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Old 15-04-15, 07:41 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 18th, '15

Since 2002


































"It’s like they’re creating the law on the fly. [The UK government] is knowingly breaking the law and then retroactively justifying themselves. Even though we got the court to admit this whole program was illegal, the things they’re saying now are wholly inadequate to protect our privacy in this country." – Eric King


"While our original intent was noble, it is impossible to pretend there is no conflict of interest (both real and perceived) in our decision to be a participant in Internet.org. In light of this, Cleartrip has withdrawn our association with and participation in Internet.org entirely." – Subramanya Sharma






































April 18th, 2015




File Sharing Isn’t New, Shouldn’t be Feared
Irene North

In the 1980s, my friends and I made many mix tapes. My friend Brian preferred LPs, but you can’t take them on a bus during band competitions so he made cassettes of them. Each side of a cassette held an entire album.

While Brian liked to listen to entire albums at once, I preferred a mix of different tempos and artists throughout my tapes. Others I knew copied them for friends to listen to before purchasing or for their girlfriends or boyfriends to profess their undying love.

Bands, such as Metallica, told their fans to make bootleg copies of their concerts and albums to share with their friends. At the time, these bands understood one of the fundamental aspects of fan support was sharing. Once your friends liked it, they were more likely to purchase their own copy.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, this is how people shared music. Record stores would either play an album for you or have a few stations with headsets where you could listen. The Maranatha Christian bookstore in Lincoln had two such stations and my friends used it to determine which albums they would buy. The same process held true for CDs.

Before this time, record stores had sound booths for you to listen to the latest record. I remember one in my hometown as I was growing into music as LPs were being phased out in favor of cassettes.

An MP3 file was the logical progression. My friend Bas, who lives in The Netherlands, instant messaged me in 2000 and asked me if I had heard of Bebel Gilberto. I hadn’t. He thought I would like her music. My main musical tastes ran along the lines of Led Zeppelin, Rush and Pink Floyd. He was sure I’d like her. I wasn’t. He sent me her album. I listened to it several times. I wanted to buy it, but no one in town could order it for me. Amazon.com cost too much ($25). My mother, who lives in New York, came to my rescue and found a copy. I now own four of her five albums, the last one, from 2014, I just haven’t bought yet.

Technically, I have committed copyright infringement in the strictest sense of the law, but no money ever changed hands and the process is the same as if I made a mix tape of songs for you in 1984. When you read about copyright infringement, it’s confusing and varies from country to country.

The majority of problems involving file sharing involve geoblocking where content is blocked for certain parts of the world or there is never a legitimate way to purchase the item. The desire for that content is there and studies have shown, when people are given a way to purchase it, they do.

For example, if you want to watch British television shows, the best you can hope for is that it might be shown on American television. “Spooks,” or “MI-5” in America, premiered in 2002 in the U.K., but didn’t see a release in the U.S. until the following year and bounced around four different networks. DVD sales were also a year behind. When it did air, there were 8-20 minutes cut from each show.

British topical news programs, such as Horizon, Panorama and Have I Got News For You (HIGNFY) have never, to my knowledge, aired in the U.S. Horizon covers amazing science issues and HIGNFY recaps the week’s news in a humorous quiz style show. Understandably, most Americans have no desire to see these shows, but there are expats around the world who do. The shows are geoblocked because in the U.K. you must have a TV license, which pays for broadcasting on the BBC.

Many turn to file sharing as a means to view programming. Most would be happy to pay for the content, but there is no legitimate way to do so. This is a worldwide problem, but that is starting to change.

The BBC announced last week that a selection of 12 recent episodes of Doctor Who will be made available via bittorrent for $12. If successful, they hope to release more of their shows for a small fee. Two weeks ago, Netflix said they would like to start working with countries to eliminate geoblocking.

There will always be people who will never pay, but the studies show that the majority of people who participate in file sharing want a way to purchase content. It’s only taken 15 years of file sharers begging major studios to listen.

People had massive sharing parties in the 1970s and 1980s. Once you accept that file sharing isn’t going away, you can start focusing on all the positive things that can be done with it.

In 2012, comedian Louis C.K. sold tickets to his show on his website, cutting out the middle man. In 2011, he put his stand-up show on his website and made $1 million in three weeks. He’s doing it again for his latest special.

Right now, you can visit VintageCartoons.tv, Documentary Heaven, Top Documentary Films or Archive.org and view programming legitimately for free.

