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Old 21-07-21, 06:21 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 24th, ’21

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July 24th, 2021




MPs Call for Complete Reset of Music Streaming to Ensure Fair Pay for Artists
Mark Savage

The music industry is weighted against artists, with even successful pop stars seeing "pitiful returns" from streaming, a committee of MPs has said.

They are calling for a "complete reset" of the market, with musicians given a "fair share" of the £736.5 million that UK record labels earn from streaming.

In a report, they said royalties should be split 50/50, instead of the current rate, where artists receive about 16%.

The findings came after a six-month inquiry into music streaming.

"While streaming has brought significant profits to the recorded music industry, the talent behind it - performers, songwriters and composers - are losing out," said Julian Knight, MP, who chairs parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee.

"Only a complete reset of streaming that enshrines in law their rights to a fair share of the earnings will do."

How streaming took over music. Music industry revenue 2011-2020. .

The findings will be seen as a victory by pop stars like Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Melanie C, Wolf Alice and Jessie Ware, who recently called on the Prime Minister to reform the way musicians get paid when their songs are streamed.

Musician Tom Gray, whose #BrokenRecord campaign prompted the inquiry, said he was "overjoyed" by the findings.

"It feels like a massive vindication," he said. "They've really come to the same conclusions that we've been saying for a very long time."

The BPI, which represents the UK recorded music industry, was more cautious.

It said streaming was "enabling more artists than ever" to earn a "long-term, sustainable income" and that new policies should be properly examined to ensure against "unintended consequences for investment into new talent".

How do artists get paid at the moment?

At present, Spotify is believed to pay between £0.002 and £0.0038 per stream, while Apple Music pays about £0.0059. YouTube pays the least - about £0.00052 (or 0.05 pence) per stream.

All that money goes to rights-holders, a blanket term that covers everything from massive record companies to artists who release their own music. That money is then divided up between everyone involved in making the record.

Often, the recording artist will only receive about 13% of the revenue, with labels and publishers keeping the rest.

Artists who release their own music, or who work with independent labels and distribution companies, tend to get a higher share.

A survey by the Ivors Academy and Musicians' Union found that in 2019, 82% of professional musicians made less than £200 from streaming, whilst only 7% made more than £1,000.

What did musicians and labels tell the inquiry?

The hearings were full of testy exchanges. Some witnesses said they were scared to speak out for fear of reprisals; and the head of one record label was described as "living in cloud cuckoo land" after he claimed artists were happy with the music streaming model.

Mercury Prize nominee Nadine Shah made headlines after telling the committee she had been forced to move back in with her parents because "earnings from my streaming are not significant enough to keep the wolf away from the door".

Pop songwriter Fiona Bevan revealed she'd earned just £100 for a track on Kylie Minogue's number one album, Disco. "Right now, hit songwriters are driving Ubers," she told MPs. "It's quite shameful."

Chic's Nile Rodgers said that the finances of streaming are shrouded in secrecy, adding: "We don't even know what a stream is worth and there's no way you could even find out what a stream is worth, and that's not a good relationship."

The three major labels - Sony, Universal and Warner Music - faced some of the toughest questioning of the inquiry, and were accused of a "lack of clarity" by MPs.

They largely argued to maintain the status quo, saying any disruption could damage investment in new music, and resisted the idea that streaming was comparable to radio - where artists receive a 50/50 royalty split.

"Streaming is 24-7 in every country in the world, you can listen to the greatest record store ever - it's clearly a sale, it's not radio, it's on-demand," said Joseph, CEO of Universal Music UK.

Representatives from the streaming companies suggested they were "open-minded" about changing the royalty system, but noted that 70% of their income already goes to labels, publishers and artists.

"It is a narrow-margin business, so it wouldn't actually take that much to upset the so-called apple cart," said Apple Music's Elena Segal.

What have MPs recommended?

The committee's report said streaming had "undoubtedly helped save the music industry" after decades of piracy, "but it is clear that what has been saved does not work for everyone".

They recommended that the government pass legislation to give performers the right to "equitable remuneration", whereby labels and artists receive an equal share of streaming royalties.

The report called it a "simple yet effective solution", as the right already exists in UK law when songs are played on radio and TV.

MPs also raised "deep concerns" about the dominance of the major music companies, and urged the government to refer the case to the Competition and Markets Authority.

Other recommendations included:

• Musicians and songwriters should be allowed to reclaim the rights to their work from labels after a set period of time.
• Artists should be given the right to adjust their contract if their work is successful beyond the remuneration they received.
• The government should explore ways to ensure songwriters, who receive minimal streaming royalties, can have sustainable careers.
• Curators who make playlists on services like Spotify and Apple Music should adhere to a "code of conduct" to avoid bribes and favouritism.
• The government should require publishers and royalty societies to inform artists about how much money is flowing through the system.
• Warner and Universal Music should follow Sony's example, and cancel their artists' historical debts.

The committee also expressed concerns that "the economics of streaming entrench historically successful artists and create barriers for new performers", with perennial hits by Abba, Queen and Fleetwood Mac starving up-and-coming musicians of opportunities.

Figures released yesterday showed that new music accounted for just 33% of the music streamed in the US this year, with older songs dominating people's listening choices.

The streaming services themselves largely escaped criticism, but MPs said YouTube's dominance was a cause for concern - citing figures that it accounts for 51% of music streaming while contributing 7% of music industry revenue.

They warned that users' ability to upload music to YouTube without licensing it from record labels gave it an "unfair advantage"; and urged the government to introduce "legally enforceable obligations to normalise licensing arrangements" on sites that host user-generated videos, such as YouTube, TikTok and Facebook.

What's the response been?

