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Old 23-07-14, 07:41 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 26th, '14

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"Personal data including text messages, contact lists and photos can be extracted from iPhones the company acknowledged this week." – Joseph Menn


"This extension is designed to automatically protect your privacy from third-party trackers that load invisibly when you browse the Web." – The EFF


"It seems that Verizon are deliberately dragging their feet and failing to provide service that people have paid for." – Colin Nederkoon






































July 26th, 2014




UK to 'Decriminalize' File-Sharing
Carlos Barria

The British government has decriminalized the act of online video game, music and film piracy, after branding harsher punishment plans as “unworkable.”

Beginning in 2015, internet users who persistently file-share will be sent a series of warning letters explaining that their actions are illegal. However, authorities will take no further action if the user continues downloading the material.

The aim of the letters is to boost consumer awareness of the array of legitimate online media outlets such as Netflix, and deter people from using file-sharing software.

The new scheme, named the 'Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme (VCAP),' came after years of talks between internet service providers (ISPs), politicians, and the music and film industries.

Major ISPs, including BT, Virgin, and Sky, have already signed up to VCAP. Other ISPs are expected to follow suit.

Geoff Taylor, chief executive of UK music trade body BPI, said VCAP was about “persuading the persuadable, such as parents who do not know what is going on with their net connection.”

“VCAP is not about denying access to the internet. It’s about changing attitudes and raising awareness so people can make the right choice,” he added.

Originally, the government wanted to impose stricter regulations on internet users. Under the planned Digital Economy Act, which was rushed through parliament in 2010, ISPs would have been forced to monitor file-sharing activity and contact authorities if a user was found to be breaching copyright laws.

The act would have also allowed ISPs to slow their internet connections, or shut them down entirely.

ISPs and other internet companies opposed the act on the grounds that it risked breaching the privacy of their users and might be in contempt of European law. However, they lost their court appeal after judges deemed the act a “fair” and “proportionate” response to tackling privacy.

VCAP, which is part of Creative Content UK – a watered down version of the Digital Economy Act – represents a compromise between politicians, the film and music industry, and internet companies.

The program aims to educate users about legal and safe ways to access content online, and will also prevent copyright infringement by blocking sites that may have access to unauthorized material.

Figures published by the communications watchdog Ofcom last year revealed that more than 1.5 billion files were downloaded illegally in the UK in 2012, accounting for 22 percent of all online content consumed.

According to Ofcom research, only a quarter of people would stop file-sharing if they thought they might get sued, while one in five said they would stop if they received a letter from their internet service provider.
http://rt.com/uk/174744-uk-internet-fileshare-piracy/





Spain Lifts Blocks on File-Sharing Websites

Some of the blocked file-sharing sites set up proxies to help people evade the restrictions
BBC

A Spanish court has ordered blocks on six file-sharing sites to be lifted.

All six sites were blocked in May after being accused of infringing copyright by the Spanish anti-piracy federation.

The block meant mobile operators and internet service providers (ISPs) in Spain were told to stop letting customers get at the sites.

Now a court in Zaragoza has said there were "insufficient grounds" for maintaining the blocks and has called for them to be lifted.

The decision should mean that mobile companies and ISPs will lift the blocks in the next few days.

The court was considering the blocks after those running some of the accused sites appealed.

The sites blocked were SpanishTracker, PCTorrent.com, NewPCT.com, PCTestrenos.com, Descargaya.es and TumejorTV.com.

Traffic to sites fell sharply after they were cut off but some of them set up alternative domains and proxies to help regular users get around the block.

Spain has been a vigorous pursuer of pirates and has passed tough anti-piracy laws and jailed operators of file-sharing sites.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28367990





Sony’s Move to Have 19 Lawsuit Dismissed Covers File-Sharing Legal Battle Loot
Chris Cooke

If it gets to court, the legal battle between 19 Entertainment and Sony Music could result in some judicial consideration being given to a number of ongoing royalty debates in the music industry. Though it’s emerged that the major filed a motion to have the case dismissed last month.

As previously reported, 19 Entertainment, suing on behalf of various ‘American Idol’ winners who scored Sony Music record deals via the show, says it found “systemically incorrect calculations” on two separate audits of royalty payments made by the major, adding that the record company then failed to allow 19′s bean counters to access all the data they required to do a full audit.

The 19 litigation also includes disputes over the way digital royalties are calculated, including the much debated issue as to whether labels should be paying lower record sale royalties or higher licensing revenue splits on download and streaming income. As much previously reported, a busload of veteran artists have gone legal on this issue already.

Meanwhile, in a review of the litigation, The Hollywood Reporter notes that 19 Entertainment also raises a web-related royalty gripe that almost pre-dates the debate over how much of iTunes revenue should be shared with artists. And that’s whether the majors are obliged to share with their acts damages received from successful file-sharing litigation.

Sony deals with that argument in its motion to dismiss, arguing that it isn’t obliged to share with artists the multi-million damages stemming from general file-sharing lawsuits – such as the long-running LimeWire legal battle that resulted in a $105 million pay off for the majors – unless recordings from said artist are specifically included in a lawsuit.

But according to the Reporter, lawyers for 19 have already responded to that, arguing that, by their interpretation of the recording contracts signed by Idol winners, the artist is due some kickback from successful catalogue-wide anti-piracy litigation. “Sony has multiple ways to bring suit” they argue. “The manner in which Sony brings suit is of no consequence as to 19′s right to receive a portion of any money which is attributable to artist’s masters”.

It is by no means assured any of this will actually reach court, but if it does, it could result in some clarification on a number of royalty issues raised across the artist community, in the US at least.
http://www.completemusicupdate.com/a...l-battle-loot/





Dutch Courts Lets eBook Reseller Stay Online

Dutch publishers wanted the site taken offline for copyright infringement
Loek Essers

Dutch publishers have failed in their efforts to immediately close down ebook reselling site Tom Kabinet.

The Amsterdam District Court ruled Monday that the reseller can stay in business, after the Dutch Publishers Association (DPA) filed a preliminary case at the beginning of July to urgently close the site for copyright infringement.

Tom Kabinet offers a platform that it says lets users legally sell used ebooks. Sellers have to declare they obtained their copies legally and agree to delete their versions when a sale is made. While the service has no way to verify whether a copy is legal or whether copies were deleted by their original owners, it does add a water mark to the ebook before it is sold in order to track down possible illegal distribution.

Tom Kabinet argued that its activities are legal under a 2012 ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that permitted the trading of "used" software licenses.

The Amsterdam court said that while it's unclear whether or not the site infringes copyright when considering the case law of the CJEU, closing down the site immediately would be a step too far.

It cannot be excluded that the same rules apply to ebooks as apply to paper books, which are allowed to be sold secondhand in any case, the court said.

Moreover, Tom Kabinet's operation cannot be equated with "pirate websites," the court said. It also denied the request for a ban on the site because the publishers "shy away from all negotiations" with Tom Kabinet while the site's intention is to work with the publishers to mitigate the problem of illegally downloaded ebooks.

A copyright lawyer who represents the publishers, Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, said he was "very disappointed" by the ruling.

The judge suggested that the publishers should start legal proceedings in which questions about the issue could be referred to the CJEU, Alberdingk Thijm said, adding that such proceedings can take years. "Due to this decision, publisher damages continue to mount," he said.

The publishers haven't decided whether to follow that course, he added.

While the court did not decide if the 2012 ruling -- which favored UsedSoft over Oracle -- applies to ebooks, this decision means that Tom Kabinet can continue to offer cheaper ebooks to its users, said Marc Jellema, one of Tom Kabinet's co-founders.
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/...r_stay_online/





Porn Studio Sues Immigrant Who Has “No Idea How Bittorrent Works,” Wins Big

Lawsuit-happy porn studio beats a "poor sap" whose pleas of ignorance fail.
Joe Mullin

Porn studio Malibu Media files more copyright lawsuits than anyone else in the US since the fall of Prenda Law; hundreds of suits against "John Doe" defendants have been filed in just the last few months. Nearly all of those cases settle before the case is decided on the merits.

However, in a rare development yesterday, a Malibu lawsuit proceeded to a judgment—and it was a slam dunk for the porn studio. In a terse five-page order, US District Judge Robert Jonker tore apart defendant Don Bui's arguments that using BitTorrent and the site Kickass Torrents to get porn files didn't violate Malibu's copyright.

In the case, the defendant admitted he had 57 unauthorized copies of Malibu Media movies on his hard drive and had used BitTorrent technology to get them. Bui tried to shift the blame to the Kickass Torrents website, but it didn't work. He also tried to distinguish the technology he used from earlier technologies found to violate copyright laws, like Grokster. That didn't sway Jonker, who wrote:

Defendant has some quarrels with the details of how BitTorrent works, but nothing that the Court sees as a fundamental or material issue of fact. Even as Defendant describes the facts, using BitTorrent technology, he ultimately winds up with 57 unauthorized copies of Plaintiff’s works—copies that did not exist until Defendant himself engaged the technology to create new and unauthorized copies with a swarm of other users. True enough, the process is not identical to the peer-to-peer file sharing program in Grokster. It is, however, functionally indistinguishable from the perspective of both the copyright holder and the ultimate consumer of the infringed work. In both situations, the end user participates in creating a new and unauthorized digital copy of a protected work. It makes no difference from a copyright perspective whether the infringing copy is created in a single wholesale file transfer using a peer-to-peer protocol or in a swarm of fragmented transfers that are eventually reassembled into the new infringing copy.

Jonker saw guidance in the recent Aereo case as well, calling it "instructive even though it is dealing with a different aspect of copyright infringement." Six justices found that Aereo's "tiny antennas" scheme wouldn't get around copyright law, and in Jonker's reading, even the three dissenting justices "simply believed the proper pathway to liability was contributory infringement rather than direct infringement." The takeaway message of the Aereo case is that "the ever-changing technological means of producing unauthorized copies of protected works must not obscure the basic protection of the Copyright Act for copyright holders."

Jonker noted that the damages "remain in dispute and will be resolved by trial if necessary."

Non-willful copyright infringement is punishable by fines of between $750 and $30,000 per work, and Bui has infringed 57 works. That makes his damages exposure very large, ranging from $42,750 to $1.7 million.

Bui's lawyer didn't respond to a request for comment about the order. Malibu Media was represented by Paul Nicoletti, who also declined to answer questions about the case. Malibu Media's owners haven't responded to interview requests.

Story of “poor sap” put upon by a “copyright troll” doesn't cut it

In court papers, Bui's lawyer described his client as a Vietnamese man who has become a naturalized US citizen. Bui, who owns a nail salon in western Michigan, "speaks basic but imperfect English," said he had no idea how BitTorrent works. The software was loaded onto his computer by a friend who recommended he check out the "Kickass Torrent" website to get free movies.

"Mr. Bui did not believe and does not now believe that he was doing anything wrong in ordering movies from Kickass Torrent," wrote Bui's lawyer, James Mitchell, in court documents filed shortly after Bui was identified as the user of the relevant IP address. "He does realize as a result of this suit being filed that Kickass Torrent was distributing illegally copied movies to him."

Bui's strategy of trying to shift the blame to the Kickass Torrents site continued over the following year. In court papers, Bui admitted that he "ordered" movies through Kickass Torrents but he didn't know they were unauthorized. Bui's lawyer argued that Malibu shouldn't be allowed to "harass individuals like Don Bui who have done nothing more than unwittingly order a copy of a movie which was then copied to its computer by Kickass Torrent in the same way in which a store loads an unauthorized CD into a customer's bag."

The lawyer, James Mitchell of Grand Rapids, Michigan, argued that Malibu was a "copyright troll" that was using Kickass Torrents as a "honey pot" to "trap unwary consumers like Don Bui" and scare them "into paying a large sum of money to avoid the rigors and exposure of a law suit [sic]." He concluded:

[Malibu] seeks to take advantage of the generous statutory damage allowance imposed by the Copyright Laws, which was intended to punish those who were reproducing and distributing hundreds of thousands of pirated works. These statutory damage provisions were not originally intended to impose damages of $750 or more against a poor sap who downloads a $20 movie. The advent of the computer age, however, allows copyright trolls to harass into bankruptcy individuals, many of whom like Don Bui are doing nothing more than was done by a music store customer who unwittingly purchased a pirated CD.

Jonker specifically rejected that analogy, saying that Bui made himself "a new and unauthorized copy of a protected work" and that his acts could not be compared to "a consumer walking into a store and unwittingly purchasing a pirated DVD." Bui's ignorance about Kickass Torrents and BitTorrent is "beside the point."

Malibu is sure to show off the Bui case as a feather in its cap to other defendants, especially after it gets a ruling on damages. The company's lawyers never hesitate to bring up the Pennsylvania "bellwether trial" which resulted in a $112,500 judgment against the only defendant who didn't settle.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...orks-wins-big/





Chrome Blocks uTorrent as Malicious and Harmful Software
Ernesto

Google's Chrome browser has started to block downloads of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent. Those who attempt to download the software are told that it's malicious and harmful, hinting that the website might have been hacked.

With millions of new downloads per month uTorrent is without a doubt the most used BitTorrent client around.

However, since this weekend the number of installs must have dropped quite a bit after Google Chrome began warning users away from the software. According to Chrome the BitTorrent client poses a serious risk.

“uTorrent.exe is malicious and Chrome has blocked it,” the browser informs those who attempt to download the latest stable release.

Chrome does give users the option to restore the file but not without another warning. The browser is convinced that the file is harmful and suggests that the uTorrent website may have been hacked.

“This file will harm your computer. Even if you have downloaded files from this website before, the website may have been hacked. Instead of recovering this file you can retry the download later.”

The first reports of Chrome’s block came in three days ago and at the time of writing the problems persist. The warnings appear for the latest stable release (3.4.2.32354) and no other releases appear to be affected.

Currently there is no indication why the software has been flagged, but a scan by more than 50 of the most popular anti-virus services reveals no active threats.