The Impact of Software Piracy on Inclusive Human Development: Evidence from Africa published by the African Governance and Development Institute has found software piracy increases literacy. A study by the BI Norwegian School of Management in 2009 found that music pirates are 10 times more likely to pay for music than those who don’t. In 2012, the U.K. communications regulator OFCOM found movie, music and TV-pirates who pay for entertainment, spend much more than average consumers.

Content providers are starting to view file sharing as an opportunity, not a threat, which will ultimately benefit all of society.
http://www.starherald.com/entertainm...af4f2174a.html





Opalcoin Launches Decentralized Filesharing
Zane Huffman

In this day and age, transparency is the norm for all aspects of the internet. In a world where all of your information is available for everyone to see online, opacity and anonymity are hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain. These values are not found at the core of most online corporations. They are, however, the core values that Opalcoin, an up and coming altcoin, was initially founded upon, and now works to protect.

Opalcoin, launched in September of 2014, has worked to provide its users with the ability to remain anonymous and private since day one. Opalcoin, whose name is inspired by opal, a completely opaque gemstone, has developed several unique features in its first months to provide their users anonymity and opacity. These features include encrypted messaging, opaque addresses, and in wallet trading.

Last march, Opalcoin increased the extent of opacity in their wallet. The developers recently implemented Opal Drive, a decentralized file sharing system.

Opal Drive works similarly to the encrypted messaging system. Through the Opal Core wallet, users can share files with other users. By inputting the public address of another Opal Core wallet owner, users can send encrypted files to one another. Users simply designate a folder on their computer through Opal Drive. Opal Drive then creates a special ID. This identification can then be sent to other addresses. When it reaches its destination, the receiver’s wallet decrypts the ID. Using Syncthing, a file synchronization service, the designated file is then synced between the two computers.

Opal Drive is largely inspired by recent failures by other file sharing options. Apple’s iCloud hack has shown that cloud storage users are not safe, and the recent Sony hack proved that no company, no matter the size, is not invulnerable to security breaches. There are also growing concerns that some storage servers compromise user data for profit and other motives.

Opal Drive is a superior option for file sharing because there is no server. The system is entirely peer to peer, meaning that at no point does any entity have access to your files, outside of the intended receiver. Because there is no central figure directing files, your files are never touched by anything besides your intended audience. There is no possibility that your file may be hacked, leaked, or compromised in any way at any step in the process.

Opal Drive is the newest of many features promoting the opacity of users. Opalcoin is still young, but has already defined itself as the best option for security and anonymity for its users. With Opal Drive, users now have another means of exerting their opacity.
http://www.coinbuzz.com/2015/04/09/o...d-filesharing/





Kim Dotcom Megaupload Case Falters Over Sharing Canadian Data

U.S. asking for American 'clean team' of forensic analysts to sift through Canadian files
Amber Hildebrandt

More than three years have passed since Canadian police seized 32 Megaupload-related servers on behalf of U.S. authorities seeking to prosecute company founder Kim Dotcom in one of the world's largest copyright infringement cases.

Still, no one — except perhaps officials with the file-sharing company itself — knows what's on the servers.

At issue now is how much of this seized Canadian data can be shared with the U.S. Department of Justice, which is very eager to press its case against Dotcom, who is currently fighting extradition from New Zealand, where he's a permanent resident.

In a Toronto court on Monday, Crown attorney Moiz Rahman, acting on behalf of the U.S., recommended bringing in a U.S. "clean team" — an American term for a group of forensic examiners independent of the case — to sift through the 25 terabytes of data on the servers to pick out relevant files and separate them from personal information.

But Megaupload's lawyer argued that the Ontario court can only ask the U.S. police officials on the so-called clean team to "double pinky promise" that they won't share information not relevant to the case, since there's no way to enforce the court's decision south of the border.

"Once they return to the United States, that's nothing more than a promise," said Scott Hutchison.

U.S. regulators shut down Megaupload, founded by the notorious Kim Dotcom, in January 2012. At the time, it was one of the world's largest file-sharing sites. (Dotcom, a German-Finnish entrepreneur who was born Kim Schmitz, changed his name in 2005.)

Dotcom and others face charges related to copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering. Prosecutors argue the company essentially rewarded users for uploading popular content such as stolen movies and TV shows.

The three-year-old case has been mired in complications and delays, including here in Canada.

On Jan. 18, 2012, an Ontario judge granted a search warrant to seize 32 servers in Canada — equivalent to the amount of data stored on 100 laptops, according to Megaupload lawyers.

A year later, a different Ontario judge rejected a request to send mirror copies of what was on those servers to the U.S, saying such a request might be overly broad.

Instead, the justice ordered both parties to find a way to filter out and share only the relevant data.

