Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 1st, ’23

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April 1st, 2023




The Internet Archive has Lost its First Fight to Scan and Lend E-Books Like a Library

A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in a lawsuit brought by four book publishers.
Jay Peters and Sean Hollister

A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit brought against it by four book publishers, deciding that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them out like a library.

Judge John G. Koeltl decided that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create “derivative works,” and so would have needed authorization from the books’ copyright holders — the publishers — before lending them out through its National Emergency Library program.

The Internet Archive says it will appeal. “Today’s lower court decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve,” Chris Freeland, the director of Open Libraries at the Internet Archive, writes in a blog post. “This decision impacts libraries across the US who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.”

The two sides went to court on Monday, with HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House joining Hachette as plaintiffs.

In his ruling, Judge Koetl considered whether the Internet Archive was operating under the principle of Fair Use, which previously protected a digital book preservation project by Google Books and HathiTrust in 2014, among other users. Fair Use considers whether using a copyrighted work is good for the public, how much it’ll impact the copyright holder, how much of the work has been copied, and whether the use has “transformed” a copyrighted thing into something new, among other things.

The judge dismissed all of the IA’s Fair Use arguments

But Koetl wrote that any “alleged benefits” from the Internet Archive’s library “cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers,” declares that “there is nothing transformative about [Internet Archive’s] copying and unauthorized lending,” and that copying these books doesn’t provide “criticism, commentary, or information about them.” He notes that the Google Books use was found “transformative” because it created a searchable database instead of simply publishing copies of books on the internet.

Koetl also dismissed arguments that the Internet Archive might theoretically have helped publishers sell more copies of their books, saying there was no direct evidence, and that it was “irrelevant” that the Internet Archive had purchased its own copies of the books before making copies for its online audience. According to data obtained during the trial, the Internet Archive currently hosts around 70,000 e-book “borrows” a day.

The lawsuit came from the Internet Archive’s decision to launch the “National Emergency Library” early in the covid pandemic, which let people read from 1.4 million digitized books with no waitlist. Typically, the Internet Archive’s Open Library program operates under a “controlled digital lending” (CDL) system where it can loan out digitized copies of a book on a one-to-one basis, but it removed those waitlists to offer easier access to those books when stay-at-home orders arrived during the pandemic. (CDL systems operate differently than services like OverDrive, which can lend you publisher-licensed ebooks.) Some weren’t happy about the Internet Archive’s choice, and the group of publishers sued the organization in June 2020. Later that month, the Archive shut down that program.

The Internet Archive says it will continue acting as a library in other ways, despite the decision. “This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books,” writes Freeland.

“The publishing community is grateful to the Court for its unequivocal affirmation of the Copyright Act and respect for established precedent,” Maria A. Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement. “In rejecting arguments that would have pushed fair use to illogical markers, the Court has underscored the importance of authors, publishers, and creative markets in a global society. In celebrating the opinion, we also thank the thousands of public libraries across the country that serve their communities everyday through lawful eBook licenses. We hope the opinion will prove educational to the defendant and anyone else who finds public laws inconvenient to their own interests.”
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/2...ibrary-lawsuit





Missouri Reps Just Voted to Completely Defund the State’s Public Libraries

The new budget sets funds for libraries to $0. Library groups say the move is retaliation for suing the state over its recent book ban law.
Claire Woodcock

Late Tuesday night, the Missouri House of Representatives voted for a state operating budget with a $0 line for public libraries. While the budget still needs to work its way through the Senate and the governor’s office, state funding for public libraries is very much on the chopping block in Missouri.

This comes after Republican House Budget Chairman Cody Smith proposed a $4.5 million cut to public libraries’ state aid last week in the initial House Budget Committee hearing, where Smith cited a lawsuit filed against Missouri by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri (ACLU-MO) as the reason for the cut.

ACLU-MO filed the suit on behalf of the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association (MLA) in an effort to overturn a state law passed in 2022 that bans sexually explicit material from schools. Since it was first enacted in August, librarians and other educators have faced misdemeanor charges punishable by up to a year in jail or a $2,000 fine for giving students access to books the state has deemed sexually explicit. The Missouri law defined explicit sexual material as images “showing human masturbation, deviate sexual intercourse,” “sexual intercourse, direct physical stimulation of genitals, sadomasochistic abuse,” or showing human genitals. The lawsuit claims that school districts have been pulling books from their shelves.

“The house budget committee’s choice to retaliate against two private, volunteer-led organizations by punishing the patrons of Missouri’s public libraries is abhorrent,” Tom Bastian, deputy director for communications for ACLU-MO said in a statement to Motherboard.

Like in all ACLU cases, the organization is not charging the two Missouri library groups for services. Both library organizations are also run by volunteers – every state has an equivalent of these two organizations that serve public and school libraries. In other words, a politician either lied or didn’t have his facts straight, and now 160 library districts risk losing state aid in June.

“State Aid helps libraries provide relevant collections, literacy based programming, and technology resources to their communities,” Otter Bowman, president of the MLA told Motherboard in a statement. “Our rural libraries rely the most heavily on this funding to serve their communities, and they will be crippled by this drastic budget cut.”

Libraries have become a recurring battleground in the latest culture wars, as conservative groups across the US seek to remove books they consider objectionable. In other states where obscenity bills became laws last year, including Oklahoma and Tennessee, it’s become easier for one adult to challenge books with LGBTQ and diversity representation. Last week, the American Library Association released data showing that in 2022, the amount of book challenges issued nearly doubled, and 32 percent of all book challenges included multiple titles. EveryLibrary Institute has tracked more than two dozen new obscenity bills introduced this year alone, as of March 23, 2023.

“If the members of the committee are concerned about preserving taxpayer funds, they should stop enacting laws they know do not meet constitutional muster, not burden local governments in a misguided effort to silence organizations who object to the legislature’s overreach,” Bastian added.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3wg...ries-book-bans





The Entertainment Industry has Become so Reliant on TikTok that Banning the App could Hurt Business, Industry Insiders Say
Taylor Lorenz

David Ma, a film director in Brooklyn, never had the money to go to film school. And though he loved shooting films, he was largely shut out of the types of opportunities reserved for big-time directors with Hollywood connections. Then came TikTok.