Google’s safe browsing diagnostic page claims that the uTorrent website was involved in malware distribution in recent months, but no further details on the nature of the supposed malware are provided.

“This site has hosted malicious software over the past 90 days. It infected 4 domain(s), including kioskea.net/, ziggi.uol.com.br/, majorgeeks.com/,” the diagnostics page reads.

This isn’t the first time that uTorrent has reported problems with Chrome. The same happened late last year when the malware blocking feature was still in beta. At the time uTorrent parent company BitTorrent Inc. managed to resolve the issues after several days.

Thus far, none of the developers have responded to user complaints in the uTorrent forums.

Update We discovered that uTorrent occasionally serves other versions as well, these are not blocked. The vast majority of the downloads are still blocked though.
http://torrentfreak.com/chrome-block...ftware-140716/





Researchers: Lawyers Blocked Our Black Hat Demo on De-Anonymising Tor

Shelved Black Hat presentation would have explained why you don't have to be the NSA to break Tor
Tom Brewster

The Tor network promises online privacy by routing users' internet traffic through a number of servers – or layers – while encrypting data.

The surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden is known to have used Tor to maintain his privacy, while the documents he leaked showed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) struggled to uncover identities of those on the network.

However, a presentation promising to detail flaws in the anonymising network has been cancelled, organisers of a major hacker conference have confirmed.

The talk, called "You don't have to be the NSA to break Tor: de-anonymising users on a budget", was due to be delivered by the Carnegie Mellon researchers Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord, but a notice on the Black Hat conference website said lawyers from the university had stepped in.

The counsel for Carnegie Mellon said that neither the university nor its Software Engineering Institute (SEI), had given approval for public disclosure of the material set to be detailed by Volynkin and McCord, according to the Black Hat organisers.

Their talk was one of the most anticipated sessions at this year’s conference, which starts on 2 August in Las Vegas. They promised to explain how anyone with $3,000 could de-anonymise users of Tor.

Details on the presentation, which have now been removed from the Black Hat site, suggested that a determined hacker could “de-anonymise hundreds of thousands Tor clients and thousands of hidden services within a couple of months”.

Besides individual users, there are numerous criminal websites making use of Tor, including sites offering hitman services and illegal drugs, even though the most prominent example, Silk Road, was shut down in 2013.

Organisers from the Tor Project said they were working with the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) at Carnegie Mellon, which is sponsored by the US Department of Homeland Security, to release information on the problems identified by the researchers.
“We did not ask Black Hat or CERT to cancel the talk. We did (and still do) have questions for the presenter and for CERT about some aspects of the research, but we had no idea the talk would be pulled before the announcement was made,” said Tor Project president Roger Dingledine.

“We never received slides or any description of what would be presented in the talk itself beyond what was available on the Black Hat webpage. Researchers who have told us about bugs in the past have found us pretty helpful in fixing issues, and generally positive to work with.”

Carnegie Mellon had not responded to a request for comment by the Guardian at the time of publication.
http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...ence-cancelled





Russian Interior Ministry Offers $111k to Crack TOR Network
Jonathan Nackstrand

Russia’s Interior Ministry is offering $111k for a technological solution that would allow police officers to identify internet surfers who are using the TOR anonymizer network, which has been rapidly growing in popularity inside the country.

The 3.9 million ruble (US$111,290) tender – whose winner will be announced on August 20 – was put on the official government procurement website and went unnoticed by the wider public for two weeks, until it was flagged by several human rights activists on Thursday.

TOR – which anonymizes the identity of an online user by encrypting their data and sending their information through thousands of random pathways, making it harder to trace – can be used to conceal potentially illegal activity. But it can also be essential for avoiding monitoring or censorship from security services, in countries with restrictive legislation.

“Law enforcers are worried about the ability of internet users to anonymously visit the internet, and particularly blocked sites. Also, the new blogging law that comes into force in August says that all bloggers with a daily audience of over 3,000 must register their identity. But someone blogging through TOR can do so anonymously,” Sarkis Darbinyan, a lawyer for Russia’s Pirate Party, told BBC.

While only a fraction of Russia’s 30 million households with internet access use an anonymizer, the number of TOR users has spiked from just 80,000 in May to nearly 200,000 this month, according to Apparat.cc online magazine – though it is unclear whether those results are muddied by automated accounts.

Nonetheless, Russia’s security service mooted a plan to ban all anonymizers last year, though the idea was later shelved.

Various technological solutions for unmasking TOR users have been applied by the NSA and other leading agencies, though most involve considerable time and expense, or rely on cracking less secure software used in conjunction with the anonymizer.

A talk titled 'You don’t have to be the NSA to Break Tor: De-Anonymizing Users on a Budget,' which was to be presented at the reputable Black Hat hacker conference in August, was pulled without explanation earlier this week.
http://rt.com/news/175408-russia-internet-tor-service/





Can You Answer These 4 Questions and Save the Media Industry from Taylor Swift?
Nilay Patel

That headline is 100 percent pure clickbait, the finest in the world.

Let's talk about why after you answer the following four questions, which I adapted from Boyd Multerer, Microsoft's brilliant head of Xbox platform development. Be careful with your answers: you're looking straight at the disruption currently upending the entire media industry.

Question 1 of 4
You want to get into painting, so you go to the art supply store and buy a 51 by 38-inch canvas, brushes, and oil paints.

How much will these materials cost?
$0
$100
$200
$300
NEED A HINT?SUBMIT ANSWER

What these questions demonstrate is the disquieting idea that art itself might be worth nothing — the prices we pay for it are entirely set by distribution and scarcity. When I wrote that Taylor Swift doesn't understand supply and demand, this is the issue I was trying to highlight. It's all well and good for Taylor Swift to think artists should charge for music, but even Taylor didn't make what Forbes estimated at $64 million in earnings last year selling records. "It's safe to say that, even in an album year, the bulk of Taylor Swift's earnings total comes from touring, merchandise sales and endorsements, not album or single sales," says Zack Greenburg, the Forbes senior editor who compiled the estimate.

Just think about the first two questions. The raw materials for an oil painting cost about $200, while an oil painting by Picasso costs $155 million. Simple subtraction should tell you that the art itself is worth $154.9998 million — that's how much value Picasso added to the raw materials.

But that can't possibly be true, because a print of the same painting only costs $60, and images of the same painting online cost $0. This is supply and demand at its most brutal: as the cost of copying falls and the supply heads towards infinity, the price you're willing to pay falls to $0. Picasso adds massive value to oil paints and canvas because it requires massive effort for him to make a single copy. Picasso adds a little value to paper and ink because it only requires a little effort for printers to make a lot of copies. And Picasso adds zero value to pixels on a screen because it requires zero effort for computers to make infinite copies.

This is a fundamental truth of media; trying to create artificial scarcity with technological solutions that prevent zero-effort copying causes so many problems that that Steve Jobs once wrote an angry open letter to the music industry demanding that it drop digital rights management technology from song files. Museums are trying to figure out how to get people to pay for GIFs, but there are entire artistic movements dedicated to stripping away copyright-protection tech from digital artwork and sharing it widely. The physical scarcity that built the media industry is gone, and it ain't coming back.

This isn't a particularly new idea; it's just a threatening one. If you're Sony Records or Paramount Pictures or whatever, digital media is an existential dilemma: the price of art itself is falling to zero because it's not inherently scarce anymore — in fact, it's inherently ubiquitous. That's why Transformers 4 is setting worldwide box office records even while romantic comedies are rapidly going extinct, and why aging rockers keep coming back for tours years after their expiration dates: all the money right now is in experiences and spectacle.

But there are other solutions to creating value when scarcity of distribution goes away online. The tech industry has been completely driven by the need to create value from something other than scarcity ever since smartphones took over the world and app distribution moved completely online — software used to be really expensive when it came on disks, but now the most popular price for apps on Apple's App Store and Google's Play store is $0. Unlike the music industry, the software industry knows CDs aren't coming back, and they're trying all sorts of things to deal with it:

• Multerer, who works on the Xbox, is of course fond of pointing out that games and interactivity create tons of value: he often describes American Idol as nothing more than a video game. "It is a two-hour cut-scene followed by one hour where everybody picks up their game controller (their phone) and votes, followed by a one-hour cut scene," he writes. "It is brilliantly designed so that you can't DVR it (skipping the commercials) without losing your ability to vote. The act of copying it lowers its value. The voting is a virtual scarcity."

• Ephemerality creates literal scarcity; things that go away have incredible value while they exist. That's why TV networks pay enormous amounts of money for the rights to broadcast sporting events like the World Cup and awards ceremonies like the Oscars: they force people to tune in and watch in real time, because once they're over their value falls to zero. And it's why ephemeral messaging apps like Snapchat are worth billions: the app makes messages from your friends feel valuable by simply deleting them after a few seconds.

• Communities also create value: a bunch of people talking about the same thing is great, and a bunch of people you know and trust talking about the same thing is incredibly valuable. Twitter pops up alerts letting you know when a lot of people are talking about the same thing; Facebook drives so much traffic when people start sharing things that it's changing journalism. It's spectacle on a five-inch screen, and you're checking your phone just to keep from missing out.

And these efforts to create new business models that don't rely on physical scarcity are making huge amounts of money. In-app purchases tied to game mechanics are so effective at getting people to pay for things that the FTC settled a lawsuit against Apple earlier this year over what it deemed to be confusing and unfair in-app billing practices; the agency just filed another against Amazon a few days ago over the same thing. (Apple also tattled on Google during its proceedings, of course.) A little bit of scarcity in a market defined by infinite supply can create unstoppable demand. Just ask anyone who's shelled out cash to keep playing Candy Crush Saga.

And then there's the journalism industry, which is currently in the middle of a frenetic period of investment and invention as it moves from the inherent scarcity of bundled physical distribution to the inherent abundance of disaggregated digital distribution on social networks. What's the biggest, most visible trend? Clickbait headlines.

Clickbait headlines are so out of control that The Onion just launched an entire site to make fun of them. They irritate and annoy. But they're also super effective at driving traffic and attention, because they're basically just games. Upworthy's now-infamous "You'll never guess what happened next" headline construction is a one-question pop quiz; a call for the reader to actually guess what happened next, and then verify that guess by reading the article. It creates value because there's a chance you'll be rewarded with the smug satisfaction of being right. (And if even you're not, you still get to share that question on Facebook to trick your friends.) Clickbait irritates when the real answer doesn't live up to the wildest guesses of the reader; no one cares if what happened next is actually boring. The virtual scarcity of the game doesn't create any value.

So yes, that headline up top is super clickbaity. This post has a list in it. I even added a quiz to increase its interactivity so other people can't copy it as easily as I copied it from Boyd. (I hope he's proud of me.) All because I want you to stick around and think about what Picasso's masterpiece Le Rêve should really be worth when you look at it online.

Somebody should tell Taylor Swift what happens next.
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5901977...m-taylor-swift





Verizon FiOS Enhances Bandwidth for Uploads

Company is seeking to race ahead of cable industry in its Internet speeds
Shalini Ramachandran

Verizon Communications Inc. VZ +0.85% 's FiOS TV and broadband service, grappling with slowing growth, is making a big push in an area where it has an edge over cable: Internet speeds.

On Monday, FiOS will unveil much faster upload Internet speeds for its customers, boosting the available bandwidth customers can use when uploading videos or pictures to the Web.

In doing so, the company is seeking to race ahead of the cable industry, which due to technological differences faces bigger hurdles in boosting upload speeds.

"Where we think we can win unequivocally is the data space," said Robert Mudge, Verizon's president of consumer and mass business markets and the top FiOS boss. "For some customers, pay TV is still the anchor of the home" but "that is shrinking." While it "isn't shrinking to the point where pay TV isn't a good business to be in," FiOS is aiming at customers for whom broadband is the "must have."

FiOS says it will make available the same upload speeds as download speeds that its customers already subscribe to, for no additional charge. Before, a subscriber to 50 megabits per second download speeds, for example, would receive only 25 Mbps for upload purposes. Starting Monday, FiOS will roll out symmetrical upload speeds for its customers, all the way up to those with the top speed of 500 Mbps.

With a 50 Mbps connection, a subscriber could upload 200 photos or a five-minute, high definition video to the Web in 40 seconds. The same task would take 1.33 minutes using a 25 Mbps connection, according to data from Verizon.

FiOS says the rollout should be done by the fall, and 95% of customers will receive it automatically.

FiOS's TV and broadband subscriber growth has slowed after years of taking market share from satellite and cable. In the first quarter of this year, Verizon's broadband customer additions slowed to 98,000 from 188,000 the year earlier. Meanwhile, the cable industry had something of a comeback in the first quarter, posting improved overall broadband and TV subscriber numbers, according to data from MoffettNathanson LLC.

Mr. Mudge says he is "still pretty pleased with the overall growth" of FiOS. But he added that "we certainly want to stay ahead" and this can be a "differentiator" from cable.

Mr. Mudge said that the upgrade required an "almost insignificant investment" for FiOS.

In contrast, most cable operators would need to invest significantly to offer symmetrical upload speeds for each of their Internet tiers, industry executives say, although coming improvements to cable technology could make those upgrades easier.

While FiOS uses fiber optic pipelines to the home, cable systems tend to use fiber only to local-area nodes, with lower-capacity coaxial cables connecting to individual homes.

Industry executives widely acknowledge that downstream speeds are what customers are most focused on, so they can better stream movies and TV shows or download songs.

But broadband executives including Mr. Mudge think upload speeds could become more important in the future, when more customers are video chatting using services like Apple Inc.'s FaceTime and sharing music and video files in the cloud.

Another big future driver of upstream traffic could be the long-discussed "Internet of Things," a vision for a world of smart gadgets from toothbrushes to ovens that could constantly update consumers via their mobile devices. Verizon said that it expects upload traffic to double by late 2016.
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_e...MDEwNjExNDYyWj





New Technique Could Boost Internet Speeds Tenfold
Dario Borghino

Researchers at Aalborg University, MIT and Caltech have developed a new mathematically-based technique that can boost internet data speeds by up to 10 times, by making the nodes of a network much smarter and more adaptable. The advance also vastly improves the security of data transmissions, and could find its way into 5G mobile networks, satellite communications and the Internet of Things.