The "vast majority" of the data, argues Megaupload lawyer Hutchison, is likely everyday files uploaded by innocent users of the file-sharing service, which allowed users to upload and share large files such as photos, videos and documents.

"We don't know what we're turning this clean team loose on," said Hutchison at Monday's motion hearing.
'Very minor' information

Even if the court assumed half of Megaupload's daily users — estimated to be 50 million at the time of the site's shutdown — were innocent, that's a lot of irrelevant files in the hands of U.S. officials, he said.

Instead, Hutchison proposed that an independent Canadian examiner be hired to review the content.

Crown attorney Rahman argued that having a U.S. clean team do the sorting posed no greater risk than the practice of allowing U.S. police to come into the country to witness evidence

He says the clean team would review the materials without delving too deeply. It would then present an index of what's contained on the servers to the court, which would decide what gets turned over to the U.S.

Rahman noted that the treaty guiding U.S.-Canada information exchange allows for the Ontario court to place restrictions on how the evidence is used.

"That's a little bit of cold comfort to me," said Justice Michael Quigley.

Beyond that, Rahman said this data pales in comparison to other information shared easily with the U.S., such as wiretaps.

"What's being proposed here looks very, very minor in terms of what we're exposing foreign officials to," said Rahman.

Ultimately, however, the issue comes down to cost. Rahman said the price tag to hire an independent Canadian examiner would be "prohibitive."

The judge ordered both parties to do a cost comparison between the U.S. clean team versus. hiring Canadian experts before a decision will be made.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/ki...data-1.3030991





People Who Share Revenge Porn in the UK Can Now be Jailed for 2 Years

High profile cases of revenge porn helped the campaign.
Blathnaid Healy

People who share explicit images without consent can be jailed for up to two years under new laws that came into effect in the UK on Monday.

The new law means that sharing explicit images via text, email, social networks and messaging apps without the consent of the person in the photo is now an offence. It also covers the sharing of photos offline.

The law, which is part of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act, makes revenge porn a specific offence. Up until now prosecutors had to prosecute cases using existing laws such as the Communications Act, Malicious Communications Act, and the Protection from Harassment Act.

The law "covers images that show the genitals but also anything that a reasonable person would consider to be sexual, so this could be a picture of someone who is engaged in sexual behaviour or posing in a sexually provocative way," the Crown Prosecution Service has said.

The clause added to the Criminal Justice and Courts Act says: "It is an offence for a person to disclose a private sexual photograph or film if the disclosure is made (a) without the consent of an individual who appears in the photograph or film, and (b) with the intention of causing that individual distress."

In November 2014, a man who shared explicit photos on WhatsApp of his ex-girlfriend was jailed for 12 weeks. He became the first person in Britain to be prosecuted for posting revenge porn.

Luke King, 21, posted the intimate image of his former girlfriend as the profile photo on his WhatsApp account. He was prosecuted under existing laws.

Earlier this year, the UK government launched a dedicated helpline for victims of revenge porn. The helpline, a pilot programme, works with law enforcement and media companies to remove content where possible.

Other laws that came into effect Monday, which are also in the Criminal Justice and Courts Act, include increasing maximum prison terms for Internet trolls to two years and making possession of extreme pornography that depicts rape illegal.
http://mashable.com/2015/04/13/revenge-porn-law-uk/





Leaked Sony Docs Published

Today, 16 April 2015, WikiLeaks publishes an analysis and search system for The Sony Archives: 30,287 documents from Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) and 173,132 emails, to and from more than 2,200 SPE email addresses. SPE is a US subsidiary of the Japanese multinational technology and media corporation Sony, handling their film and TV production and distribution operations. It is a multi-billion dollar US business running many popular networks, TV shows and film franchises such as Spider-Man, Men in Black and Resident Evil.

In November 2014 the White House alleged that North Korea's intelligence services had obtained and distributed a version of the archive in revenge for SPE's pending release of The Interview, a film depicting a future overthrow of the North Korean government and the assassination of its leader, Kim Jong-un. Whilst some stories came out at the time, the original archives, which were not searchable, were removed before the public and journalists were able to do more than scratch the surface.

Now published in a fully searchable format The Sony Archives offer a rare insight into the inner workings of a large, secretive multinational corporation. The work publicly known from Sony is to produce entertainment; however, The Sony Archives show that behind the scenes this is an influential corporation, with ties to the White House (there are almost 100 US government email addresses in the archive), with an ability to impact laws and policies, and with connections to the US military-industrial complex.

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said: "This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation. It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geo-political conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there."