Tom Gray said the report confirmed what his #BrokenRecord campaign had been telling record labels all along: "That their business model needs to change and that they need to face the reality of that and get on with it".

He said he hoped the government would enact the recommendations quickly, potentially by acting on a private member's bill by Labour MP Kevin Brennan that seeks to change copyright laws around streaming.

"This is something that they can do for the British cultural sector, where they don't have to go and negotiate with Brussels," he told the BBC. "If they want to help British creators, inventors and performers, this is something they can just do."

The Association of Independent Music (AIM) welcomed the report's praise for independent record labels, who traditionally pay higher royalty rates to their artists.

"However, our view is that equitable remuneration will not deliver the outcome they are hoping for," said CEO Paul Pacifico. "It is a 20th Century solution not fit for the 21st Century digital market and will leave the next generation of artists worse off."

The BPI argued that streaming worked in artists' favour - with 2,000 artists set to achieve 10 million streams this year, the equivalent of selling 10,000 CDs, or making about £29,000. It warned unpicking the current system could damage investment in new music.

"When considering this report, the Government also needs to consider the vital role that labels play as the leading investors into artists' careers, with investment in artists by record labels growing year-on-year," said CEO Geoff Taylor.

"We will carefully examine the findings of this report, but it is essential that any policy proposals avoid unintended consequences for investment into new talent, and do not imperil this country's extraordinary global success in music."

Meanwhile, the Musicians Union called the report "revolutionary".

"It grasps the issue, identifies the problems and recommends achievable and practical solutions, which won't cost the taxpayer a penny," said general secretary Horace Trubridge.

In a joint statement, the Featured Artists Coalition and Music Managers Forum said the "landmark" report could "fundamentally improve" the economic situation for thousands of musicians.

"This is a once in a lifetime moment to reset our business along fairer and more equitable lines, it is not an opportunity to be wasted."
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57838473





The Best Ways to Recover Deleted Spotify Playlists

How to save your favorite songs, even from yourself.
David Nield

If you play music on Spotify, you know it’s not quite the same as stacking your shelves with vinyl. You’ve got access to tens of millions of songs, but keeping track of them can be a chore. That’s why many users build playlists. The problem is, it’s easy to accidentally delete one of your favorite playlists. Here’s how to restore vanished playlists, and preserve them for future use.

Use Spotify’s playlist recovery tool

You may never have visited it, but you have a Spotify account page on the web. You can access it by logging in at spotify.com. Just use the same account name and password you do to log in on a smartphone or desktop client.

The first page you’ll see gives you access to all the standard account information, including your name, your profile picture, and, if you have a premium subscription, the method you use to pay Spotify every month.

For the purposes of this guide, the link we’re interested in is the one marked Recover playlists, which does exactly what the name suggests. You’ll find playlists you’ve deleted stretching back several months. Spotify doesn’t specify how long it keeps erased playlists around for, but we’ve seen ones that are six months old.

Click Restore next to the playlist you want to bring back, and as if by magic, it will be restored to your account. Just make sure you really, really do want to delete a playlist the next time you erase one from your Spotify list.

Try other recovery options

We’re all guilty of hitting the wrong keyboard combination or clicking on the wrong menu entry from time to time, and if you’ve just wiped a playlist you didn’t intend to from your account, the old faithful undo command can bring it back right away.

If you’re using Spotify’s desktop app, hit Ctrl+Z on a Windows PC or Cmd+Z on a Mac before you touch anything else and your last action will be undone, restoring the playlist to its previous position. If you act quickly, you won’t have to rely on the playlist recovery feature—though these shortcuts won’t work on Spotify’s web player.

It’s not unheard of for playlists to disappear from Spotify due to a bug or a technical hitch (it’s certainly happened to us). If you find most or all of your playlists have been wiped without you touching them, and they’re not available to recover online, get in touch with Spotify support. The @SpotifyCares Twitter account is a good place to start.

Spotify support should be able to restore your playlists from the backups at their end, although you will have to confirm your date of birth and some of your payment information to prove your identity.

Preserve your playlists before they change or disappear

Some playlists will shift and change over time, without any input from you. These include playlists by other people you’ve subscribed to, as well as the Discover Weekly playlist that Spotify refreshes for you every week based on your listening history.

If you’ve happened across a Discover Weekly playlist that you really like, or you want to preserve another user’s playlist for future listening, follow these steps: Open the Spotify desktop client on your Windows or Mac machine, click somewhere inside the playlist, and hit Ctrl+A on Windows or Cmd+A on a Mac to highlight all of the tracks.

Right-click (or use a two-finger click on a Mac) on the playlist, then choose Add to playlist. You can add all of the selected tracks to a playlist you’ve already set up, or create a new playlist that you can rename later.

Your new, permanent copy of the playlist won’t be affected by any changes made to the original, so your songs will be safe and sound in your account. That is, at least until you accidentally delete another one of your playlists.





The F.T.C. Votes to Use its Leverage to Make it Easier for Consumers to Repair their Phones.
Aishvarya Kavi

The Federal Trade Commission voted unanimously on Wednesday to push harder for the right of consumers to repair devices like smartphones, home appliances, cars and even farm equipment, arguing that large corporations have cost consumers by making such products harder to fix.

All five commissioners — two Republicans and three Democrats — voted to back a policy statement that promises to explore whether companies that make it harder for consumers to repair products are breaking antitrust or consumer protection laws, and to step up enforcement of the laws against violators.

“These types of restrictions can significantly raise costs for consumers, stifle innovation, close off business opportunity for independent repair shops, create unnecessary electronic waste, delay timely repairs and undermine resiliency,” said Lina Khan, the commission’s chairwoman. “The F.T.C. has a range of tools it can use to root out unlawful repair restrictions, and today’s policy statement would commit us to move forward on this issue with new vigor.”