The problem with TCP/IP
Data is sent over the internet in "packets," or small chunks of digital information. The exact format of the packets and the procedure for delivering them to their destination is described by a suite of protocols known as TCP/IP, or the internet protocol suite, designed in the early 70s.

Back when it was conceived, the internet protocol suite was a tremendous leap forward that revolutionized our paradigm for transmitting digital information. Remarkably, 40 years on, it still forms the backbone of the internet. However, despite all its merits, few would say that it is particularly efficient, secure or flexible.

For instance, in order for a TCP data transmission to be successful, the recipient needs to collect the packets in the exact order in which they were sent over. If even a single packet is lost for any reason, the protocol interprets this as a sign that the network is congested – the transmission speed is immediately halved, and from there it attempts to rise again only very slowly. This is ideal in some situations and terribly inefficient in others. The issue is that the protocol doesn't have the intelligence to know what the right thing to do is.

Also, although the packets could take a theoretically infinite number of paths to travel between point A and point B in a network, it turns out that data in a TCP connection always travels along the same path – which makes it quite easy for an eavesdropper to spy on your communications.

Network coding – the solution?
An interesting proposal that might offer the solution to these problems is so-called network coding, which aims to make each node in the network much smarter that it currently is. In TCP/IP, the nodes of the network are just simple switches that can only store data packets and then forward them to the next node along their predetermined route; by contrast, in network coding each node can elaborate packets as needed, for instance by re-routing or re-encoding them.

Adding intelligence at the node level may be a truly disruptive change, because it allows for unparalleled flexibility in the way information is handled. For instance, it can take advantage of multipath TCP (implemented in iOS 7) and, on top of it, add an encoding mechanism that further increases security and speed, or even enable data storage right within the nodes of the network.

In a recent study, a team of researchers from Aalborg University (Denmark), MIT and Caltech have built an implementation of just such a protocol, displaying some impressive speed gains. In a demo, a four minute-long mobile video was downloaded five times faster than with the state of the art technology, and was then streamed without interruptions.

"In experiments with our network coding of Internet traffic, equipment manufacturers experienced speeds that are five to 10 times faster than usual. And this technology can be used in satellite communication, mobile communication and regular internet communication from computers," says Prof. Frank Fitzek, who led the study.

How it works
Whether the contents of a packet are part of a YouTube video, a text or a song, they are nonetheless encoded by a string of zeros and ones, which can also be seen as a number in binary format.

In TCP/IP, the nodes of a network treat data packets individually by simply storing their content and relaying it to the next node. But in the protocol developed by Fitzek and colleagues, the content of the packet is seen as an actual number, and packets are processed in chunks. Each node builds a set of linear equations, using both the numbers extracted from the content of the packets and a set of randomly generated coefficients.

Each linear equation forms a "coded packet" where the coefficients are stored inside the coded packet's header, and the unknown variables are the actual contents of the packets, treated as a number. In other words, each coded packet contains partial information on several "standard" packets at once, but multiplied by different coefficients.

As you might remember from high school math, you need N linear equations to solve for N unknown variables. Because each coded packet contains a single equation, this means that the recipient will need N packets (with different coefficients) before it can decode the data.

But why go to the trouble of complicating things so much? The answer is that now, unlike with TCP/IP, the recipient doesn't need to receive packets in order. In fact, the order in which packets are received becomes completely irrelevant. All that matters is that the recipient obtains N coded packets, all with different coefficients, so it can solve the equations and obtain the original data.

This flexibility in the order means that the whole system is much more efficient, because all the packets are interchangeable. A lost packet is no longer cause for severe transmission delays as in TCP/IP.

And because the order doesn't matter, the packets can now travel along different paths through the network. This also increases security, because it becomes nearly impossible for anyone to intercept the communication by tapping into a single line.

What's next?
The technology could find application in 5G telecommunications, the Internet of Things, and software-defined networks. Moreover, the intelligence of the network also opens up the possibility of vastly distributed storage solutions directly within the network.

"I think the technology will be integrated in most products because it has some crucial and necessary functions," says Fitzek. "The only thing that can stop the development is patents. Previously, individual companies had a solid grip on patents for coding. But our approach is to make it as accessible as possible."
http://www.gizmag.com/random-linear-...-coding/33038/





From AT&T To Verizon: What The Web’s Biggest Players Told The FCC About Net Neutrality
Kate Cox

The FCC originally planned to stop taking comments about their net neutrality proposal on Tuesday. But after demand overwhelmed and crashed their antique IT system, they extended the deadline to 11:59 p.m. (EDT) tonight. As of yesterday, well over one million comments had been entered, and that number’s still going up. Clearly, the public cares — but what is the public saying?

There’s a clear recurring trend in comments from individuals: paid fast lanes are not a valid option. Some advocate for Title II regulation, some stand against it, and some don’t mention it at all, but millions have laid out their personal cases for why internet access is important to them and why big companies should not be able to interfere in consumers’ access.

Still, not all comments are created equal. Advocacy groups, companies, and trade and lobbying groups have now all had their say too, with “comments” over a hundred pages long. Here’s what they’re saying.

ACLU

We need Title II to protect First Amendment rights.
The ACLU goes straight to calling for classification of broadband services as a Title II common carrier. They see “concentration in communications markets” as a danger that can prevent citizens from accessing their first amendment rights.

Ideally, they point out, the market would regulate such restrictive service providers, as consumers would switch to an ISP that didn’t discriminate among its network traffic. In the real world, though, that’s impossible due to the extreme lack of competition and monopoly conditions in most markets.

The ACLU’s key argument, though, is that this FCC rule isn’t about 2014 or 2015 — it’s about future-proofing, and that’s why they need to get it right: “Reclassification is especially important in the light of the potential First Amendment risks posed by [Section 706] case-by-case enforcement. … We fear an overly aggressive future administration could conceivably and abusively cite Section 706 in regulating edge providers, and could potentially extend Section 706 to content regulation. In our view, any such application would be a gross abuse of the plain terms of the statute, but there is no assurance such a future administration would occur.”

AT&T

Title II is terrible and so is regulation. P.S. We like fast lanes.
Like other broadband companies, AT&T is in favor of as little regulation as possible. They stand to make money if paid prioritization goes through, and so although they claim to be against fast lanes they propose a giant loophole that would allow them to charge anyway.

AT&T also argues that Section 706 regulation is the way to go, because Title II classification will ruin everything forever. Separately, they submitted a 19-page PowerPoint presentation all about peering agreements. Unsurprisingly, they also advocate against applying net neutrality non-discrimination standards to mobile broadband.

The company sums up their 99-page opinion — that there is no problem and we should all move along — succinctly early on, saying: “Calls to use this proceeding to impose a host of additional regulatory controls on broadband Internet access providers should be firmly rejected, particularly because the record is devoid of evidence of any actual threat to Internet openness that could possibly warrant heavy-handed regulation.”

Comcast

We are so dedicated to net neutrality that we don’t need stronger rules, which wouldn’t work anyway.
Comcast favors tighter regulation about as much as you’d think, which is not at all. They more or less say the Wheeler proposal is fine, except for the bit where they want to add some cases where some traffic and “specialized services” are exempt so Comcast can charge for delivering them.

Comcast spends the majority of their 74 pages arguing heavily against Title II classification, saying it would be counterproductive, ineffective, and unlawful. Plus, Comcast says, it wouldn’t do what everyone wants anyway because common carriers have the right to some “permissible discrimination.” They also feel that public wifi and mobile broadband should be subject to the same standard, whatever the rule ends up being.

Their basic argument: allowing Comcast to make more money will be an economic benefit to America — and not doing so will stifle innovation, and cost everyone. “Relying on [section 706] authority,” Comcast says, “the Commission should reaffirm the importance of its transparency framework, reinstate a ‘no blocking’ rule with a revised legal rationale, and establish a ‘commercial reasonableness’ standard to govern direct commercial relationships between broadband providers and edge providers relating to the transmission of Internet traffic over broadband Internet access service. Following this path will enable the Commission to build confidence across the Internet ecosystem and strengthen the ‘virtuous circle’ that has produced
abundant benefits for consumers, businesses, and the economy as a whole.”

Common Cause

Monopolies and industry consolidation mean we need Title II now.
Common Cause is the advocacy group where former FCC commissioner Michael Copps now holds a role. They argue that an open internet is essential for a functional democracy, allowing citizens both to be an informed electorate and to interact with their government at every level.

To this end, they write, paid prioritization needs to be banned altogether, and broadband service needs to be reclassified under Title II. Extreme industry consolidation has left no other real choice: “Limited competition in last mile connectivity means end-users are largely captive to ISP gatekeeping behaviors,” the comment says.

In order to preserve the ability for citizens to participate in the political process, they conclude, the FCC needs to prevent ISPs from doing that and they should do that using Title II. “Communications policy should empower consumers, not gatekeepers,” the organization writes. “Any proposal to allow blocking, discrimination, or paid prioritization would strengthen incumbent ISPs that possess both the technical ability and financial incentives to act as toll collectors, judges and juries of internet content and access.”

Consumers Union

Consumers need protecting from big companies that just get bigger. Use Title II.
Consumers Union echoes sentiments of other advocacy groups and calls directly for Title II reclassification of broadband services as the best way to protect consumers.

CU (the advocacy arm of our parent company, Consumer Reports) writes that going with Title II would make things clearest for everyone, saying: “Reclassification would put in place clear rules of the road to protect consumers and would ensure that consumers – and not a handful of ISPs – have control over access to content online.” They, too, say that whatever rule the FCC puts in place needs to apply equally to mobile broadband and to traditional wired broadband.

The organization also points to the looming Comcast/TWC and AT&T/DirecTV merger plans, pointing out that consolidation leaves companies with big incentives and consumers with no options. “The market for last-mile internet access is already controlled by a handful of powerful companies and the largest ISPs are becoming increasingly vertically integrated with programmers,” CU writes. “Paid priority arrangements would give ISPs even greater power to determine which services reach consumers, putting them in a position to determine which services will thrive. With control over both the pipes and content, these providers have the leverage and incentive to favor their own content over the programming of their competitors, and to make market entry difficult for new entrants.”

Information Technology Industry Council

We are mostly okay with the proposed rule, because we can afford to benefit from fast lane access.
This industry group represents many major tech companies, including Apple, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Yahoo, and a whole bunch of others.

The ITI argues that whatever rule the FCC puts into place needs to protect not only consumers, but also businesses large and small. To that end, they advocate against Title II classification — calling it a “heavily regulatory” framework that would make the FCC too hands-on — but instead want to see something very like the now-vacated 2010 rule.

The ITI largely supports the proposed rule, agreeing that ISPs should not be able to block or degrade any lawful activity, but that “the rule should not bar the potential for commercial arrangements that could benefit consumers.” They also support the FCC’s plan to take a case-by-case look at commercial arrangements to determine whether they meet an agreed-upon minimum acceptable level of service.

The organization “recognizes that without proper protections, commercial arrangements between online service providers and broadband ISPs have the potential to adversely impact competition and choice in the online marketplace,” they write, but that doesn’t preclude certain arrangements that would benefit the biggest, richest companies who they represent. “Consistent with the no-blocking rule, the Commission should permit opportunities for companies to experiment with commercial agreements that could benefit customers”.

Internet Association

We don’t need reclassification, but we do need to block fast lanes.
This trade group represents Air BnB, Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, Expedia, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, reddit, Twitter, Yahoo, Yelp, Uber, and a few dozen other internet companies you have almost certainly heard of. (And yes, Google, Yahoo, and others are members of both organizations.)

The open internet, they write, is essential to innovation and growth and the owners of the last mile should not be allowed to hamper it. The IA takes a slightly different tactic from the ITI, though, pointing out that ISPs do have both the means and the motivation to put policies in place that discriminate among internet traffic sources, and that they should not be allowed to do so. Instead, the FCC should require broadband providers to undertake “application agnostic” network management protocols. The organization also supports applying the same regulations to mobile broadband as to wirelines.

However, the IA stops short of addressing reclassification, instead simply hinting around the edges that they hope the FCC doesn’t go that far. Mainly, the IA focuses on what they want to see the FCC do, and disregards the how. “The current proposed rule proposes a difficult to enforce, multi-factor framework that is not focused on the goals of broadband deplotment and adoption … and that could lead to overreaching regulatory interventsion by the Commission,” the IA writes. “Consumers and the online ecosystem would be far better served by clearer and more straightforward prohibitions against blocking and paid prioritization.”

Netflix

Comcast ruins everything. We need Title II and rules about peering/interconnection.
Netflix filed their own comment, separately from any of the trade groups that they’re a member of. They, more than any other content company, have been at the center of recent disputes over peering, prioritization, and bandwidth use and everyone bandies them around as a test case or case study.

Netflix, unlike many other tech companies but like most consumer advocate groups, comes down in favor of Title II reclassification. They also discuss at length the ways in which their streaming service degraded prior to their paid agreement with Comcast earlier this year, and explain that although peering and interconnection are being considered separately from the Open Internet rule, they are also a vital part of network neutrality.

This piecemeal approach under section 706 ultimately will not work, Netflix says. The clearest route to a policy that supports non-discrimination policies is reclassification. “Title II provides a solid basis to adopt prohibitions on blocking and unreasonable discrimination by ISPs. Opposition to Title II is largely political, not legal,” their comment says. They continue by pointing out that “the D.C. Circuit [court] in Verizon pointed to the Commission’s failure to reclassify broadband Internet access as a telecommunications service under Title II as the chief impediment to a solid jurisdictional basis for meaningful open Internet rules.” So reclassification, then, would prevent this all from ending up in court again in the near future.

reddit

Title II reclassification is vital to setting any rule, and that rule should ban fast lanes.
The “front page of the internet” did what they do best: crowdsourced part of the comment to their community, and told personal stories.