Ma joined the app in 2020 and immediately amassed a following for his unique directorial style. Studio executives and Hollywood bigwigs noticed, and suddenly, Ma was landing directing jobs. The entire trajectory of his career changed.

“I was never on the radar in places like Netflix or HBO Max or Paramount,” he said. “Since I’ve been able to create work on the platform, my work has reached studio executives and marketing departments. TikTok allowed me to build that network without having the roster or résumé.”

Since the last time the U.S. government considered banning TikTok in 2020, the app has evolved from a social platform supporting a robust ecosystem of content creators and small businesses to an entertainment powerhouse, upending Hollywood power structures and rewriting the rules of the entertainment landscape. A ban now would threaten not the livelihoods of TikTok’s biggest stars and thousands of small businesses, it could deal a massive blow to the entertainment industry, forcing movie studios, record labels, casting directors, Hollywood agents, and actors to radically shift the way they do business.

“TikTok is the most democratized content platform we’ve ever had and it has revolutionized Hollywood,” said Adam Faze, studio chief of FazeWorld, an entertainment studio that produces scripted and unscripted shows. “I see TikTok as the old days of free network TV … Taking it away would go back to an era where we’re relying on legacy media brands and what Hollywood wants us to watch because they’re the only ones who can afford a marketing budget to find an audience.”

TikTok has allowed those who have traditionally been shut out of the media and entertainment industry a way to circumvent legacy gatekeepers and get a foot in the door.

That is consistent with what a recent poll conducted by The Washington Post found about TikTok’s audience: Its users are more likely to be young and non-White.

The poll found that 53 percent of non-White adults (including 67 percent of Hispanic adults) used TikTok in the past month, compared with 29 percent of White adults. Fifty-nine percent of Americans ages 18-34 used TikTok in the past month, compared with just 13 percent of those 65 and older.

TikTok users are also more likely to have lower incomes — 45 percent of those with household incomes of under $50,000 used TikTok in the previous month, compared with 32 percent of those with incomes of $100,000 or more. And people without college degrees are more likely to have used TikTok in the past month (42 percent) than those who are college graduates (32 percent).

Faze began producing scripted and unscripted television shows for TikTok last year, after discovering he could reach millions of viewers overnight at scale. One show produced by Fazeworld called “Keep the Meter Running,” where comedian Kareem Rahma conducts Anthony Bourdain-style interviews with cabdrivers as they travel on adventures together, became an overnight hit, amassing millions of views.

“Three weeks into doing the show, we went to London to shoot an episode, and we were getting chased down the street by kids saying, ‘This is my favorite show,’” Faze said. “TikTok helped the show find an audience in a way that would have taken years in traditional media.”

Unlike platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, TikTok bills itself as an entertainment platform, not a social network. Rather than relying on users to friend or follow dozens of accounts to find interesting content, the app delivers a fresh feed of videos every day through its “For You” feed. In that way, it's as much of a Netflix, HBO, or Spotify competitor as a social platform.

“I’ve never, in my entire life working in Hollywood, been able to talk about a project I’m working on and assume the person I’m talking to has seen it,” Faze said. “TikTok has allowed that to happen.”

While there is no authoritative figure of how much money studios spend publicizing their offerings on TikTok, it is clear the platforms’ role in launching new movies is huge. When a TikTok trend around a movie takes off, it results in box office gold.

Last year, after a TikTok trend in which teenagers dressed up in suits to see “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” Universal Pictures saw ticket sales rise. The Minions movie netted more than $940 million globally at the box office, becoming the fifth highest-grossing film of 2022. Movies like “M3GAN” and “Cocaine Bear” have also become hits with the help of TikTok.

Alex Sanger, executive vice president of global digital marketing at Universal Pictures, said that the company relies on TikTok “heavily” when it comes to marketing its movies. “TikTok is how we can reach basically everyone at scale,” he said. “We use it as an awareness builder, we use it to drive deeper engagement with our IP, we use it further down the funnel to convert people into moviegoers. We certainly use all the other platforms, but they have different functionality and different uses.”

“When our films really break through [on TikTok], and become kind of a part of the cultural zeitgeist, that's an amazing thing for us,” he added.

TikTok has said its research shows that 58 percent of its users are interested in seeing more content from entertainment studios on the platform. Last year, Variety reported that more major film studios, including Lionsgate and Universal, were leveraging the app to achieve box-office success. Sony also used TikTok to generate hype for the theatrical release of “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” It gave popular TikToker Michael Le a walk-on part in the film and enlisted TikTok content creators to share behind-the-scenes footage before the film’s release. The film became the seventh highest-grossing film in movie history.

Last October, the app rolled out a new advertising format called Showtimes, specifically tailored to the needs of entertainment industry clients. The ad format allows users to more easily discover new movies, watch trailers, and purchase tickets.

In addition to television and movies, TikTok has also radically transformed the music industry. It is now the primary place where young users go to discover new songs and artists, it’s where record labels do A&R, (essentially talent scouting and talent development) and it’s what huge music stars use to engage with fans in a way they say could never replicate on Instagram or YouTube.

TikTok has launched the careers of a slew of pop stars including Lil Nas X, JVKE, and Jack Harlow. Other major artists such as Lizzo, Megan Thee Stallion, and Doja Cat all skyrocketed to fame after their songs went viral and became trends on the app.

Tatiana Cirisano, a music industry analyst at Midia Research, an entertainment industry research and consulting firm, said banning TikTok would throw the music industry into disarray. “This isn’t just about artists losing a tool, this is a major discovery mechanism for major labels themselves,” she said. “The [potential ban] is more important and more related to their bottom line than you might think.”

