P2P-Zone  

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

Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 25-11-20, 07:40 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 28th, ’20

Since 2002

































November 28th, 2020




GitHub Revamps Copyright Takedown Policy after Restoring YouTube-dl

The company is also establishing a $1 million legal defense fund for developers.
Igor Bonifacic

The source code for YouTube-dl, a tool you can use to download videos from YouTube, is back up on GitHub after the code repository took it down in October following a DMCA complaint from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Citing a letter from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the EFF), GitHub says it ultimately found that the RIAA’s complaint didn’t have any merit.

The RIAA argued the tool ran afoul of section 1201 of the US copyright law by giving people the means to circumvent YouTube’s DRM. It also claimed the software’s documentation invited people to pirate several popular songs. In its letter, the EFF dissects the RIAA’s claims, highlighting where the organization had either misinterpreted the law or how the code of YouTube-dl works. “Importantly, YouTube-dl does not decrypt video streams that are encrypted with commercial DRM technologies, such as Widevine, that are used by subscription videos sites, such as Netflix,” the organization points out when it comes to the RIAA’s primary claim.

This is the best possible outcome of the RIAA's attack on youtube-dl. Good on @GitHub for standing up for developers against DMCA § 1201 abuses.

The @EFF did amazing work representing the project, and you should read their letter: https://t.co/Whh0cKTgIFhttps://t.co/BT1aovWZx7
— Filippo Valsorda ����❤️ ✊ (@FiloSottile) November 16, 2020

If there’s a silver lining to the episode, it’s that GitHub is implementing new policies to avoid a repeat of a repeat situation moving forward. First, it says a team of both technical and legal experts will manually evaluate every single section 1201 claim. In instances where there’s any ambiguity to a claim, the company says it will err on the side of developers and leave their repository online. If the company’s technical and legal teams ultimately find any issues with a project, GitHub will give its owners the chance to address those problems before it takes down their work. Following a takedown, it will continue to give people the chance to recover their data — provided it doesn’t include any offending code.

GitHub is also establishing a $1 million defense fund to provide legal aid to developers against suspect section 1201 claims, as well as doubling down on its lobbying work to amend the DMCA and other similar copyright laws across the world.
https://www.engadget.com/github-yout...222301386.html





Revisions to Copyright Act to Tackle Online Pirating

Intellectual Property Japan
Hitomi Iwase, Michiko Kinoshita

Introduction

In the past decade, the Japanese manga and entertainment industries have been severely damaged by pirate sites which typically operate on servers located in jurisdictions lacking sufficient copyright protection. For example, the pirate site 'Manga-mura' shocked Japanese society by illegally uploading a large amount of manga and other content that was accessible for free, costing the manga industry up to an estimated Y300 billion.(1) Pirate sites are linked to websites and apps, resulting in a large number of people accessing illegal content. Such websites and apps which do not host pirated content themselves but rather post or provide URLs or links to pirate sites are called 'leech (web)sites and apps' in Japan (see Figure 1). The previous Copyright Act did not provide sufficient measures to address the proliferation of pirate sites. Website blocking in this context is not clearly legal under Japanese law and it is often difficult to identify and take action against pirate site operators (although Manga-mura was closed, and its alleged operator was arrested). To address these issues, the 2020 revisions to the Copyright Act introduced new measures to crack down on leech websites and expand the scope of illegal downloading.

Crackdown on leech websites and apps

Leech websites and apps would aid copyright infringement by pirate sites but did not constitute direct copyright infringement under the previous Copyright Act; thus, copyright owners were unable to seek an injunction against leech websites and apps. However, under the amended act, the following actions can now trigger civil and criminal liability for copyright infringement:

• posting URLs or links to pirated content on leech websites and apps; and
• operating leech websites and apps.

Websites and apps are considered to be leech website and apps if they specifically lead to pirate sites (determined by the number of URLs and other factors). With regard to operating leech websites and apps, copyright infringement can be established simply by a website operator leaving URLs or links to pirated content on the website despite being able to remove them.

Under these provisions, copyright protection does not extend to derivative works. In other words, providing a link to access unauthorised derivative works is non-infringing. In addition, , platform service providers such as YouTube or Google are not liable, except for malicious cases such as ignoring requests from copyright owners for the removal of links for a considerable period without justifiable grounds.

On the other hand, both actions can be found to constitute copyright infringement for linking to pirated content provided in a streaming format or linking to pirated content uploaded to servers outside of Japan.

Copyright owners can seek an injunction and compensation for damages against infringers under these provisions. Further, the following criminal penalties apply:

• a provider of URLs may be subject to imprisonment for up to three years, a fine of up to Y3 million or both; and
• an operator of leech sites may be subject to imprisonment for up to five years, a fine of up to Y5 million or both.

The revisions for cracking down on leech websites took effect on 1 October 2020.

Expansion of definition of 'illegal downloading'

Even before the recent amendment to the Copyright Act, downloading pirated music or videos even for private use was already illegal and subject to claims for damages or an injunction and criminal penalties as a prosecutable intentional offence,(3) but downloading other pirated works such as manga was not illegal. In 2019, in order to address the extensive damage caused by the downloading of pirated content other than music or videos, the government attempted to outlaw and criminalise the downloading of all other pirated works, including manga, photographs and books. However, this attempt was abandoned due to opposition on the grounds that the draft amendment act would have outlawed and criminalised such a broad range of downloading that downloading even mere screenshots may have been considered illegal, which could have had a tremendous effect on information gathering. Although the 2020 amendment makes it illegal to download anything other than music or videos, downloads that cause only minor damage to the copyright owner (eg, screenshots), are exempted.