The commission’s vote on Wednesday falls in line with President Biden’s policies to prioritize initiatives to increase competition between large corporations and to limit their power. In an executive order this month, Mr. Biden encouraged the commission to crack down on companies that make it harder for consumers to get equipment or electronics repaired by third-party shops. It singled out manufacturers of farming equipment — the tractor manufacturer John Deere, for example — that use license agreements that block farmers from repairing their tractors on their own.

Wednesday’s vote was a victory for the “right to repair” movement, which has long been pushing for repair-friendly policies at the federal, state and local levels. Nathan Proctor, the senior director of the United States Public Interest Research Group’s Right to Repair campaign, celebrated the agency’s decision in a statement.

“They have pledged to assist states in making right to repair improvements, and to tackle illegal behavior from manufacturers,” Mr. Proctor said. “The F.T.C. is no longer on the sidelines.”

But TechNet, an advocacy group representing technology companies including Google and Apple, criticized the move by the commission, saying it would only jeopardize the safety of consumers.

“The F.T.C.’s decision to upend an effective and secure system for consumers to repair products that they rely on for their health, safety, and well-being, including phones, computers, fire alarms, medical devices, and home security systems, will have far-reaching, permanent impacts on technology and cybersecurity,” Carl Holshouser, the senior vice president of TechNet, said in a statement.

It sent a report to Congress in May, titled “Nixing the Fix,” in which it described how companies designed products to be harder to fix and how they narrowed repair options in order to push consumers to more frequently buy new products. There is “scant evidence to support manufacturers’ justifications for repair restrictions,” the report said.

It also noted that the limitations imposed by companies harmed the consumer, especially communities of color and low-income communities. According to the report, the cost of buying a new product or the difficulty of repairing a product can fall disproportionately on small businesses owned by people of color.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/u...epair-FTC.html





‘Welcome to the Mesh, Brother’: Guerrilla Wi-Fi Comes to New York

NYC Mesh, a band of a few dozen tech volunteers, takes on Verizon and the big “incumbent providers,” with the promise of inexpensive community internet.
Bliss Broyard

Daniel Heredia peered across rooftops, surveying the derelict satellite dishes and rusty television antennas of Brownsville, Brooklyn. Wearing a motorcycle jacket and boots, he crouched on Andre Cambridge’s roof, trying to see if he had a clear line of sight to the Riverdale Avenue Community School a half-mile off. A large tree was possibly in the way.

Mr. Cambridge, a 28-year-old student who lives with his parents and younger brother in an apartment on the first floor, watched the scene apprehensively. He had been without internet for nine weeks. “Man,” Mr. Heredia said, “you should have told us.” He could have moved up the installation.

Mr. Heredia is a 19-year-old volunteer with NYC Mesh, a nonprofit community Wi-Fi initiative, and he was there to install a router that would bring inexpensive Wi-Fi to the building. Mr. Cambridge’s family said they had become fed up with the take-it-or-leave-it pricing for spotty service that internet providers seem to get away with in this part of Brooklyn.

Mr. Heredia crouched to affix the router to a plumbing vent, positioning it so the Wi-Fi signal could avoid the tree down the block. An app on his phone beeped to indicate the strength of the connection. Higher in pitch and more rapid was good. Mr. Cambridge whipped out his phone to search for NYC Mesh among the available networks. “It just came up!”

He skipped across the roof, beaming under Ray bans and dreadlocks. The installation took two hours and cost $240 to cover the equipment, plus a $50 tip for Mr. Heredia, the installer.

They’ll enjoy our special rate of $1 a week.

Mr. Cambridge ran a speed test. “We’re getting 80 megabits down and 50 megabits up!”

Mr. Heredia clasped palms and bumped shoulders with Mr. Cambridge. “Welcome to the Mesh, brother,” he said.

In New York, like most big cities, the wealthier a neighborhood is, the more options for internet service its residents probably have — and the more incentive for providers in those areas to compete on service and price. On some blocks on the Upper West Side, residents can choose among four carriers. In Brownsville, Mr. Cambridge could choose between Altice or Optimum — which is owned by Altice. Verizon’s fiber-optic service, Fios, is supposed to be available on every city block, which in theory would spur more competition, but that has yet to happen.

While a fiber connection remains the gold standard, “fixed wireless” options like the rooftop routers used by NYC Mesh can deliver a signal that is plenty strong for most residential uses and usually much faster and cheaper to deploy. NYC Mesh has a subsidized option for installations, and members pay a suggested monthly donation of $20 to $60.

NYC Mesh is one of many fixed-wireless outfits in New York City. They range from community-owned models — like the D.I.Y. “internet in a box” efforts led by the digital justice organization Community Tech NY, and the internet cooperative People’s Choice, started by former Spectrum strikers — to smaller for-profits like Starry, a Boston-based start-up rolling out flat-rate internet plans of $50 a month in large urban markets including New York City.

NYC Mesh covers more neighborhoods than the others and is the largest community network in the city by far. Yet it’s still small, serving only about 800 households, concentrated in Lower Manhattan and central Brooklyn. That’s a tiny slice of the 2.2 million New York City households with broadband at home, usually through one of the “incumbent providers,” as they are known: Verizon, Spectrum or Optimum.

But with NYC Mesh’s expansion into Brownsville, and a new contract with the city to place routers on a handful of housing developments, the one million New Yorkers who don’t have broadband — 46 percent of households in poverty lack a home connection — might soon have another, more affordable choice. “To grow, we need to be on more tall buildings,” said Brian Hall, the founder of NYC Mesh. The pandemic has actually helped his initiative get there, and it might encourage New Yorkers to think about the internet in a new way — as a utility that everyone should be able to access.