While many Hollywood and music industry insiders told The Post they weren’t lobbying hard against the ban publicly for fears of wading into a political PR disaster, they were angry at what they considered government overreach and worried that a ban could seriously hurt their businesses. “Everything about how you market music and ‘break’ an artist is changing,” said Cirisano, using industry jargon for introducing a new performer. “TikTok is something the music industry has been relying on to help solve some of those challenges over the past couple of years.”

It has also provided a new revenue stream the music industry has been desperately seeking. “The music industry gets revenue from music being played on TikTok,” Cirisano said. “These licensing deals are becoming a more and more important part of labels’ revenue streams.” A TikTok ban would wipe out that revenue overnight, Cirisano said.

TikTok contributed an estimated 13 percent of record labels’ “emerging platform” revenue in 2021, according to a report from Goldman Sachs. Since then, the app has nearly tripled its revenue.

While entertainment executives scramble to create contingency plans if the worst-case scenario comes to fruition, workers in the industry are also nervous. Casting directors, agents, and model scouts all rely on TikTok to identify up and coming talent. The functionality of the platform is radically different from YouTube or Instagram and has allowed a generation of Hollywood talent to bypass traditional gatekeepers.

“The consensus among the people I’m talking to is a fear that their voice might be silenced in the event that TikTok does get banned,” said Stephen Hart, an actor in Los Angeles who began creating content on TikTok during the early days of the pandemic when jobs were scarce. His TikTok account, which has more than 416,800 followers, has helped raise his profile significantly and provides a steady stream of income.

Sarah Pribis, an actress in New York City, said that a TikTok ban would be disastrous financially. “I would have to go back to bartending,” she said. “Right now, I’m able to do everything from home and have this nice, loose schedule. If TikTok was banned, I would have to go back to being on my feet at a bar eight hours a night, then come home at midnight exhausted. I would have less financial stability and freedom.”

Grant Goodman, an actor in Atlanta who appeared on the TV series “Stranger Things,” said a ban would be particularly harmful for actors who don’t traditionally have the Hollywood connections and the money to move to Los Angeles.

“A TikTok ban would be an active hindrance to people wanting to become actors who don’t have these advantages,” he said. “It would thin the talent pool and give an advantage to a lot of people who can afford rent in L.A. and already have connections at talent agencies and other advantages, whether financial, professional or familial. A TikTok ban would hinder a lot of the working class from even beginning in this industry. People who have advantageous upbringings, they’d have a tremendous advantage if the app was banned.”

Ma, the film director, agreed, echoing that a ban could be catastrophic for those from marginalized groups seeking to pursue a career in entertainment. “In an industry that is a very difficult one to break into, TikTok gives people without schooling or relationships the opportunity to be seen, attend premieres, film sets, and tell their stories they wrote, acted, directed, shot and edited,” he said. “These kinds of opportunities and visibility mean a lot to young and underrepresented filmmakers trying to make it in the industry.”

TikTok has allowed a generation of talent to bypass traditional gatekeepers, industry experts said, and yanking that away would be a huge step back in terms of equality and access.

“TikTok allows an unbiased look into other people’s lives, without the need for a media establishment,” Faze said. “This bill is being fueled by a media and tech establishment that’s very scared of TikTok, and not because it’s owned by China.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...llywood-music/





The RIAA v. Steve Jobs
Paul Kafasis

It may be difficult to imagine, but back at the turn of the millennium, the simple right to record audio on your computer was not well-established. Though the precedent of time shifting existed for television, space shifting was still an emerging idea. The acronym for the Recording Industry Association of America, RIAA, was something of a new four-letter word due to their hostility toward new ideas. In addition to shutting down Napster, they also attempted to squash the first hardware MP3 player.

This had an impact on our marketing for the first version of Audio Hijack. Rather than focusing on the app’s recording functionality, we highlighted use cases like adding an equalizer to movies. We knew recording was useful, but the app’s ability to apply audio effects anywhere on the Mac carried much less legal peril.

At that time, our sales were slow enough that we often skimmed incoming orders to learn about who was buying. On September 30, 2003, exactly one year after we opened our virtual doors, an order with an RIAA email address came through. That put a damper on our first anniversary celebrations, as we had full knowledge of the organization’s litigious history. We were naturally concerned that they were aware of our product. Unfortunately, there was nothing for us to do but feel uneasy and await their next move.

It never came. We never heard a word from the RIAA, nor their lawyers. As time passed without any trouble, we eventually came to assume that they recognized our tool’s many legitimate fair uses. We continued development of Audio Hijack, leaning in to its audio recording abilities. That focus led to it being a premier solution for podcasters, both then and now.

Earlier this month, however, we heard a chilling story. It comes from the Podfather himself, Adam Curry, who was instrumental in helping podcasts take off in the mid-2000s. He’s also a long-time Audio Hijack user and supporter, one who provided us with many helpful suggestions in the early years. Recently, Adam gave an interview detailing his efforts to modernize the podcasting format. Therein, he told a story about the origins of podcasts in iTunes, and a conversation he had with Steve Jobs circa 2005:

And in that very meeting, Steve asked: “How do you do your recording?”. We didn’t really have any tools to record, there was not much going on at the time. But the Mac had an application called Audio Hijack Pro, and it was great because we could create audio chains with compressors, and replicate a bit of studio work.

Eddy Cue said: “The RIAA wants us to disable Audio Hijack Pro, because with it you could record any sound off of your Mac, any song, anything”. Steve then turned to me and said: “Do you need this to create these podcasts?”. I said: “Currently, yes!”. So Steve Jobs told them to get lost, and I thought: “Hey man, thanks, Steve’s on my side. That’s cool.”.

Even 18 years on, I find this story rather terrifying. If not for an offhand conversation in which we had no involvement, things could have turned out very differently for our company.
https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2023/...-v-steve-jobs/





U.S. and China Wage War Beneath the Waves – Over Internet Cables

Subsea cables, which carry the world's data, are now central to the U.S.-China tech war. Washington, fearful of Beijing's spies, has thwarted Chinese projects abroad and choked Big Tech's cable routes to Hong Kong, Reuters has learned.
Joe Brock

It started out as strictly business: a huge private contract for one of the world’s most advanced undersea fiber-optic cables. It became a trophy in a growing proxy war between the United States and China over technologies that could determine who achieves economic and military dominance for decades to come.