Sony is a member of the MPAA and a strong lobbyist on issues around internet policy, piracy, trade agreements and copyright issues. The emails show the back and forth on lobbying and political efforts, not only with the MPAA but with politicians directly. In November 2013 WikiLeaks published a secret draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) IP Chapter. The Sony Archives show SPE's internal reactions, including discussing the impact with Michael Froman, the US Trade Representative. It also references the case against Megaupload and the extradition of its founder Kim DotCom from New Zealand as part of SPE's war on piracy.

The connections and alignments between Sony Pictures Entertainment and the US Democratic Party are detailed through the archives, including SPE's CEO Lynton attending dinner with President Obama at Martha's Vineyard and Sony employees being part of fundraising dinners for the Democratic Party. There are emails setting up a collective within the corporation to get around the 5,000 USD limit on corporate campaign donations to give 50,000 USD to get the Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo elected as "Thanks to Governor Cuomo, we have a great production incentive environment in NY and a strong piracy advocate that’s actually done more than talk about our problems."

Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton is on the board of trustees of RAND Corporation, an organisation specialising in research and development for the United States military and intelligence sector. The Sony Archives show the flow of contacts and information between these two major US industries, whether it is RAND wanting to invite George Clooney and Kevin Spacey to events, or Lynton offering contact to Valerie Jarrett (a close advisor to Obama) or RAND desiring a partnership with IMAX for digital archiving. With this close tie to the military-industrial complex it is no surprise that Sony reached out to RAND for advice regarding its North Korea film The Interview. RAND provided an analyst specialised in North Korea and suggested Sony reach out to the State Department and the NSA regarding North Korea's complaints about the upcoming film. The Sony documents also show Sony being in possession of a brochure for an NSA-evaluated online cloud security set-up called INTEGRITY.

The archives also detail SPE's development of its own films and collecting "intelligence" on rival pictures, for example documents in the archive reveal the budget breakdown for Oliver Stone's rival picture Snowden, which is currently in production. The budget reveals the rights spend: 700,000 USD to the Guardian's Luke Harding, 600,000 USD to Oliver Stone for his work on the script and 1,000,000 USD to Snowden's Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena.

WikiLeaks has a committment to preserving the historical archive. This means ensuring archives that have made it to the public domain remain there regardless of legal or poltical pressure, and in a way that is accessible and useable to the public. WikiLeaks' publication of The Sony Archives will ensure this database remains accessible to the public for years to come.
https://wikileaks.org/sony/press/





Judge Rules Against Jim Hood Over Google
Jim Hood

A federal judge has ruled against Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood in his effort to keep Google from getting its hands on correspondence between Hood and lobbyists for the movie industry.

It's the latest defeat for Hood in his effort to investigate the Internet search giant, after the same judge wrote a stinging opinion in March suggesting that Hood sent a 79-page subpoena to Google as retaliation for the company's refusal to buckle under to Hood's objections about what it posts online. The Democratic attorney general, though, may have the chance to launch a counteroffensive next week, as he hosts a conference of attorneys general in Biloxi examining online crime issues.

After U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate ruled blocking Hood's investigation of Google in March, the Mountain View, California, company pressed its attempt to obtain copies of Hood's correspondence with the Motion Picture Association of America. The Internet giant says Hood is part of a covert campaign by movie studios to use legal action to achieve enhanced piracy protection that Congress has rejected. The company and others say that the association may have had input into the subpoena Hood sent Google, point to a Hood letter that the group apparently did draft, and note that former Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore was hired by the Digital Citizens Alliance, a nonprofit group funded by movie studios and other companies.

Hood, who says he's only working with crime victims, sought to delay having to hand over the documents. But Wingate instructed him this week to produce them by Wednesday. Even after he lost, Hood's office renewed his request Friday for a stay pending appeal.

Last fall's subpoena demanded Google produce information on subjects including whether it helps criminals by allowing searches to find pirated music, by having its autocomplete function suggest illegal activities and by sharing YouTube ad revenue with makers of videos promoting illegal drug sales.

Google then sued Hood in Wingate's court in Jackson. It argued that Hood's investigation is blocked by a 1996 federal law that says Internet services are immune from lawsuits over what third parties say using the services. It also argues that Hood is infringing on its free speech rights.

Wingate orally granted Google a preliminary injunction on March 2, and released a full written order on March 27. That written opinion was highly critical of Hood, saying he couldn't issue a subpoena to "wage an unduly burdensome fishing expedition into Google's operations."