Community Wi-Fi networks have been operating in other countries since the early 2000s. It’s a relatively niche phenomenon. The biggest community network in the world is Guifi.net in Spain, and that has only 39,000 connections. Still, it was an inspiration to Mr. Hall when he was starting NYC Mesh back in 2014. Burned out from his job as a programmer, he wanted to do something community-based that could have an impact.

Mr. Hall secured funding from the Internet Society, an international nonprofit that promotes open and secure internet around the world, to set up NYC Mesh’s first “supernode” on top of the former Verizon building in downtown Manhattan. This supernode, plus another in Industry City, on the Brooklyn waterfront, serve as the central spigots for NYC Mesh’s neighborhood hubs and nodes, as they refer to the members’ routers.

Early supporters were mostly tech-liberationist types. “Initially everyone united around hating Time Warner Cable,” Mr. Hall said. A manifesto on NYC Mesh’s website lists the reasons members were behind community Wi-Fi: to build a neutral network that doesn’t block content or sell personal data; to bridge the digital divide; and to “stand in opposition to the telecom oligopoly in New York of Verizon, Optimum and Spectrum.”

There are no paid employees. A team of 30 or so volunteers, about a third of them women, lead installations and maintain the network. A recent installation at a housing development in Bedford-Stuyvesant that Mr. Heredia helped lead included a 50-year-old coder/actor/carpenter, a 40-year-old Turkish woman who ran a tech company back home, a 26-year-old with a fellowship to study the digital divide from the Robin Hood Foundation (whose family used to live in that very complex), and a father with a week-old baby whose wife had given him permission to go.

Organizing occurs on the online platform Slack, with the work documented on public channels for the benefit of other groups interested in starting community Wi-Fi projects. The pandemic brought a rush of volunteers along with requests from people needing help to get communities connected, including one from an intrepid social worker from the Riverdale Avenue Community School in Brownsville. After setting up that hub, Mr. Heredia and another volunteer installed routers in the hallways of the family homeless shelter across the street.

Around that time, NYC Mesh members were already in negotiations with the New York City Housing Authority about putting a hub on a 24-story tower in Bed-Stuy. It would extend the nonprofit’s coverage area to less-gentrified parts of Brooklyn — hundreds of buildings within a two-mile radius of the hub could get internet. It wouldn’t cost the city anything. NYC Mesh simply needed permission. There was reason to be optimistic.

In January 2020, the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio released its Internet Master Plan, an ambitious reimagining of the city’s broadband infrastructure. The plan offers free use of the rooftops of public buildings and streetlight poles to providers large and small to build out their network infrastructures. This strategy amounts to a thumb on the scale in favor of grass-roots outfits like NYC Mesh, whose technology depends on rooftop access versus the larger providers, who must bury their cable or string it from telephone poles.

Brian Dietz, a spokesman from the industry lobbying group NCTA — the Internet & Television Association — maintained that commercial broadband is the best for consumers. “It provides the fastest, most reliable service for the best value,” Mr. Dietz said. “We have made billions of dollars of investment in infrastructure and speeds have increased thousands of times over the last decade.”

Before the recent vision, the city’s last major broadband intervention was negotiated under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in 2006. New York entered a franchise agreement with Verizon that gave the company the privilege of burying fiber-optic cable under city streets in exchange for installing high-speed Fios in every neighborhood. But Verizon has failed to do so in many low-income neighborhoods. In a public hearing in April, the city’s chief technology officer, John Paul Farmer, testified that the relatively few providers in some neighborhoods meant that there was little market pressure to bring the prices down. “The current oligopolistic system is broken, and it has built digital inequity into the streets and neighborhoods of New York,” he said.

The city recently reached a settlement with Verizon, requiring it to connect an additional 500,000 households, with at least 125,000 in underserved neighborhoods, by 2023.

Chris Serico, a spokesman for Verizon, said the company was on track to meet the terms of its settlement. “Verizon is committed to finding long-term solutions that make affordable broadband options available to low-income Americans,” Mr. Serico wrote in an email.

Clayton Banks, the chief executive of Silicon Harlem, a company focused on increasing connectivity in Harlem, said he hoped that the city’s strategy of betting on more competition would work, but that he was waiting to see how Fios and the current providers would be priced. “If you continue to build out infrastructure, which is certainly welcome and necessary, but you keep the same retail price,” he said, “you haven’t solved anything in terms of getting more people online.”

After months of back and forth, NYC Mesh got the greenlight to put a hub on the 24-story public housing tower in Bed-Stuy, along with two other developments in the Bronx and Queens. Four other small providers, including Silicon Harlem, were selected to wire up 10 other NYCHA developments. As part of Phase One of the Internet Master Plan, to which the city will direct $157 million, NYC Mesh installed free public hot spots around the exterior grounds of the projects; the other companies must provide residents access to Wi-Fi in their apartments for no more than $20 a month.

NYC Mesh has applied to establish hubs on an additional 163 public buildings as part of Phase Two. If successful, this would allow NYC Mesh to cover much of the city in the next five to seven years. Since each router installation comes with a free public Wi-Fi hot spot, NYC Mesh could help make the internet truly universal throughout New York City.

Even as NYC Mesh has continually grown, it still runs into the same trouble as the big providers: The internet sometimes goes down. Mr. Heredia and other volunteers pride themselves on resolving service problems quickly, but as the organization expands, it will need more people like Mr. Heredia if it wants to keep members happy.

Mr. Heredia has been volunteering since last October, when he stumbled across NYC Mesh online when researching alternatives to commercial providers. After setting up a router using NYC Mesh’s instructions, he attended a socially distanced meet-up in a Brooklyn park. A half-dozen installs later, Mr. Heredia got his own cable-crimping set and became an install leader.