To be more precise, the following acts are exempted:

• unintentionally downloading pirated content, even when grossly negligent;
• downloading derivative works and parodies;
• downloading or screenshotting minor amounts of pirated content, such as a couple of panels of manga; and
• downloading pirated content under special circumstances that do not unfairly prejudice the interests of the copyright owner.

Notably, it is not illegal to simply view pirated content in a streaming format. However, as with the amendment to rules on leech websites, whether pirated content was uploaded to a server outside of Japan is irrelevant to the question of liability.

Criminal penalties against infringers under these amended provisions include imprisonment for up to two years, a fine of up to Y2 million, or both. However, to establish criminal liability, the following elements must be established in addition to the basic elements of copyright infringement:

• the work is fee based (ie, presented to the public for value); and
• the downloading was done continuously or repeatedly.

The revisions to expand the definition of illegal downloading will take effect on 1 January 2021.
https://www.internationallawoffice.c...nline-pirating





Amazon Patents a New Technique to Detect Piracy Makers

While adding watermarks isn't new, Amazon's way of making it is different.
Manikanta Immanni

Amazon was granted a patent to try a new technique to detect the piracy makers in its Prime Video platform. The largest retailer is facing copyright infringement issues just as any other OTT and has now come with an old yet novel technique called “encoding identifiers into customized manifest data” to detect the source user making the duplicate content.

Amazon’s New Way of Finding Pirates

As Amazon expanded to streaming service, it has added its industry’s rivals’ general problems – piracy. The piracy makers are pulling any new title released on Amazon’s Prime Video to serve for free.

While many have tried reporting the pirate sites warning users, a straight path to find the pirates is yet to be found.

In that pursuit, Amazon has just come up with a new technique called “encoding identifiers into customized manifest data,” which is more like adding a watermark on the content to detect pirates. While adding watermarks isn’t new, Amazon’s way of making it is different, and hopes to give better results than those that failed earlier.

Under this new scheme, Amazon adds a unique identifier (User ID) to the content’s customized manifest data when a user watches it. Adding it to manifest data instead of content is different, and it’s invisible to the human eye but detectable when recorded through a camera!

These specifications make it clear streaming for the user, yet giving Amazon a chance to spot the pirate user.

Amazon Patents

The above image depicts the flow of action of Amazon’s new plan. As TorrentFreak explained from the parent’s technical paper,

“The subscriber in question has a unique identifier (ID:1011). When this person plays the video, Amazon generates customized manifest data (126) based on this ID.

This is used as input for the Fire TV player (124), which requests video data based on the data and decodes the media server’s video fragments (122). When the subscriber records the video with an HD camera in this example, this includes a code or mark that points back to the manifest data.

However, unbeknownst to user 102, a pattern of version information 110 is encoded into at least some of the content fragments (e.g., 112-118) identified by customized manifest data 126 and is recoverable as a version pattern 132 that can identify user 102 as the source of the recorded episode.”

Making the identifier hard to detect is another clever move since it makes it hard for the pirates to remove it. Amazon also mentions that this technique works on pre-uploaded videos and live streams like the NFL.

It’s unknown whether Amazon has been using this technology already or not, but it will be interesting to see how effective this strategy is.
https://techdator.net/amazon-patents...piracy-makers/





Moviegoing On the Brink After Nealy 700 Theaters Reclose Overnight in North America

Amid an alarming surge in COVID-19 cases, 646 theaters closed late last week in the U.S. along with 60 locations in Canada.
Pamela McClintock

It's no surprise why box office observers are trying to not freak out.

Over the Nov. 20-22 weekend, Blumhouse and Universal's campy body-swap reboot Freaky came in No. 1 with $1.2 million in its second outing, a steep 66 percent drop. That's by far one of the lowest chart-topping grosses of all time — much less for the weekend before Thanksgiving, one of the most lucrative corridors of the year for the moviegoing. Normally, the film itself would be blamed. But not in this case.

Heading into the weekend, 646 movie theaters in the U.S. closed down again virtually overnight amid an alarming surge in COVID-19 cases, according to Comscore. There were also 60 cinemas reclosures in Canada, meaning that in the span of several days, the North American box office lost 706 locations compared to a week ago.

Domestic revenue for the weekend came in at anywhere from $4 million-$5 million — a final tally will be revealed Monday — down as much as 50 percent from the previous frame and the lowest since the box office recovery began in late August with the release of Unhinged and then Tenet.

That recovery was already strained. Cinemas in Los Angeles and New York City have never been allowed to reopen, posing a major hurtle. Without the two largest moviegoing markets in play, most Hollywood studios delayed their fall and year-end holiday event pics, leaving cinema operators without tentpole product. Some circuits began reducing hours, while Cineworld last month indefinitely closed the 400 or so Regal locations it had reopened in the U.S.

However, the latest round of closures has been the most dramatic to date. Nor is anyone sure how many more are yet to come amid the surge. Last week, in a preemptive move, Warner Bros. announced that Wonder Woman 1994 will debut on Christmas Day in whatever North America cinemas remain open as well as on HBO Max. (Overseas, including China, the superhero sequel will attempt a traditional theatrical run.)

"It’s tough as more and more are closed due to forced restrictions by local government authority. I think those that are allowed to open are staying open as long as they can cover their variable costs," says Wall Street analyst Eric Handler of MKM Partners.