A fast lane, they explain, would have throttled reddit before it even got off the ground. Although the site has a huge number of subscribers and moves a tremendous amount of traffic, it doesn’t generate the same level of revenue as Google or Facebook and would likely not be able to handle paying an ISP for priority access to reasonable connection speeds.

In order to create any kind of valid regulation, reddit argues, the FCC has no choice but to first reclassify ISPs as common carriers. “TFCC cannot do a bright line rule against discrimination without Title II,” reddit writes. “Nor can it ban access fees and paid prioritization, as the court already ruled that such a ban leaves “no room at all” (not substantial room) for discrimination. Thus, in order to enact the rules it must, the FCC needs to classify broadband providers (which, as the FCC recognized in 2010, have terminating access monopolies over their users) as ‘telecommunications services’ under Title II of the Communications Act and apply rulings with appropriate forbearance.”

Verizon

Title II is for trains. Paid prioritization gives us, content companies, and consumers more flexibility.
Verizon has a lot to say, in their whopping 184-page comment — as one might expect, since it was their lawsuit that led to the 2010 net neutrality rule being vacated in the first place.

Verizon says that the best environment is one that has as little regulation as possible. They have no incentive to throttle any service, they say, because consumers will dump them and flock to competitors if they do. (Ignoring the fact that while FiOS customers might have one other local option, Verizon DSL consumers almost never do.)

Verizon calls out “superficial news reports, sensationalistic interest-group fund-raising appeals, and even late-night comedy routines” for exaggerating the threat that ISPs may pose, but also sings the praises of the proposed “flexibility to offer new products and services,” including those which would rely on paid prioritization agreements. The real threats to equality of internet access, they say, come from Amazon, Netflix, and Google.

And as for Title II reclassification? Well, Verizon argues, that would basically send the internet back to the Stone Age. “The arcane regulatory framework embodied in Title II was crafted for 19th century railroad monopolies and the early 20th century one-wire telephone world. The price and service regulation inherent in Title II have no place in today’s fast-paced and competitive Internet marketplace, and the threats posed by this approach would not likely be confined to broadband providers but would spread inevitably to other Internet sectors.”
http://consumerist.com/2014/07/18/fr...et-neutrality/





Deaf Advocacy Groups to Verizon: Don’t Kill Net Neutrality On Our Behalf

Verizon claimed Internet fast lanes will help deaf, blind, and disabled.
Jon Brodkin

No company has lobbied more fiercely against network neutrality than Verizon, which filed the lawsuit that overturned the FCC's rules prohibiting ISPs from blocking and discriminating against Web content. But the absence of net neutrality rules isn't just good for Verizon—it's also good for the blind, deaf, and disabled, Verizon claims.

Verizon also says FCC's no-blocking rule could be too strict.
That's what Verizon lobbyists said in talks with congressional staffers, according to a Mother Jones report last month. "Three Hill sources tell Mother Jones that Verizon lobbyists have cited the needs of blind, deaf, and disabled people to try to convince congressional staffers and their bosses to get on board with the fast lane idea," the report said. With "fast lanes," Web services—including those designed for the blind, deaf, and disabled—could be prioritized in exchange for payment.

Now, advocacy groups for deaf people have filed comments with the FCC saying they don't agree with Verizon's position.

"We also take this opportunity to express our concern over the reported contentions of at least one broadband provider that the Commission should facilitate 'fast lanes'—essentially permitting paid prioritization—for the sake of accessibility," the groups wrote on July 18, adding a footnote that links to the Mother Jones article. "While we strongly believe that Internet-based services and applications must be made accessible, we also believe that doing so is possible on an open network and without the need for broadband providers to specifically identify traffic from accessibility applications and separate it out for special treatment.

"To the extent that accessibility-specific applications implicate non-commercial prioritization concerns such as quality-of-service guarantees, we believe those concerns likely can be addressed on the same terms as other, similar applications through the Commission’s case-by-case approach to its exception for reasonable network management," the filing continued. "In no case should accessibility considerations form a basis for permitting paid prioritization more broadly, and the Commission should reject any overture to the contrary."

The comments were filed by Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Inc.; the National Association of the Deaf; the Hearing Loss Association of America; Deaf and Hard of Hearing Consumer Advocacy Network; and Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Telecommunications Access.

While Verizon has lobbied against the FCC reclassifying broadband as a common carrier or "Title II" service, the deaf advocacy groups favor reclassification. The groups say reclassification is important for network neutrality and the ongoing transition from landline phones to Internet Protocol-based voice, which doesn't face the same utility-style rules applied to our traditional phone system. "Title II reclassification would afford the Commission substantial additional flexibility to ensure that broadband services are accessible to people with disabilities," they wrote. "This additional flexibility is likely to prove particularly important as the telecommunications system moves from the public switched telephone network ('PSTN') to Internet Protocol ('IP')-based networks and diverse telecommunications modes emerge that substitute the Internet for the PSTN."

The American Association of People with Disabilities also urged the FCC to "consider banning [paid prioritization] to preserve and protect the Open Internet. Paid prioritization has the potential to create arbitrary subdivisions in the online market... We believe this has the potential to harm investment in edge providers who drive the virtuous cycle, and people with disabilities stand to benefit significantly from the innovations of the virtuous cycle." This group also said the FCC should "look to Title II as a way to secure the interests of public safety, consumer protection, consumers with disabilities, and privacy."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...on-our-behalf/





Enraged Verizon FiOS Customer Posts Video Seemingly Proving ISP Throttles Netflix
Paul Lilly

The ongoing battle between Netflix and ISPs that can't seem to handle the streaming video service's traffic boiled over to an infuriating level for Colin Nederkoon, a startup CEO who resides in New York City. Rather than accept excuses and finger pointing from either side, Nederkoon did a little investigating into why he was receiving such slow Netflix streams on his Verizon FiOS connection, and what he discovered is that there appears to be a clear culprit.

Nederkoon pays for Internet service that promises 75Mbps downstream and 35Mbps upstream through his FiOS connection. However, his Netflix video streams were limping along at just 375kbps (0.375mbps), equivalent to 0.5 percent of the speed he's paying for. On a hunch, he decided to connect to a VPN service, which in theory should actually make things slower since it's adding extra hops en route to his home.

Speeds didn't get slower, they got faster. Much faster. After connecting to VyprVPN, his Netflix connection suddenly ramped up to 3000kbps, the fastest the streaming service allows and around 10 times faster than he was getting when connecting directly with Verizon.

"It seems absurd to me that adding another hop via a VPN actually improves streaming speed. Clearly it’s not Netflix that doesn’t have the capacity," Nederkoon vented in a blog post. "It seems that Verizon are deliberately dragging their feet and failing to provide service that people have paid for. Verizon, tonight you made an enemy, and doing my own tests have proven (at least to me) that you’re in the wrong here."

Verizon may have a different explanation as to why Nederkoon's Netflix streams suddenly sped up, but in the meantime, it would appear that throttling shenanigans are taking place. It seems that by using a VPN, Verizon simply doesn't know which packets to throttle, hence the gross disparity in speed. If that's truly the case, Verizon may have made more enemies than just a pissed off customer in New York City.
http://hothardware.com/News/Enraged-...ttles-Netflix/





Cable Companies: We’re Afraid Netflix Will Demand Payment from ISPs

Industry tries to turn net neutrality debate on its head.
Jon Brodkin

While the network neutrality debate has focused primarily on whether ISPs should be able to charge companies like Netflix for faster access to consumers, cable companies are now arguing that it's really Netflix who holds the market power to charge them.

This argument popped up in comments submitted to the FCC by Time Warner Cable and industry groups that represent cable companies. (National Journal writer Brendan Sasso pointed this out.)

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), which represents many companies including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Cox, and Charter wrote to the FCC:

Even if broadband providers had an incentive to degrade their customers’ online experience in some circumstances, they have no practical ability to act on such an incentive. Today’s Internet ecosystem is dominated by a number of “hyper-giants” with growing power over key aspects of the Internet experience—including Google in search, Netflix and Google (YouTube) in online video, Amazon and eBay in e-commerce, and Facebook in social media.

If a broadband provider were to approach one of these hyper-giants and threaten to block or degrade access to its site if it refused to pay a significant fee, such a strategy almost certainly would be self-defeating, in light of the immediately hostile reaction of consumers to such conduct. Indeed, it is more likely that these large edge providers would seek to extract payment from ISPs for delivery of video over last-mile networks.


ISPs making payments to online video companies would be similar to the payments cable TV providers make to programmers. But in practice it hasn't worked that way. Cable TV and Internet providers have less incentive to ensure that Netflix and YouTube work well on their networks because online video competes against their own video services and because the cable companies face little competition in each local market.

All talk of "fast lanes" has centered on ISPs potentially charging Web services for better access to consumers over the last mile of the network. The FCC's latest proposal would let ISPs charge for fast lanes as long as they provide a minimum level of service to all Internet users and Web services. Network neutrality proponents have urged the FCC to pass stronger rules that would ban such prioritization. Yet the issue is even more complicated than that because ISPs could still degrade bandwidth-heavy services like video by refusing to upgrade infrastructure that connects their networks to the rest of the Internet.

Netflix CEO: “We don’t charge them, they don’t charge us”

Nonetheless, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings noted in an earnings call this week that "the question comes up—should we over time be charging ISPs for the privilege of carrying our data to their customers, and charging for that?"

The answer, so far, is no. "I think the Internet really has this different, much more open architecture than classic cable, where we meet in the middle, we bring the bits to where they want, we don't charge them, they don't charge us," Hastings said. "Both sides innovate,. It's very open structure, and I think then you get more competitors for Netflix frankly, but what you get is this open vibrant system that the Internet has been so famous for, and that's really the tradition that we grew up in, and that we're trying to see carry forward, and I'm optimistic about it, frankly."

In fact, Netflix has paid Comcast and Verizon for direct connections to their networks to improve quality, although not for a faster pipe over the last portions of the network that bring video directly to consumers.

Time Warner Cable's filing with the FCC makes an argument similar to the NCTA's. The concern about ISPs charging Web services for "fast lanes" is a "red herring," Time Warner wrote.

"To TWC’s knowledge, no broadband provider has expressed any intention of prioritizing one class of Internet traffic at the expense of another," the company wrote. "If anything, it is more likely that some content owners might well seek payment from broadband Internet access providers as a condition of delivering their content—paralleling the business model that already exists on MVPD [multichannel video programming distributor] platforms. The Commission should not turn a blind eye to actual marketplace dynamics in developing open Internet protections."

Verizon also complained about the power wielded by Google, Netflix, and Amazon, saying that the companies "have undeniable power to affect the consumer experience online and Internet openness, and the reach of these companies often dwarfs that of particular ISPs." For example, "Netflix has built its 'Open Connect' content delivery network to support its video service, and until recently it denied the highest quality video to end users whose broadband providers did not agree to host Netflix’s servers directly on their networks."

The ability of ISPs to offer special, paid arrangements to Web services "could prove crucial to help smaller companies" competing against Google, Amazon, and Netflix, which are big enough to build their own content delivery networks, Verizon wrote. Verizon asserts that it doesn't plan to offer paid prioritization but does want the ability to negotiate "individualized agreements beyond paid prioritization, such as sponsored data, two-sided pricing, or other benign arrangements."

The American Cable Association (ACA), which represents smaller cable companies (and opposes the AT&T/DirecTV and Comcast/TWC mergers) argued that the FCC's rules should apply to Web services as well. "If protecting and preserving Internet openness are the goals, the proposed rules are too narrow because they do not address the threats posed by Internet edge providers," the ACA wrote.

The concerns aren't hypothetical, the ACA said.

"For example, Internet edge providers who are also distributors of MVPD programming, have opted to selectively block access to otherwise freely accessible Internet content to all broadband Internet subscribers of an MVPDs to extract higher fees for its MVPD programming from the MVPD," the ACA wrote. "In 2009, Viacom threatened to block access to Time Warner Cable broadband subscribers from accessing its web-based content, including such popular sites as MTV.com and Nick.com. In 2010, News Corp. threatened to block access to Cablevision Internet users from accessing Fox websites, including Hulu.com, which News Corp. partially owned, as part of Fox’s on-going retransmission dispute with Cablevision… Similarly, in 2013, CBS elected to block Time Warner Cable and Bright House Network broadband subscribers in New York as part of their dispute over retransmission rights."

Although big and small cable providers have different concerns on many issues, the ACA and NCTA ultimately make roughly the same argument on net neutrality. Each said the FCC should continue a "light touch regulatory approach" and that broadband providers should not be reclassified as common carriers, a move that would open them up to stricter, utility-style regulation.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014...ent-from-isps/





Netflix Files a Final Parting Shot to the FCC Over Net Neutrality
Michelle Clancy

Netflix has filed lengthy, sharply critical comments with the Federal Communications Commission, just barely under the wire of the regulatory agency closing its public comment on a controversial Net neutrality proposal.

Earlier in the year Verizon prevailed in a lawsuit to block the FCC’s ability to enforce Net neutrality rules by essentially arguing that Internet services are not communications services. “The FCC has acted without statutory authority to insert itself into this crucial segment of the American economy, while failing to show any factual need to do so,” Verizon said in its brief to the court.

Since then, consumers have anecdotally reported slower video streaming experiences across a variety of providers.

The FCC’s new proposed rules for regulating broadband Internet include a provision prohibiting ISPs from separating Web traffic into fast and slow lanes. But, while throttling websites specifically is a banned practice, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has left the door open for companies to strike commercial deals with ISPs to have their traffic prioritised over others when it comes to bandwidth allocation and faster delivery. Critics have been concerned that allowing this behaviour would essentially translate into smaller Web companies being squeezed out of the market, because only the larger ones would have the ability to pay the toll, as it were. And that in turn, they say, would result in a stifling of innovation, a reduction in the marketplace of ideas and the killing of the long-tail economy that has sustained the Internet to date.