He also helps maintain the network, particularly the hub on top of a NYCHA building in Bed-Stuy that supplies his internet. A few months back, the power went out at Mr. Heredia’s hub. It turned out the building’s custodians were repairing the elevator and had shut off some breakers. Mr. Heredia (who is a full-time student with a part-time job) sped over on his motorcycle with a long extension cord and battery packs, and had it working again an hour and 15 minutes after the first complaint came in on the NYC Mesh Slack channel. “All the people I know in the Mesh who participate actively have a similar relationship,” he said about his own vested interest in maintaining the network.

But the people who use the free hot spots in public housing or the family shelter in Brownsville don’t know how to fix the equipment or where to request a repair or report an outage on Slack. Indeed, all but one of the hallway routers in the shelter have been out for the last couple of months, and a number of new ones at the Bed-Stuy tower keep going offline. There’s an issue with the devices that Mr. Heredia and other volunteers have spent hours trying to figure out.

The future for Mesh relies on cooperation with members, but it’s a hard sell in certain neighborhoods. First, not all renters can put routers on the roofs of their buildings. Some people are suspicious of “free internet” and won’t use the hot spots. NYC Mesh volunteers acknowledge that they need community members from the underserved neighborhoods to take the same ownership over their hubs as Mr. Heredia does over his.

Brownsville’s newest member, Andre Cambridge, might be up for the task. A week after his installation, Mr. Cambridge told me that his speeds had been good and that he hadn’t experienced any problems. His mother even suggested that they should up their monthly donation from $20 to support the cause.

He said he was excited but also wary about Mesh’s future. He had seen other community solutions get up and running only to be squashed by regulation and corporate interests. He suggested that if the government really wanted to help, it should fund training for volunteer installs, subsidize hardware costs and pay for network education so community members would understand the hubs they would be stewarding.

In the meantime, Mr. Cambridge said he was prepared to do his part to take care of his new hub. “If you had a community well back in the day, you had to maintain it,” he said. “Eventually I’m going to be like, ‘What’s the network map on this, what’s my upkeep look like?’ I’m part of a system, so I have to be. I’m going to advocate for my neighbor. ‘Hey, would you like to join the system too?’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/n...-internet.html





Censorship Circumvention Tool Helps 1.4 Million Cubans Get Internet Access
David Shepardson

Psiphon Inc's freely available internet censorship circumvention tool has about helped nearly 1.4 million Cubans this week gain access to websites, the company said on Friday, after Cuba's government curbed access to popular social media and messaging platforms.

The Toronto-based company's Psiphon Network receives U.S. government financial support and also helped people in other countries including Iran and China overcome governmental restrictions on internet access.

Thousands of Cubans joined nationwide protests over shortages of basic goods, limits on civil liberties and the government's handling of a surge in COVID-19 infections on Sunday, the most significant unrest in decades in the communist-run country.

Psiphon said 1.389 million users accessed the open web from Cuba through its network on Thursday, as well as 1.238 million as noon EDT (1600 GMT) on Friday.

"Internet is ON; circumvention tools ARE working," Psiphon said in a statement.

Psiphon said the roughly 1.4 million represents about 20% of Cuban internet users. Its open source circumvention tool can be downloaded from app stores like Google Play or Apple to "maximize your chances of bypassing censorship," according to the company. Canadian university researchers developed the software in 2007 to let users evade governmental internet firewalls.

Cuba's government has restricted access to platforms including Facebook and WhatsApp amid the protests, according to global internet monitoring firm NetBlocks.

"We must stand with those opposing authoritarian regimes," said U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, a congressional supporter of U.S. funding for the network.

President Joe Biden said on Thursday the White House is reviewing whether the U.S. government can help Cubans regain internet access. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki sidestepped questions on Friday about the effort or whether Biden's administration has reached out to U.S. tech firms.

Reporting by David Shepardson; Additional reporting by Nandita Bose; Editing by Will Dunham
https://www.reuters.com/world/americ...ss-2021-07-16/





Democratic Bill would Suspend Section 230 Protections when Social Networks Boost Anti-Vax Conspiracies
Taylor Hatmaker

Two Democratic senators introduced a bill Thursday that would strip away the liability shield that social media platforms hold dear when those companies boost anti-vaccine conspiracies and other kinds of health misinformation.

The Health Misinformation Act, introduced by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), would create a new carveout in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to hold platforms liable for algorithmically promoted health misinformation and conspiracies. Platforms rely on Section 230 to protect them from legal liability for the vast amount of user-created content they host.

“For far too long, online platforms have not done enough to protect the health of Americans,” Klobuchar said. “These are some of the biggest, richest companies in the world and they must do more to prevent the spread of deadly vaccine misinformation.”

The bill would specifically alter Section 230’s language to revoke liability protections in the case of “health misinformation that is created or developed through the interactive computer service” if that misinformation is amplified through an algorithm. The proposed exception would only kick in during a declared national public health crisis, like the advent of COVID-19, and wouldn’t apply in normal times. The bill would task the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with defining health misinformation.

“Features that are built into technology platforms have contributed to the spread of misinformation and disinformation, with social media platforms incentivizing individuals to share content to get likes, comments, and other positive signals of engagement, which rewards engagement rather than accuracy,” the bill reads.

The bill also makes mention of the “disinformation dozen” — just 12 people, including anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a grab bag of other conspiracy theorists, who account for a massive swath of the anti-vax misinformation ecosystem. Many of the individuals on the list still openly spread their messaging through social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.

Section 230’s defenders generally view the idea of new carveouts to the law as dangerous. Because Section 230 is such a foundational piece of the modern internet, enabling everything from Yelp and Reddit to the comment section below this post, they argue that the potential for unforeseen second-order effects means the law should be left intact.