In February, American subsea cable company SubCom LLC began laying a $600-million cable to transport data from Asia to Europe, via Africa and the Middle East, at super-fast speeds over 12,000 miles of fiber running along the seafloor.

That cable is known as South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 6, or SeaMeWe-6 for short. It will connect a dozen countries as it snakes its way from Singapore to France, crossing three seas and the Indian Ocean on the way. It is slated to be finished in 2025.

It was a project that slipped through China’s fingers.

A Chinese company that has quickly emerged as a force in the subsea cable-building industry – HMN Technologies Co Ltd – was on the brink of snagging that contract three years ago. The client for the cable was a consortium of more than a dozen global firms. Three of China’s state-owned carriers – China Telecommunications Corporation (China Telecom), China Mobile Limited and China United Network Communications Group Co Ltd (China Unicom) – had committed funding as members of the consortium, which also included U.S.-based Microsoft Corp and French telecom firm Orange SA, according to six people involved in the deal.

HMN Tech, whose predecessor company was majority-owned by Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, was selected in early 2020 to manufacture and lay the cable, the people said, due in part to hefty subsidies from Beijing that lowered the cost. HMN Tech’s bid of $500 million was roughly a third cheaper than the initial proposal submitted to the cable consortium by New Jersey-based SubCom, the people said.

The Singapore-to-France cable would have been HMN Tech’s biggest such project to date, cementing it as the world’s fastest-rising subsea cable builder, and extending the global reach of the three Chinese telecom firms that had intended to invest in it.

But the U.S. government, concerned about the potential for Chinese spying on these sensitive communications cables, ran a successful campaign to flip the contract to SubCom through incentives and pressure on consortium members.

Reuters has detailed that effort here for the first time. It’s one of at least six private undersea cable deals in the Asia-Pacific region over the past four years where the U.S. government either intervened to keep HMN Tech from winning that business, or forced the rerouting or abandonment of cables that would have directly linked U.S. and Chinese territories. The story of those interventions by Washington hasn’t been previously reported.

SubCom had no comment on the SeaMeWe-6 battle, and HMN Tech did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement last year about infrastructure projects, the White House briefly noted that the U.S. government helped SubCom to win the Singapore-to-France cable contract, without giving details. China’s foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment. China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom and Orange did not respond to requests for comment. Microsoft declined to comment.

Undersea cables are central to U.S.-China technology competition.

Across the globe, there are more than 400 cables running along the seafloor, carrying over 95% of all international internet traffic, according to TeleGeography, a Washington-based telecommunications research firm. These data conduits, which transmit everything from emails and banking transactions to military secrets, are vulnerable to sabotage attacks and espionage, a U.S. government official and two security analysts told Reuters.

The potential for undersea cables to be drawn into a conflict between China and self-ruled Taiwan was thrown into sharp relief last month. Two communications cables were cut that connected Taiwan with its Matsu islands, which sit close to the Chinese coast. The islands’ 14,000 residents were disconnected from the internet.

Taiwanese authorities said they suspected a Chinese fishing vessel and a Chinese freighter caused the disruption. However, they stopped short of calling it a deliberate act and said there was no direct evidence showing the Chinese ships were to blame. China, which considers Taiwan a breakaway province, has ratcheted up military and political efforts to force the island to accept its dominion.

Eavesdropping is a worry too. Spy agencies can readily tap into cables landing on their territory. Justin Sherman, a fellow at the Cyber Statecraft Initiative of the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank, told Reuters that undersea cables were “a surveillance gold mine” for the world’s intelligence agencies.

“When we talk about U.S.-China tech competition, when we talk about espionage and the capture of data, submarine cables are involved in every aspect of those rising geopolitical tensions,” Sherman said.

Two of the projects upended by the U.S. government involved cables that had already been manufactured and laid thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean. U.S. tech behemoths Google LLC, Meta Platforms Inc and Amazon.com Inc were major investors in at least one, or in Meta’s case both, of those cables, according to public announcements made about the projects. The delays and rerouting of the cables cost each of those companies tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue and additional costs, four sources who worked on the projects said.

Amazon, Meta and Google declined to comment about these projects or the cable wars.

SubCom’s cable coup is part of a wider effort in Washington aimed at reining in China as Beijing strives to become the world's dominant producer of advanced technologies, be it submarines, semiconductor chips, artificial intelligence or drones. China is bulking up its military arsenal with sophisticated armaments. And Beijing has become increasingly assertive about countering U.S. influence worldwide through trade, weapons and infrastructure deals that are drawing wide swaths of the globe into its orbit.

The U.S. cable effort has been anchored by a three-year-old interagency task force informally known as Team Telecom.

To oust the Chinese builder from the Singapore-to-France cable, the United States proffered sweeteners – and warnings – to the project’s investors.

On the sweetener side, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) told Reuters it offered training grants valued at a total of $3.8 million to five telecom companies in countries on the cable’s route in return for them choosing SubCom as the supplier. Telecom Egypt and Network i2i Limited, a company owned by India’s Bharti Airtel Limited, got $1 million apiece, USTDA said. Djibouti Telecom, Sri Lanka Telecom and Dhivehi Raajjeyge Gulhun of the Maldives each received $600,000. None of the five responded to questions from Reuters.

Meanwhile, American diplomats cautioned participating foreign telecom carriers that Washington planned to impose crippling sanctions on HMN Tech, a development that could put their investment in the cable project at risk. The U.S. Commerce Department made good on that threat in December 2021, citing HMN Tech’s intention to acquire American technology to help modernize China’s People’s Liberation Army.