Adds Paul Dergarabedian of Comscore: "Given the limited number of open theaters, the holiday movie season will be tasked with bridging the gap between this most challenging period and when the cinematic cavalry arrives in the form of what on paper looks to be a truly spectacular 2021 slate of blockbusters. The adage 'it's always darkest before the dawn' certainly applies here. Theaters need new high-profile films to drive audiences to the multiplex, but unfortunately those are in short supply in the coming weeks."

The major exceptions are Universal's animated sequel The Croods: A New Age, which debuts Wednesday in advance of Thanksgiving weekend, and Paul Greengrass' Christmas Day release News of the World, starring Tom Hanks. Universal has stayed in the theatrical release game by striking a landmark deal with top exhibitors allowing the studio to make its films available early on premium VOD.

According to Comscore, there were 2,154 theaters open in the U.S. over the Nov. 20-22 weekend, or roughly 40 percent of the country's 5,449 locations (give or take a few). That's down from 2,800 locations open over the Nov. 13-15 weekend, or 51 percent of all cinemas

Factoring in Canada, the total number of theaters open in North American dropped from 3,096 sites over the Nov. 13-15 weekend to 2,390 theaters over the Nov. 13-15 frame, per Comscore.

The weighted box office — i.e., a ranking of theaters in terms of the revenue they contribute to the overall pie — is likewise dropping. At one point this fall, 86 percent of the market was open. That fell to 62.5 percent over the Nov. 20-22 weekend.

Analysts are banking on a vaccine to reverse the crisis and result in a renaissance in terms of the big screen.

"Movie theaters over the decades have proven to be extraordinarily resilient and have survived every challenge from the pandemic of 1918, through the Great Depression to the introduction of TV through the home theater revolution and now the streaming boom," says Dergarabedian. "COVID-19 has presented a modern-era challenge unlike no other and weathering this storm will be no easy task, but if history tells us anything it's that the movie theater experience is an essential component of the entertainment ecosystem and thus will find a way to survive."
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...-north-america





Hollywood’s ‘We’re Not in Kansas Anymore’ Moment

The announcement that “Wonder Woman 1984” will be released in theaters and on HBO Max on Christmas Day is the clearest sign that streaming is now central to the film industry’s business model.
Nicole Sperling

In explaining why WarnerMedia had decided to release the much-anticipated big-budget “Wonder Woman 1984” simultaneously in theaters and on the streaming service HBO Max on Christmas Day, the company’s chief executive, Jason Kilar, invoked the classic Hollywood film “The Wizard of Oz.”

“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” Mr. Kilar said in a statement.

No longer, he said, would a film’s success be judged solely by the box office revenue it generates in theaters. Instead, it would be measured partly by the number of HBO Max subscribers it is able to attract. And just like Dorothy entering the Technicolor world of Oz, Hollywood feels as if it is stepping into a new era — one with streaming at the center.

The end-of-the-year holiday season usually means that theaters are packed with blockbuster crowd pleasers, award hopefuls — and moviegoers. Not this year. With many theaters shut because of the coronavirus and the ones that are open struggling to attract audiences, many studios have either pushed the release dates of major films into 2021 or created a hybrid model in which the theaters still in operation can show new releases while they are also made available through streaming or on-demand services.

“Wonder Woman 1984” is the most prominent example so far to be released using the hybrid model. But when it appears on HBO Max on Christmas Day, it will join Pixar’s animated “Soul,” and DreamWorks Animation’s “The Croods: A New Age” as marquee, holiday-season films that were expected to be box office favorites but are now likely to be primarily seen in people’s living rooms.

For companies that have their own streaming platforms, like WarnerMedia and Disney, releasing movies this way is now seen as an opportunity to drive subscriptions. Both companies have said that the moves will only last through the pandemic, but they also both recently shuffled their executive responsibilities to make it clear that streaming is the new priority. (Disney, for example, now has a central division that decides how its content is distributed, a change in strategy that puts Disney+ at the top of the studio’s priorities.) And audiences may not want studios to go back to the old way of releasing films that gave theaters 90 days of exclusive rights.

“There will be a new normal,” said Jason Squire, editor of “The Movie Business Book” and a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. “Over the years, there has been a lot of tension between theatrical exhibition and studio distribution but not a lot of change. The pandemic has jump-started the change.”

It wasn’t long ago that Hollywood viewed streaming as an unwelcome insurgency. Several years ago, when Netflix began to seriously compete for Oscars, traditionalists scoffed at the thought of bestowing prestigious awards on films that were only nominally released theatrically. (This year, bowing to pandemic reality, the motion picture academy announced that films could skip a theatrical release and be eligible for Oscar consideration.)

Still, studios have long wanted to shorten the exclusive window given to theaters. Theater chains aggressively lobbied against that, worried that people would be reluctant to buy tickets to a movie they could soon see at home.

The sanctity of the theatrical release was being zealously guarded even after the pandemic lockdowns began. In April, Universal Pictures had a successful video-on-demand release for “Trolls World Tour” and said it would make more movies available that way without an exclusive theatrical run. Adam Aron, the chief executive of AMC, the largest theater operator in the world, called the move “categorically unacceptable” and said his company would no longer book any Universal films.

