. In reality, almost everyone played a role in jeopardizing the business.

“Everyone has a piece in this story,” one media executive told me. “It’s like Murder on the Orient Express. All 17 players stabbed the person.”

SUSPECT #1: REED HASTINGS

Perhaps no one deserves more credit for threatening the old TV business model than Netflix Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings. As the driving force behind the world’s largest streaming video service, with about 130 million subscribers, he’s taught consumers to expect an abundance of old and new shows and movies, without the irritation of commercial interruptions, for just $8 a month.

But if Hastings’s success is responsible for the decline of the cable industry, he had plenty of accomplices among TV executives who fueled Netflix’s rise in the early going. Over the past decade, media companies have licensed their old hits to Hastings, getting a short-term payout but jeopardizing the long-term health of the industry.

Looking back, some TV executives express regret for doing business with an up-and-coming Netflix, and they struggle to justify their decision to do so. Had they withheld shows from the companies, TV executives might have been vulnerable to lawsuits by the Hollywood talent who have a financial stake in a show being sold to the highest bidder. Netflix frequently offered the most money.

Investors also pressured media companies to take Netflix’s cash. Take, for instance, Time Warner Inc., which is now owned by AT&T Inc. While Disney, CBS, and others licensed many of their old shows to Netflix, Time Warner initially held out. Starting in 2009, Time Warner and Comcast Corp. tried to rally the industry around an idea to slow Netflix by making TV episodes available online—but only to cable subscribers. The idea was called TV Everywhere.

By 2012, however, Time Warner’s investors were demanding to know why the company wasn’t selling its reruns to Netflix, according to one former Time Warner executive. “We sat out for a few years, and all of Wall Street said, ‘What the hell are you guys doing? You’re leaving value on the table for your shareholders!’ ” the former executive said. “So we relented. That was the beginning of the end.”

Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting did its first deal with Netflix that year. Another transaction the following year brought in more than $250,000 per episode for reruns of shows like Robot Chicken and Aqua Teen Hunger Force, according to the former executive. Time Warner figured Netflix’s money would make up for any lost advertising revenue from viewers who watched on Netflix instead of a cable box.

By 2015, Wall Street had changed its tune. With about 40 million U.S. subscribers, Netflix was becoming a clearer threat. Analysts started pushing media companies to reclaim those old episodes from Netflix to make cable TV more attractive, which could slow the rise of cord-cutting. That year, Todd Juenger, an influential analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co, estimated that big media companies, including Viacom, Fox, and CBS, would have been worth a total $45 billion more if they hadn’t done business with Netflix in the first place.

“It was a big flip-flop from Wall Street,” the former Time Warner executive said.

Some also concluded that the streaming service could be good for ratings after seeing the success of AMC’s Breaking Bad. The drama about a meth kingpin drew more than 10 million viewers in its final episode in 2013 after past seasons began appearing on Netflix. That compared with 1.4 million viewers for the first-season debut in 2008. Fans had caught up on the old seasons on Netflix, then tuned in to the current season on TV, they thought.

Media companies are now clawing back their old shows from Netflix to use for their own online services, while Hastings is ordering up more and more original series. His company is spending $8 billion on programming this year, far more than rivals such as HBO and Showtime.

Netflix has already changed consumers’ expectations, said Craig Moffett, an analyst at MoffettNathanson. A lot of the damage to the cable bundle has been done. “All of the media companies got addicted to the crack cocaine of licensing to Netflix,” Moffett said. “It created a new window to sell shows, but it also created a monster.”

SUSPECT #2: BOB IGER

TV executives have also spent billion of dollars acquiring sports rights, which has driven up the price of TV service—and almost no one has bid more aggressively for sports than Disney CEO Robert Iger. Disney, owner of ESPN, is on the hook for $45 billion in sports rights in the coming years. To cover those fixed costs, ESPN charges TV operators about $8 per month per subscriber, making it the most expensive channel and an easy target for critics.

“ESPN created the model of everybody paying for sports even if only a fraction of the country cares,” said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG and a Disney critic. “The cost of the bundle has gotten so absurd because of what Disney has done with sports rights.”

Sports programming is still an undeniably huge draw. Justin Connolly, Disney’s executive vice president for affiliate sales and marketing, said ESPN is a big reason why people sign up for new online services such as Sling TV or DirecTV Now. And, of course, access to big-time sporting events is one of the reasons many people renew their cable-TV subscriptions.

For its part, ESPN is happy to avoid a deep inquiry into the connection between sports and rising prices. “We as an industry need to figure out how to avoid the finger-pointing around who is to blame, and provide consumers with the feeling that if they spent $35 or $40 or $90 or $100 on a pay-TV package, they see real value,” Connolly said.

If anyone is responsible for the high cost of sports, it’s not ESPN—it’s sports fans, according to Bill Rasmussen, who co-founded ESPN in the 1970s. “The fan is responsible for ESPN,” said Rasmussen, who no longer works at the network. “They just kept demanding more sports, and ESPN kept going out and buying more rights.”

The cost to networks of paying huge sums for sports rights get passed on to customers in the form of higher monthly bills. Broadcast channels like Fox, CBS, and NBC are also shelling out billions of dollars on sports because it’s one of the few things consumers still watch live, which helps the companies sell advertising. Those broadcasters are raising the prices they charge cable operators, leading to higher consumer bills. Congress handed that new-revenue stream—known as retransmission consent fees –to broadcast channels in the early 1990s.

“From there, the whole industry became a nuclear arms race,” said Mike White, the former CEO of DirecTV.

Cable-TV distributors aren’t blameless. Many own local sports channels, among the priciest constituents of the cable bill.

To some executives, no company offers a more egregious example of how the value of sports has spiraled out of control than Time Warner Cable. In 2013 the cable company, now owned by Charter Communications Inc., agreed to pay an average $334 million a year to broadcast Los Angeles Dodgers games for the next 25 years on its cable channel, SportsNet LA. That’s roughly eight times what Fox reportedly paid in the previous Dodgers deal. To cover the cost, Time Warner Cable initially charged almost $5 per month per subscriber, making it one of the most expensive in the bundle.

Five years later, no other major TV provider around Los Angeles carries the Dodgers channel because of the steep price. Unable to watch their favorite team, many Dodgers fans have either switched to Charter, which carries the channel, or else cut the cord. Charter declined to comment.

“That was such an extreme overpayment for sports rights,” one TV executive said of the Dodgers deal. “That’s what’s killing the bundle.”

SUSPECT #3: CHARLIE ERGEN

The cable bundle was badly wounded by a man who made one of the great fortunes from it: Dish Network Corp. co-founder Charlie Ergen.

For decades, consumers who wanted just a few channels had to pay for all of them. Comcast or DirecTV couldn’t offer, say, MTV without also including Viacom’s less popular channels such as TV Land. While consumers wanted to pay for single networks on an a la carte basis, the industry fought attempts to break the bundle into smaller, less expensive pieces.

In the past decade, the Federal Communications Commission and Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona attempted to force media companies to offer their channels individually. Neither effort went very far. The cable industry argued prices would rise if consumers could choose only certain channels, and channels aimed at minority groups, for instance, wouldn’t survive without every subscriber paying for them—regardless of whether they watched.

It wasn’t until 2015, when Ergen introduced Sling TV, that the floodgates truly opened. Sling TV is a so-called “skinny bundle,” giving online subscribers the option to buy just a few channels and pay a much lower monthly fee—in this case, about a fourth of the average cable bill. Since its arrival, at least six more online TV services have entered the market.

These lower-cost services have won back some people who quit cable, providing hope for the likes of ESPN or CNN, whose channels are included. But the skinny bundles haven’t won back all the departed. They have only about 6 million customers so far. And companies whose channels have been excluded from them have little recourse to make up lost ground.

“Sling TV was a watershed moment,” said Moffett, the analyst. “It broke the all-for-one and one-for-all model for the first time.”

SUSPECT #4: EVERYONE’S GREED

In hindsight, some TV executives believe the industry would be much healthier now if everyone—programmers and distributors—had agreed to make all episodes of shows available to cable subscribers on any device. That was the dream behind TV Everywhere, an idea hatched in 2009 by Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes. But in those crucial early days, TV Everywhere struggled to get off the ground.

Executives couldn't agree on how long to make old episodes available for subscribers. Some gave viewers only a day to catch up on a show they missed because the broadcasters had sold the reruns to another service. Others made past series available to subscribers for a month. Consumers became confused about where to go and how long they had to binge-watch a show. Some TV networks were slow to make their channels available online.

In the end, the cable industry’s failure to protect the bundle came down largely to greed, Moffett said. Media executives wanted to charge more for certain rights, like making every old episode available to cable subscribers, or granting the rights to watch a show on an iPad outside the home, instead of giving them away for the good of the industry.

“As soon as TV Everywhere was proposed, media companies imagined ways to charge extra for it,” Moffett said. “It was doomed from the start, and the rest is history.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...able-tv-bundle





Programming in the Adult Entertainment Industry is Broken
Jeremy Woertink

NOTICE: I've tagged this post as NSFW just as a heads up, but there won't be any actual "nsfw" related stuff (like pictures, graphic text, etc...)

The "Industry"

I don't really publicize it, but as a software developer contractor, I get many different clients, and one of my clients is in the Adult Entertainment industry. Simply put, I build porn sites for them. (There, I said it).

I get a lot of questions like "Do you get to meet all the stars?", or "Do you just watch porn all day?", and so many more. Really though, I spent the first year on the job upgrading all the rails apps to 4.2 (from 3.x or 4.0), and then the next few years working on accounting software for affiliate tracking... Also, I work from home, so it's basically a normal job.... except for the fact that this industry is broken.