A senior U.S. State Department official confirmed that the department had advocated through its embassies to help SubCom win the contract, including warning other countries about the security risks posed by HMN Tech. Though the cable won’t come ashore in Chinese territory, the U.S. government believed HMN Tech could insert remote surveillance equipment inside the cable, the official said without providing evidence. The Commerce Department declined to comment.

Two months later, in February 2022, SubCom announced that the cable consortium had awarded it the contract to build the SeaMeWe-6 cable. China Telecom and China Mobile, which were due to own a combined 20% of the cable, pulled out because the Chinese government wouldn’t approve their involvement in the project with SubCom as the cable contractor, three people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. China Unicom remained.

China’s foreign ministry and its defense ministry, which handles questions for the People’s Liberation Army, did not respond to Reuters’ questions.

On June 26, 2022, the White House published a fact sheet citing various upcoming infrastructure projects, including the SubCom undersea cable deal. The document said the U.S. government had “collectively helped secure” the award of that contract for SubCom.

The White House did not respond to a request for further comment.

Tensions rising

U.S.-China relations are at the lowest they’ve been in decades. The two countries have clashed on a host of issues, including China’s tacit support for Russia’s invasion of democratic Ukraine, its crackdown on Hong Kong, and the future of Taiwan, which Chinese President Xi Jinping has pledged to bring under Beijing’s control. In February, the United States shot down a Chinese spy balloon that floated into American airspace. China has claimed it was a weather balloon that got blown off course and accused the Americans of overreacting.

President Joe Biden’s policies are increasingly isolating China’s high-tech sector with the aim of bringing some technology manufacturing back to America while keeping cutting-edge U.S. innovation out of Chinese hands.

Over the last year, the Biden administration has pushed through a landmark bill to provide $52.7 billion in subsidies for U.S. semiconductor production and research. The Commerce Department in December added dozens of Chinese firms producing technology such as drones and artificial intelligence chips to its so-called Entity List, which severely restricts their access to U.S. technology.

Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, speaking in Beijing this month, said the two superpowers are destined for “conflict and confrontation” unless Washington abandons its policy of “containment and suppression” towards China.

Three companies have dominated the construction and laying of fiber-optic subsea cables for decades: America’s SubCom, Japan’s NEC Corporation and France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks, Inc.

But a seismic shift occurred in 2008 when Huawei Marine Networks Co Ltd entered the fray. Owned by Chinese telecom Huawei Technologies, the Tianjin-based company initially built small cable systems in underserved markets such as Papua New Guinea and the Caribbean.

Fast-forward 15 years and the firm, now known as HMN Tech, has become the world’s fastest-growing manufacturer and layer of subsea cables, according to TeleGeography data.

But the company’s short history has been shaped by deteriorating U.S.-China relations.

In 2019, Huawei Technologies came under fire from the administration of then-U.S. President Donald Trump. The Commerce Department banned Huawei and 70 affiliates from buying parts and components from U.S. companies without government approval.

That move was part of a global campaign by Washington and its allies to stop Huawei Technologies from building fifth-generation, or 5G, communications networks around the world due to concerns that host nations would be vulnerable to Chinese eavesdropping or cyberattacks, the details of which were revealed in a previous Reuters investigation.

Huawei Technologies said at the time that it was a private company that is not controlled by the Chinese government. Contacted for this story, Huawei Technologies said it fully divested its stake in Huawei Marine in 2020 and is no longer connected with the cable-laying company, which rebranded as HMN Tech under new Chinese ownership.

HMN Tech expanded its ambitions with the PEACE cable, which came online last year and connects Asia, Africa and Europe. The firm was poised to make another great leap with the Singapore-to-France project before SubCom snatched it away.

The following account of how that deal fell apart for the Chinese players is based on interviews with six people directly involved in the SeaMeWe-6 contract. They all asked not to be named as they were not authorized to discuss potential trade secrets or matters of national security.

Backroom brawl

Large undersea cables cost several hundreds of millions of dollars. They are usually paid for by a consortium of tech or telecom companies that can spread the cost and risks, as well as take responsibility for any cable landing that ends up in their countries.

In the case of SeaMeWe-6, there were more than a dozen companies funding the cable, and there was immediately a split in the group, which would need to reach a consensus to select a contractor for the project, the people said.

China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom were resolutely behind HMN Tech, which had come in with a bid of around $500 million. Microsoft, Orange and India’s Bharti Airtel expressed concerns about the risk of potential U.S. pushback on HMN Tech’s involvement. Still, it was hard to argue with the price. SubCom’s bid was closer to $750 million.

On a series of video calls in mid-2020, the consortium members verbally agreed that HMN Tech would build the cable. SubCom would be the reserve in case the Chinese firm pulled out or failed to deliver on the terms of its proposal.

But behind the scenes, SubCom and the U.S. government were sowing seeds of doubt about whether HMN Tech was the best company for the job.

SubCom had already successfully applied for loans from the federal Export-Import Bank of the United States to support its bid. It also secured advocacy assistance from the Department of Commerce, which quickly mobilized U.S. embassies around the world to lean on consortium members in their host nations.

U.S. ambassadors in at least six of those countries, including Singapore, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, wrote letters to local telecom carriers participating in the deal, according to people involved. One of these letters, seen by Reuters, said picking SubCom is “an important opportunity to enhance commercial and security cooperation with the United States.”

Separately, ambassadors and senior diplomats met with executives at foreign telecom companies in at least five countries. The message: HMN Tech could be subject to U.S. sanctions in the near future. That in turn would make it difficult for the telecoms to sell bandwidth because their biggest likely customers – U.S. tech firms – wouldn’t be allowed to use the cable.

One senior Asian telecom executive recalled a meeting in mid-2020 with a top U.S. diplomat and an American digital trade attaché. The U.S. officials explained how sanctions on HMN Tech would render the cable virtually worthless, providing him a printed spreadsheet with an economic analysis showing just that.

“They said we’d go bankrupt. It was a persuasive argument,” the executive told Reuters.

Two other Asian telecom executives in the consortium told Reuters they met with both Chinese and U.S. diplomats, who urged them to back HMN Tech and SubCom, respectively.