But some members of Congress — both Democrats and Republicans — see Section 230 as a valuable lever in their quest to regulate major social media companies. While the White House is pursuing its own path to craft consequences for overgrown tech companies through the Justice Department and the FTC, Biden’s office said earlier this week that the president is “reviewing” Section 230 as well. But as Trump also discovered, weakening Section 230 is a task that only Congress is positioned to accomplish — and even that is still a long shot.

After a recent war of words with President Biden over its handling of Covid-19 misinformation, Facebook struck a cooperative if vague note on the new Democratic bill. “We believe clarification on the difficult and urgent questions about health related misinformation would be helpful and look forward to working with Congress and the industry as we consider options for reform,” Facebook VP of Public Policy Kevin Martin said.

While the new Democratic bill is narrowly targeted as far as proposed changes to Section 230 go, it’s unlikely to attract bipartisan support. Republicans are also interest in stripping away some of Big Tech’s liability protections, but generally hold the view that platforms remove too much content rather than too little. Republicans are also more likely to sow misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines themselves, framing vaccination as a partisan issue. Whether the bill goes anywhere, it’s clear that an alarming portion of Americans have no intention of getting vaccinated — even with a much more contagious variant on the rise and colder months on the horizon.

“As COVID-19 cases rise among the unvaccinated, so has the amount of misinformation surrounding vaccines on social media,” Luján said of the proposed changes to Section 230. “Lives are at stake.”
https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/22/se...formation-act/





Huge Data Leak Shatters the Lie that the Innocent Need Not Fear Surveillance

Our investigation shows how repressive regimes can buy and use the kind of spying tools Edward Snowden warned us about
Paul Lewis

Billions of people are inseparable from their phones. Their devices are within reach – and earshot – for almost every daily experience, from the most mundane to the most intimate.

Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time.

Such are the capabilities of Pegasus, the spyware manufactured by NSO Group, the Israeli purveyor of weapons of mass surveillance.

NSO rejects this label. It insists only carefully vetted government intelligence and law enforcement agencies can use Pegasus, and only to penetrate the phones of “legitimate criminal or terror group targets”.

Yet in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as candidates for possible surveillance by NSO clients in a massive leak of data.

Without forensics on their devices, we cannot know whether governments successfully targeted these people. But the presence of their names on this list indicates the lengths to which governments may go to spy on critics, rivals and opponents.

First we reveal how journalists across the world were selected as potential targets by these clients prior to a possible hack using NSO surveillance tools.

Over the coming week we will be revealing the identities of more people whose phone numbers appear in the leak. They include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state.

Our reporting is rooted in the public interest. We believe the public should know that NSO’s technology is being abused by the governments who license and operate its spyware. But we also believe it is in the public interest to reveal how governments look to spy on their citizens and how seemingly benign processes such as HLR lookups can be exploited in this environment.

The Pegasus project is a collaborative reporting project led by the French nonprofit organisation Forbidden Stories, including the Guardian and 16 other media outlets. For months, our journalists have been working with reporters across the world to establish the identities of people in the leaked data and see if and how this links to NSO’s software.

It is not possible to know without forensic analysis whether the phone of someone whose number appears in the data was actually targeted by a government or whether it was successfully hacked with NSO’s spyware. But when our technical partner, Amnesty International’s Security Lab, conducted forensic analysis on dozens of iPhones that belonged to potential targets at the time they were selected, they found evidence of Pegasus activity in more than half.

One phone that has contained signs of Pegasus activity belonged to our esteemed Mexican colleague Carmen Aristegui, whose number was in the data leak and who was targeted following her exposé of a corruption scandal involving her country’s former president Enrique Peña Nieto.

The data leak suggests that Mexican authorities did not stop at Aristegui. The phone numbers of at least four of her journalist colleagues appear in the leak, as well as her assistant, her sister and her son, who was 16 at the time.

Investigating software produced and sold by a company as secretive as NSO is not easy. Its business is surveillance, after all. It meant a radical overhaul of our working methods, including a ban on discussing our work with sources, editors or lawyers in the presence of our phones.

The last time the Guardian adopted such extreme counter-espionage measures was in 2013, when reporting on documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Those disclosures pulled back the curtains on the vast apparatus of mass surveillance created after 9/11 by western intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and its British partner, GCHQ.

In doing so, they instigated a global debate about western state surveillance capabilities and led to countries, including the UK, admitting their regulatory regime was out of date and open to potential abuse.

The Pegasus project may do the same for the privatised government surveillance industry that has turned NSO into a billion-dollar company.

Companies such as NSO operate in a market that is almost entirely unregulated, enabling tools that can be used as instruments of repression for authoritarian regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

The market for NSO-style surveillance-on-demand services has boomed post-Snowden, whose revelations prompted the mass adoption of encryption across the internet. As a result the internet became far more secure, and mass harvesting of communications much more difficult.

But that in turn spurred the proliferation of companies such as NSO offering solutions to governments struggling to intercept messages, emails and calls in transit. The NSO answer was to bypass encryption by hacking devices.

Two years ago the then UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, called for a moratorium on the sale of NSO-style spyware to governments until viable export controls could be put in place. He warned of an industry that seemed “out of control, unaccountable and unconstrained in providing governments with relatively low-cost access to the sorts of spying tools that only the most advanced state intelligence services were previously able to use”.

His warnings were ignored. The sale of surveillance continued unabated. That GCHQ-like surveillance tools are now available for purchase by repressive governments may give some of Snowden’s critics pause for thought.