Now, when I say broken, let's think about porn sites. I know y'all be watching them, there's no shame in it. What's the first thing you think about when you think about porn sites? Sketchy? Maybe full of viruses, and ads? Malware, spyware, email spam for male enhancement pills? The fact is, this industry leads the technology market. It has to stay on the cutting edge of technology to find more ways to generate revenue. But the industry got a bad rep because people found out it was really easy to make a LOT of money with these sites. Ad revenue is ridiculous. Since people are going to look regardless, why not throw a few extra ads on there, maybe some popups? What if you just paid for subscriptions instead similar to hulu or netflix? First thing people say is "with so much free content, why pay for it? Who even pays for it?". Well, that mentality is why all those ads exist. These businesses have to make money to pay for hosting costs, and so much more, like legal fees for example.

The sites I work on don't really fall in to these same categories because my sites are actual pay sites with proprietary content. No need for the random pop-ups, or background pop-under windows because our members just straight up pay for all the content. But paying for the content is BROKEN.

How billing works

Let me give you a scenario with a guy we will call "Joe".

Joe's wife looks at the bank statement and sees a charge to "crazywildnekkidpeeps.ninja" (I hope that's not a real thing). She asks Joe what this charge is. He says in a furious tone "I have no idea! maybe our bank info was stolen, we better contact the bank." He calls the bank up right then and there and demands a new account number, and have that charge reversed. It's a fake charge. Well, the bank looks back through his account history over the last year and sees no other charges to this thing. It's out of the normal spending habits, so it must be fake. The bank reverses the charge, then sends the dispute back to the crazy wild... you get it. This chargeback actually goes to a biller company that gets dinged by Visa or Mastercard.

When you run a business, you can only have a certain threshold of chargebacks. This goes for ANY industry. You have to keep this percentage SUPER low.

Well, the crazy wild co looks through their member history, and they see an account for "joelikescrazynekkidninjas". They know for sure he signed up one night, but proving it is just not worth all the hassle. This scenario happened enough times that the banks got fed up with it.

Because of this, banks wrote their software to basically auto-detect some of these things, and just block it. It's a proactive way to stop fraud charges. So now we get Jim who is all about signing up, and his card gets declined. He's a legit customer with money, but the bank won't let him make the charge, unless he calls up their support. And, I'm sorry, but there ain't NO person that's gonna call a 1-800 bank customer support line at 11pm at night to sit on hold and have a porn charge go through for what may be 30seconds? A minute at best? of viewing time...

Cascade Billing

Enter cascade billing. A thing that really, no other industry has to program. This is a concept where a customer's card gets declined, and we assume that was a mistake. So what do we do? Well, we forward the customer to a DIFFERENT biller company to have them try again. That's right, a different company. On a normal app, you might use something like Stripe to handle your billing. It's super easy to setup, the fees are cheap, and the support is amazing. One problem for us is their TOS prohibits adult entertainment related charges. They literally say that we can't use their service. Why? Well, because they would have to take the hit for those chargebacks. If they didn't, they would have to raise their fees. Speaking of fees... Stripe charges 2.9% + .30 cents per transaction. Some of the billers in the porn industry charge up to 30% per transaction. Yup, 30% (not cents; percent) PER CHARGE. So if we charge someone $1.00 for a 1 day trial, the biller gets 30 cents off the top.

You might be asking yourself, what is one biller gonna do that another didn't? Well, some shady stuff is what they're gonna do. The first biller in the cascade will ask for your credit card. It gets declined, so we send to another biller that will ask for an e-check or wire transfer number, then if that still doesn't work, we can send them to a biller that sort of does an e-currency exchange type deal. The customer buys "bitcoin" (not actually bitcoin), and the bank says "oh, that's crypto currency, not porn, so we'll allow it", then the biller gets the money, and takes their fee, then sends the rest to us.

I haven't even got to the worst parts yet... If you're cringing already, then hold on, seriously..

It gets worse

For compliance sake, some of these billers require that the payments be done on their sites. This means we have to redirect the user completely off our servers over to these biller servers with some code for the product (subscription) that they are buying. We log in to their admin interface and create these products on their sites (they don't offer APIs), and then take the codes, and store those in our database. A very common problem is that we have a price set, then the biller shows a different price because someone forgot to log in to each of these billers (like 4 or 5 of them?) and update the prices there too. One biller had a bug in their software where we sent them the price in USD, they converted it to YEN, then sent us the amount that was paid was $YEN (not ¥YEN). Our system then saw we had a member sign up for $1,100 USD. We did a 50/50 split with the affiliate, and when it should have been like $10 sending the affiliate $5, we sent them almost $600. We noticed that it wasn't just 1 biller that had issues with currency conversion, but a few of them do. Again, we don't have a choice. We have to use these people because companies that are nice to use (like stripe) don't allow for us to use them.

Here's where it really gets good. When a customer has a support issue, they don't come to us. They go to the biller. The biller is who charged them, so the biller handles support. Sometimes a member might have trouble logging in to their account. The biller will then need to contact us to relay that there's an issue. We fix the issue, then let the biller know the issue is fixed so they can let the customer know. This turn around time is tough when you have a 1 day trial. The customer completely misses their trial and feels like maybe this was a scam.

It's very common in this industry, as a developer, to do things that are against your normal programming teachings. Things that in any other context you'd be taught to never do. The reason is because of all these work arounds dealing with so many different moving parts. Especially when these moving parts are all super outdated and really expensive pieces of software that you've been tightly coupled with.

A common piece of software, that almost all sites in the industry uses, has a unified solution for these sites to track affiliate sales, handle the postback data from the billers, manage multi-tenant sites, and member subscriptions plus do all the reporting. You pay a hefty fee to this company for the license to use their software (all written in PHP), and then you're ready to go. We don't use PHP though, we had written everything in rails, and we had to integrate with it. Here's how that went:

1. Even though it's written in PHP, they used zend to "compile" and obfuscate the codebase. It was almost impossible to fix a bug or make a change.
2. It didn't support SSL at all.
3. It used reserved characters for URL encodings which break most (including rails) URI parsers. This left us with weird bugs
4. Inconsistent database schema. It took heavy use of php serialization to store numerous bits of data in a single column, and in some cases required 4+ table join just to get a single bit of data.
5. Upgrade was really expensive, and required a huge server update to support the version of PHP, and a few other things.
6. The admin section generated reports in to a single image of bar graphs, and these images were broken (showed the broken image icon). So viewing reports was very difficult
7. At some point, it didn't follow pemdas, and since some of the reports were broken (see 6), no one notices affiliates being over/under paid out for several years. That's a lot of cash down the drain.

Fighting the Law

A big chunk of money that these companies have to spend are on lawyers and law suits. As a general consumer of this content, this may never occur to you. I'm sure you've been on one of the major tube sites and come across a video or two that have water marks on them in one of the corners.

Well, this content was created by someone. Someone owns the rights to it, and it's most likely NOT that tube site. This is common enough that some sites have to go after other sites for "stealing" their content. 99% of the time it's just a user that saw a video on one site, downloaded it, then uploaded to another. That means that when a site allows users to upload content, they have to be VERY diligent about what was uploaded. Even more so because some people are sick and upload some very illegal content. So as a company in this industry, you have be ready to pay for some lawyers to help fight the actions of stupid people using your site.

So after a $13,000 hosting and CDN bill, $20,000 in attorney fees, $50,000 in affiliate payouts, and $50,000 in developer/employee costs, and the coup de grace 30% fee on every transaction, it's easy to see why these sites either charge a lot, or have a ton of ads.

Recap

1. We deal with multiple outdated and broken bits of software
2. We get charged unreal amounts by 3rd parties because we're limited in who we can use due to TOS for most companies
3. Customers can't be trusted
4. Billers can't be trusted
5. Changing laws affect how and what content can be created which shrinks market availability and makes the limited market more competitive and difficult
6. Server hack attempts are multiple times hourly.
7. Law suits for content being "stolen" or take down notices

If anyone wants to make a killing, seriously, build a proper billing system for this industry. I wish I could get in to more of the technical details of why these things are bad, but trust me, it's worse than what I've described.
https://dev.to/jwoertink/programming...-is-broken-hgn





Amazon in Running to Acquire Landmark Movie Chain
Anousha Sakoui, Nabila Ahmed and Spencer Soper

• Move would mark latest incursion into brick-and-mortar world
• The indie-focused chain operates more than 50 theaters

Amazon.com Inc. is in the running to acquire Landmark Theaters, a move that would vault the e-commerce giant into the brick-and-mortar cinema industry, according to people familiar with the situation.

The company is vying with other suitors to acquire the business from Wagner/Cuban Cos., which is backed by billionaire Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. The chain’s owners have been working with investment banker Stephens Inc. on a possible sale, the people said. No final decisions have been made, and talks could still fall apart.

Pushing into movie theaters would follow Amazon’s expansion into myriad other forms of media, including a film and TV studio and music service. With Landmark, it gets a chain focused on independent and foreign films with more than 50 theaters in 27 markets, including high-profile locations in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Landmark’s theaters are known for art-house fare, and some high-end locations include coffee bars or lounges, setting them apart from the typical movie experience.

“This is probably a move to get broader distribution of film content,” said Leo Kulp, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets LLC. “Netflix had been discussed as a potential buyer of Landmark for a similar reason.”

Amazon and Landmark declined to comment.

The possible move was viewed positively by investors, who saw it as a sign that Amazon wasn’t looking to disrupt moviegoing and was supportive of the theatrical experience, Kulp said. After initially being down, shares of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. and Cinemark Holdings Inc. climbed on Thursday. AMC, the market leader, rose as much as 4.2 percent, reaching its highest point in the past year.

Cozying Up

Amazon’s move into Hollywood has broadly been welcomed by theaters and studios. Its studio has presented its slate of movies at CinemaCon, the annual convention for national theater operators, unlike Netflix Inc. Amazon struck a deal with Sony Pictures where it offered its Prime members the opportunity to see movies like “Jumanji” and “Hotel Transylvania 3” two weeks before release at about 1,000 theaters.

Though the acquisition price for Landmark would likely be small, it would mark a significant new incursion by Seattle-based Amazon into the physical world. The online retailer shocked the supermarket industry last year by acquiring Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, positioning the organic-food chain in the middle of its campaign to sell more groceries.

The e-commerce company already spends billions each year on movies and TV shows, saying it helps entice shoppers to join its Prime subscription plan and makes existing members more likely to renew.