The judge wrote Google had a legitimate fear of Hood coercing it into giving up its First Amendment right to free speech because it feared prosecution, and that Hood's authority appeared to be overridden by federal law. Wingate wrote that it appeared likely that Google could prove at trial that "Hood has violated Google's First Amendment rights by: regulating Google's speech based on its content; by retaliating against Google for its protected speech (i.e., issuing the subpoena); and by seeking to place unconstitutional limits on the public's access to information."

No trial date has been set. In court papers, Hood's office wrote settlement talks last month broke down.

Hood is using his presidency of the National Association of Attorneys General to focus on Internet crime and crime prevention this year, hosting a conference from Sunday through Tuesday on the subject.

Hood said digital piracy, one of his allegations against Google, is a serious part of online crime.

"Counterfeiting and piracy of U.S. products occurring on rogue websites is a serious issue," he said in a Thursday news release. "Of particular concern to me is the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and other such dangerous goods. Counterfeit drugs may be loaded with dangerous or ineffective substances, either of which can be deadly."
http://www.clarionledger.com/story/n...ogle/25638823/





Google May Offer New Way to Target Ads

Google in talks to let advertisers reach existing customers
Rolfe Winkler and Jack Marshall

The war for advertising dollars between Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. may add a new front: email addresses.

Google is in talks to allow advertisers to target ads in search results at their existing customers, according to people familiar with the matter. Google has suggested that advertisers hand over customer information such as email addresses, which Google would then use to target the ads, the people said.

The move would follow a similar advertising service launched in 2012 by Facebook called “custom audiences,” which is helping the social network chip away at Google’s lead in digital advertising. Facebook reported ad revenue grew 65% to $11.5 billion in 2014 while Google’s advertising revenue grew 17% to $59.1 billion.

The proposed ads highlight the increasingly sophisticated ways that Internet companies track users’ online and offline activities for marketing purposes. Such tactics might raise questions about how well customers understand what businesses do with personal information they volunteer to a website or through a store loyalty program.

The idea could also potentially appeal to any Web publisher that collects user data. Wall Street Journal-owner News Corp is exploring the possibility of offering advertisers similar functionality, according to people familiar with the matter. News Corp has suggested to marketers that they could target and track ads to their customers across the media company’s properties using their email addresses.

Two people familiar with the matter said Google has talked about launching the new ads later this year or early next year. “We’re always discussing potential product ideas with our clients,” a Google spokesman said, “but have nothing new to share at this time.”

Here’s an example of how Google’s ads would work, according to the people familiar with the matter: An office-supply retailer would give Google the email addresses of recent printer purchasers. The retailer could then bid to show ads when those people search for printer ink on google.com. The retailer could also tailor its Google ads based on other information it knows about the customer, including age, gender or prior purchases.

It isn’t clear how Google might match email addresses on its end, but one of the people familiar with the matter said it could use Gmail addresses. Many users of Google services including Gmail, YouTube and Google Maps also provide secondary email addresses to the company.

For now, the ads would be limited to search results and wouldn’t include banner ads, this person said.

The ads would give marketers another way to reach customers when they are searching for products rather than running more general ads when they aren’t necessarily shopping. The data could also help both Google and advertisers better understand the relationship between online ads and consumers’ real-world activities and purchases.

Facebook’s similar “custom audiences” program helps advertisers target customers as they scroll through its Web page and mobile app. Facebook has detailed personal information for many of its 1.4 billion users, including their names, email addresses and phone numbers, which it matches against the customer information uploaded by advertisers.

Such ads help Facebook close the gap with Google in terms of Web users’ intent. Google’s $60 billion annual ad business is built around user searches, such as “flights to Charlotte” or “Chicago Cubs baseball hat.” Facebook has personal information on its users, but they aren’t necessarily flipping through their news feed looking to buy a flat-screen TV or to book a hotel room.

With custom audiences, Facebook can let a shoe retailer upload a list of people who bought running shoes two years ago and then target those people with ads because they may need another pair soon.

Facebook also allows advertisers to compile lists of “lookalikes”—that is, people that Facebook believes are similar to the advertisers’ customers based on their age, gender or interests. Such ads are thought to be effective. Adobe Inc. ’s Media Optimizer unit reported in one case study that lookalike ads led to triple the sales of regular Facebook ads.

Google is also discussing the possibility of creating “lookalike” audiences, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.

The company already allows advertisers to target search ads to users who have previously visited the advertiser’s website. The proposed ads would be different because they would rely on information that customers have provided themselves, such as their email address.
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/goo...NjE4NDAxMjQzWj





Top Websites Secretly Track Your Device Fingerprint

A new study by KU Leuven-iMinds researchers has uncovered that 145 of the Internet’s 10,000 top websites use hidden scripts to extract a device fingerprint from users' browsers. Device fingerprinting circumvents legal restrictions imposed on the use of cookies and ignores the Do Not Track HTTP header. The findings suggest that secret tracking is more widespread than previously thought.