By July, however, the two companies signed a multiyear deal whereby Universal movies would play in AMC theaters for a minimum of 17 days before becoming available in homes through premium video-on-demand, or P.V.O.D. in industry parlance. This past week, Universal signed similar deals with Cinemark, the third-largest theater chain in North America, and Cineplex, Canada’s top exhibitor, adding the provision that for movies opening to $50 million in ticket sales, the exclusive theatrical window will stretch to 31 days.

The shortened window means the studio can theoretically spend less on marketing than is typically required when theatrical and home video debuts are three months apart. And studios typically keep 80 percent of premium on-demand revenue, while ticket sales from theatrical releases are split roughly 50-50 between studios and theater companies.

“Our hope is that by putting P.V.O.D. into the marketplace, we are improving the economics for the studio and as a result of that there will be more films that will get released theatrically,” said Peter Levinsohn, vice chairman and chief distribution officer for Universal. “The whole goal here is to have more efficiencies in our marketing, keep the films more profitable and stop the films from being sold off” to subscription services like Netflix or Amazon.

Warner Bros. chose to defend the tried-and-true theatrical model, hoping that Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” would draw people back to theaters this summer after the first wave of the virus passed and 68 percent of American theaters were able to reopen. But with theaters still closed in the two largest markets, New York and Los Angeles, the film only grossed $56 million in its entire U.S. run. That was a far cry from Mr. Nolan’s previous theatrical achievements, like “Interstellar,” which earned $188 million domestically, and a stark warning to other distributors that the traditional way of releasing films was not going to work in 2020.

Today, the theatrical climate is more grim. Half of the theaters in the United States are closed and virus cases are rising around the country. Regal Cinemas, the second-largest chain in the U.S., has closed all of its theaters, citing a lack of films and audience. If there is not a federal grant program available to theaters soon, John Fithian, chief executive of the theaters’ national trade association, said he expects 70 percent of them will either close permanently or file for bankruptcy by early next year.

Big-budget spectacles have kept audiences flocking to movie theaters even through waves of home entertainment competition, from VCRs to streaming. That’s benefited both theater chains and studios, and it’s why few expect movies of the size of “Wonder Woman 1984” to be going directly to streaming post-pandemic.

A move away from theaters would affect what kinds of films are made. In short, if there is less box office money to be collected — because of a reduction in the number of movie theaters or a permanent shift in consumer behavior — studios would be forced to make fewer big-budget films. For those who believe Hollywood has become too reliant on lumbering superhero movies, that may actually be welcome news. The thousands of people each of those films employ would undoubtedly have a different perspective.

But others are not sure the change will be so drastic, pointing to the power of the theatrical experience.

Charles Roven, a producer for “Wonder Woman 1984,” said in an interview that he was confident that its release was not a sign of a new long-term strategy. “There is no question they want to make HBO Max successful and they should,” he said of Warner Bros. “But to say that this particular thing is what’s going to happen in the future, that would be taking a leap.”

Disney chose to bypass U.S. theaters altogether and release the $200 million “Mulan” on Disney+ in September, charging subscribers $30 on top of their monthly fee to watch the live-action adaptation of the animated film. Sales were hurt by an outcry over a filming location in China, but Bob Chapek, Disney’s chief executive, told analysts earlier this month that he saw “enough very positive results before that controversy started to know that we’ve got something here in terms of the premier access strategy.” Disney is planning to send several more big-budget movies to Disney+.

For studios without their own streaming services, the calculus is a bit different. While many opted to postpone their theatrical releases until 2021, others sold off films as a way to recoup some cash. Paramount offloaded “The Trial of the Chicago 7” to Netflix and “Coming to America 2” to Amazon, for example. In a twist, Netflix is currently one of the few studios still sending product to the struggling chains. From now to the end of the year, Netflix will give eight of its films limited theatrical runs before they appear on the service, including potential Oscar contenders like “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and David Fincher’s “Mank.”

Universal is the other big studio still supplying films to theaters, buoyed by its new P.V.O.D. deals with theaters that allow it to distribute both larger movies like the “Croods” sequel and smaller films from its indie subsidiary, Focus Features.

That’s good news for Bobbie Bagby Ford, an executive vice president at the family-owned B&B Theaters, the nation’s sixth-largest theater chain based in Liberty, Mo.

Ms. Bagby Ford said that before the pandemic her company would not have accepted Warner’s plan to release “Wonder Woman 1984" in theaters and on HBO Max at the same time. Now though, any opportunity to show a film that could do some actual business would be a relief for a company that is staving off bankruptcy.

“Our moviegoers in the Midwest are very excited to come back, and they have been asking about ‘Wonder Woman’ for months and months and months,” Ms. Bagby Ford said.

Mr. Kilar, WarnerMedia’s chief, said in his statement that the pandemic was the main reason to release “Wonder Woman 1984” in theaters and through streaming. But he also noted how the move put the control of how to watch the film firmly in the hands of the audience.

“A little over four million fans in the U.S. enjoyed the first ‘Wonder Woman’ movie on its opening day in 2017,” Mr. Kilar wrote. “Is it possible for that to happen again this Christmas with ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ between theaters and HBO Max? We are so excited to find out, doing everything in our power to provide the power of choice to fans.”

Should that work, it’s unlikely things will ever be the same.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/22/b...streaming.html





The Pandemic is Changing Hollywood, Maybe Forever
Jake Coyle

“No New ‘Movies’ Till Influenza Ends” blared a New York Times headline on Oct. 10, 1918, while the deadly second wave of the Spanish Flu was unfolding.