Amazon, founded as a book seller, previously disrupted that industry by giving authors an alternative to the big publishers, eliminating a middleman between readers and artists. It opened its first physical bookstore in 2015 in Seattle and now has nearly 20 around the country.

Paramount Decree

The U.S. has previously barred film studios from the theater industry. But the government said earlier this month that it was considering terminating a 70-year-old Hollywood settlement that halted the vertical integration of studios and theaters. The so-called Paramount decree may have prevented smaller films from getting wider distribution.

“It’s very possible that the Paramount decree gets overturned,” said David Miller, an analyst with Imperial Capital LLC. “It will be interesting to see if Amazon could be the first to test the new rules.”

For more on Amazon’s expansion efforts, check out the Decrypted podcast:

Cuban and Wagner also own Magnolia Pictures, the production company 2929 Productions, and the networks AXS TV and HDNet Movies. Cuban, a 60-year-old who also appears on the reality show “Shark Tank,” told the Hollywood Reporter in April that he hired a bank to evaluate offers, but said at the time he was in “no rush to sell.”

The theater operators had been under pressure in recent years as the popularity of Netflix and other home streaming services fueled fears that audiences were less willing to go out to movies.

“I’d say this is a sign of good health for the industry,” Miller said.

— With assistance by Scott Moritz, and David Caleb Mutua
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...rk-movie-chain





‘The Meg’ Is a Surprise Box-Office Monster

Warner Bros. backed “The Meg” with a campy marketing campaign, a strategy that can be risky.
Brooks Barnes

Going into the weekend, “The Meg” looked like a big, fat belly flop for Warner Bros.

Surveys indicated minimal interest in the killer shark movie, which cost at least $200 million to make and market. Rival studios snickered that Warner’s new marketing chief had made a rookie mistake in backing “The Meg” with a campy ad campaign: Make a joke of your own noncomedic movie, the Hollywood conventional wisdom holds, and ticket buyers will stay home.

Guess who is getting the last laugh? “The Meg,” a brassy, brainless, computer-generated mishmash, took in $44.5 million at North American theaters — roughly 120 percent more than most analysts had expected. “The Meg” collected an additional $97 million overseas, with China contributing half of that total.

“The Meg” was co-financed and co-produced by Gravity Pictures, a Chinese company, and designed to sell tickets in China. The movie co-stars a Chinese actress, Li Bingbing, and the 70-foot shark at its center threatens a crowded Chinese beach in one action sequence. “The Meg” stars Jason Statham and was directed by Jon Turteltaub, whose last big-budget movie was the 2010 flop “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

“The Meg” represents an important success for Blair Rich, who took over as Warner’s president of worldwide marketing in April amid a broader management shake-up at the studio, which is now owned by AT&T and has struggled with whipsawing box-office results in recent years. Ms. Rich and her team took a risk in advertising “The Meg” as a joke — winking at potential ticket buyers with a campy trailer starring a Yorkie with a pink bow and featuring silly music. Its tagline: “Pleased to Eat You.”

Second place for the weekend in the United States and Canada went to “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” (Paramount), which took in about $20 million, for a new global total of $438 million, according to comScore, which compiles box-office data. “Christopher Robin” (Disney) was third, collecting an estimated $12.4 million, for a new global total of $62.1 million.

Arriving in fourth place was “Slender Man” (Sony), a poorly reviewed horror movie that cost about $10 million to make and sold $11.3 million in tickets.

Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” (Focus Features) was fifth. Opening-weekend ticket sales for the euphorically reviewed film, which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in May, totaled roughly $10.8 million — the best result for a film by Mr. Lee in more than a decade. “BlacKkKlansman,” backed by Blumhouse Productions, was booked into 1,512 theaters. To compare, “The Meg” played in 4,118.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/12/m...e-monster.html





DNC Serves WikiLeaks with Lawsuit Via Twitter
Kathryn Watson

The Democratic National Committee on Friday officially served its lawsuit to WikiLeaks via Twitter, employing a rare method to serve its suit to the elusive group that has thus far been unresponsive.

As CBS News first reported last month, the DNC filed a motion with a federal court in Manhattan requesting permission to serve its complaint to WikiLeaks on Twitter, a platform the DNC argued the website uses regularly. The DNC filed a lawsuit in April against the Trump campaign, Russian government and WikiLeaks, alleging a massive conspiracy to tilt the 2016 election in Donald Trump's favor.

All of the DNC's attempts to serve the lawsuit via email failed, the DNC said in last month's motion to the judge, which was ultimately approved.

The lawsuit was served through a tweet from a Twitter account established Friday by Cohen Milstein, the law firm representing the DNC in the suit, with the intent of serving the lawsuit.

@wikileaks By Court order, you are being served with the following legal documents: https://t.co/ICg8qWnsUy, https://t.co/ZP2tTPJ4pb, https://t.co/RKue30s4hM, https://t.co/q5g0G1rQpQ.
All of these documents may be found here: https://t.co/NOCgvQhh2j.
— Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll Process Server (@ProcessServiceC) August 10, 2018

The DNC argued the unusual method of serving a lawsuit over Twitter was feasible because WikiLeaks, founded by Julian Assange, frequently uses Twitter and had even suggested it had read the DNC's lawsuit.

How did WikiLeaks become associated with Russia?

On April 21, the WikiLeaks Twitter account tweeted, "Democrats have gone all Scientology against @WikiLeaks. We read the DNC lawsuit. Its primary claim against @WikiLeaks is that we published their 'trade secrets.' Scientology infamously tried this trick when we published their secret bibles. Didn't work out well for them.'"

The DNC also noted last month that there is some legal precedent for serving the lawsuit on Twitter. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the DNC notes, decided service by Twitter was a reasonable way to alert the defendant, who had an active Twitter account.

"WikiLeaks seems to tweet daily," the DNC said in the motion made to the judge last month.

In the months before the 2016 election, WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 internal DNC emails, many of which were related to Hillary Clinton. WikiLeaks later released thousands of emails belonging to John Podesta, who was Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign chairman.

Mr. Trump and many in his administration have described questions of alleged conspiracy with Russia as an excuse for losing the election.

"Just won lawsuit filed by the DNC and a bunch of Democrat crazies trying to claim the Trump Campaign (and others), colluded with Russia. They haven't figured out that this was an excuse for them losing the election!" the president tweeted in July, although the lawsuit is ongoing.

Just won lawsuit filed by the DNC and a bunch of Democrat crazies trying to claim the Trump Campaign (and others), colluded with Russia. They haven’t figured out that this was an excuse for them losing the election!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 6, 2018
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dnc-ser...t-via-twitter/





An 11-Year-Old Changed Election Results on a Replica Florida State Website in Under 10 Minutes
Michael D. Regan

An 11-year-old boy on Friday was able to hack into a replica of the Florida state election website and change voting results found there in under 10 minutes during the world’s largest yearly hacking convention, DEFCON 26, organizers of the event said.

Thousands of adult hackers attend the convention annually, while this year a group of children attempted to hack 13 imitation websites linked to voting in presidential battleground states.

The boy, who was identified by DEFCON officials as Emmett Brewer, accessed a replica of the Florida secretary of state’s website. He was one of about 50 children between the ages of 8 and 16 who were taking part in the so-called “DEFCON Voting Machine Hacking Village,” a portion of which allowed kids the chance to manipulate party names, candidate names and vote count totals.

Here’s the DefCon Voting Machine Hacking Village roundup of discoveries for the day! Day 1 / Part 1 pic.twitter.com/ovQs7uX7jK

— DEFCON VotingVillage (@VotingVillageDC) August 11, 2018

Nico Sell, the co-founder of the the non-profit r00tz Asylum, which teaches children how to become hackers and helped organize the event, said an 11-year-old girl also managed to make changes to the same Florida replica website in about 15 minutes, tripling the number of votes found there.

Sell said more than 30 children hacked a variety of other similar state replica websites in under a half hour.

“These are very accurate replicas of all of the sites,” Sell told the PBS NewsHour on Sunday. “These things should not be easy enough for an 8-year-old kid to hack within 30 minutes, it’s negligent for us as a society.”

Sell said the idea for the event began last year, after adult hackers were able to access similar voting sites in less than five minutes.

“So this year we decided to bring the voting village to the kids as well,” she said.

About 50 children participated in the DEFCON hacking event for children on Friday and Saturday. More than 30 of them were able to hack into replicas of secretaries of states, where vote tallies are posted. Photo courtesy of r00tz Asylum

In a statement regarding the event, the National Association of Secretaries of State said it is “ready to work with civic-minded members of the DEFCON community wanting to become part of a proactive team effort to secure our elections.” But the organization expressed skepticism over the hackers’ abilities to access the actual state websites.

“It would be extremely difficult to replicate these systems since many states utilize unique networks and custom-built databases with new and updated security protocols,” it read. “While it is undeniable websites are vulnerable to hackers, election night reporting websites are only used to publish preliminary, unofficial results for the public and the media. The sites are not connected to vote counting equipment and could never change actual election results.”’

But Sell said the exercise the children took part in demonstrates the level of security vulnerabilities found in the U.S. election system.

“To me that statement says that the secretaries of states are not taking this seriously. Although it’s not the real voting results it’s the results that get released to the public. And that could cause complete chaos,” she said. “The site may be a replica but the vulnerabilities that these kids were exploiting were not replicas, they’re the real thing.”

“I think the general public does not understand how large a threat this is, and how serious a situation that we’re in right now with our democracy,” she said.

Matt Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who helped organize the “hacking village,” said that thousands of adults including voting security experts also tried to access voting machines and other voting software currently being used in U.S. elections today to become “more knowledgeable about voter technology.”

He also noted that the children who participated in their own challenge last week were dealing with replicas that were in many cases created to be even more formidable to access than the actual websites used by secretaries of states across the nation.