Before deciding on any new course of action however, the FCC was seeking comment on the proposal. And in a 28-page filing, Netflix urged the FCC to reclassify broadband providers as Title II services that would allow the agency to treat them like a telephone service and other public utilities, thus bringing them back under its regulatory purview.

The company also blamed both Verizon and Comcast for reducing its movie streams down to “nearly VHS quality.” Netflix has signed direct, paid, interconnection deals (instead of the more typical settlement-free peering arrangements) with both ISPs in a state of affairs that CEO Reed Hastings is clearly not happy about.

“Some big ISPs are extracting a toll because they can - they effectively control access to millions of consumers and are willing to sacrifice the interests of their own customers to press Netflix and others to pay,” Hastings noted in a blog a few months back. “Though they have the scale and power to do this, they should realize it is in their long term interest to back strong Net neutrality. While in the short term Netflix will in cases reluctantly pay large ISPs to ensure a high quality member experience, we will continue to fight for the Internet the world needs and deserves.”

He added, “If this kind of leverage is effective against Netflix, which is pretty large, imagine the plight of smaller services today and in the future,” he added. “Roughly the same arbitrary tax is demanded from the intermediaries such as Cogent and Level 3, who supply millions of websites with connectivity, leading to a poor consumer experience.”

Netflix accounts for a majority of peak Web traffic on any given day (and 30% of overall Web traffic), which has given rise to a series of disputes over settlement-free peering arrangements, which Hastings was alluding to. Comcast for instance told Level 3 it would no longer exchange Internet traffic without being paid for it, back in 2010. At the time, Level 3 was a main backbone provider for Netflix, and was sending more traffic to Comcast than Comcast was sending back to Level 3 — an uneven arrangement that demanded compensation, in Comcast's view, to help pay for necessary network upgrades to accommodate all of that traffic.

Major ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner Cable have also been involved in ongoing disputes related to peering and Netflix backbone provider Cogent Communications. Last summer, Cogent accused Verizon of delaying upgrades to the ports through which the two companies exchange Internet traffic.

"Cogent is not compliant with one of the basic and long-standing requirements for most settlement-free peering arrangements: that traffic between the providers be roughly in balance," Verizon said at the time. "When the traffic loads are not symmetric, the provider with the heavier load typically pays the other for transit. This isn't a story about Netflix, or about Verizon 'letting' anybody's traffic deteriorate. This is a fairly boring story about a bandwidth provider that is unhappy that they are out of balance and will have to make alternative arrangements for capacity enhancements, just like any other interconnecting ISP."

Emphasising that he is not willing to enter into paid peering arrangements, Cogent Communications CEO Dave Schaeffer has publically offered to resolve the impasse with the ISPs over Netflix and other streaming, by paying the capital cost required for these companies to upgrade the connections (as well as Cogent's own costs) to ensure adequate capacity to deliver quality service.

Verizon and Netflix are also locked in a war of words over streaming quality and interconnection. Netflix in May began serving customers an on-screen message blaming the relevant ISP for network congestion if a video takes too long to buffer when streaming. After being called out for poor speeds, Verizon subsequently sent the over-the-top (OTT) giant a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Netflix stop sending such messages to its customers, and requested a list of Verizon ISP customers that Netflix has contacted so far.

"This is about consumers not getting what they paid for from their broadband provider,'' Netflix spokesman Jonathan Friedland said. "We are trying to provide more transparency, just like we do with the ISP Speed Index, and Verizon is trying to shut down that discussion."

Verizon, though, says that Netflix is blaming the wrong carrier. "Netflix has been aware for some time that a few Internet middlemen have congestion issues with some IP Networks and nonetheless, Netflix has chosen to continue sending its traffic over those congested routes," Milch said.
http://www.rapidtvnews.com/201407203...eutrality.html





Netflix Profit Doubles on U.S., Foreign Subscriber Growth

Netflix Inc said on Monday its quarterly profit more than doubled, boosted by strong growth in U.S. and international subscribers as a price increase for its most popular U.S. video streaming plan did not deter new users.

Netflix added 570,000 U.S. customers in the second fiscal quarter ended June 30, passing 50 million worldwide subscribers for the first time. It added 1.12 million customers in international markets. bit.ly/UnqT1D

The company's shares rose nearly 1 percent at $456.21 in after-hours trading, after the company also said it expected average revenue per user to rise slowly as it wins over more subscribers at the new prices.

The company in May increased the price of its most popular video streaming plan by $1 per month to $9 for new customers in the United States — the company's first price hike in its largest market in three years.

The company suffered a consumer exodus and stock plunge after it announced an unpopular price increase in July 2011.

Netflix executives also said they were contemplating an eventual move into China, the world's most populous country. "It's conspicuously large, and it's conspicuously a growing and very strong economy," David Wells, Netflix's chief financial officer, said on a video-streamed conference call with analysts. "Look for the future in terms of an answer from us in China."

Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings cautioned that any move into China, if it happens, would occur far in the future. "We're not thinking about it hard right now," Hastings said in an interview. "We are really focused on Europe at this point."

The company said it planned to expand into Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg in September, taking its international addressable market to more than 180 million broadband households — double the current U.S. market.

Netflix has invested in original series such as "House of Cards" and the Emmy-nominated "Orange is the New Black" to square off against competition from online video players Amazon.com Inc and Hulu. The June release of a second season of "Orange" helped lure customers during the quarter, Netflix said.

The company's profit rose to $71 million, or $1.15 per share, from $29.5 million, or 49 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue rose to $1.34 billion from $1.07 billion.

Analysts on average had expected $1.16 per share in profit on revenue of $1.34 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Netflix also repeated its opposition to the planned merger of Comcast Corp and Time Warner Cable Inc. The company called on regulators to block the merger or place a condition that would prevent the combined company from charging interconnection fees to deliver video over their broadband networks.

(Reporting by Lisa Richwine and Lehar Maan; Editing by Joyjeet Das and Cynthia Osterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0FQ21520140721





Comcast Profit Beats Estimates on Internet Subscriber Growth

Comcast Corp, the largest U.S. cable operator, reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit, helped by strong growth in high-speed internet subscribers.

The company's shares rose 2 percent to $54.96 in premarket trading on Tuesday. The stock has gained 3.6 percent so far this year through Monday's close.

Net income attributable to Comcast rose to $1.99 billion, or 76 cents per share, in the second quarter ended June 30, from $1.73 billion, or 65 cents a share, a year earlier.

Excluding items, the company earned 75 cents per share, higher than the average analysts' estimate of 72 cents, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Revenue at Comcast's high-speed internet business rose about 10 percent in the quarter, helped by 203,000 net customer additions.

That was above the 161,000 analysts were expecting, according to market research firm StreetAccount.

The company's total revenue rose 3.5 percent to $16.84 billion, but fell short of the average analysts' expectation of $16.95 billion due to weakness in its cable business and at NBC Universal.

Comcast's cable business revenue rose only 1.2 percent to $5.18 billion. It lost 144,000 net video subscribers, more than the 123,000 analysts were expecting, according to StreetAccount.

NBC Universal revenue inched up 0.3 percent to $6.02 billion, and also fell short of analysts' expectation $6.19 billion, according to StreetAccount.

The company blamed fewer movie releases in its filmed entertainment unit for the slow growth in revenue at NBC Universal.

(Reporting by Soham Chatterjee; Editing by Savio D'Souza)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0FR12M20140722





Comcast’s Worst Nightmare: How Tennessee Could Save America’s Internet

Chattanooga's public electric utility offers residents lightning-quick connections -- much to big telecoms' dismay
David Sirota

The business lobby often demands that government get out of the way of private corporations, so that competition can flourish and high-quality services can be efficiently delivered to as many consumers as possible. Yet, in an epic fight over telecommunications policy, the paradigm is now being flipped on its head, with corporate forces demanding the government squelch competition and halt the expansion of those high-quality services. Whether and how federal officials act may ultimately shape the future of America’s information economy.

The front line in this fight is Chattanooga, Tennessee, where officials at the city’s public electric utility, EPB, realized that smart-grid energy infrastructure could also provide consumers super-fast Internet speeds at competitive prices. A few years ago, those officials decided to act on that revelation. Like a publicly traded corporation, the utility issued bonds to raise resources to invest in the new broadband project. Similarly, just as many private corporations ended up receiving federal stimulus dollars, so did EPB, which put those monies into its new network.

The result is a system that now provides the nation’s fastest broadband speeds at prices often cheaper than the private competition. As the Chattanooga Times Free Press noted a few years back, “EPB offers faster Internet speeds for the money, and shows equal pep in both uploading and downloading content, with Comcast and AT&T trailing on quickness.” Meanwhile, EPB officials tell the Washington Post that the utility’s telecom services have become “a great profit center” — an assertion confirmed by a Standard & Poor credit upgrade notice pointing out that the utility “is now covering all costs from telephone, video and Internet revenue, as well as providing significant financial benefit to the electric system.”

This is great news for local businesses and taxpayers — but it is terrible news for private telecom companies, who not only fear being outcompeted and outperformed in Chattanooga, but also fear the Chattanooga model being promoted in other cities. In response, those telecom firms have been abandoning the standard argument about the private sector. Indeed, as the Times Free Press reported last week, rather than insisting the private sector has inherent advantages over the public sector, the firms have gone to court insisting “that EPB, as a public entity, would have an edge when competing against private companies, which would be at a disadvantage when facing an entity owned by taxpayers.”

To date, those court cases have been thwarted by EPB. However, it is a different story in state legislatures. Once again abandoning the business lobby’s typical call for less government intervention, telecom firms have successfully pushed 20 states to pass laws limiting the reach of community-owned utilities like EPB.

That’s where Washington comes in. With Census figures showing more than 1 in 5 Tennessee residents having no Internet connection, EPB is now proposing to offer its ultra-fast services to new communities. But it needs the Federal Communications Commission to preempt the Tennessee statute prohibiting the utility from competing with private telecom companies outside its current market.

For EPB, the good news is that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has repeatedly pledged that in the name of competition and broadband access, he will support preempting state laws like Tennessee’s. However, in a capital run by money, EPB may still be politically overpowered. After all, as a community-owned utility in a midsized city, EPB does not have the lobbyists and campaign cash to match those of behemoths like Comcast and AT&T. What the utility does have is a solid track record and a pro-consumer, pro-competition argument.

The question is: Will that be enough to prevent Wheeler from backing down or being blocked by Congress? The future of the Internet may be at stake in the answer.
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/18/comc...ernet_partner/





Municipal Broadband Roadblocks

19 State Laws That Stop Your City From Installing Blazing Fast Internet
Nick Reese

According to FCC data released in 2013, over 39 million Americans have less than 2 wired broadband providers they can get broadband service from.

Our team at Broadband Now has been obsessed with this fact because without a competitive market, companies have little incentive to treat their customers well or improve their infrastructure leading to poor customer service [1] and questionable business practices.[2]

Lucky for some consumers, municipalities across the country have been stepping into help underserved populations get access to better more competitive broadband service.

While this introduction of new competition sounds like a win for consumers, incumbent providers have been leveraging their lobbying power at the state level to limit what municipalities can and can’t do.

Providers Lobby to Keep Municipalities from Competing

While this practice of lobbying has gained a lot of attention in recent years, it’s still more common than you’d expect.

In fact according to OpenSecrets.org, large broadband providers, such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, and Verizon, are some of the top contributors to PACs and top spenders on lobbyists.

With AT&T and Comcast each donating over $2M each to Political Action Committees (or PACs). [3] [4]

And for existing providers, money spent on lobbying and getting officials sympathetic to their interests elected, is money well spent. (see update)

It’s so effective that as of this writing, there are 19 states that ban or limit municipalities from offering competitive broadband services.

In the guide below we’ve broken these states and categorized them by the 7 types of common roadblocks:

• Administrative Hurdles: North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Virginia
• No Direct Sale: Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington
• Referendum (or Vote): Alabama, Colorado, Louisiana, and Minnesota
• Population Caps: Nevada
• Feasibility Studies: Utah
• Request for Proposal: Michigan
• Excessive Taxes: Florida

Hat tip to Baller Herbst Law Group for their analysis which we based our research off of.

Administrative Hurdles

States affected: North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Virginia

Administrative hurdles are one of the most widespread methods of restricting municipal broadband.

This hurdle is typically installed by state legislators and are designed to limit the ability of municipalities by adding superfluous paperwork and adding excessive administrative costs.

North Carolina

One of the more punitive states on municipal broadband is North Carolina. It’s legal code is full of administrative hurdles designed to stop any community supported broadband initiatives.

It requires municipalities to:

1. Not cross-subsidize funds
2. Incur debt for construction the way a for-profit company could.
3. Adds additional limitations on using public channels for advertising.
4. Plus further limits on how land-use regulation can and can’t be used.

To make matters worse, North Carolina also requires cities considering broadband services to release sensitive documentation to local private companies and hold a referendum (or vote) to measure the need.

Combined these rules force municipalities to compete with for-profit corporations, but with none of the benefits of being a municipality.

South Carolina

Following North Carolina’s lead, South Carolina makes it incredibly difficult for municipalities to compete by:

1. Forcing municipalities to match their costs to that of private providers.
2. Requiring municipalities to obtain a special Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity from the South Carolina Public Service Commission.

In effect, these laws, especially the matching of costs from private providers, remove any potential advantages municipalities might have had when entering the market.

Tennessee

In many places it can be more cost effective to link community telecommunications efforts with publicly owned power facilities.

This is helpful because the power companies can lay down expensive fiber optic cable conduits at the same time they are doing construction.

These types of projects are referred to as “dig once” project and unfortunately in Tennessee this is illegal.

It’s illegal because Tennessee prohibits municipals from delivering both electric and internet service in any “area where a privately-held cable television operator is providing cable service.”

In short, anywhere demand is concentrated enough to support municipal broadband is off limits.