A century later, during another pandemic, movies — quotes no longer necessary — are again facing a critical juncture. But it’s not because new films haven’t been coming out. By streaming service, video-on-demand, virtual theater or actual theater, a steady diet of films have been released under COVID-19 every week. The Times has reviewed more than 460 new movies since mid-March.

Yet until recently — with only a few exceptions — those haven’t been the big-budget spectacles Hollywood runs on. Eight months into the pandemic, that’s changing. Last month, the Walt Disney Co. experimented with the $200 million “Mulan” as a premium buy on its fast-growing streaming service, Disney+ — where the Pixar film “Soul” will also go on Dec. 25. WarnerMedia last week announced that “Wonder Woman 1984” — a movie that might have made $1 billion at the box office in a normal summer — will land in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously next month.

Much remains uncertain about how the movie business will survive the pandemic. But it’s increasingly clear that Hollywood won’t be the same afterward. Just as the Spanish Flu, which weeded out smaller companies and contributed to the formation of the studio system, COVID-19 is remaking Hollywood, accelerating a digital makeover and potentially reordering an industry that was already in flux.

“I don’t think the genie will ever be back in the bottle,” says veteran producer Peter Guber, president of Mandalay Entertainment and former chief of Sony Pictures. “It will be a new studio system. Instead of MGM and Fox, they’re going to be Disney and Disney+, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, HBO Max and Peacock.”

Many of the pivots in 2020 can be chalked up to the unusual circumstances. But several studios are making more long-term realignments around streaming. WarnerMedia, the AT&T conglomerate that owns Warner Bros. (founded in 1923), is now run by Jason Kilar, best known as the former chief executive of Hulu. Last month, Disney chief executive Bob Chapek, the Robert Iger heir, announced a reorganization to emphasize streaming and “accelerate our direct-to-consumer business.”

Universal Pictures, owned by Comcast, has pushed aggressively into video-on-demand. Its first major foray, “Trolls,” kicked up a feud with theater owners. But as the pandemic wore on, Universal hatched unprecedented deals with AMC and Cinemark, the largest and third-largest chains, respectively, to dramatically shorten the traditional theatrical window (usually about three months) to just 17 days. After that time, Universal can move releases that don’t reach certain box-office thresholds to digital rental.
While the nation’s second largest theater chain, Regal Cinemas, has resisted such deals, there’s widespread acknowledgement that the days of 90-day theatrical runs are over. It’s something the studios have long sought for the potential benefit of covering both platforms with one marketing campaign. Many see the pandemic as accelerating a decades-long trend.

“Windows are clearly changing,” says Chris Aronson, distribution chief for Paramount Pictures. “All this stuff that’s going on now in the business was going to happen, the evolution is just happening faster than it would have. What would have taken three to five years is going to be done in a year, maybe a year and a half.”

That condensed period of rapid change is happening at the same time as a land rush for streaming market share, as Disney+, HBO Max, Apple and Peacock wrestle for a piece of the home viewing audience dominated by Netflix and Amazon. With theme parks struggling and worldwide box office down tens of billions, streaming is a bright spot for media companies, and the pandemic may offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lure subscribers. “Wonder Woman 1984” and “Soul” are essentially very expensive advertisements for those streaming services.

Each studio, depending on their corporate ownership and streaming positioning, is taking a different approach. Paramount, like Sony Pictures, doesn’t have a streaming service to offload films to. Both have held back their tentpole releases while selling more midsized films to streamers. For Paramount, “A Quiet Place: Part II,” “Top Gun Maverick” and “Mission: Impossible 7” are waiting for 2021 while “The Trial of the Chicago 7” fetched a reported $56 million from Netflix and Eddie Murphy’s “Coming to America 2” went to Amazon Prime Video for a reported $125 million.

HBO Max has had a bumpier rollout than Disney+, so “Wonder Woman 1984” is an especially critical gambit for WarnerMedia following the audacious release of “Tenet.” As the first tentpole to test theaters reopened with safety protocols and reduced capacities, it has made about $350 million worldwide -- a lot considering everything but far less than originally hoped for. Credit Suisse analyst Douglas Mitchelson called the “Wonder Woman” plans — which include rolling theatrical runs in China, Europe and elsewhere — “a grand experiment that could have-lasting implications if successful.”

Director Patty Jenkins acknowledged the simultaneous release was a kind of sacrifice, not just to HBO Max but to families stuck at home. “At some point you have to choose to share any love and joy you have to give, over everything else,” Jenkins wrote on Twitter.

It can be easy to cheer such moves, even if their financial performance remain cloudy (no studio has been transparent about its viewership numbers or digital grosses) and their long-term viability uncertain. Can you replicate $1 billion in box office in new subscriptions? And for how long will the one-time bounce of a new movie (unlike a series staggered over weeks or months) drive subscribers once streaming services are closer to tapping as many homes as they can?

“The whole thing is more complicated than people want it to be,” says Ira Deutchman, the veteran independent film producer and Columbia University professor. “The way movies are made and distributed, certainly at the studio level, has been really in need of change and hopefully this will bring it on. But when people hear that, it’s like: The pandemic is the straw that broke the camel’s back and now theatrical is dead. I personally feel that’s garbage.”

Deutchman considers the idea that people, after a year of quarantines and lockdowns, won’t want to leave their living room “ludicrous.” But he does imagine continued mergers and acquisitions, and “a new equilibrium” for distributors and theater owners.