“It’s not surprising that these precocious, bright kids would be able to do it because the websites that are on the internet are vulnerable, we know they are vulnerable,” he said. “What was interesting is just how utterly quickly they were able to do it.” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/...der-10-minutes





An 11-Year-Old Changed The Results Of Florida's Presidential Vote At A Hacker Convention

Veteran hackers have tried for years to get the world to notice flaws in voting machines. Now that they’ve got it, they have to wrestle with scaring people away from voting.
Kevin Collier

Election hackers have spent years trying to bring attention to flaws in election equipment. But with the world finally watching at DEFCON, the world’s largest hacker conference, they have a new struggle: pointing out flaws without causing the public to doubt that their vote will count.

This weekend saw the 26th annual DEFCON gathering. It was the second time the convention had featured a Voting Village, where organizers set up decommissioned election equipment and watch hackers find creative and alarming ways to break in. Last year, conference attendees found new vulnerabilities for all five voting machines and a single e-poll book of registered voters over the course of the weekend, catching the attention of both senators introducing legislation and the general public. This year’s Voting Village was bigger in every way, with equipment ranging from voting machines to tabulators to smart card readers, all currently in use in the US.

In a room set aside for kid hackers, an 11-year-old girl hacked a replica of the Florida secretary of state’s website within 10 minutes — and changed the results.

Before Russian hackers targeted the 2016 US election process, hacking voting equipment was a niche issue. The Voting Village has changed that. “As far as broad social impact,” said Jeff Moss, DEFCON’s founder, “it is Voting Village” that has achieved the most notoriety in the conference’s history.

But that attention has brought pushback. The day before the conference began, ES&S, one of the largest providers of election equipment in the US, sent an email to its customers assuring them that while “attendees will absolutely access some voting systems internal components ... Physical security measures make it extremely unlikely that an unauthorized person, or a person with malicious intent, could ever access a voting machine,” the company said.

The National Association of Secretaries of State, the group that brings together each state’s top election official, issued an unusually testy statement against the Voting Village. “Our main concern with the approach taken by DEFCON is that it uses a pseudo environment which in no way replicates state election systems, networks, or physical security,” it said.

“Providing conference attendees with unlimited physical access to voting machines,” NASS said, “does not replicate accurate physical and cyber protections established by state and local governments before and on Election Day.”

The conflict brings into sharp relief the contrast between how cybersecurity research is usually conducted and the stodginess of government-approved election vendors and their customers.

“I think the statement was misguided,” said Matt Blaze, a veteran election security researcher who helped organize the Voting Village. “It’s only through scrutiny that we’re going to have confidence in elections. That said, the fact that a system has vulnerabilities in it, even incredibly serious vulnerabilities, is not the same as saying any given election has been tampered with.”

“There’s an interesting paradox.” Blaze said. “We know these systems are wildly insecure, and there’s been precious little evidence of these vulnerabilities so far being exploited in real elections. I think we’ve been very lucky, and I think there’s a little bit of a ticking time bomb here.”

Since October 2016, when intelligence agencies first put forth a statement warning that Russia was attempting to interfere in the US election, the US government has walked a tightrope between warning that Russia was trying various tactics to influence the outcome and insisting that everyone’s vote was counted accurately. While a number of Russian tactics with a range of effects have been exposed — hacking and leaking Democrats’ emails, scanning state voter registration databases, and sending phishing emails to county employees — there is, as numerous agencies have repeatedly stated, no known evidence of foreign hackers ever changing a US vote tally. One of Russia’s fundamental goals with such attacks, analysts stress, is undermining Americans’ faith in democracy itself.

“You have to balance raising awareness of vulnerabilities and pushing vendors to make more secure projects, which is a lot of what DEFCON is trying to do, with the ability for vendors to react to that,” said DHS’s top cybersecurity official, Jeanette Manfra, who spoke at the conference Friday. “And we have to explain that no, these are physically secure up until Election Day, then they’re wiped. There are all these other compensating controls that are in place.”

“If you’re saying ‘even a kid can hack into this,’ you’re not getting the full story, which can have the impact of the average voter not understanding,” Manfra told BuzzFeed News.

In the most fundamental sense, security researchers work by throwing the book at a piece of software, poking and prodding for any obscure or overt flaw in a program, usually causing developers to issue regular patches as vulnerabilities are discovered. Conferences like DEFCON provide a platform for both critical research and “stunt hacking,” flashy tricks that are often simple but designed to catch the broader public’s attention.

But that process is anathema to voting equipment manufacturers for a number of reasons. Vendors have to follow some government guidelines and undergo certain audits, but they’re largely unaccountable to the public. Patching voting equipment that isn’t connected to the internet is difficult for many counties with little technical expertise, and vendors fall back on how unlikely it is that a registered poll worker or an elected official would have the time it takes to tamper with a voting machine. The vendors also point out that even if someone had the time to work a hack, the overall US election system is decentralized enough that as unlikely as hacking one machine is, a coordinated effort to hack them in bulk is even less likely.

Copyright laws have previously made it difficult for researchers to legally acquire voting equipment to test it. With an incentive to assure customers that their product isn’t dangerous, vendors have historically lied outright about vulnerabilities they deemed unlikely to cause problems in the real world.

One hacker at this year’s village, who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to tie his research to his day job as a programmer, took a Diebold TSX voting machine — versions of which are in use in at least some areas of 20 states — and turned it into a jukebox that played music from its tinny speakers and a display for an Illuminati GIF he found online.

The trick, he found, was noticing that while the machine has tamper-resistant seals that would likely alert poll workers that somebody had tried to alter a voting file, he could access the operating system itself without any apparent effect on the machine. So he replaced what that machine was running, Windows 4.1, with Linux, where he could hook up his own laptop and display whatever he wanted.

The procedure took a few hours, he said, and it would be extremely difficult to pull off in the real world, but in theory, it could be done by someone with basic hacker skills and access to voting machines in storage.

“Obviously, it’s a long shot that people would tamper with these in a warehouse,” he said. “I chose to do this because I thought it was hilarious, but obviously there are serious implications.”

In another area of DEFCON, organizers set up a semicircle of computers preloaded with copies of secretaries of states’ websites to allow young children to try to alter the appearance of a vote result. While such an attack wouldn’t change actual votes, simply changing the appearance could cause havoc on Election Day, and reflects a tactic Russia did employ in Ukraine in 2014.

Notably, the kids were instructed to use a simple database hacking tactic called SQL injection, the same tool the US has said Russian hackers used when targeting state voter registration databases in the summer of 2016.

Within a few minutes, Audrey, 11, had figured it out, and made it appear that libertarian candidate Darrell Castle had won Florida’s presidential vote in 2016.

“Basically what you’re doing is you’re taking advantage of it being not secure,” she explained.

Once she accessed that vote database, it was quick: “It took maybe a minute or so, because I’m a fast typer,” she told BuzzFeed News. “You can [subtract] points, you can do whatever you want.”

Florida's Secretary of State stressed that changing the appearance of the vote on a website isn't the same as changing actual votes.

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, spokesperson Sarah Revell said that “the election night reporting website is only used to publish preliminary, unofficial results for the public and the media. The sites are not connected to vote counting equipment and could never change actual election results.”
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...ufacturers-ess





AP Exclusive: Google Tracks Your Movements, Like it or Not
Ryan Nakashima

Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to.

An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you've used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so.

Computer-science researchers at Princeton confirmed these findings at the AP's request.

For the most part, Google is upfront about asking permission to use your location information. An app like Google Maps will remind you to allow access to location if you use it for navigating. If you agree to let it record your location over time, Google Maps will display that history for you in a "timeline" that maps out your daily movements.

Storing your minute-by-minute travels carries privacy risks and has been used by police to determine the location of suspects — such as a warrant that police in Raleigh, North Carolina, served on Google last year to find devices near a murder scene. So the company will let you "pause" a setting called Location History.

Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you've been. Google's support page on the subject states: "You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored."

That isn't true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking. (It's possible, although laborious, to delete it .)

For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are. And some searches that have nothing to do with location, like "chocolate chip cookies," or "kids science kits," pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude — accurate to the square foot — and save it to your Google account.

The privacy issue affects some two billion users of devices that run Google's Android operating software and hundreds of millions of worldwide iPhone users who rely on Google for maps or search.

Storing location data in violation of a user's preferences is wrong, said Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission's enforcement bureau. A researcher from Mayer's lab confirmed the AP's findings on multiple Android devices; the AP conducted its own tests on several iPhones that found the same behavior.

"If you're going to allow users to turn off something called 'Location History,' then all the places where you maintain location history should be turned off," Mayer said. "That seems like a pretty straightforward position to have."

Google says it is being perfectly clear.

"There are a number of different ways that Google may use location to improve people's experience, including: Location History, Web and App Activity, and through device-level Location Services," a Google spokesperson said in a statement to the AP. "We provide clear descriptions of these tools, and robust controls so people can turn them on or off, and delete their histories at any time."

To stop Google from saving these location markers, the company says, users can turn off another setting, one that does not specifically reference location information. Called "Web and App Activity" and enabled by default, that setting stores a variety of information from Google apps and websites to your Google account.

When paused, it will prevent activity on any device from being saved to your account. But leaving "Web & App Activity" on and turning "Location History" off only prevents Google from adding your movements to the "timeline," its visualization of your daily travels. It does not stop Google's collection of other location markers.

You can delete these location markers by hand, but it's a painstaking process since you have to select them individually, unless you want to delete all of your stored activity.

You can see the stored location markers on a page in your Google account at myactivity.google.com, although they're typically scattered under several different headers, many of which are unrelated to location.

To demonstrate how powerful these other markers can be, the AP created a visual map of the movements of Princeton postdoctoral researcher Gunes Acar, who carried an Android phone with Location history off, and shared a record of his Google account.

The map includes Acar's train commute on two trips to New York and visits to The High Line park, Chelsea Market, Hell's Kitchen, Central Park and Harlem. To protect his privacy, The AP didn't plot the most telling and frequent marker — his home address.

Huge tech companies are under increasing scrutiny over their data practices, following a series of privacy scandals at Facebook and new data-privacy rules recently adopted by the European Union. Last year, the business news site Quartz found that Google was tracking Android users by collecting the addresses of nearby cellphone towers even if all location services were off. Google changed the practice and insisted it never recorded the data anyway.