Wisconsin

Wisconsin requires a public hearing on the proposed ordinance, where the community has 30 days to collect, compile, and submit all records reporting estimated costs of constructing, owning, and operating the broadband service for at least 3 years.

To make it more complex, Wisconsin law requires local governments to contact all current broadband providers to notify them of the community’s attempt to offer broadband service. This allows incumbent providers enough time to dispute the creation before it even breaks ground.

Virginia

Virginia allows municipal electric utilities to offer telecommunication services such as broadband.

But there is a catch.

Legislators in Virginia have forbidden cities from cross-subsidizing money for the purposes of creating a municipal broadband installation. (This is something corporations can do without regulation.)

Then to make matters worse, municipalities are required to artificially inflate prices to match the costs of private industries for materials, taxes, licenses, and more.

Certainly, administrative hurdles can act as one of the largest barricades to a municipality starting their own broadband service when legislators are involved.

No Direct Sale

States affected: Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington

Almost as prevalent as administrative hurdles are states that explicitly restrict the direct sale of broadband (through communities or public power utilities) to end users.

Most of the roadblocks to municipal broadband involve extra paperwork or economic disadvantages, but disallowing the direct sale to consumers effectively removes any ability for municipalities to bring faster speeds to their citizens… besides begging incumbent providers.

In effect, by banning municipal broadband these states are disagreeing with any advantage of community-run internet including local job growth, improved infrastructure, and self-reliability.

The sad thing is, unlike other barriers to entry, there isn’t even a way for cities and communities alike to get around the problem of direct sale, other than convincing the entire state of a complete overhaul of existing law code, which is difficult, time consuming, and at times, seemingly impossible.

Referendum (or Vote)

States affected: Alabama, Colorado, Louisiana, and Minnesota

In states where a referendum is required, municipal broadband cannot even be considered without first passing a referendum or vote.

In essence, a referendum occurs when a petition is submitted to a local or state government to contest or overturn preexisting legislation.

This means that in states where municipal broadband is prohibited, the majority of citizens must vote to support community networks.

While this approach does prevent municipalities from wasting tax payer dollars, according to Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) incumbents typically invest 10 to 60 times more in advertising than local broadband groups.

And it makes sense, because it spending more on advertising companies are able to limit new competition.

Population Caps

States affected: Nevada

In Nevada, municipalities with populations greater than 25,000 and counties with more than 50,000 people are not allowed to offer telecommunication services directly to the customer.

From the state’s perspective, the areas with higher populations should have more providers to cover the amount of people, but in reality, whether a city has a population of 10,000 or 400,000 most people in the US only have access to 1 or 2 providers.

(In fact, 39 million people only have access to one provider.)

While population may be an interesting approach letting the market regulate itself, it doesn’t solve this complex issue as most large providers prefer to serve communities with higher income levels, leaving the less privileged with fewer options.

Feasibility Studies

States affected: Utah

In Utah, local governments are required to prepare, submit, and approve a feasibility study. This study can only be considered “feasible” if it proves without a doubt that the network will cash flow in the first year.

Once again, this sounds great on the service but most businesses rarely appear profitable in their first year of service.

Not to mention, fiber optic cables are expected to last at least 40 years since only the lasers need to be updated at corresponding ends.

Request for Proposal

States affected: Michigan

Michigan requires local governments and cities to produce a Request for Proposal or RFP, which can only be actualized if they receive less than three qualified bids.

Not more than 3, less than 3 bids.

If that isn’t strange enough logic, by requiring a RFP municipalities are essentially forced to use the same procedures as a for-profit business, limiting any of their potential disadvantages.

Excessive Taxes

States affected: Florida

Florida is one of the few states that levies unique taxes on municipal telecommunications services while also requiring a plan proving the network will break even in less than four years.

Once again, this is great on the surface but it downplays the longterm value created for the local community by attracting new businesses and creating more jobs.

Update: Proposed Federal Legislation Would Further Limit Municipal Broadband

Over the past months, former telecommunications lobbyist and current FCC Chairman, Tom Wheeler has repeatedly stated that he would move to stop states from limiting municipal broadband. [5]

This would be a huge win for all of the states listed above, but fortunately for incumbent ISPs Representative Blackburn has rushed to their aid with new legislation that would preempt the FCC from “meddling with state’s rights.”

Her proposed amendment would leave intact the limits on the states above and allow more states to pass laws limiting municipal broadband.

While Blackburn is clearly overlooking the success of municipal broadband provider EPB from her own state, what’s left out of the conversation is that largest percentage of funds for Blackburn’s campaign came directly from the telecommunications industry.
http://broadbandnow.com/report/munic...nd-roadblocks/





FCC Gets Its Chance to Overturn State Limits On Broadband Competition

Tennessee utility wants to serve people who can't get minimum broadband speeds.
Jon Brodkin

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has been saying he’ll use the agency’s authority to overturn state laws that limit municipal broadband networks, and now he has a chance to make good on that promise.

EPB, a community-owned electric utility in Chattanooga, Tennessee, today filed a petition with the FCC asking it to invalidate a state law that prevents it from offering Internet and TV service outside its electric service area. EPB already operates a fiber network that provides broadband, TV, and phone service to people within its territory, and nearby communities have asked for service as well.

Wheeler is already facing opposition from House Republicans and the threat of a lawsuit, but he argues that the FCC can overturn state laws by using its authority to promote competition in local telecommunications markets by removing barriers that prevent investment.

EPB’s petition asks the FCC to do just that, describing how the utility already had to overcome legal challenges from incumbent Internet providers. EPB faced lawsuits from the Tennessee Cable and Telecommunications Association and Comcast, both of which were dismissed in 2008.

EPB served its first fiber customers in 2009 and finished building its network by 2011. Now it's turning a profit that puts money back into the electric system, EPB Chief Operating Officer David Wade told Ars last November. EPB has 60,000 electric customers who also buy the utility’s voice, video, or Internet services.

While EPB offers gigabit uploads and downloads, there are residents in surrounding areas who can’t even get what the FCC considers minimum “broadband” speeds, which are 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream.

“Recognizing the quality and value of the Internet and video programming services that EPB provides, neighboring communities, residents, and businesses located outside of EPB’s electric service territory have asked EPB many times to extend Internet and video services to serve them,” the EPB petition says.

EPB is allowed to offer VoIP phone service to other communities, but it can’t also offer Internet access and video programming, making the prospect economically unsound. To expand into other communities without that restriction, EPB needs the FCC to declare that four words of a 1997 state law—“within its service area”—are unenforceable.

“Since 1999, several bills have been introduced to modify territorial or other limitations applicable to municipal electric systems that provide Internet and video services. None of the bills has been enacted,” the petition says.

EPB’s petition to the FCC is limited to just the Tennessee law, though there are laws limiting municipal broadband in 20 states. We’ve asked the FCC when the agency will take action on the Tennessee petition and whether it has plans to act in other states, and we'll provide an update if we get one.

UPDATE: According to the FCC, "there is no specific timeline for review" of the Tennessee petition and any future ones from other states. These petitions will be handled on a case-by-case basis, so don't expect the FCC to make a single declaration that preempts all state laws inhibiting municipal broadband. "The FCC has the authority to take broader action through rulemakings—but that is not what is happening here," an FCC spokesperson said.

UPDATE 2: It turns out the FCC received two petitions to overturn state laws limiting municipal broadband today, including one from a city in North Carolina. Wheeler issued the following statement: “We have just received the petitions filed by EPB of Chattanooga and the City of Wilson, North Carolina and are reviewing them. We look forward to a full opportunity for comment by all interested parties, and will carefully review the specific legal, factual, and policy issues before us.”
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014...d-competition/





No One Is Paying Attention To The Way Wireless Companies Could Destroy Internet Freedom
Steve Kovach

Over the past few months, there's been a lot of anger, debate, and misinformation regarding the FCC's plans for net neutrality. Since the FCC introduced a proposal that would essentially prioritize some internet traffic over other traffic, something net neutrality advocates fear could ruin the internet.

But the irony is the debate around net neutrality largely ignores the wireless industry. As much of our computing shifts to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, wireless carriers are increasingly becoming the primary gatekeepers to the web.

Two recent moves by AT&T and T-Mobile have net neutrality advocates freaking out. In January, AT&T announced its Sponsored Data program, which lets content providers pay AT&T so usage of their apps and services don't count against a customer's data plan. In June, T-Mobile announced a plan that will let customers stream all the music they want from select services like Spotify without it counting against data plans.

With AT&T's Sponsored data, the fear is that it will allow rich companies that can afford to pay gain an unfair advantage over scrappy startups. That will, in turn, create monopolies over some services and will ultimately result in higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

T-Mobile's case isn't as blatant of a violation against the core principles of net neutrality, but the notion remains that the carrier is inadvertently giving customers an incentive to choose one of its preferred music apps over competitors. If you're a T-Mobile customer, why would you sign up for a service like Rdio when you know you'll be able to stream all you want from Spotify without being penalized?

And while these moves seem good for the consumer in the short term, there's a chance they could set a precedent for some point in the not-so-distant future when the majority of our online activity is on mobile devices, not gadgets tethered to wired broadband.

"No one is bringing wireless into the conversation," BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield said an in interview with Business Insider. "The whole world is going wireless, and yet the big push right now is to heavily regulate what's happening on wired lines."

It's the slippery slope argument. If wireless carriers start giving preferential treatment to some apps and services now, how does that affect the playing field down the road when people rely on it for most, if not all, of their internet access? Won't the wireless carrier moves we're seeing today translate into a few services becoming so big and so dominant that others won't have a chance?

Gary Greenbaum, the CEO of Syntonic Wireless, AT&T's newest Sponsored Data partner, had an alternative take. He sees sponsored data programs like AT&T's as a better way to get content to the consumer without the consumer having to worry about eating into his or her data plan. Syntonic Wireless works with mobile content and app makers to provide their stuff to users without it counting against data plans. Greenbaum's plan is to make online mobile content more like the way TV works today — users should pay for the stuff they want to see, not necessarily the networks that deliver it.

And the little guys don't have to worry, Greenbaum said.

"I signed up for [AT&T Sponsored Data] and I'm a startup," Greenbaum said. "I'm a small company. I don't see any disadvantage in what we're doing. A lot of smaller companies come up to me and see the opportunity, too."

There are even more practical advantages to sponsored data, according to Greenbaum. For example, a school district can provide free access to an online curriculum for students who can't afford internet access at home. And businesses can pay carriers so usage of certain enterprise apps don't count against their employees' data plans.

Even though wireless net neutrality has largely been ignored in the current debate, there's a chance it could get some attention as we see more consolidation in the industry. As has been widely reported, Sprint and T-Mobile are considering a merger, and could formally start the process before the summer is over.

BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk said in an interview with Business Insider that Softbank, the Japanese telecommunications giant that owns a majority of Sprint, could throw in a lot of offers that'll make net neutrality advocates happy in order to sweeten the deal for U.S. regulators. For example, Sprint and T-Mobile could commit to offering unlimited data plans, making sponsored data plans a non-issue.

"As part of the merger discussions with companies trying to gain approval, there's an opportunity for the FCC to do some things on wireless net neutrality," Piecyk said.
http://www.businessinsider.com/wirel...trality-2014-7





Mobile Carriers Charging Differently, But Still Finding Plenty of Ways to Make Money
Ina Fried

A few years ago, cellular companies charged for each call their customers made and gave most of them unlimited data.

As data use exploded and voice calling and texting began to wane, carriers effectively flipped their business model, with most people now getting unlimited calling and texting and paying for the size of data plans they want.

That transition in the U.S. is now largely complete, with the industry having managed to keep its profits high, while changing the way it does business.

A new study from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners finds Verizon has navigated that shift best, with the fewest customers still on unlimited data as well as the largest share of consumers paying more than $100 per month.

“Verizon has succeeded in getting the most out of its smartphone customers,” CIRP partner Josh Lowitz said in a statement. “Not only do more of their customers use Verizon data on additional devices, with limited data plans, their customers also pay for their actual data usage.”

Some 51 percent of Verizon customers play more than $100 per month, including 14 percent that pay upward of $200 per month, according to a survey of about 500 U.S. customers who activated new or used phones between April and June. The same survey found that just 22 percent of Verizon customers have an unlimited data plan, compared with 44 percent for AT&T and 78 percent for both Sprint and T-Mobile.

AT&T and Verizon have been moving away from unlimited data plans, especially for core smartphone customers. AT&T, for example said that, as of the first quarter of this year, about 81 percent of postpaid smartphone subscribers were on some type of usage-based data plan.

Verizon, which reports earnings on Tuesday, has already indicated it had a strong second quarter.

CEO Lowell McAdam said at the recent Sun Valley, Idaho conference that Verizon Wireless expects to report an addition of more than 1.4 million retail postpaid customers with limited churn and profit margins consistent with the last few quarters.

AT&T and Verizon have both been actively pushing customers toward metered data plans, including those that let customers pool data across multiple devices, such as tablets and hotspots. As of last quarter, Verizon said more than half its customers were on shared data plans.

Industry analyst Chetan Sharma noted in a report earlier this year that data now accounts for more than half of revenue for U.S. carriers.

The other big trend has been a move, led by T-Mobile, to separate the cost of the phone from monthly service. Doing so has paved the way for business models that allow customers to upgrade their phones more frequently.
http://recode.net/2014/07/18/mobile-...to-make-money/





China Says to Crack Down on Pornography in Mobile Apps

China will crack down on smartphone apps featuring pornography and obscene content, the government said on Tuesday, the latest move in an official campaign to 'clean the Internet'.

The ruling Communist Party has since last year intensified a campaign against what it calls 'rumors' and 'pornography' online due to their harmful effect on the country.

Critics, however, say the crack down aims to quash anti-government discourse.

The anti-porn campaign targeting mobile apps will encourage companies to remove the offensive material themselves, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on its website.

China will also "enhance abilities to discover pornographic and obscene apps" and "improve the process of punishment", MIIT said.