Device fingerprinting, also known as browser fingerprinting, is the practice of collecting properties of PCs, smartphones and tablets to identify and track users. These properties include the screen size, the versions of installed software and plugins, and the list of installed fonts. A 2010 study by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) showed that, for the vast majority of browsers, the combination of these properties is unique, and thus functions as a ‘fingerprint’ that can be used to track users without relying on cookies. Device fingerprinting targets either Flash, the ubiquitous browser plugin for playing animations, videos and sound files, or JavaScript, a common programming language for web applications.

This is the first comprehensive effort to measure the prevalence of device fingerprinting on the Internet. The team of KU Leuven-iMinds researchers analysed the Internet’s top 10,000 websites and discovered that 145 of them (almost 1.5%) use Flash-based fingerprinting. Some Flash objects included questionable techniques such as revealing a user's original IP address when visiting a website through a third party (a so-called proxy).

The study also found that 404 of the top 1 million sites use JavaScript-based fingerprinting, which allows sites to track non-Flash mobile phones and devices. The fingerprinting scripts were found to be probing a long list of fonts – sometimes up to 500 – by measuring the width and the height of secretly-printed strings on the page.

Do Not Track

The researchers identified a total of 16 new providers of device fingerprinting, only one of which had been identified in prior research. In another surprising finding, the researchers found that users are tracked by these device fingerprinting technologies even if they explicitly request not to be tracked by enabling the Do Not Track (DNT) HTTP header.

The researchers also evaluated Tor Browser and Firegloves, two privacy-enhancing tools offering fingerprinting resistance. New vulnerabilities – some of which give access to users’ identity – were identified.

Device fingerprinting can be used for various security-related tasks, including fraud detection, protection against account hijacking and anti-bot and anti-scraping services. But it is also being used for analytics and marketing purposes via fingerprinting scripts hidden in advertising banners and web widgets.

To detect websites using device fingerprinting technologies, the researchers developed a tool called FPDetective. The tool crawls and analyses websites for suspicious scripts. This tool will be freely available at http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~gacar/fpdetective/ for other researchers to use and build upon.

The findings will be presented at the 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security this November in Berlin.
https://www.kuleuven.be/english/news...ly-track-users





Meet the Privacy Activists Who Spy on the Surveillance Industry
Daniel Rivero

On the second floor of a narrow brick building in the London Borough of Islington, Edin Omanovic is busy creating a fake company. He is playing with the invented company’s business cards in a graphic design program, darkening the reds, bolding the blacks, and testing fonts to strike the right tone: informational, ambiguous, no bells and whistles. In a separate window, a barren website is starting to take shape. Omanovic, a tall, slender Bosnian-born, Scottish-raised Londonite gives the company a fake address that forwards to his real office, and plops in a red and black company logo he just created. The privacy activist doesn’t plan to scam anyone out of money, though he does want to learn their secrets. Ultimately, he hopes that the business cards combined with a suit and a close-cropped haircut will grant him access to a surveillance industry trade show, a privilege usually restricted to government officials and law enforcement agencies.

Once he’s infiltrated the trade show, he’ll pose as an industry insider, chatting up company representatives, swapping business cards, and picking up shiny brochures that advertise the invasive capabilities of bleeding-edge surveillance technology. Few of the features are ever marketed or revealed openly to the general public, and if the group didn’t go through the pains of going undercover, it wouldn’t know the lengths to which law enforcement and the intelligence community are going to keep tabs on their citizens.

“I don’t know when we’ll get to use this [company], but we need a lot of these to do our research,” Omanovic tells me. (He asked Fusion not to reveal the name of the company in order to not blow its cover.)

The strange tactic– hacking into an expo in order to come into close proximity with government hackers and monitors– is a regular part of operations at Privacy International, a London-based anti-surveillance advocacy group founded 25 years ago. Omanovic is one of a few activists for the group who goes undercover to collect the surveillance promotional documents.

“At last count we had about 1,400 files,” Matt Rice, PI’s Scottish-born advocacy officer says while sifting through a file cabinet full of the brochures. “[The files] help us understand what these companies are capable of, and what’s being sold around the world,” he says. The brochures vary in scope and claims. Some showcase cell site simulators, commonly called Stingrays, which allow police to intercept cell phone activity within a certain area. Others provide details about Finfisher– surveillance software that is marketed exclusively to governments, which allows officials to put spyware on a target’s home computer or mobile device to watch their Skype calls, Facebook and email activity.