Critics say Google's insistence on tracking its users' locations stems from its drive to boost advertising revenue.

"They build advertising information out of data," said Peter Lenz, the senior geospatial analyst at Dstillery, a rival advertising technology company. "More data for them presumably means more profit."

The AP learned of the issue from K. Shankari, a graduate researcher at UC Berkeley who studies the commuting patterns of volunteers in order to help urban planners. She noticed that her Android phone prompted her to rate a shopping trip to Kohl's, even though she had turned Location History off.

"So how did Google Maps know where I was?" she asked in a blog post .

The AP wasn't able to recreate Shankari's experience exactly. But its attempts to do so revealed Google's tracking. The findings disturbed her.

"I am not opposed to background location tracking in principle," she said. "It just really bothers me that it is not explicitly stated."

Google offers a more accurate description of how Location History actually works in a place you'd only see if you turn it off — a popup that appears when you "pause" Location History on your Google account webpage . There the company notes that "some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other Google services, like Search and Maps."

Google offers additional information in a popup that appears if you re-activate the "Web & App Activity" setting — an uncommon action for many users, since this setting is on by default. That popup states that, when active, the setting "saves the things you do on Google sites, apps, and services ... and associated information, like location."

Warnings when you're about to turn Location History off via Android and iPhone device settings are more difficult to interpret. On Android, the popup explains that "places you go with your devices will stop being added to your Location History map." On the iPhone, it simply reads, "None of your Google apps will be able to store location data in Location History."

The iPhone text is technically true if potentially misleading. With Location History off, Google Maps and other apps store your whereabouts in a section of your account called "My Activity," not "Location History."

Since 2014, Google has let advertisers track the effectiveness of online ads at driving foot traffic , a feature that Google has said relies on user location histories.

The company is pushing further into such location-aware tracking to drive ad revenue, which rose 20 percent last year to $95.4 billion. At a Google Marketing Live summit in July, Google executives unveiled a new tool called "local campaigns" that dynamically uses ads to boost in-person store visits. It says it can measure how well a campaign drove foot traffic with data pulled from Google users' location histories.

Google also says location records stored in My Activity are used to target ads. Ad buyers can target ads to specific locations — say, a mile radius around a particular landmark — and typically have to pay more to reach this narrower audience.

While disabling "Web & App Activity" will stop Google from storing location markers, it also prevents Google from storing information generated by searches and other activity. That can limit the effectiveness of the Google Assistant, the company's digital concierge.

Sean O'Brien, a Yale Privacy Lab researcher with whom the AP shared its findings, said it is "disingenuous" for Google to continuously record these locations even when users disable Location History. "To me, it's something people should know," he said.
https://www.apnews.com/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb





To Catch A Robber, The FBI Attempted An Unprecedented Grab For Google Location Data

The FBI asked Google to provide information on its users who'd been at two of nine locations at certain times, as investigators tried to find leads in an armed robbery case.
Thomas Fox-Brewster

Back in March, as it investigated a spate of armed robberies across Portland, Maine, the FBI made an astonishing, unprecedented request of Google. The feds wanted the tech giant to find all users of its services who’d been within the vicinity of at least two of nine of those robberies. They limited the search to within 30-minute timeframes around when the crimes were committed. But the request covered a total space of 45 hectares and could’ve included anyone with an Android or iPhone using Google’s tools, not just the suspect.

The FBI then demanded a lot of personal information on affected users, including their full names and addresses, as well as their Google account activity. The feds also wanted all affected users’ historical locations. According to court records, while Google didn’t provide the information, the cops still found their suspect in the end.

Outside of concerns around government overreach, the FBI’s remarkable attempt to force Google to assist in its investigation will likely worry all who were disturbed by an Associated Press investigation published on Monday that claimed Google continued to track people even when they turned location features off. The court warrants unearthed by Forbes indicate some at the FBI believe they have a right to that location data too, even if it belongs to innocents who might be unwittingly caught up in invasive government surveillance. And the government feels such fishing expeditions are permissable; it issued the warrant on Google without knowing whether or not the suspect used an Android device or any of the company services at all.

Feds get creative

Above all, though, the documents show the FBI is getting creative in how it obtains data from Google. And it has privacy implications for all users of Google services.

Nathan Wessler, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Forbes it was unlikely the average user of Google services would know such government searches were even possible. “I think it’d be surprising to learn that Google and other tech companies kept these kinds of records that are searchable ... to help find people at a specific location at a specific time.

“People should have an understanding of what data is being collected of theirs and how they can protect it.”

Marina Medvin, an attorney and founder of Medvin Law, said the warrant amounted to “a completely indiscriminate search of a large group of people.”

Despite limiting the search to users who’d been at two of the locations within certain timeframes, Medvin said the government didn’t go far enough. “This is a general search, which is prohibited under our Constitution. It is not particularized, a legal prerequisite to obtain a warrant under U.S. law,” she said. “The Supreme Court explained that the purpose of the particularity requirement is to make general searches impossible and to prevent ‘a general, exploratory rummaging.’

“Yet, general, exploratory rummaging of a bunch of people who visited these places is exactly what would result if such a warrant were executed successfully.”

FBI gives up on Google data

It was only last week that the FBI finally gave up chasing Google for the information, having spent five months waiting.

The feds filed an initial application on March 30 for a warrant that would get them information from Android devices at nine different locations, including a Subway, two gas stations, two Chinese restaurants, two coffee shops and two minimarts. Between March 20 and March 29, an unidentified individual (or individuals) entered those premises carrying a handgun and demanded the cashier hand over money. They stole cash totalling around $2,300.

Forbes created a Google map showing those nine separate crime scenes, covering a total of 45 hectares (approximately 110 acres) of ground. While most locations were far enough away from one another to dramatically lower the possibility of innocents being in two of the locations at the given times, two were within 500 meters of one another. They both included a significant number of residences and business premises.

In justifying the need for the warrant, FBI agent Patrick Clancy wrote it would “identify which cellular devices were near two or more of the locations where the robberies occurred at the date and time the robberies occurred, and may assist law enforcement in determining which persons were present or involved with the robberies under investigation.”

Clancy didn‘t note whether or not personal data belonging to innocent people would be hoovered up. Nevertheless, the warrant was signed off by a judge, who also sent a so-called gag order to Google, forcing it to to keep the warrant secret from either those targeted or “any other person” for 180 days.

Google was expected to return the information on April 19, but didn’t. The FBI filed a motion to extend the time it had to get the data, which a judge granted. But Google never handed it over, despite another three FBI motions to extend. Though the prosecutor, assistant U.S. attorney Michael Conley, said a fifth motion would be filed if the data didn’t arrive, the government gave up the ghost earlier this month.

A final returned warrant, dated August 6, simply stated: “Google did not provide information responsive to the warrant.”

It’s unclear whether Google didn’t want to give up the information, or if it simply couldn’t retrieve the data. There were no filings objecting to the warrant and Google declined to comment.

Such government requests are known as reverse location warrants. Traditionally they’ve been sent to telecoms companies. But earlier this year, local media publication WRAL reported numerous cases where Google had been sent similar orders in Raleigh, North Carolina.

What made the Maine data request unique was its complexity and breadth, asking Google to carry out significant work to find people who’d been in two locations, across multiple locations at specifc times, all in a single warrant. “This is not an old school investigavitve tecnique, it’s a totally new and novel power,” the ACLU’s Wessler said.

It also appears to be the first known occasion that the FBI has issued such a reverse location warrant.

Cops get their man without Google

The feds didn’t appear to need Google’s data anyway. They still managed to find a suspect, 38-year-old Travis Card, who pled guilty earlier this month. Court records show investigators used a wide range of other surveillance techniques to tie Card to the crimes.

One was the use of footprints. They matched specific prints from an Under Armour sneaker found on snow across crime scenes. Miraculously, the FBI retrieved a missing Under Armour shoe on April 11. They then took DNA samples from the shoe, which matched those they had on record for Card.

Cops also obtained E-ZPass toll records for Card’s work truck and historical cellphone location data, though it doesn’t say from where, and the prosecutors declined to provide more information on that separate warrant. Wessler suspects a cellphone service provider handed over the data, most likely containing records of devices that hit particular cell towers.

“This general kind of request is something we’ve seen a lot directed at cellphone service providers in terms of tower dumps,’ he added. “It can be powerful, but it’s also a tool that sweeps up data on a large number of innocent people.”

Card’s attorney said she had no idea about the government’s request for Google data until yesterday.

“I would have been all over it if Travis exercised his right to a trial. It is mind-blowing that the federal government believes this is not a blatant violation of privacy,” Heather Gonzales of law firm Strike Gonzales & Butler Bailey.

“Bottom line, when an investigation violates the Constitution, the evidence can’t be used at trial, which often results in dismissals of the charges, regardless of what the evidence was, which means some suspects who could have been convicted just walk right out of the courtroom. The hubris defeats the goal.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasb.../#7a1327fd741d





Australia on the Cusp of Showing the World how to Break Encryption

You just pass a law, apparently
Richard Chirgwin

The Australian government has scheduled its “not-a-backdoor” crypto-busting bill to land in parliament in the spring session, and we still don't know what will be in it.

The legislation is included in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet's schedule of proposed laws to be debated from today (13 August) all the way into December.

All we know, however, is what's already on the public record: a speech by Minister for Law Enforcement and Cybersecurity Angus Taylor in June, and the following from the digest of bills for the spring session:

“Implement measures to address the impact of encrypted communications and devices on national security and law enforcement investigations. The bill provides a framework for agencies to work with the private sector so that law enforcement can adapt to the increasingly complex online environment. The bill requires both domestic and foreign companies supplying services to Australia to provide greater assistance to agencies.”

What's worrying to Vulture South is not so much the government sticking to the idea that there are magical powers to be had to decrypt strongly end-to-end encrypted messages.