China has the world's biggest online population, with 632 million Internet users, and the majority - 83 percent as of the end of June - use smartphones to access the web, according to the China Internet Network Information Centre.

Mobile messaging apps are widely used, with Tencent Holdings Ltd's WeChat one of the most popular in China. Users of WeChat say there are chat groups dedicated to sharing lewd animated clips and images. Tencent declined to comment.

Other Chinese social networking and messaging apps include Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's [IPO-BABA.N] Laiwang, Xiaomi's Miliao, and Yixin, jointly developed by China Telecom Corp and NetEase Inc.

(Reporting by Paul Carsten; Editing by Miral Fahmy)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0FR10320140722





Those Parental-Control Filters? As Few as 4% are Signing Up
Nicole Kobie

Broadband customers are overwhelmingly choosing not to use parental-control systems foisted on ISPs by the government - with take-up in the single digits for three of the four major broadband providers.

Last year, the government pushed ISPs to roll out network-level filters, forcing new customers to make an "active" decision about whether or not they want to use them.

An Ofcom report has revealed that the vast majority of new customers are not opting for the filters.

Only 5% of new BT customers signed up, 8% opted in for Sky and 4% for Virgin Media. TalkTalk rolled out a parental-control system two years before the government required it and has had much better take-up of its offering, with 36% of customers signing up for it.

Ofcom noted that the figures represented take-up only at the time of account activation, and said it's possible more customers turned on the filters afterwards.

Indeed, Sky said it had more take-up from existing customers, who aren't yet forced to make a decision on using the filters, than from new ones, who must make a choice. However, it didn't specify how many more signed up.

Ofcom said about 40% of British homes would likely have children in them, but noted that customer demographics varied by ISP. BT said about 20-25% of its customer base has children "of a relevant age".

Ofcom added that previous research showed about 42% of British homes with children already had parental controls of some sort before the rollout. Indeed, BT noted that about 9% of its customers - which it said works out to 40% of its customers with young children - use a device-based filter rather than the network-level filter.

BT added that the network-level filter was new, and believes that with further awareness take-up will increase from the current 5%.

Virgin Media pointed out filters are just one way it helps parents to keep children safe online, pointing out that its numbers may be low because the systems are so new. We've asked for comment from the other ISPs, but have yet to hear back.

We've also asked for comment from MP Claire Perry, who led the efforts to get ISPs to offer the filters, but her office said she had no response as she no longer acts as advisor to the PM on the issue.

Unavoidable choice

The low take-up is despite all new customers being forced to say whether they want the filters or not during account setup.

While BT, Sky and TalkTalk are showing all their new customers the "unavoidable choice" on setting up filters, Virgin Media managed to show the message to only 35%.

Virgin pinned the blame on its engineers. "The majority of new Virgin Media installations involve an engineer visit," the report said. "Virgin Media believes that, in many cases, the engineer runs the broadband activation process and bypasses or ignores the filtering choice. It has recognised that this is a failure in the process and indicated it is taking steps to address this gap."

The ISP said it would be "dramatically streamlining" the process so engineers stop avoiding it, and has shown additional prompts for the service to its customers, with the vast majority of users signing up for its Web Safe controls after activating their broadband.

But do they work?

Ofcom's report describes the systems used by the ISPs, but the regulator disappointingly didn't bother to test the effectiveness of the filters - something we at PC Pro have done on multiple occasions.

Ofcom admitted that filters are easily circumvented, but suggests it requires a "dedicated and technically competent user, supported by a range of advice available online". Our research suggests some of the filters can be dodged by using basic proxy services, including Google Images or Google Translate - and yes, PC Pro has been blamed by one ISP for spreading information about how to get around filters.

The report suggests the ISPs have "taken some steps to limit the extend of circumvention" but acknowledged that a VPN would bypass all the filters.

We've asked the Department for Media, Culture and Sport if it will test the filters efficacy, but have yet to hear back.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadban...are-signing-up





Private Browsing Settings Aren't as Private as You Think
Sylvan Lane

Let's be honest: There's probably a few things you've been looking at online that you don't want anyone to know about.

Whether you're secretly searching for a gift for someone who uses your computer, planning a surprise event or just looking at websites you'd prefer to keep to yourself, there are plenty of reasons to want to keep your web history in the shadows.

There a few different ways of doing this, and they all depend on who it is you want to hide your history from. But here's the thing: The websites you visit in private browsing modes can still be tied back to you. Even if the people on your computer can't see which websites you've been visiting, your Internet provider and the websites you're visiting can. Here's how it works.

What private browsing modes do

Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox,Opera and Internet Explorer all have private browsing modes you can use to make sure the websites you visit don't appear in your browsing history. Typically, your browser will record a running log of each website you visit and store information about what you entered into search and information forms on websites.

So, if you found an awesome T-shirt on an online store, but can't remember which store it was or what you searched to find it in the first place, your browser will store that information so you can use it later.

Your browser will also store cookies from websites, which are small files of data that help tailor a website to you and your computer. Whenever you go to a website that already has you logged in, remembers what you were last looking at or displays ads that eerily fit what you've been searching for, that's a cookie at work.

When you enable private browsing modes, you are telling your browser not to record which websites you're visiting, and telling it not to use or download any cookies. So, if you set up an account with an online jewelry store to find an engagement ring for your girlfriend, and she uses the same computer as you, she won't be able to see any of that if you only do it in a private browsing mode.

However, there are a few security flaws that can leak this information back onto your browser. In 2010, professors at Stanford University found that while Firefox won't record your history during a private browsing session, it still records which sites on which you've installed SSL certificates (which enable secure, encrypted information exchange indicated by the "https" in front of the URL) and allowed specific permissions.

So if you download an SSL certificate from a website or told that site specifically to stop displaying pop-ups and downloading cookies, all of that information is still stored on Firefox.

Also, if you log into your Google account in Chrome's Incognito mode, the browser will record your history and remember your cookies, which effectively ends the private session.

Private browsing modes — by the admission of their developers — only try to hide your history from other users of the same computer, and there are still ways to get around that. If you're looking for something that prevents anyone from tracking your browsing history, a normal browser isn't going to cut it on its own.

What private browsing modes don't do

Even if the private browsing mode doesn't keep a record of which sites you visit, it's still possible to track all of that information with your Internet Protocol (IP) address. Your IP address is both an identifier and a locator, telling the Internet who you are and from where in the world and on a computer network you're connecting to the Internet.

Any device that can access the Internet has an IP address, which is the Internet's version of the return address on an mailed envelope. Whenever you send a request over the Internet, your IP address is included.

Because every request sent over the Internet is tied to an IP address, anyone with the capacity to monitor which IP address sends requests to a server can figure out where you've been going online and to whom you've been sending messages. That's how the NSA metadata collection program worked in a nutshell: The agency collected information about which IP addresses were sending requests to each other with the goal of figuring out the composition of terrorist networks.

Private browsing settings can prevent your history from being recorded on your browser, but they cannot prevent your IP address from being tied to those requests. Your Internet provider, law enforcement much more local than the NSA and any website that can install tracking cookies or access your search history can track those requests. The federal government can legally request your Internet history, too.

Also, anything you download and any bookmarks you make during a private browsing session will remain on your computer. Expecting those to go away when the session is over is like expecting a package you got in the mail to disappear just because you threw out its box. The file is now on your hard drive, and it will take a lot more than deleting your browser history to get rid if it.

There's no way to avoid using your IP address in an Internet request. However, there are ways to hide it.

How to privately browse

Tor, previously known as The Onion Router, is a network that allows users to surf the web anonymously by routing your traffic through a series of computers before connecting you with your intended destination.

You can find a comprehensive explanation of the technology behind Tor here, but essentially, the only computer that knows the start and end points of the request is yours. All of this together makes it so your request cannot be tied directly to your IP address, and even the NSA has difficulty getting into the system.

No system is perfect, and there could be a security gap the NSA is exploiting that we don't know about (remember Heartbleed?). But Tor has been around since 2005, and it's done its job pretty well for the past decade.

DuckDuckGo, a private search engine that doesn't store your personal information, won't send any of it to the websites you access through its service. While the websites will still know you visited them through your IP address, it won't send the search phrases you used to them.

This will prevent third-party cookies from associating certain phrases with you, and using DuckDuckGo will let you search the Internet without a filter constructed from previous browsing and information.
http://mashable.com/2014/07/21/how-p...rowsing-works/





The 'Fingerprinting' Tracking Tool That's Virtually Impossible to Block
Julia Angwin

A new, extremely persistent type of online tracking is shadowing visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn.com.

The type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor’s web browser to draw a hidden image, and was first documented in a upcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user’s device a number that uniquely identifies it.

Like other tracking tools, canvas fingerprints are used to build profiles of users based on the websites they visit — profiles that shape which ads, news articles or other types of content are displayed to them.

But fingerprints are unusually hard to block: They can’t be prevented by using standard web browser privacy settings or using anti-tracking tools such as AdBlock Plus.

The researchers found canvas fingerprinting computer code, primarily written by a company called AddThis, on 5% of the top 100,000 websites. Most of the code was on websites that use AddThis’ social media sharing tools. Other fingerprinters include the German digital marketer Ligatus and the Canadian dating site Plentyoffish. (A list of all the websites on which researchers found the code is here).

Rich Harris, chief executive of AddThis, said that the company began testing canvas fingerprinting earlier this year as a possible way to replace “cookies,” the traditional way that users are tracked, via text files installed on their computers.

“We’re looking for a cookie alternative,” Harris said in an interview.

Harris said the company considered the privacy implications of canvas fingerprinting before launching the test, but decided “this is well within the rules and regulations and laws and policies that we have.”

He added that the company has only used the data collected from canvas fingerprints for internal research and development. The company won’t use the data for ad targeting or personalization if users install the AddThis opt-out cookie on their computers, he said.

Arvind Narayanan, the computer science professor who led the Princeton research team, countered that forcing users to take AddThis at its word about how their data will be used, is “not the best privacy assurance.”

Device fingerprints rely on the fact that every computer is slightly different: Each contains different fonts, different software, different clock settings and other distinctive features. Computers automatically broadcast some of their attributes when they connect to another computer over the Internet.

Tracking companies have long sought to use those differences to uniquely identify devices for online advertising purposes, particularly as web users are increasingly using ad-blocking software and deleting cookies.

In May 2012, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, noticed that a web programming feature called “canvas” could allow for a new type of fingerprint –- by pulling in different attributes than a typical device fingerprint.

In June, the Tor Project added a feature to its privacy-protecting web browser to notify users when a website attempts to use the canvas feature and sends a blank canvas image. But other web browsers did not add notifications for canvas fingerprinting.

A year later, Russian programmer Valentin Vasilyev noticed the study and added a canvas feature to freely available fingerprint code that he had posted on the Internet. The code was immediately popular.

But Vasilyev said that the company he was working for at the time decided against using the fingerprint technology. “We collected several million fingerprints but we decided against using them “We collected several million fingerprints but we decided against using thembecause accuracy was 90%,” he said, “and many of our customers were on mobile and the fingerprinting doesn’t work well on mobile.”

Vasilyev added that he wasn’t worried about the privacy concerns of fingerprinting.

“The fingerprint itself is a number which in no way is related to a personality,” he said.

AddThis improved upon Vasilyev’s code by adding new tests and using the canvas to draw a pangram “Cwm fjordbank glyphs vext quiz” — a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. This allows the company to capture slight variations in how each letter is displayed.

AddThis said it rolled out the feature to a small portion of the 13 million websites on which its technology appears, but is considering ending its test soon. “It’s not uniquely identifying enough,” Harris said.

AddThis did not notify the websites on which the code was placed because “we conduct R&D projects in live environments to get the best results from testing,” according to a spokeswoman.

She added that the company does not use any of the data it collects – whether from canvas fingerprints or traditional cookie-based tracking – from government websites including WhiteHouse.gov for ad targeting or personalization.

The company offered no such assurances about data it routinely collects from visitors to other sites, such as YouPorn.com. YouPorn.com did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica about whether it was aware of AddThis’ test of canvas fingerprinting on its website.
http://mashable.com/2014/07/21/impos...tracking-tool/





EFF's Snoop-Stopping, Ad-Smashing Privacy Badger Plugin Hits Beta
Zach Miners

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights group, has released a downloadable plugin for Chrome and Firefox designed to stop third parties from tracking people’s Web browsing.

The tool, Privacy Badger, is in beta and comes following an alpha launch several months ago. Since then more than 150,000 people have installed it, the EFF said Monday.

The extension is not meant to block online ads outright. It’s a broader privacy tool designed to stop third parties from gathering a record of the pages people visit across the Web.

“Our aim is not to block ads, but to prevent non-consensual invasions of people’s privacy because we believe they are inherently objectionable,” the group says.

However, because third-party trackers often exist to serve ads, Privacy Badger users will likely see less of them.

The tool is also designed to stop the tracking that happens when people click on social media widgets such as the Facebook “like” or Twitter tweet button on sites outside of Facebook or Twitter.

Third-party trackers are companies that embed different content like images, scripts and advertising into websites. The companies often use digital files or “cookies” stored in people’s browsers to keep track of their browsing activity. The content these trackers embed on sites often exists alongside the site’s own content, such as news articles on nytimes.com.

Privacy Badger is designed to keep track of these different sources of content. And if the same source appears to be tracking a person’s browser across different websites, then the extension is meant to stop the tracker from gathering the data.

“This extension is designed to automatically protect your privacy from third-party trackers that load invisibly when you browse the Web,” the EFF says.

Sometimes third-party domains provide content that is necessary for the website to function. In these cases the extension will allow it, but block it from gathering cookies, the EFF says.

The extension uses algorithms to determine whether a domain is tracking a user. Because it’s still in beta, it probably won’t catch them all.

There are a number of other privacy-aimed software apps for Web browsing, such as Disconnect, AdBlock Plus and Ghostery.

But with its tool, the EFF says it aims to provide something that works automatically without custom configuration.