In the UK, the whistleblower’s detractors argued breezily that spying was what intelligence agencies were supposed to do. We were assured that innocent citizens in the Five Eyes alliance of intelligence powers, comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US, were safe from abuse. Some invoked the dictum: “If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.”

The Pegasus project is likely to put an end to any such wishful thinking. Law-abiding people – including citizens and residents of democracies such as the UK, such as editors-in-chief of leading newspapers – are not immune from unwarranted surveillance. And western countries do not have a monopoly on the most invasive surveillance technologies. We’re entering a new surveillance era, and unless protections are put in place, none of us are safe.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/202...r-surveillance





Researchers Hid Malware Inside an AI's 'Neurons' And It Worked Scarily Well

In a proof-of-concept, researchers reported they could embed malware in up to half of an AI model's nodes and still obtain very high accuracy.
Radhamely De Leon

Neural networks could be the next frontier for malware campaigns as they become more widely used, according to a new study.

According to the study, which was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Monday, malware can be embedded directly into the artificial neurons that make up machine learning models in a way that keeps them from being detected. The neural network would even be able to continue performing its set tasks normally.

“As neural networks become more widely used, this method will be universal in delivering malware in the future,” the authors, from the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, write.

Using real malware samples, their experiments found that replacing up to around 50 percent of the neurons in the AlexNet model⁠—a benchmark-setting classic in the AI field⁠—with malware still kept the model’s accuracy rate above 93.1 percent. The authors concluded that a 178MB AlexNet model can have up to 36.9MB of malware embedded into its structure without being detected using a technique called steganography. Some of the models were tested against 58 common antivirus systems and the malware was not detected.

Other methods of hacking into businesses or organizations, such as attaching malware to documents or files, often cannot deliver malicious software en masse without being detected. The new research, on the other hand, envisions a future where an organization may bring in an off-the-shelf machine learning model for any given task (say, a chat bot, or image detection) that could be loaded with malware while performing its task well enough not to arouse suspicion.

According to the study, this is because AlexNet (like many machine learning models) is made up of millions of parameters and many complex layers of neurons including what are known as fully-connected "hidden" layers. By keeping the huge hidden layers in AlexNet completely intact, the researchers found that changing some other neurons had little effect on performance.

In the paper, the authors lay out a playbook for how a hacker might design a malware-loaded machine learning model and have it spread in the wild:

"First, the attacker needs to design the neural network. To ensure more malware can be embedded, the attacker can introduce more neurons. Then the attacker needs to train the network with the prepared dataset to get a well-performed model. If there are suitable well-trained models, the attacker can choose to use the existing models. After that, the attacker selects the best layer and embeds the malware. After embedding malware, the attacker needs to evaluate the model’s performance to ensure the loss is acceptable. If the loss on the model is beyond an acceptable range, the attacker needs to retrain the model with the dataset to gain higher performance. Once the model is prepared, the attacker can publish it on public repositories or other places using methods like supply chain pollution, etc."

According to the paper, in this approach the malware is "disassembled" when embedded into the network's neurons, and assembled into functioning malware by a malicious receiver program that can also be used to download the poisoned model via an update. The malware can still be stopped if the target device verifies the model before launching it, according to the paper. It can also be detected using “traditional methods” like static and dynamic analysis.

“Today it would not be simple to detect it by antivirus software, but this is only because nobody is looking in there,” cybersecurity researcher and consultant Dr. Lukasz Olejnik told Motherboard.

Olejnik also warned that the malware extraction step in the process could also risk detection. Once the malware hidden in the model was compiled into, well, malware, then it could be picked up. It also might just be overkill.

"But it's also a problem because custom methods to extract malware from the [deep neural network] model means that the targeted systems may already be under attacker control," he said "But if the target hosts are already under attacker control, there's a reduced need to hide extra malware."

"While this is legitimate and good research, I do not think that hiding whole malware in the DNN model offers much to the attacker,” he added.

The researchers noted in the study that they hoped that this could “provide a referenceable scenario for the defense on neural network-assisted attacks.” They did not return Motherboard’s request for comment.

This isn't the first time that researchers have looked into how neural networks can be exploited by malicious actors, such as with images designed to confuse them or by embedding backdoors that would cause models to misbehave. If neural networks really are the future of hacking, this could become a new threat to large companies as malware campaigns increase.

“With the popularity of AI, AI-assisted attacks will emerge and bring new challenges for computer security. Network attack and defense are interdependent,” the paper notes. “We hope the proposed scenario will contribute to future protection efforts.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvzp...d-scarily-well





A Defunct Video Hosting Site Is Flooding Normal Websites With Hardcore Porn

Stories on major news sites like ‘The Washington Post,’ and ‘New York Magazine’ currently have porn embedded in them because of an old site called Matthew Gault, Jason Koebler

Hardcore porn is embedded all over regular-ass websites because a porn company has purchased the domain of a popular, defunct video hosting site.

As pointed out by Twitter user @dox_gay, hardcore porn is now embedded on the pages of the Huffington Post, New York magazine, The Washington Post, and a host of other websites. This is because a porn site called 5 Star Porn HD bought the domain for Vidme, a brief YouTube competitor founded in 2014 and shuttered in 2017. Its Twitter account is still up, but the domain lapsed.

Seemingly any vid.me embeds now redirect to the 5 Star Porn HD homepage. The site vid.me also redirects there. For example, if you check out this New York magazine article about former House Majority leader John Boehner's "creepy kissy face," you will see photos of Boehner but also images of a man with a gigantic penis fucking a woman.

Archived versions of this page show that there was formerly a vid.me embed on the page; the page's source code shows the same.

Over at the Huffington Post, an article about Martin Shkreli being banned from Twitter is augmented with videos titled “Getting Into Porsha’s Ass” and “Why Don’t We Tag Team Your GF?”