It’s that there’s a persistent strain of authoritarian magical thinking that keeps looking for some kind of reality-hack that gives law enforcement what it wants without somehow breaking encryption. For example, defenders of the government’s position argues that you can keep encryption intact if you only attack end-user devices (say, a rootkit with screen-capture powers), and that proves that the government doesn’t want to break into networks.

In effect, it is argued, the government wants to force companies to push rootkits onto users to read received and sent messages without decrypting network traffic.

Apart from the dodgy technological sophistry involved, this belief contradicts what Angus Taylor said in June (our only contemporary reference to what the government has in mind).

“We need access to digital networks and devices, and to the data on them, when there are reasonable grounds to do so,” he said (emphasis added).

If this accurately reflects the purpose of the legislation, then the Australian government wants access to the networks, not just the devices. It wants a break-in that will work on networks, if law enforcement demands it, and that takes us back to the “government wants a backdoor” problem.

And it remains clear that the government's magical thinking remains in place: having no idea how to achieve the impossible, it wants the industry to cover for it under the guise of “greater assistance to agencies”.

Telcos (although not companies like Apple or Google) already provide plenty of assistance – lawful intercept, metadata, and the like – but the “greater assistance” is specifically in the context of access to encrypted communications.

It's nothing more than a legislatively-encoded rehash of FBI Director Chris Wray's plaintive call that since the technology existed to put a man on the Moon, technology must exist to decrypt communications.

Perhaps, like loonies who think someone's hiding the secret of burning water to power cars, governments believe the technology they want already exists, but telcos and tech platforms are hiding the fact. Stupidity or conspiracy: it's hard to know which is worse.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/0...n_legislation/





From Laboratory in Far West, China's Surveillance State Spreads Quietly
Cate Cadell

Filip Liu, a 31-year-old software developer from Beijing, was traveling in the far western Chinese region of Xinjiang when he was pulled to one side by police as he got off a bus.

The officers took Liu’s iPhone, hooked it up to a handheld device that looked like a laptop and told him they were “checking his phone for illegal information”.

Liu’s experience in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital, is not uncommon in a region that has been wracked by separatist violence and a crackdown by security forces.

But such surveillance technologies, tested out in the laboratory of Xinjiang, are now quietly spreading across China.

Government procurement documents collected by Reuters and rare insights from officials show the technology Liu encountered in Xinjiang is encroaching into cities like Shanghai and Beijing.

Police stations in almost every province have sought to buy the data-extraction devices for smartphones since the beginning of 2016, coinciding with a sharp rise in spending on internal security and a crackdown on dissent, the data show.

The documents provide a rare glimpse into the numbers behind China’s push to arm security forces with high-tech monitoring tools as the government clamps down on dissent.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Public Security Bureau, which oversee China’s high-tech security projects, did not respond to requests for comment.

The scanners are hand-held or desktop devices that can break into smartphones and extract and analyze contact lists, photos, videos, social media posts and email.

Hand-held devices allow police to quickly check the content of phones on the street. Liu, the Beijing software developer, said the police were able to review his data on the spot. They apparently didn’t find anything objectionable as he was not detained.

The data Reuters analyzed includes requests from 171 police stations across 32 out of 33 official mainland provinces, regions and municipalities, and appears to show only a portion of total spending.

The data shows over 129 million yuan ($19 million) in budgeting or spending on the equipment since the beginning of 2016, with amounts accelerating in 2017 and 2018.

For a graphic on China's investment on surveillance, click tmsnrt.rs/2vz5gRN

In Shanghai, China’s gleaming international port city, two districts budgeted around 600,000 yuan each to purchase phone scanners and data-ripping tools. Beijing’s railway police budgeted a similar amount, the documents show.

“Right now, as I understand it, only two provinces in the whole country don’t use these,” said a sales representative at Zhongke Ronghui Security Technology Co Ltd, a Shaanxi-based firm that produces the XDH-5200A, one of the scanners detailed in several police procurement documents.

The representative said police stations across the whole country could consult a centralized repository of extracted data. “Almost every police station will have the equipment.”

Chinese-made devices cost as little as about 10,000 yuan for smaller ones, to hundreds of thousands of yuan for more sophisticated ones, according to prices seen at a police equipment fair in Beijing earlier this year.

The scanners have not been immediately apparent in cities like Shanghai and Beijing.

At recent checks at Beijing bus and train stations, and the heavily guarded Tiananmen square area, there were no signs of the devices. But a police officer at Beijing Railway Station confirmed they “have access when needed” to smartphone forensic technology.

SCANNER DATA

These sorts of scanners are used in countries like the United States but they remain contentious and security forces need to go through a lengthy legal process to be able to forcibly break into a suspect’s phone.

In China, while a number of firms say they have the ability to crack many phones, police are generally able to get users to hand over their passwords, experts say.

The procurement documents show some police stations asked for tools that can pull data from a phone user’s accounts on Twitter (TWTR.N), Facebook (FB.O) and its WhatsApp chat service, Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google Chrome browser and Japan’s Line messaging platform.

A May 25 filing from a customs bureau in Beijing budgeted 5.7 million yuan for smartphone forensic tools from two providers, Meiya Pico and Resonant Ltd. It listed messaging platforms and “overseas” apps the devices could read.

“Basic content collection functions” must include “mobile phone passwords, address books, call history, SMS records, MMS, pictures, audio and video data, calendars, memos and mobile app data,” the document said.

Others listed tools that can breach well-known smartphone brands such as Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), Blackberry, China’s own Xiaomi (1810.HK) and Huawei [HWT.UL], as well as Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O) tough-to-crack iPhone. Samsung, Blackberry, Xiaomi and Huawei did not respond to requests for comment. Apple declined to comment.

Wu Wangwei, an engineer at the Beijing-based Dasi Kerui Technology, which trains police personnel to use the scanners said the equipment had become “very common”.

“The smartphone has become the most important source of evidence,” he said. Police will always use it “if the case needs it”.

Chinese court cases often cite “electronic investigations,” including the collection and accessing of smartphones and tapping into social media accounts, but it is unclear what forensic equipment is involved.

EXPANDING OUTWARD

China spent roughly 1.24 trillion yuan on domestic security in 2017, accounting for 6.1 percent of total government spending and more than was spent on the military. Budgets for internal security, of which surveillance technology is a part, have doubled in regions including Xinjiang and Beijing.

“A good bunch of that went to some very obscure, miscellaneous security spending categories ... including technology,” said Adrian Zenz, an academic who specializes in Chinese security spending.

According to two officials at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, including one who worked on police projects in Xinjiang, surveillance techniques are tested in the region before being rolled out in other provinces.

The projects get both public and private financing. Those that have been tested in Xinjiang and later adopted in other provinces include surveillance camera systems, database software and smartphone forensics hardware, one of the officials said, requesting anonymity because the plans are not public.

“Even if it is not the original plan, if the technology can be tested then it will be cheaper so it can easily be deployed some other place,” the person said.

CRACKS IN THE MACHINE

China’s high tech surveillance gadgets, sometimes referred to as “black tech”, often make the headlines. They include police glasses with built-in facial recognition, cameras that analyze how people walk, drones and artificially-intelligent robots.

A fast-growing industry has developed supplying the government’s surveillance needs, propelling firms like the camera maker Hangzhou Hikvision (002415.SZ) and SenseTime, a fast-growing facial recognition firm.

The scanners though are key to harvesting data from individuals, whether on the militarized streets of Xinjiang or behind closed doors in Shanghai or Beijing.

In a cramped training center at Jundacheng Technology in Beijing’s tech district, engineers showed Reuters one such machine: a gray, shoebox-sized computer that was hooked up to and ostensibly extracting data from a Samsung smartphone.

The training firm is one of many that has cropped up to meet a demand for surveillance tools from military, police and private firms.

The scanner was made by Cellebrite, an Israeli company, but firms including Xiamen Meiya Pico (300188.SZ), Hisign Technology and Pwnzen Infotech also make versions widely used in China. Marketing materials promise the ability to crack into most smartphones, including iPhones.

The hype though can run beyond the reality, experts say.

Chinese scanner makers often tout the ability to crack smart phone security systems, including Apple’s iPhone, but industry insiders admit this usually doesn’t mean the latest models.

“I can only recover older iPhone versions, the most recent ones I can’t,” Zhang Baizheng, who heads digital forensics training school Beijing Judacheng, told Reuters during a recent visit to the center.

Apple is also taking steps to stop devices like those used by Chinese police from cracking its phones. New versions of its iOS operating platform disable the USB port after an hour without password access, blocking a key cracking route.

According to one of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officials, such security precautions may not matter.

Most people in China would comply with police requests to unlock their devices, he said.

“In China, it’s not wise to refuse.”

Reporting by Cate Cadell; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Philip McClellan
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKBN1KZ0R3





BBC Websites Blocked in China after Security Change
BBC

The BBC's web services are all currently blocked in China, following a decision by the corporation to change the website's format.

It has altered all of its addresses from beginning "HTTP" to "HTTPS", which is widely considered to be a more secure connection but is routinely blocked in China.

In a statement, the BBC recommended the use of either a virtual private network (VPN) or the Psiphon app.

Both of these can circumvent the block.

Why HTTPS?

In a recent blog post, James Donohue, principal software engineer in BBC News, explained why the website had made the transition and why BBC pages now had a green padlock next to the address on the top left hand side.

"In a climate of anxiety around fake news, it's vital that users are able to determine that articles have not been tampered with and that their browsing history is private to them," he wrote.

"HTTPS achieves both of these as it makes it far more difficult for ISPs [internet service providers] to track which articles and videos you're looking at or selectively suppress individual pieces of content.

"We've seen cases outside the UK, with some of our World Service sites where foreign governments have tried to do this."

VPNs in China

Many people use VPNs in China despite government crackdowns and bans on unlicensed networks.

VPNs disguise the location of a device, meaning that it can access online content that may be banned in the region where it physically is.

The BBC said that its audience in China had not had official access to its online content for about a week.

"We regret this loss of service," said a representative.

"We continue to work with local service providers so that specific BBC content can be made directly available to our audience in China.

"The last time BBC services were blocked to this extent in China was in 2014 and we call on all parties to observe the UN Declaration of Human Rights, article 19."