A built-in browser tool for blocking third-party tracking was conceived years ago by privacy advocates, called “Do Not Track.” The setting is currently in the major browsers, but turning it on doesn’t do much, because many companies don’t honor it.

The EFF said companies blocked by Privacy Badger can unblock themselves by committing to respect people’s Do Not Track requests.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/24565...-tracking.html





New Surveillance Whistleblower: The NSA Violates the Constitution

A former Obama administration official calls attention to unaccountable mass surveillance conducted under a 1981 executive order.
Conor Friedersdorf

John Napier Tye is speaking out to warn Americans about illegal spying. The former State Department official, who served in the Obama administration from 2011 to 2014, declared Friday that ongoing NSA surveillance abuses are taking place under the auspices of Executive Order 12333, which came into being in 1981, before the era of digital communications, but is being used to collect them promiscuously. Nye alleges that the Obama administration has been violating the Constitution with scant oversight from Congress or the judiciary.

"The order as used today threatens our democracy," he wrote in The Washington Post. "I am coming forward because I think Americans deserve an honest answer to the simple question: What kind of data is the NSA collecting on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?"

If you've paid casual attention to the Edward Snowden leaks and statements by national-security officials, you might be under the impression that the Obama administration is already on record denying that this sort of spying goes on. In fact, denials about NSA spying are almost always carefully worded to address activities under particular legal authorities, like Section 215 of the Patriot Act or Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. An official will talk about what is or isn't done "under this program," eliding the fact that the NSA spies on Americans under numerous different programs, despite regularly claiming to be an exclusively foreign spy agency.

Executive Order 12333 is old news to national-security insiders and the journalists who cover them, but is largely unknown to the American public, in part because officials have a perverse institutional incentive to obscure its role. But some insiders are troubled by such affronts to representative democracy. A tiny subset screw up the courage to inform their fellow citizens.

Tye is but the latest surveillance whistleblower, though he took pains to distinguish himself from Snowden and his approach to dissent. "Before I left the State Department, I filed a complaint with the department’s inspector general, arguing that the current system of collection and storage of communications by U.S. persons under Executive Order 12333 violates the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures," Tye explained. "I have also brought my complaint to the House and Senate intelligence committees and to the inspector general of the NSA."

These steps—which many say Snowden should've taken—produced no changes to the objectionable NSA spying and wouldn't be garnering attention at all if not for Snowden's leaks. It is nevertheless telling that another civil servant with deep establishment loyalties and every incentive to keep quiet felt compelled to speak out. As Tye put it:

I have never made any unauthorized disclosures of classified information, nor would I ever do so. I fully support keeping secret the targets, sources and methods of U.S. intelligence as crucial elements of national security. I was never a disgruntled federal employee; I loved my job at the State Department. I left voluntarily and on good terms to take a job outside of government. A draft of this article was reviewed and cleared by the State Department and the NSA to ensure that it contained no classified material.

When I started at the State Department, I took an oath to protect the Constitution of the United States. I don’t believe that there is any valid interpretation of the Fourth Amendment that could permit the government to collect and store a large portion of U.S. citizens’ online communications, without any court or congressional oversight, and without any suspicion of wrongdoing. Such a legal regime risks abuse in the long run, regardless of whether one trusts the individuals in office at a particular moment.


This act of conscience illuminates yet another path a surveillance whistleblower can take. If more current and former federal officials believe the NSA is in flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment, they should consider declaring themselves too. "Based in part on classified facts that I am prohibited by law from publishing," Tye wrote, "I believe that Americans should be even more concerned about the collection and storage of their communications under Executive Order 12333 than under Section 215." I wonder what he saw but isn't revealing.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...merges/374722/





Apple iPhones Allow Extraction of Deep Personal Data, Researcher Finds
Joseph Menn

Personal data including text messages, contact lists and photos can be extracted from iPhones through previously unpublicized techniques by Apple Inc employees, the company acknowledged this week.

The same techniques to circumvent backup encryption could be used by law enforcement or others with access to the "trusted" computers to which the devices have been connected, according to the security expert who prompted Apple's admission.

In a conference presentation this week, researcher Jonathan Zdziarski showed how the services take a surprising amount of data for what Apple now says are diagnostic services meant to help engineers.

Users are not notified that the services are running and cannot disable them, Zdziarski said. There is no way for iPhone users to know what computers have previously been granted trusted status via the backup process or block future connections.

“There’s no way to `unpair' except to wipe your phone,” he said in a video demonstration he posted Friday showing what he could extract from an unlocked phone through a trusted computer.

As word spread about Zdziarski’s initial presentation at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference, some cited it as evidence of Apple collaboration with the National Security Agency.

Apple denied creating any “back doors” for intelligence agencies.

“We have designed iOS so that its diagnostic functions do not compromise user privacy and security, but still provides needed information to enterprise IT departments, developers and Apple for troubleshooting technical issues,” Apple said. “A user must have unlocked their device and agreed to trust another computer before that computer is able to access this limited diagnostic data.”

But Apple also posted its first descriptions of the tools on its own website, and Zdziarski and others who spoke with the company said they expected it to make at least some changes to the programs in the future.

Zdziarski said he did not believe that the services were aimed at spies. But he said that they extracted much more information than was needed, with too little disclosure.

Security industry analyst Rich Mogull said Zdziarski’s work was overhyped but technically accurate.

“They are collecting more than they should be, and the only way to get it is to compromise security,” said Mogull, chief executive officer of Securosis.

Mogull also agreed with Zdziarski that since the tools exist, law enforcement will use them in cases where the desktop computers of targeted individuals can be confiscated, hacked or reached via their employers.

“They’ll take advantage of every legal tool that they have and maybe more,” Mogull said of government investigators.

Asked if Apple had used the tools to fulfill law enforcement requests, Apple did not immediately respond.

For all the attention to the previously unknown tools and other occasional bugs, Apple’s phones are widely considered more secure than those using Google Inc's rival Android operating system, in part because Google does not have the power to send software fixes directly to those devices.

(Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0FV01D20140726





Google Under Fire from Regulators Over Response to EU Privacy Ruling
Julia Fioretti

Google's handling of "right to be forgotten" requests from European citizens will come under fire from the continent's privacy watchdogs on Thursday, after the search engine restricted the removal of Internet links to European sites only.

European data protection authorities are meeting representatives of Google, Microsoft, which operates the Bing search engine, and Yahoo to discuss the implementation of the landmark ruling from Europe's top court upholding people's right to request that outdated links be removed from Internet search results.

European Union privacy watchdogs have several concerns on the way the ruling, which has pitted privacy advocates against free speech defenders, is being implemented, particularly by Google, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Regulators can take Google to court if it refuses to meet their demands, as happened in Spain where the "right to be forgotten" ruling originated.

Under particular scrutiny is Google's decision to only remove results from its European search engines, such as google.co.uk, meaning anyone can easily access the hidden information by switching to the widely used google.com.

Experts have said this effectively defeats the purpose of the ruling, which gives people the right to ask search engines to stop links to information deemed "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive" from appearing in searches for their name.

"Google has claimed that the decision is restricted to localized versions of Google," said Ashley Hurst, a partner at Olswang, a law firm. "There appears to be no basis for that claim at all."

Google declined to comment ahead of Thursday's meeting.

TRANSPARENCY VERSUS PRIVACY

Another issue likely to be raised by the EU watchdogs is Google's decision to notify the owners of the websites that have been removed from search results.

This sparked controversy three weeks ago when Europe's most popular search engine removed links to an article by a well-known BBC journalist about an ex-Wall Street banker and several links to stories in Britain's Guardian newspaper.

The authors of the stories promptly wrote about the removal, thereby drawing attention to the issue and feeding speculation about who requested the removal. Google eventually reinstated a few links to the Guardian articles.

EU privacy watchdogs are concerned about the effect the notification process could have on people making the requests, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Google already notifies the owners of websites that are removed from search results due to copyright infringements.

Privacy advocates and legal experts said the backlash over the newspaper articles showed the difficulty of implementing the privacy ruling given the broad criteria laid down by the court for information that is inadequate or irrelevant.

"We are likely to see complainants dressing up libel complaints as data protection complaints as it is easier to prove that data is inaccurate than it is to prove that it is libelous," Hurst said. "This will lead to some difficult decisions for Google."

EUROPEAN PRIVACY TOUR

California-based Google faces a number of privacy headaches in Europe, where rules protecting people's personal data are much stricter than in the United States.

While the EU has been discussing a major overhaul of its pre-Internet era data protection laws for over two years, the debate heated up last year after revelations that the United States had been conducting mass surveillance programs involving European citizens and some heads of state.

U.S. web companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, came under increased scrutiny over their handling of swathes of personal data in Europe.

In a sign of the importance Google is attaching to the privacy debate in Europe, it has recruited a panel of high profile academics, policymakers and civil society experts to advise it on how to implement the ruling as it ploughs through the over 70,000 requests it has received so far.

Separately, a group consisting of representatives from the EU's 28 data protection regulators are developing guidelines to help them deal with complaints against Google in a coherent manner, given the differences in national data protection legislation. Thursday's meeting will feed into that process.

Complaints from people whose requests have been refused by Google have begun to trickle in. The British privacy regulator had received 23 complaints by Tuesday afternoon, a spokesman said, while complaints to the French and Italian authorities were still in single figures.

(Editing by Mark Potter)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0FT1AZ20140724





Sony's Walkman Makes Comeback

New $700 device is aimed at upscale users
Kana Inagaki

Thirty five years after its debut, Sony Corp.'s 6758.TO +0.09% Walkman is enjoying a little comeback.

But while the original cassette player of 1979 heralded the age of mass-market, portable music, the new $700 Walkman is aimed at premium buyers, as technological advances help more audio-on-the go users head upscale.

The ZX1, as Sony's gadget is called, is in many ways the antithesis of Apple Inc. AAPL -0.52% 's slender iPod, and the Walkman's own svelte predecessors. It has a heavy, bulky body that houses 128 gigabytes of storage for ultra-high-quality music files. Sony says each ZX1 is manually carved from a block of expensive aluminum, which helps reduce noise.

"The message for our designers and engineers was: please create a good product without worrying about the cost," said Kenji Nakada, Sony's sound product planner.

Unlike many earlier Sony attempts at high-end consumer electronics, the ZX1 is selling well—at least in Japan. The new Walkman quickly sold out after hitting Japanese stores in December. Since February, the product has made its debut in Europe and other parts of Asia, although its launch date in the U.S. hasn't been set.

Despite the success, the ZX1 remains a niche product: Sony declined to give sales figures but analysts estimate only several thousand units have been sold so far in Japan.

And nobody expects the new Walkman—however successful—to go far in turning around Sony's chronic losses. The company said it lost $1.3 billion in the fiscal year ended March, and expects to stay in the red through March 2015. Televisions and games remain Sony's mainstay products in consumer electronics.

Still, the ZX1's popularity does highlight what industry watchers say is a shift among some portable-audio buyers, as advances in Internet speed and data storage allow consumers, who long opted for convenience over sound quality, to have both. Older-generation digital-audio players managed to store tens of thousands of songs in slim devices by compressing the audio files, a process that sacrificed sound quality.

"An entire generation missed the visceral emotion of listening to uncompressed audio," said Sony Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai, during an electronics show in January.

Now, faster and bigger storage memory chips as well as speedier Internet connections allow gadgets like the Walkman ZX1 to play, store and transfer heavier music files that the industry has dubbed "high-resolution audio" without losing too much of the sound data from original recordings. Longer battery life also allows the Walkman to play heavy audio files and last around 16 hours, although that is still about one-fifth of the hours possible for other portable players playing compressed files, according to Mr. Nakada.

Sony claims the format provides better sound quality than CDs, from deep bass tones to high-pitched sounds, including the moment when the singer takes a breath. High-resolution audio files contain more than three times as much audio data than CDs.

Sony has rolled out more than 25 types of high-resolution audio devices since September, including a cheaper Walkman model; it says the products made up more than 20% of all audio sales for the October through March period.

Other firms are also experimenting in the area. South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. 005930.SE -0.37% , LG Electronics Inc. 066570.SE +0.54% and Taiwan's HTC Corp. 2498.TW +2.54% are all coming out with smartphones that claim to support high-resolution audio files.

In the U.S., sales of premium headphones have doubled in the past three years, according to research firm NPD Group. Japanese research firm Fuji Chimera Research Institute Inc. projects that high-resolution audio devices will account for about 20% of sales in the global audio market by 2020 in terms of value from less than around 5% now.

"People are becoming more quality conscious with high-definition television and this is the same parallel in the audio world," said David Chesky, the founder of HDtracks, a U.S. digital-music store that offers high-resolution audio files. The firm has more than doubled its revenue each year since its launch in 2008.

Tento Koyama, a 19-year-old university student, is one consumer who is willing to pay extra for sound quality. In mid-May, Mr. Koyama lined up for one hour to take part in a headphone festival event in Tokyo where Sony's ZX1 Walkman was displayed.

"I think this one is the best Walkman in its history," Mr. Koyama said, after listening to the ZX1 at a crowded Sony booth. "I don't mind the price."

Still, analysts say hurdles remain high for mass adoption since differences in sound quality are harder to detect than differences in TV picture quality.

"To get it to the mainstream, it's an effort to actually get people to listen to the difference," said Benjamin Arnold, an industry analyst at NPD Group.

And just as with TVs and smartphones, Sony already faces a growing challenge from rival audio device makers.

After trying out the ZX1 Walkman for about 40 minutes at a consumer-electronics store in Tokyo, Mr. Tamaki, a 34-year-old employee at a publishing firm who only gave his last name, said he's leaning toward buying a high-quality portable audio player by Iriver Ltd. 060570.KQ -0.95% , a South Korean firm founded by former Samsung officials. That product cost twice as much as Sony's ZX1.

"This one is better than Sony's," he concluded.
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_e...MDEwNjExNDYyWj

















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