So what could that mean on the other side of COVID, if moviegoers are once again comfortable sitting in packed theaters on opening weekend? It will almost certainly mean the months-long runs of films like “Titanic” or “Get Out” are a thing of the past. It could mean variable pricing on different nights. It could mean an even greater division between the franchise films of the multiplex and the boutique art house, with everything in between going straight to streaming.

But after decades of slow but steady decline in attendance, most think movie theaters will have to innovate in a way other than raising ticket prices.

“The outlook is pretty dire in terms of being a major theatrical exhibitor,” says Jeff Bock, senior box-office analyst for Exhibitor Relations. He imagines shortened windows will mean few films — even the Marvel releases — ascending to $1 billion in worldwide box office. He can see some studios, like Disney, operating their own theaters as “mini-theme parks” with merchandising stuffing the lobbies.

In the meantime, theaters are hoping for much-needed relief from Congress. With the virus surging, about 40% of U.S. theaters are open; in New York and Los Angeles, they’ve stayed shut since March. Chains have taken on loans to stay afloat and avert bankruptcy. Cineworld, owner of Regal Cinemas (currently entirely closed) on Monday announced a deal for a $450 million rescue loan.

It will be a very different holiday season — usually the most lucrative corridor in theaters — for the movie business. How different 2021 and beyond will be remains to be seen. Some things, though, may never change.

“If you’re going to be in this business, no matter what you do or where it plays, whether it’s streaming or in cinemas, you’re going to make hits and you’re going to make flops,” says Guber. “The idea is to make more hits than flops.”
https://apnews.com/article/pandemic-...e968c6212bd5f8





Good Heavens! 10M Impacted in Pray.com Data Exposure

The information exposed in a public cloud bucket included PII, church-donation information, photos and users’ contact lists.
Tara Seals

The Christian faith app Pray.com has leaked private data for up to 10 million people, according to researchers.

The app offers “daily prayer and Bible stories to inspire, educate and help you sleep” on a subscription basis. Subscriptions run anywhere from $50 to $120. It offers a host of audio content, including services from televangelists like Joel Osteen, and religious recordings using celebrity voices like Kristin Bell and James Earl Jones.

It has been downloaded by more than 1 million people on Google Play, and ranks as the #24 lifestyle app in the Apple App store.

vpnMentor analysts found several open, publicly accessible cloud databases (Amazon Web Services S3 buckets, in this case) belonging to Pray.com, containing 1.9 million files – about 262 GB worth of data. Most of this was internal information, but one of the buckets contained concerning data, the researchers said. 80,000 files contained various personal identifiable information (PII) for tens of millions of people – and not just from Pray.com users.

These included photos uploaded by the app’s users (profile photos and avatars for Pray.com’s private “Communities” social network), including those of minors. And, the files included CSV files from churches that use the app to communicate with their congregations, the investigation found. These files contained lists of the church’s attendees, with information for each churchgoer that included names, home and email addresses, phone numbers and marital status.

The app also says that it facilitates church donations – users can donate directly via the app to any church that is part of the Pray.com ecosystem. The donations were also logged in the bucket, along with the donation amount, the donor’s PII, and Pray.com’s fee for processing the donation. However, missing were any records of donations being forwarded to churches.

“The long lists of donations processed by Pray.com would give cybercriminals invaluable insight into the finances of app users and an opportunity to contact them appearing as the app, querying a previous donation,” researchers said.

Most damningly, the cloud database included whole phone books from users. Whenever a person joins the Communities social network, the app asks if it can invite friends to join. If a user says yes, the app uploads the user’s entire ‘phonebook’ from their device, containing all contacts and associated information.

Researchers said that many of these phonebooks contained hundreds of individual contacts, each one revealing that person’s PII data, including names, phone numbers, email, home and business addresses, and other details, like company names and family ties. Some of the entries included login information for private accounts.

“The people whose data Pray.com had stored in these phonebook files were not app users,” according to vpnMentor’s analysis this week. “They were simply people whose contact details had been saved on a Pray.com user’s device. In total, we believe Pray.com stored up to 10 million peoples’ private data without their direct permission – and without its users realizing they were allowing it to happen.”

Cloud Complexity

Interestingly, a little over 80,000 files were made private, only accessible to people with the right security permissions. However, these files were being exposed through a second Amazon service, vpnMentor found, demonstrating the complexity that cloud configurations can entail.

“Through further investigation, we learned that Pray.com had protected some files, setting them as private on the buckets to limit access,” they explained. “However, at the same time, Pray.com had integrated its S3 buckets with another AWS service, the AWS CloudFront content delivery network (CDN). Cloudfront allows app developers to cache content on proxy servers hosted by AWS around the world – and closer to an app’s users – rather than load those files from the app’s servers. As a result, any files on the S3 buckets could be indirectly viewed and accessed through the CDN, regardless of their individual security settings.”

They added, “Pray.com’s developers accidentally created a backdoor that gave complete access to all the files they had tried to protect.”

Chris DeRamus, vice president of technology for the Cloud Security Practice at Rapid7, noted that companies need to be aware that the self-service nature of cloud opens them up to increased risk.

“Unprotected S3 buckets and databases are a common occurrence, and one that attackers continue to exploit. In fact, out of 196 breaches caused by cloud misconfigurations in 2018 and 2019, S3 bucket misconfigurations accounted for 16 percent of those breaches,” he said via email. “Organizations should take the appropriate security measures, such as security automation, to ensure that data is protected at all times. If risk is not considered and addressed initially, organizations can face fines, legal fees, and ultimately their viability.”