A pre-Trump-presidency Uproxx article about Trump’s performance at a GOP debate is illustrated with thumbnails for videos titled “Aria Lee Is Back For More” and “Naughty Spy Girls Part 2.”

This is funny, unfortunate, and also, an example of a much larger problem: The internet is a collective hallucination that is fading away thanks to link rot.

5 Star HD Porn did not immediately return Motherboard’s request for comment.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8x...-hardcore-porn





Report Finds Big Telecom Spends $230,000 on Lobbying Every Day

Telecom giants spent $234 million during the 116th Congress to ensure US broadband remained spotty, crappy, and expensive.
Karl Bode

A new study argues crappy U.S. broadband is an active policy choice—and a direct result of pathetically weak U.S. lobbying and corporate finance laws.

Over the last few years big internet service providers have killed net neutrality, eliminated most FCC oversight of broadband providers, derailed efforts to pass meaningful privacy rules, and thwarted a wide variety of proposals designed to deliver faster, cheaper fiber broadband competition.

A new joint study by Common Cause and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union found that the telecom industry spent $234 million on lobbying during the 116th Congress alone, or nearly $230,000 a day. Comcast was the biggest spender at more than $43 million, with AT&T not far behind at $36 million.

“The powerful ISP lobby will seemingly spend whatever it takes to keep politicians beholden to them and maintain a status quo that leaves too many Americans on the wrong side of the digital divide,” the groups said.

The result of this influence, the study found, is U.S. broadband that’s slower, more expensive, and generally worse than the global average. And political leaders that are generally too feckless and compromised to do much of anything about it.

“The largest ISPs have used their outsized influence in Congress to block any legislation that would undermine their stranglehold over the broadband marketplace,” the study noted.

The groups found that one of the industry’s top targets during the last Congress was the Save the Internet Act, which would have restored net neutrality and the FCC consumer protection authority stripped away during the Trump administration (amidst a flood of empty promises).

Telecom lobbyists also fought against the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, which includes money to help fund local community broadband. And they successfully derailed the RESILIENT Networks Act, proposed as an attempt to shore up Puerto Rico network resiliency after prolonged telecom outages from hurricanes Irma and Maria.

An estimated 83 million Americans live under a broadband monopoly, usually a regional cable giant like Comcast or Charter. Millions more live under a duopoly consisting of either an apathetic phone company or their local cable provider. The end result is obvious: spotty access, slow speeds, high prices, and generally terrible customer service.

Often these failures are treated as a matter of cost (we’re not spending enough) or technology (we’re not inventing or investing in the right solutions). But the CWA and Common Cause study argues that substandard U.S. broadband is an active policy choice made by heavily-lobbied lawmakers. In other words: corruption.

“For years, Congressional efforts to pass legislation needed to address the nation’s long-standing disparities in connectivity have been stopped dead in their tracks in part because of aggressive industry lobbying and the oversized political influence of the largest ISPs,” Common Cause Media and Democracy Program Director Yosef Getachew said of the study.

Getachew noted that efforts to improve broadband mapping, fund the deployment of competitive fiber, or even improve the standard definition of broadband have all repeatedly been scuttled by industry lobbying. At the same time, telecom lobbyists have worked tirelessly to undermine federal and state regulatory oversight of the heavy monopolized telecom industry.

For example the Trump-era net neutrality repeal didn’t just kill net neutrality rules designed to protect consumers, it eliminated much of the agency’s consumer protection authority. To accomplish this the industry didn’t just lobby Congress, it was caught hiring marketing firms to flood the FCC with bogus support from both dead and fake Americans.

The report found that a primary reason this dynamic doesn’t change is an obvious one: U.S. lobbying laws are too pathetic to rein in corporate influence.

Current federal lobbying laws define a “lobbyist” as an individual who—within a three-month period—makes two or more lobbying contacts or spends more than 20 percent of their time lobbying. But it’s relatively trivial for most lobbying firms to tap dance around these restrictions by using multiple lobbyists or by simply calling what they do—something else.

However weak our federal lobbying laws are, the report notes that U.S. campaign finance laws are even weaker. Thanks in large part to the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision, which eliminated already flimsy restrictions on corporate political expenditures, flooding DC with an unlimited parade of “dark money” contributions.

“Under Citizens United and its progeny, ISPs, trade associations, and other corporations can make unlimited expenditures in federal elections and unlimited contributions to super PACs and dark money groups to be spent on supporting or opposing federal candidates,” the report said.

Much of this spending isn’t really tracked, meaning that however much your local cable monopoly spends on lobbying, it’s likely spending millions more on various (and often extremely dodgy) campaigns to influence policy, media coverage, and the public discourse.

The report is quick to note that while this kind of lopsided telecom giant influence is bad for everybody, it’s particularly harmful for low-income and marginalized communities, which not only can’t afford the resulting high prices, but are routinely left out of the loop when it comes to next-generation broadband upgrades.

“Our political system is rigged in favor of hedge funds and wealthy shareholders who demand short-term profits over the lasting health of our economy,” CWA Senior Director for Government Affairs Shane Larson told Motherboard. “Telecom companies are limiting deployment of fiber optic broadband to wealthier neighborhoods and monopoly cable is overcharging for subpar service.”

To fix the U.S. broadband problem, the report recommends first updating the Lobbying Disclosure Act to force companies to clearly disclose what legislation they’re lobbying on and which public officials they’ve been in contact with. The report also recommends passing the For the People Act to help usher forth additional lobbying and voting reforms.

Only then can Congress actually pass broadband reform legislation the public generally supports, whether it’s tough net neutrality rules, broadband-related consumer privacy protections, or dismantling unjust state restrictions on community broadband.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88nd...ying-every-day

















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