By the end of 2020, several consortium members, including Bangladesh Submarine Cable Company Limited, India’s Bharti Airtel, Sri Lanka Telecom, France’s Orange and Telecom Egypt, told their partners they were having second thoughts about choosing HMN Tech as a supplier, mostly over the fear of sanctions.

None of these companies responded to requests for comment.

In February 2021, with the consortium partners at loggerheads, SubCom and HMN Tech were given a chance by the group to submit a “best and final offer.” SubCom lowered its bid to close to $600 million. But HMN Tech was now offering to build the cable for $475 million.

Several consortium members, including Microsoft, Singapore Telecommunications Limited (Singtel) and Orange, argued to the other participants that when the risk of sanctions was factored into the bids, SubCom was offering a better deal. The three state-owned Chinese companies strongly disagreed. The companies all declined comment.

On a tense final video call in late 2021, an executive from Singtel, the chair on the cable committee, urged the companies to vote on a final decision before the whole deal collapsed, two people who were on that call told Reuters.

China Telecom and China Mobile threatened to walk off the project, taking tens of millions of dollars of investment with them. But the majority of the consortium picked SubCom, and the two Chinese state-owned firms departed. Two new investors – Telekom Malaysia Berhad and PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia International (Telin) – joined the deal, and some of the original members raised their stakes to make up the shortfall, the people said.

Telekom Malaysia and Telin did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition to the successful campaign to freeze out HMT Tech from the Singapore-to-France cable, teams across the U.S. state and commerce departments and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative once again coordinated with the White House to use diplomatic pressure to boot the Chinese firm from a project. This time it was a cable connecting the three Pacific island nations of Nauru, the Federated States of Micronesia and Kiribati, according to two sources involved in that deal.

The United States, Australia and Japan announced in December 2021 that they would jointly fund a cable on the same route, known as the East Micronesia Cable. In a joint statement this month, the three said they had met on March 8 to help “push forward” on this cable, without giving a time frame.

The U.S.-China backroom brawling over undersea cables is threatening to overwhelm the subsea cable industry, which has always relied on careful diplomatic collaboration to survive, said Paul McCann, a Sydney-based subsea cable consultant.

“I've never seen such geopolitical influence over subsea cables in the 40-odd years I’ve been involved in the business,” McCann told Reuters. “It's unprecedented.”

Team Telecom

At the heart of Washington’s newly aggressive strategy is Team Telecom. That’s the informal name for an interagency committee set up through an Executive Order signed by Trump in April 2020. The mission: safeguarding U.S. telecommunication networks from spies and cyberattacks.

Team Telecom is run by the National Security Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ). That division is headed by Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen. Nominated to that position by Biden in May 2021, Olsen has worked in a string of intel posts. He served as director of the National Counterterrorism Center under former President Barack Obama from 2011 to 2014, and before that as general counsel for the National Security Agency, the U.S. spy nerve center.

The DOJ declined to make Olsen available for an interview.

While the State Department and its partners have helped to prevent China from obtaining new subsea contracts in foreign places of U.S. strategic interest, Team Telecom has focused on a purely domestic concern: stopping any cable from directly connecting U.S. territory with mainland China or Hong Kong due to worries about Chinese espionage.

To that end, the team makes cable licensing recommendations to the U.S. telecom regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Since 2020, the team has been instrumental in the cancellation of four cables whose backers had wanted to link the United States with Hong Kong, Devin DeBacker, a DOJ official and senior member of Team Telecom, told Reuters in an interview.

Hong Kong, a former British colony that transitioned to self-rule and is dubbed a “special administrative region” by China, has long been the investment gateway to the communist mainland because of its well-developed financial sector, open economy and highly-educated workforce.

However, in 2019, Beijing launched a security crackdown and increased surveillance in Hong Kong, prompting mass demonstrations. As China tightened its grip, Washington became concerned that Chinese spy agencies would intercept data on the planned undersea cables if that equipment ultimately came ashore in Hong Kong, said DeBacker, the chief of the Foreign Investment Review Section of the DOJ’s National Security Division.

“That provides a physical access point in what is effectively Chinese territory,” DeBacker said. “Because of the way that China has eroded Hong Kong's autonomy, that enabled the Chinese government to have a direct, all-access path, effectively a collection platform on U.S. persons’ data and communications.”

Washington’s decision to nix any Hong Kong terminus for the four planned subsea cable deals upended the plans of Google, Meta and Amazon. These tech titans have been among the biggest investors in new cables over the last decade as they seek to link up a network of data centers in the United States and Asia that underpin their fast-growing Cloud computing businesses, according to TeleGeography.

The first, a project owned by Google and Meta known as the Pacific Light Cable Network, will now only transmit data from the United States to Taiwan and the Philippines, after Team Telecom recommended that the FCC reject the Hong Kong leg. The section of the cable going to Hong Kong, spanning hundreds of miles, is currently lying abandoned on the ocean floor, two people involved in the deal said.

In an unsuccessful appeal to the FCC, Google and Meta said Team Telecom’s argument that China might intercept data on the cable was “unsupported and speculative,” and that its decision was “a referendum on China, rather than the assertion of any real specific concern,” according to an Aug. 20, 2020, submission by the companies that is available on the FCC website.

Similarly, the Bay to Bay Express Cable System, developed by Amazon, Meta and China Mobile, will not run as planned from Singapore to Hong Kong to California. As part of a deal struck between Amazon, Meta and Team Telecom, China Mobile left the consortium and the cable was rebranded as CAP-1, with a new route from Grover Beach, California, to the Philippines, three people involved said. The cable had already been almost entirely laid along the original route, and the section to Hong Kong now sits unused in the depths, the people said.

Google, Meta and Amazon declined to comment. China Mobile did not respond to requests for comment.

There is evidence the U.S. campaign has slowed China’s subsea cable juggernaut.