The database was discovered on Oct. 6, but it wasn’t made private despite multiple attempts to contact Pray.com about the problem, according to vpnMentor. After the researchers contacted Amazon directly, the contact files were removed from the open bucket on Nov. 17.

While it’s unknown how long the files were exposed, some of the data dated back to 2016, researchers said.

“By not protecting its users’ data – while also aggressively harvesting the data of their friends and family – Pray.com has exposed millions of people to various dangers [like phishing, identity theft and account takeover],” according to vpnMentor. “The implications for the app’s users, and the general public, should not be understated.”
https://threatpost.com/10m-impacted-...posure/161459/





UK Telecom Companies Face Big Fines Under New Security Law
AP

Telecom companies in Britain face hefty fines if they don’t comply with strict new security rules under a new law proposed in Parliament on Tuesday that is aimed at blocking high-risk equipment suppliers like China’s Huawei.

The Telecommunications (Security) Bill tightens security requirements for new high speed 5G wireless and fiber optic networks, with the threat of fines of up to either 10% of sales or 100,000 pounds ($134,000) a day for companies that don’t follow the rules.

The draft law paves the way for the U.K. government to formalize Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision in July prohibiting Huawei from building Britain’s 5G mobile phone networks because of security concerns.

The British government said it was bringing in the ban - reversing an earlier plan to give Huawei a limited role - because U.S. sanctions made it impossible to ensure the security of its networking gear. Wireless carriers were also ordered to rip out any existing Huawei 5G equipment from their networks by 2027. The Chinese company is one of the flashpoints in a broader global battle between Washington and Beijing over trade and technology.

The new rules are a major step to protecting the U.K. from hostile cyber activity by state actors or criminals, the government said, citing previous cyberattacks attributed to Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.

“This groundbreaking bill will give the U.K. one of the toughest telecoms security regimes in the world and allow us to take the action necessary to protect our networks,” Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden said.

The bill, which needs to be approved by Parliament, spells out tougher security standards for the electronic equipment and software at mobile phone mast sites and in telephone exchanges that handle internet traffic and telephone calls.

Huawei said it was disappointed that the U.K. government was looking to exclude it from the 5G rollout.

“This decision is politically-motivated and not based on a fair evaluation of the risks,” said Vice President Victor Zhang. ”It does not serve anyone’s best interests as it would move Britain into the digital slow lane and put at risk the government’s levelling up agenda.”
https://apnews.com/article/business-...b1bd8b757ea35f





OneWeb Exits Bankruptcy and is Ready to Launch more Broadband Satellites

OneWeb plans satellite launches in December and throughout 2021 and 2022.
Jon Brodkin

OneWeb has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy under new ownership and says it will begin launching more broadband satellites next month. Similar to SpaceX Starlink, OneWeb is building a network of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites that can provide high-speed broadband with much lower latencies than traditional geostationary satellites.

After a launch in December, "launches will continue throughout 2021 and 2022, and OneWeb is now on track to begin commercial connectivity services to the UK and the Arctic region in late 2021 and will expand to delivering global services in 2022," OneWeb said in an announcement Friday.

In March this year, OneWeb filed for bankruptcy and reportedly laid off most of its staff. In July, OneWeb agreed to sell the business to a consortium including the UK government and Bharti Global Limited for $1 billion. In the Friday announcement, OneWeb said it has secured "all relevant regulatory approvals" needed to exit bankruptcy.

"Together with our UK Government partner, we recognised that OneWeb has valuable global spectrum with priority rights, and we benefit from $3.3 billion invested to date and from the satellites already in orbit, securing our usage rights," Bharti founder and Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said.

Launch scheduled for December 17

OneWeb previously launched 74 satellites into low Earth orbits and said it plans a launch of 36 more satellites on December 17, 2020. The Friday announcement also said OneWeb plans "a constellation of 650 LEO satellites," but that could be just the beginning. OneWeb in August secured US approval for 1,280 satellites in medium Earth orbits, bringing its total authorization to 2,000 satellites.

OneWeb will be playing catch-up against SpaceX, which has launched about 800 satellites, has permission to launch nearly 12,000, and it is already providing Internet service to US customers in a beta. SpaceX and OneWeb are both seeking US permission to launch tens of thousands of additional satellites.

There's also competition from Amazon's Project Kuiper, which has US approval to launch 3,236 low-Earth-orbit satellites and a $10 billion investment plan.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...dband-by-2022/





Comcast to Enforce 1.2TB Data Cap in Entire 39-State Territory in Early 2021

Data cap comes to 12 more US states over four years after everyone else got it.
Jon Brodkin

Comcast's 1.2TB monthly data cap is coming to 12 more states and the District of Columbia starting January 2021. The unpopular policy was already enforced in most of Comcast's 39-state US territory over the past few years, and the upcoming expansion will for the first time bring the cap to every market in Comcast's territory.

Comcast will be providing some "courtesy months" in which newly capped customers can exceed 1.2TB without penalty, so the first overage charges for these customers will be assessed for data usage in the April 2021 billing period.

Comcast's data cap has been imposed since 2016 in 27 of the 39 states in Comcast's cable territory. The cap-less parts of Comcast's network include Northeastern states where the cable company faces competition from Verizon's un-capped FiOS fiber-to-the-home broadband service.

But last week, an update to Comcast's website said that the cap is coming to Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. The cap is also coming to parts of Virginia and Ohio where it wasn't already implemented. In all, Comcast has nearly 28 million residential Internet customers.