The technology buyers at these conferences are the usual suspects — the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service– but also representatives of repressive regimes —Bahrain, Sudan, pre-revolutionary Libya– as the group has revealed in attendees lists it has surfaced.

At times, companies’ claims can raise eyebrows. One brochure shows a soldier, draped in fatigues, holding a portable device up to the faces of a somber group of Arabs. “Innocent civilian or insurgent?,” the pamphlet asks.

“Not certain?”

“Our systems are.”

The treasure trove of compiled documents was available as an online database, but PI recently took it offline, saying the website had security vulnerabilities that could have compromised information of anyone who wanted to donate to the organization online. They are building a new one. The group hopes that the exposure of what Western companies are selling to foreign governments will help the organization achieve its larger goal: ending the sale of hardware and software to governments that use it to monitor their populations in ways that violate basic privacy rights.

The group acknowledges that it might seem they are taking an extremist position when it comes to privacy, but “we’re not against surveillance,” Michael Rispoli, head of PI’s communications, tells me. “Governments need to keep people safe, whether it’s from criminals or terrorists or what it may be, but surveillance needs to be done in accordance with human rights, and in accordance with the rule of law.”

The group is waging its fight in courtrooms. In February of last year, it filed a criminal complaint to the UK’s National Cyber Crime Unit of the National Crime Agency, asking it to investigate British technology allegedly used repeatedly by the Ethiopian government to intercept the communications of an Ethiopian national. Even after Tadesse Kersmo applied for– and was granted– asylum in the UK on the basis of being a political refugee, the Ethiopian government kept electronically spying on him, the group says, using technology from British firm Gamma International. The group currently has six lawsuits in action, mostly taking on large, yet opaque surveillance companies and the British government. Gamma International did not respond to Fusion’s request for comment on the lawsuit, which alleges that exporting the software to Ethiopian authorities means the company assisted in illegal electronic spying.

“The irony that he was given refugee status here, while a British company is facilitating intrusions into his basic right to privacy isn’t just ironic, it’s wrong,” Rispoli says. “It’s so obvious that there should be laws in place to prevent it.”

PI says it has uncovered other questionable business relationships between oppressive regimes and technology companies based in other Western countries. An investigative report the group put out a few months ago on surveillance in Central Asia said that British and Swiss companies, along with Israeli and Israeli-American companies with close ties to the Israeli military, are providing surveillance infrastructure and technical support to countries like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan– some of the worst-ranking countries in the world when it comes to freedom of speech, according to Freedom House. Only North Korea ranks lower than them.

PI says it used confidential sources, whose accounts have been corroborated, to reach those conclusions.

Not only are these companies complicit in human rights violations, the Central Asia report alleges, but they know they are. Fusion reached out to the companies named in the report, NICE Systems (Israel), Verint Israel (U.S./ Israel), Gamma (UK), or Dreamlab (Switzerland), and none have responded to repeated requests for comment.

The report is a “blueprint” for the future of the organization’s output, says Rice, the advocacy officer. “It’s the first time we’ve done something that really looks at the infrastructure, the laws, and putting it all together to get a view on how the system actually works in a country, or even a whole region,” says Rice.

“What we can do is take that [report], and have specific findings and testimonials to present to companies, to different bodies and parliamentarians, and say this is why we need these things addressed,” adds Omanovic, the researcher and fake company designer.

The tactic is starting to show signs of progress, he says. One afternoon, Omanovic was huddled over a table in the back room, taking part in what looked like an intense conference call. “European Commission,” he says afterwards. The Commission has been looking at surveillance exports since it was revealed that Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain were using European tech to crack down on protesters during the Arab Spring, he added. Now, PI is consulting with some members, and together they “hope to bring in a regulation specifically on this subject by year’s end.”

***

Privacy International has come a long way from the “sterile bar of an anonymous business hotel in Luxembourg,” where founder Simon Davies, then a lone wolf privacy campaigner, hosted its first meeting with a handful of people 25 years ago. In a blog post commemorating that anniversary, Davies (who left the organization about five years ago) described the general state of privacy advocacy when that first meeting was held:

“Those were strange times. Privacy was an arcane subject that was on very few radar screens. The Internet had barely emerged, digital telephony was just beginning, the NSA was just a conspiracy theory and email was almost non-existent (we called it electronic mail back then). We communicated by fax machines, snail mail – and through actual real face to face meetings that you travelled thousands of miles to attend.”