HMN Tech supplied 18% of the subsea cables to have come online in the last four years, but the Chinese firm is only due to build 7% of cables currently under development worldwide, according to TeleGeography. These figures are based on the total length of cable laid, not the number of projects.

In a tit-for-tat maneuver, China has thrown up a roadblock on a cable in which Meta is an investor, according to two cable consultants with direct knowledge of the project.

That cable, known as the Southeast Asia-Japan 2 cable, was planned to run from Singapore through Southeast Asia and touch down in Hong Kong and mainland China before going on to South Korea and Japan. China has delayed giving a license for the cable to pass through the South China Sea, citing concerns about the potential for the cable manufacturer – Japan’s NEC – to insert spy equipment on the line, the consultants said.

In response to Reuters’ questions, an NEC spokesperson said it does not comment on individual projects, but said that it does not insert surveillance equipment into its cables.

Meta and China’s foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

In recent years, the U.S. government has blocked American firms from using telecom gear from Chinese firms that Washington has deemed to be national security threats, and it has banned several Chinese state-owned telecom companies from operating in U.S. territory.

Among them is China Telecom, which had previously won authorization to provide services in the United States. The FCC revoked that authorization in 2021, saying China Telecom’s America’s unit “is subject to exploitation, influence and control by the Chinese government.” The agency cited examples of the company using its access to U.S networks to misroute international traffic back to Chinese servers.

China Telecom failed to convince a U.S. court to reverse that decision.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington last year said the FCC has “abused state power and maliciously attacked Chinese telecom operators” without any factual basis.

Team Telecom’s DeBacker said China uses similar tactics on undersea cables, declining to give specific examples.

“The risk is real,” DeBacker said. “It has materialized in the past, and what we're trying to do is prevent it from materializing in the future.”
https://www.reuters.com/investigates...a-tech-cables/





Colorado Eyes Killing State Law Prohibiting Community Broadband Networks
Karl Bode

U.S. telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast spent millions of dollars and several decades quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either ban or heavily hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Even in instances and areas where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly refused to upgrade their networks.

Quite often, these industry ghost written laws even ban municipalities from engaging in public/private partnerships. It’s a scenario where ISPs get to have their cake and eat it too; they often refuse to upgrade their networks in under-served areas (particularly true among telcos offering DSL), but also get to write shitty laws preventing these under-served towns from doing anything about it even if such efforts are approved by the majority of voters.

This dance of dysfunction has been particularly interesting in Colorado, however. While lobbyists for Comcast and CenturyLink managed to convince state leaders to pass such a law (SB 152) in 2005, the legislation contains a provision that lets individual Colorado towns and cities ignore the measure with a simple referendum. Whoops.

As a result, more than 121 Colorado communities have opted out of the restrictions in a bid to improve local broadband access. And now state leaders are finally considering eliminating the pointless law entirely via SB183:

If passed, the new proposed legislation (SB-183) – co-sponsored by a bipartisan-ish group of state legislators (10 Democrats and 2 Republicans) – would neuter SB-152 and allow local communities to decide for themselves if they wanted to pursue municipal broadband without needing special permission from the state.

COVID lockdowns and the home education and telework bills did a fabulous job highlighting these dumb laws, which effectively exist to shield local monopolies from any sort of disruption. In this case, that disruption comes in the form of an organic, voter-approved response to widespread market failure that’s left Americans paying an arm and a leg for what’s often spotty, substandard broadband access.

Two states, Washington and Arkansas, already dramatically scaled back their state restrictions during COVID, leaving seventeen states that still have some kind of pointless restrictions on the books. For a while, telecom giants successfully scared Americans away from community-owned and -operated broadband networks by claiming they were inherent taxpayer boondoggles or “socialism.”

But data routinely shows that such networks offer faster, cheaper, and better broadband access than that of many private sector monopolies. Locally owned ISPs also tend to be more directly accountable to locals because they are locals. And such efforts often prod telecom monopolies routinely pampered by regulatory capture and muted competition to actually try harder.

Most of the most interesting work going on in the telecom sector continues to be at the hands of municipalities, cooperatives, or city-owned utilities frustrated by decades of monopoly power. Big ISPs could have thwarted this movement at any time by providing better, cheaper, faster access — but it’s generally easier to pay off captured state lawmakers for protectionist laws instead.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/30/...band-networks/





NordVPN Launches Free Meshnet File Sharing & Peer-to-Peer VPN Tunnel

We look at the latest technology gadgets and consumer tech toys and what they can offer to business IT.
Adrian Bridgwater

Anyone who has dabbled with asking friends and contacts for a VPN recommendation will have probably received a few suggestions.

One of those suggestions is to opt for one of the free VPNs.

This is generally not regarded to be very sensible (a Which magazine report concluded this and backed up this suggestion), they come with a lot of invasive advertising and are widely agreed to not be totally robust or safe.

The name that is often tabled as a reasonable choice is NordVPN.

We now have a new confluence point as NordVPN launches a free version in what is one of the company’s biggest product update transformations.

Full disclosure: we have used a press subscription for NordVPN and have always found it to be performant, stable and compatible across desktop Windows devices, Apple iOS and mobile Android.

The company says it has now included a new file-sharing functionality through Meshnet as well as an open source Linux application.

It also makes Meshnet free of charge.

Meshnet is a technology designed to allow users to work, share, play with other devices – users can share files, play LAN games, or simply access other devices directly and it’s free even if you don’t have a NordVPN subscription. It also allows users to create a peer-to-peer VPN tunnel between devices with NordVPN installed.

“We are continuously expanding the capabilities of NordVPN. This release marks a significant change in openness by both making part of the service free as well as open sourcing a substantial part of our client software,” says Vykintas Maknickas, product strategist at NordVPN.

Meshnet allows users to avoid Internet limitations by routing their Internet traffic through any remote device in the world, as long as it has NordVPN installed. Any Windows, Mac, or Linux device can turn into a personal VPN server.

This means that people can enjoy all the benefits they have at home or provided by other users despite their current location.