We viewed the updated language on Comcast's website Friday. Comcast appears to have taken the update off that webpage, but a Comcast spokesperson confirmed to Ars today that the data cap is going nationwide in January 2021 and said that notifications are being sent to customers in their bills. The updated language from the Comcast website was also preserved in a news article by Stop the Cap today.

Courtesy months for newly capped users

Comcast's update said customers in newly capped markets "can take the months of January and February to understand how the new 1.2TB Internet Data Plan affects them without additional charges. We'll credit your bill for any additional data usage charges over 1.2TB during those months if you're not on an unlimited data plan."

That would delay enforcement until March, but Comcast also provides all customers with one courtesy month in each 12-month period. Newly capped customers could thus start getting overage charges for their April 2021 usage.

"Comcast is certain to be criticized for expanding data caps in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially as the number of cases explodes in the United States, pushing more people than ever to work from home," Stop the Cap wrote.

The data-cap expansion will likely result in more disputes between Comcast and customers. Comcast has always said its data meter is accurate but has had to correct occasional mistakes, and customers who suddenly face overage fees often suspect the meter is wrong. Comcast provides no way for customers to independently verify the meter readings, and there's no government regulation of broadband-data meters to ensure their accuracy.

Unlimited data options

Comcast's overage charges are $10 for each additional block of 50GB, up to a maximum of $100 each month. Customers can avoid overage charges by spending an extra $30 a month on unlimited data or $25 for the "xFi Complete" plan that includes unlimited data and the rental cost for Comcast's xFi gateway modem and router.

Comcast is trying to give customers in newly capped markets an incentive to upgrade to unlimited data before the caps actually go into effect. It's a bit convoluted: customers who sign up for unlimited data in December or January will have the $30 unlimited-data charge waived until June, the Comcast spokesperson told Ars. People who sign up for unlimited data in February or March would be charged the extra $30 fee starting in April.

Comcast is doing something similar with the $25 xFi Complete add-on, which essentially combines two charges into one—a $14-per-month charge for Comcast's gateway and another $11 to get unlimited data. Customers who upgrade to the unlimited-data version of xFi Complete in December or January will not be charged the extra $11 until June, the spokesperson said. Customers who sign up later will pay the charge starting in April.

Comcast says cap is for “super users”

The Comcast spokesperson defended the data-cap expansion, saying that "a very small number of customers drive a disproportionately large volume of traffic," as "5 percent of residential customers make up more than 20 percent of our network usage."

About 95 percent of Comcast residential customers use less than 1.2TB a month, with the median customer at 308GB, the spokesperson said. The cap is "for those super users, a very small subset of our customers," and "for those super users we have unlimited options," the spokesperson said.

But Comcast customers would likely use more data if they didn't face caps. New research by OpenVault, a vendor that sells a data-usage tracking platform to ISPs, found that 9.4 percent of US customers with unlimited data plans exceeded 1TB a month and that 1.2 percent exceeded 2TB in Q3 2020. For customers with data caps, 8.3 percent exceeded 1TB and 0.9 percent exceeded 2TB.

Comcast did not provide a clear answer as to why the company decided that now is the right time to expand the data cap to more states. The spokesperson said Comcast has spent $12 billion to expand its network since 2017 and that increasing capacity helped the network perform well even as the COVID pandemic caused big increases in residential broadband usage. But Comcast reduced capital spending on its cable division in 2019 and reduced cable-division capital spending again in the first nine months of 2020.
Data caps generate revenue for ISPs

It's been clear for years that Comcast's data caps are a revenue-generating system rather than a congestion management tool. When Comcast was enforcing a 300GB monthly cap in 2015, a Comcast engineering executive said imposing the monthly data limit was a business decision, not one driven by technical necessity.

Monthly data caps are not useful for managing congestion in real time, since they apply only to a customer's monthly total rather than actually addressing the impact heavy users might have on other customers at peak usage times. Comcast used to use a congestion-management system to slow down the heaviest Internet users, but turned the system off a few years ago, saying its network was strong enough that it was no longer needed.

Comcast began imposing the data cap and overage charges in some states in 2012. The cap was originally 300GB and was raised to 1TB in 2016.

Comcast waived the data cap for a few months during the pandemic, then raised it from 1TB to 1.2TB when it was reimposed in July. Despite the temporary data-cap waiver, Comcast boasted that its network was able to handle the pandemic-fueled usage.

One small ISP in Maryland, Antietam Broadband, decided to permanently remove data caps after finding that increased usage during the pandemic didn't harm the network. Antietam also said that customers working at home switched to "broadband packages that more accurately reflected their broadband needs." As Antietam's experience shows, heavy Internet users often pay for faster speeds, ensuring that ISPs get more revenue from heavy users even when there's no data cap.

As Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told Ars earlier this year, the pandemic showed that data caps aren't necessary to manage network traffic. "Data caps have always been about socking consumers with extra fees to pad Big Cable's profit margins," Wyden said at the time. "Even after the COVID-19 emergency passes, ISPs should do away with unnecessary data caps."
https://arstechnica.com/information-...2-more-states/

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

November 21st, November 14th, November 7th, October 31st

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


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


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

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

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

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 24th, '12 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 21-11-12 09:20 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 16th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-07-11 06:43 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 30th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-01-10 07:49 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 16th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-01-10 09:02 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 5th, '09 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 02-12-09 08:32 AM






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 08:08 AM.


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