Article 19 states that everybody has the right to freedom of opinion and expression and the right to receive and impart information.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45098190





Users in China Found Reddit Blocked Over the Weekend
Alice Truong

Many Reddit users in China who tried to access the social network this weekend were slightly annoyed to find the company’s site and app weren’t working. But in China, it’s second nature for internet users to turn on their VPNs, and in almost no time at all, they were surfing the “front page of the internet” again.

And when they got back online, they started discussions about Reddit being blocked on the r/China subreddit: “Reddit won’t load without VPN,” “China finally block [sic] Reddit,” “Reddit banned in China?” There was outrage, but there was also amusement that Reddit wasn’t already blocked, given its frequent discussions of taboo topics, like censorship. (Reddit has been periodically unaccessible from mainland China, according to SupChina, which first reported the outage.) Some even joked that being censored was a badge of honor.

According to users’ posts, the crackdown appeared to have started on Friday (Aug. 10). By today (Aug. 13), more people said they were able to access Reddit again. Many, however, report that Reddit remains behind the Great Firewall for them. Comparitech, a tool that checks if a domain is blocked in China, continues to show that reddit.com is not accessible via regular internet access, but reachable over VPN.

It’s unclear if geography is a factor for why some people are and aren’t able to access the site. Quartz asked some associates in mainland China to check if Reddit was working for them. A person in Shanghai and another in Hunan said Reddit was loading for them, while others in Shenzhen and Beijing said it wasn’t. According to Reddit posts from Monday afternoon local time, users in Hangzhou and Dongguan reported the site was working while another person in Nanjing said it remained blocked.

Ziyi Tang contributed reporting to this piece.
https://qz.com/1354441/china-blocked...or-some-users/





BitTorrent’s New Owners – What Crypto Experts have to Say
Jamie McKane

P2P file sharing communities and cryptocurrency backers collided last month when blockchain startup TRON acquired BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is a file-sharing communications protocol built on a peer-to-peer network which facilitates the sharing of all types of files.

While the BitTorrent protocol and software is legal – and have been used by large companies to distribute files – there are a number of ways which the software can be used “illegally”.

This includes using torrents to share and download pirated content from other users.

With its acquisition of BitTorrent, TRON aims to combine its ambitious blockchain plans and P2P networks to build a large network of cryptocurrency users.

Acquisition and growth

Following the acquisition, TRON founder Justin Sun said the two companies would combine their teams in the United States and work together to build “the future of the decentralised Internet”.

“From this day on, BitTorrent, whose software has been installed on billions of user devices, will become part of the TRON ecosystem, making TRON the largest decentralised Internet ecosystem in the world,” said Sun.

TRON is a cryptocurrency which can be traded on numerous exchanges, with its value driven largely by speculation as to its potential applications.

Following the acquisition of BitTorrent by TRON, many speculated the blockchain startup would integrate its cryptocurrency model into the company’s software.

The extent of this integration was revealed soon after the acquisition, with Sun stating that TRON will incentivise file sharing and seeding by rewarding peers who seed torrents with cryptocurrency.

“At this point, there are no incentives for peers who have completed downloading to continue to seed. We intend to extend rewards to peers who seed torrents, infusing more resources into the torrent ecosystem.”

“BitTorrent will be the largest application on the TRON network, which will allow TRON to surpass Ethereum on daily transactions and become the most influential public blockchain in the world,” said Sun.

Controversy

Sun’s TRON blockchain has drawn a lot of hype from cryptocurrency investors, and many cryptocurrency advocates on social media regularly reference the coin’s price or increasing transaction volumes as a measure of its success.

Sun also draws comparisons between his cryptocurrency and other major coins like Ethereum, even before a stable implementation of the TRON blockchain protocol existed.

This is shown in his tweet below.

Why #TRON is better than #ETH: 1. 10000TPS vs. 25TPS 2. zero fee vs. high fee 3. consistent Coinburn vs. no coinburn 4. Java vs. Solidity 5. strong extensibility vs. no ex. 6. 1 billion USD developers rewards vs. no plan 7. 100 million users vs. small number #TRX $TRX pic.twitter.com/WvxH5EToa8

— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) April 6, 2018

The project has drawn fire from several high-profile cryptocurrency experts, however, including Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin and Protocol Labs CEO Juan Benet.

Buterin previously called TRON a scam project aimed at raising as much money as possible, referencing the token’s high valuation when it had no discernible product.

At the beginning of 2018, Protocol Labs CEO Juan Benet called out the project and its founder for plagiarising content in their white paper.

Benet noted that TRON’s white paper mostly comprised of content copied from other projects, including the white papers of his own projects IPFS and Filecoin.

TRON continues to grow and accrue investment despite the criticism, though, and its acquisition of BitTorrent is a big play to bring more legitimacy to its blockchain and its use cases.
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/crypt...ve-to-say.html





The Strange David and Goliath Saga of Radio Frequencies
David Zweig

The email blast from the head of my son and daughter’s theater group relayed a frantic plea: “We need to raise $16,000 before the upcoming spring performances,” Anya Wallach, the executive director of Random Farms Kids’ Theater, in Westchester, New York, wrote in late May. If the money didn’t materialize in time, she warned, there could be a serious problem with the shows: nobody would hear the actors.

Random Farms, and tens of thousands of other theater companies, schools, churches, broadcasters, and myriad other interests across the country, need to buy new wireless microphones. The majority of professional wireless audio gear in America is about to become obsolete, and illegal to operate. The story of how we got to this strange point involves politics, business, science, and, of course, money.

Four years ago, in an effort to bolster the country’s tech infrastructure, the FCC decreed that the portion of the radio spectrum used by most wireless mics would be better utilized for faster and more robust mobile broadband service. Now, as the telecom companies that won the rights to that spectrum begin to use it, the prior tenants are scrambling for new radio-frequency homes.

The dispossessed are a diverse and varied lot. Wireless mics are near ubiquitous in modern life, in our schools—think lecture halls and pep rallies—our offices, our hotels and meeting halls, our entertainment venues, musical and theatrical tours, our houses of worship, and our radio and television broadcasts.

Replacing them will not be cheap. Even small community or school theaters can use 30 or more microphones, which, including ancillary gear, can cost $1,000 or more apiece. “I’ll need to replace at least 24 mics, which will cost at least 24 grand,” says Brian Johnson, artistic director of the theater program at La Habra High School, in California. The Shakespeare Theatre Company, in Washington, DC, will spend $50,000 on new mics, says Tom Haygood, their director of production.

Behind the scenes, the stagehands responsible for moving sets, rigs, curtains, and the like also use wireless communications devices. Nearly every director I spoke with said that regardless of their theater’s financial condition, they’re immediately replacing this gear out of safety concerns. Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Haygood says he’s already spent another $45,000 on headsets for backstage personnel. The combined expense will hamper many companies’ ability to pay for musicians, costumes, and sets. “Basically, we will be robbing Peter to pay Paul,” one director told me. By the time the switchover is supposed to be complete, in July 2020, the total tab could top $100 million.

For commercial broadcasters, and other corporate users, replacing wireless gear won’t be a financial strain. But it’s a pending crisis for nonprofit theaters, which generally rely on ticket sales and donations to survive. Many school theater programs will have to appeal to their community, as their districts don’t often fund such a capital expense. “The idea of going to a school board and asking for money to replace audio equipment is a non-starter,” says Jim Palmarini, of the Educational Theatre Association, a national organization of school theater programs. He says half of the group’s members rely solely on box-office revenue. Most community theaters don’t have any hope of municipal help, and as nonprofits few of them have the resources to easily cover such a large outlay. That’s why, Wallach told me, she sent her panicked email asking for funds.

Wireless audio, like all wireless communication, operates by sending and receiving signals on specific frequencies in the radio spectrum. Each part of the RF spectrum has different characteristics, better suited for particular uses. The low-end waves, such as AM radio, are very weak, but can travel many miles. On the high end, home to x-rays, waves are intensely powerful but don’t travel far. It’s the juicy part in the middle that’s so desirable for communications devices, making claims for every frequency in that range competitive.

The problem is there’s only so much of this desirable spectrum to go around, with numerous uses—phones, tablets, digital TV signals, GPS, baby monitors, Bluetooth devices—staking claims. To control the virtual landscape, the government dictates which devices, types of use, or even individual companies, can operate at which frequencies. So it’s no surprise that the allocation of frequencies is political, and can favor interests with the most money or influence.

The upheaval around wireless mics can be traced to the National Broadband Plan of 2010, where, on the direction of Congress, the FCC declared broadband “a foundation for economic growth, job creation, global competitiveness and a better way of life.” Two years later, in a bill best known for cutting payroll taxes, Congress authorized the FCC to auction off additional spectrum for broadband communications. In 2014, the FCC determined it would use the 600 MHz band— where most wireless microphones operate—to accomplish that goal.

The auction began in 2016 and continued into 2017. T-Mobile, the largest purchaser of the reallocated spectrum, spent close to $8 billion, and is using it to increase its LTE coverage and to lay the foundation for its 5G network. Wireless mic users have until July 2020, at the latest, to vacate the 600 MHz band. But T-Mobile began taking over its acquired spectrum in certain regions in August 2017. In a sort of electronic eminent domain, yet without government recompense, prior users of those frequencies must vacate their airwave real estate once T-Mobile or other auction winners move in, rendering all or most of their current gear useless. T-Mobile did not respond to a request for comment.

T-Mobile has been updating its rollout plans online, but there’s still broad uncertainty about the details, and many would rather be safe than sorry. At Random Farms, Wallach’s audio engineer, Randy Taber, advised her that T-Mobile was slated to flip the switch in her region toward the end of this year, and had begun testing in the area. So she and others are opting to purchase new mics now, than risk being too late and having a blast of static radiate from the theater’s speakers just as Dorothy opens her mouth to sing “Over the Rainbow.”