Added file sharing

The new feature requires two-way consent, so users don’t have to put their privacy at risk.

“Using Meshnet, people can now instantly share files from one device to another. Take a screenshot on your mobile device. Pick the NordVPN app in sharing options and choose the device you want to send your screenshot to. It’s that easy. Share photo or video files of unlimited size without losing quality. Users can share any files they want without limitation. Any file sent this way goes through an end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer VPN tunnel, making it the most secure option to share,” notes the company, in a technical product statement.

NordVPN has also released three of its products under an open source license, which includes the entire NordVPN Linux application, Libtelio — a networking library used across NordVPN apps on all operating systems and Libdrop — a library that’s used to share files over Meshnet.

NordVPN has revamped its Meshnet documentation page to include the most popular use cases of this feature.

With Meshnet enabled, users who are traveling can route their traffic through a laptop left at home, allowing them to browse the Internet with their own IP address. Whereas a regular NordVPN service routes your Internet traffic through VPN servers, in the meantime changing your IP address to that of the server, Meshnet lets you create your own VPN server through your own or your friends’ devices, no matter where they are in the world.

When users use Meshnet, they don’t need to make their shared folders public to access them remotely.

Peer-to-peer VPN tunnel

Users don’t need to make their IP camera available to anyone to use it from their work computer – Meshnet creates a peer-to-peer VPN tunnel between your devices so you are the only person who connects to your home network.

Meshnet works as a virtual local area network (LAN), so users can play multiplayer games with their friends without needing LAN cables, even if they live in a different neighbourhood or country. With Meshnet, users can all connect to the same server from various locations.

Meshnet is available on all platforms, including Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux as well as Android TV. Users can link up to 10 personal and 50 external devices to their own network.
https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/...eer-VPN-tunnel





The 'Insanely Broad' RESTRICT Act Could Ban Much More Than Just TikTok

Digital rights experts told Motherboard the RESTRICT Act, which may be used to ban TikTok, could impact many other types of services too, including VPNs.
Joseph Cox

The RESTRICT Act, a proposed piece of legislation which provides one way the government might ban TikTok, contains “insanely broad” language and could lead to other apps or communications services with connections to foreign countries being banned in the U.S., multiple digital rights experts told Motherboard.

The bill could have implications not just for social networks, but potentially security tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs) that consumers use to encrypt and route their traffic, one said. Although the intention of the bill is to target apps or services that pose a threat to national security, these critics worry it may have much wider implications for the First Amendment.

“The RESTRICT Act is a concerning distraction with insanely broad language that raises serious human and civil rights concerns," Willmary Escoto, U.S. policy analyst for digital rights organization Access Now told Motherboard in an emailed statement.

Do you know anything else about the RESTRICT Act? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

The Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act is led by Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and John Thune (R-SD). The pair introduced the bill earlier this month, which is deliberately not limited to just TikTok.

Under the RESTRICT Act, the Department of Commerce would identify information and communications technology products that a foreign adversary has any interest in, or poses an unacceptable risk to national security, the announcement reads. The bill only applies to technology linked to a “foreign adversary.” Those countries include China (as well as Hong Kong); Cuba; Iran; North Korea; Russia, and Venezuela.

The bill’s language includes vague terms such as “desktop applications,” “mobile applications,” “gaming applications,” “payment applications,” and “web-based applications.” It also targets applicable software that has more than 1 million users in the U.S.

“The RESTRICT Act could lead to apps and other ICT services with connections to certain foreign countries being banned in the United States. Any bill that would allow the US government to ban an online service that facilitates Americans' speech raises serious First Amendment concerns,” Caitlin Vogus, deputy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Free Expression Project, told Motherboard in an emailed statement. “In addition, while bills like the RESTRICT Act may be motivated by legitimate privacy concerns, banning ICT services with connections to foreign countries would not necessarily help protect Americans' privacy. Those countries may still obtain data through other means, like by purchasing it from private data brokers.”

Escoto from Access Now added, “As written, the broad language in the RESTRICT Act could criminalize the use of a VPN, significantly impacting access to security tools and other applications that vulnerable people rely on for privacy and security.”

“Many individuals and organizations, including journalists, activists, and human rights defenders, use VPNs to protect their online activity from surveillance and censorship. The RESTRICT Act would expose these groups to monitoring and repression, which could have a chilling effect on free speech and expression,” Escoto wrote.

(Many VPN companies engage in misleading marketing practices which exaggerate their importance and alleged security benefits. Used correctly, and with a provider that does not introduce its own issues such as logging users’ traffic, VPNs can be a useful tool for digital security).

Rachel Cohen, communications director for Senator Warner, responded by telling Motherboard in an email “This legislation is aimed squarely at companies like Kaspersky, Huawei and TikTok that create systemic risks to the United States’ national security—not at individual users.” She added “The threshold for criminal penalty in this bill is incredibly high—too high to ever be concerned with the actions of someone an individual user of TikTok or a VPN.”

With the bill’s introduction, Warner and Thune instead pointed to other foreign-linked companies that may pose their own security and privacy issues.

“Before TikTok, however, it was Huawei and ZTE, which threatened our nation’s telecommunications networks. And before that, it was Russia’s Kaspersky Lab, which threatened the security of government and corporate devices,” Warner said in a statement at the time. “We need a comprehensive, risk-based approach that proactively tackles sources of potentially dangerous technology before they gain a foothold in America, so we aren’t playing Whac-A-Mole and scrambling to catch up once they’re already ubiquitous.”

Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Jerry Moran (R-KS), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Susan Collins (R-ME), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and Mitt Romney (R-UT) are co-sponsors of the proposed legislation

Both Vogus and Escoto pointed to another potential solution: the U.S. passing a more fundamental privacy law.

“If Congress is serious about addressing risks to Americans’ privacy, it could accomplish far more by focusing its efforts on passing comprehensive privacy legislation like the American Data Privacy and Protection Act,” Vogus said.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3d...an-tiktok-vpns

















Until next week,

- js.



















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