Other spectrum purchasers at the 600 MHz auction, including Dish and Comcast, are not yet using their frequencies. Government rules allow spectrum holders a decade or more to “build out” their services. A Dish spokesperson says the spectrum is intended for “our 5G future,” but it’s not yet using the spectrum because TV broadcasters haven’t yet vacated those frequencies. Comcast did not respond to a request for comment.

The shift is especially difficult because this is the second time in less than 10 years that wireless mics are being evicted from their frequency home. A decade ago, many wireless mics were designed to operate in the 700 MHz band. But in 2010 the FCC auctioned off much of that range for wireless broadband and public-safety uses, forcing out many wireless mics. Many theaters then spent tens of thousands of dollars on new gear, only now to be told that they have to purchase new gear again.

That will further strain relations with school boards and benefactors. At Hightstown High School in New Jersey, the district paid $39,500 for new gear that operated outside of the 700 MHz band, which became off limits for wireless mics after June 2010. “I do not believe going back to the school at this time would be productive,” says Tallen Olsen, the school’s director of choral music and theater. “They believe they ‘fixed’ the problem the first time.” Nevertheless, Olsen will appeal again, if for no other reason than to make officials aware of the problem. Olsen said he’ll likely buy mics individually over a number of years, taking money directly out of the show budget, and hope for the best.

A number of theaters choose to rent gear, at great annual expense, out of fear that the government will once again change the rules. Sean Warner, operations manager at the Arts High School, in Newark, New Jersey, told me, “we purposely rent every year, in part due to this issue.” But renting can be fiscally unsound for many theaters. Years ago, until he finally got funds to purchase equipment, Olsen used to spend $5,000 per show renting audio gear, which left his program barely able to break even.
https://www.wired.com/story/wireless...cies-fcc-saga/





The FCC is Also Targeting Alex Jones, this Time Over a Pirate Radio Station
Peter Weber

Alex Jones and/or his Infowars site have been banned from Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify over their hateful and demonstrably false conspiracy theories, and even Twitter just put Jones on one-week probation, but none of that has anything to do with why the Federal Communications Commission shut down Jones' flagship radio station, Radio Liberty. According to documents in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Austin this week, Radio Liberty had been illegally broadcasting over a local FM station from 2013 until it ceased pirating the airwaves in December and switched to online streaming and a call-in "listen line."

FCC agents from Houston tracked the pirate radio signals to apartments in north-central Austin owned by defendants Walter Olenick and M. Rae Nadler-Olenick, the Austin American Statesman reports. According to the FCC, the Olenicks refused to pay the agency's $15,000 fine or recognize its authority and threatened to treat FCC agents as trespassers if they returned to the property. On Wednesday, the American Statesman said, the once-pirated frequency, 901. FM, was playing religious programming.
http://theweek.com/speedreads/790535...-radio-station





The FCC Says Net Neutrality Lawsuits Are Moot Because It Already Repealed Net Neutrality

The agency is using an arcane strategy to try to shut down some of the efforts to restore net neutrality.
Kaleigh Rogers

The Federal Communications Commission is making every effort to shut down lawsuits against its decision to repeal net neutrality, including employing some arcane and somewhat desperate legal strategies.

Put as simply as possible, the FCC wants to have a previous court decision on net neutrality rules scrapped from the legal record, which would eliminate a precedent for net neutrality proponents currently challenging the agency. The FCC’s reasoning for requesting the scrap, though, is that those net neutrality rules don’t exist anymore...because the FCC reversed them…which is why they’re being challenged in court in the first place.

“It’s kind of like they’re trying to sweep a broken vase under the rug and saying ‘what vase? What are you talking about?’” said Christopher Terry, a media law professor at the University of Minnesota, in a phone interview.

The long, complicated saga of net neutrality litigation goes back to when the agency first established the rules, through the Open Internet Order in 2015. This order cemented net neutrality protections federally by reclassifying ISPs as a telecommunications service that can be regulated like a public utility.

Major telecom companies were not psyched about these new rules, in part because they limited the ways companies could make money (for example, an ISP couldn’t get a kickback from a streaming service for providing faster connections to that service over, say, Netflix). Big Telecom’s first move was to take the FCC to court to challenge the new rules, which resulted in a 2016 ruling from the D.C. Court of Appeals that upheld net neutrality rules and said the FCC was well within its right to reclassify ISPs.

Big Telecom was not satisfied, so in September of last year lobbyists appealed to the Supreme Court, asking it to rule on net neutrality and whether the FCC had overstepped. Then, while we were waiting for the court to hear that case, the FCC went ahead and nuked net neutrality last December. In response, pro-net neutrality groups—including Mozilla, digital rights non profits, and 22 state attorneys general—launched a lawsuit against the FCC, claiming it can’t repeal net neutrality because its justification for doing so, that the original order was outside of the agency’s purview, had already been ruled against in that 2016 D.C. Court decision.

“However this works out is just the opening act.”

This brings us to today (excuse me while I gasp for air). We’re all now awaiting the Supreme Court case, which will more likely focus on whether or not ISPs have first amendment rights rather than whether the FCC has authority to reclassify industries. As part of the filings for that case, the FCC and the Department of Justice have asked the Supreme Court to vacate the 2016 ruling, claiming that since it’s about rules that don’t exist anymore, it’s now moot. This would weaken many of the arguments of those suing the FCC, which point to legal precedent.

“The current FCC doesn’t like the 2015 rules and would very much like to see them go away, but that’s complicated by the fact that the D.C. Circuit Court has said that those rules were valid and legitimate use of the FCC’s authority,” Terry explained. “That’s really inconvenient for the Pai FCC. It really is.”

The Trump administration has had success before with asking the Supreme Court to vacate earlier decisions it now considers moot. Last year, while litigation unfolded over President Donald Trump’s travel ban on visitors from predominantly-Muslim countries, the Supreme Court vacated a court ruling that Trump had exceeded his authority. It made this decision because, at that point, the administration had already scrapped and reworded the original ban.

Terry told me that while this tactic wasn’t likely to be successful, it was not a surprising move from an agency that’s ready to make every effort to prevent net neutrality from being restored. Yet even if this request is granted by the Supreme Court, it would only be the tip of the iceberg.

“This isn’t over,” Terry said. “However this works out is just the opening act.”
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...net-neutrality





A Community-Run ISP Is the Highest Rated Broadband Company in America

A Consumer Reports survey of 176,000 Americans finds that small, locally owned ISPs are routinely ranked higher than big telecom companies.
Karl Bode

It’s no surprise that Americans generally hate their ISPs. After all, companies like Comcast not only routinely abuse a lack of competition to drive up prices, but they often provide some of the worst customer service in any industry in America. That’s when they’re not busy happily killing net neutrality or lobbying for the death of other meaningful consumer protections.

But in countless parts of the country, consumers are increasingly turning to community-run broadband networks as an alternative to this cavalcade of dysfunction. More than 750 communities around the country have now either built their own broadband networks or built local cooperatives in a quest for better, cheaper service.

A new survey by Consumer Reports once again highlights how consumers are responding positively to this home-grown approach to better broadband.

The organization surveyed 176,000 Consumer Reports readers on their experience with their pay TV and broadband providers, and found that the lion’s share of Americans remain completely disgusted with most large, incumbent operators. The full ratings are paywalled but available here to those with a Consumer Reports subscription.

All the usual suspects including Comcast, Charter (Spectrum), AT&T, Verizon, and Optimum once again fell toward the bottom of the barrel in terms of overall satisfaction, reliability, and value, largely mirroring similar studies from the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

One of the lone bright spots for broadband providers was Chattanooga’s EPB, a city-owned and utility operated broadband provider we profiled several years back as an example of community broadband done well. The outfit, which Comcast attempted unsuccessfully to sue into oblivion, was the only ISP included in the study that received positive ratings for value.

“EPB was the top internet service provider in our telecom ratings two times in the past three years,” Christopher Raymond, electronics editor at Consumer Reports told Motherboard.

“ Consumer Reports members have given it high marks for not only reliability and speed, but also overall value—and that's a rare distinction in an arena dominated by the major cable companies,” he said.

A major problem is that incumbent broadband providers have gone to great lengths to nickel and dime subscribers with a wide variety of spurious surcharges and bogus fees. Regulators have historically been apathetic to this problem, which often involves making up entirely nonsensical fees, then hiding them below the line to pad the advertised rate post sale.

As a result, most broadband and cable TV subscribers often have no idea what they’ll pay until they actually receive their first bill. To that end, Consumer Reports has been waging a new campaign dubbed What the Fee!? aimed at holding cable TV providers and ISPs accountable for what’s effectively false advertising.

Raymond told me most municipal broadband providers are often too small to include in the organization’s rankings. That said, other studies have supported the idea that municipal broadband providers are more likely to offer better, cheaper service free of obnoxious surcharges and quickly-evaporating promotional savings.

For example, a recent Harvard study found that community-owned broadband networks provide consumers with significantly lower rates than their private-sector counterparts. That’s often because these ISPs have a vested interest in the communities they serve that extends beyond extracting monopoly rents from captive subscribers.

“Almost all community-owned networks offered prices that were clear and unchanging, whereas private ISPs typically charged initial low promotional or 'teaser' rates that later sharply rose, usually after 12 months,” the researchers said.

So why haven’t more towns and cities building their own broadband networks?

As EPB and other municipal providers have found out, ISPs are often quick to sue such operations in the hopes of putting them in a deep financial hole right out of the gate. More than 21 states have also passed protectionist laws—often quite literally written by ISP lobbyists—banning towns and cities from exploring the option.

That’s not to say that building your own broadband network will be an automatic success story. Municipal broadband is like any other business model, and depends entirely on the quality of those crafting them and the financing that’s available.

That said, the multi-decade effort by ISPs like AT&T, CenturyLink and Comcast to take the right of self-determination away from local communities only highlights how terrified incumbent ISPs are of these communities taking matters into their own hands.

Fortunately, efforts to roll back these protectionist laws have gained traction in states like Colorado. And as Trump-era attacks on consumer protections like net neutrality gain steam, it only advertises how community-run broadband can be a faster, cheaper, and more transparent alternative to Comcast.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...ompany-ratings

















Until next week,

- js.



















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