Immediately, there were disagreements about the scope of issues the organization should focus on, as detailed in the group’s first report, filed in 1991. Some of the group’s 120-odd loosely affiliated members and advisors wanted the organization to focus on small privacy flare-ups; others wanted it to take on huge, international privacy policies, from “transborder data flows” to medical research. Disputes arose as to what “privacy” actually meant at the time. It took years for the group to narrow down the scope of its mandate to something manageable and coherent.

Gus Hosein, current executive director, describes the 90’s as a time when the organization “just knew that it was fighting against something.” He became part of the loose collective in 1996, three days after moving to the UK from New Haven, Connecticut, thanks to a chance encounter with Davies at the London Economics School. For the first thirteen years he worked with PI, he says, the group’s headquarters was the school pub.

They were fighting then some of the same battles that are back in the news cycle today, such as the U.S. government wanting to ban encryption, calling it a tool for criminals to hide their communications from law enforcement. “[We were] fighting against the Clinton Administration and its cryptography policy, fighting against new intersections of law, or proposals in countries X, Y and Z, and almost every day you would find something to fight around,” he says.

Just as privacy issues stemming from the dot com boom were starting to stabilize, 9/11 happened. That’s when Hosein says “the shit hit the fan.”

In the immediate wake of that tragedy, Washington pushed through the Patriot Act and the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, setting an international precedent of invasive pat-downs and extensive monitoring in the name of anti-terrorism. Hosein, being an American, followed the laws closely, and the group started issuing criticism of what it considered unreasonable searches. In the UK, a public debate about issuing national identification cards sprung up. PI fought it vehemently.

“All of a sudden we’re being called upon to respond to core policy-making in Western governments, so whereas policy and surveillance were often left to some tech expert within the Department of Justice or whatever, now it had gone to mainstream policy,” he says. “We were overwhelmed because we were still just a ragtag bunch of people trying to fight fights without funding, and we were taking on the might of the executive arm of government.”

The era was marked by a collective struggle to catch up. “I don’t think anyone had any real successes in that era,” Hosein says.

But around 2008, the group’s advocacy work in India, Thailand and the Philippines started to gain the attention of donors, and the team decided it was time to organize. The three staff members then started the formal process of becoming a charity, after being registered as a corporation for ten years. By the time it got its first office in 2011 (around the time its founder, Davies, walked away to pursue other ventures) the Arab Spring was dominating international headlines.

“With the Arab Spring and the rise of attention to human rights and technology, that’s when PI actually started to realize our vision, and become an organization that could grow,” Hosein says. “Four years ago we had three employees, and now we have 16 people,” he says with a hint of pride.

***

“This is a real vindication for [Edward] Snowden,” Eric King, PI’s deputy director says about one of the organization’s recent legal victories over the UK’s foremost digital spy agency, known as the Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ.

PI used the documents made public by Snowden to get the British court that oversees GCHQ to determine that all intelligence sharing between GCHQ and the National Security Administration (NSA) was illegal up until December 2014. Ironically, the court went on to say that the sharing was only illegal because of lack of public disclosure of the program. Now that details of the program were made public thanks to the lawsuit, the court said, the operation is now legal and GCHQ can keep doing what it was doing.

“It’s like they’re creating the law on the fly,” King says. “[The UK government] is knowingly breaking the law and then retroactively justifying themselves. Even though we got the court to admit this whole program was illegal, the things they’re saying now are wholly inadequate to protect our privacy in this country.”

Nevertheless, it was a “highly significant ruling,” says Elizabeth Knight, Legal Director of fellow UK-based civil liberties organization Open Rights Group. “It was the first time the [courts have] found the UK’s intelligence services to be in breach of human rights law,” she says. “The ruling is a welcome first step towards demonstrating that the UK government’s surveillance practices breach human rights law.”

In an email, a GCHQ spokesperson downplayed the significance of the ruling, saying that PI only won the case in one respect: on a “transparency issue,” rather than on the substance of the data sharing program. “The rulings re-affirm that the processes and safeguards within these regimes were fully adequate at all times, so we have not therefore needed to make any changes to policy or practice as a result of the judgement,” the spokesperson says.

Before coming on board four years ago, King, a 25-year old Wales native, worked at Reprieve, a non-profit that provides legal support to prisoners. Some of its clients are at Guantanamo Bay and other off-the-grid prisons, something that made him mindful of security concerns when the group was communicating with clients. King worried that every time he made a call to his clients, they were being monitored. “No one could answer those questions, and that’s what got me going on this,” says King.

Right now, he tells me, most of the group’s legal actions have to do with fighting the “Five Eyes”– the nickname given to the intertwined intelligence networks of the UK, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand. One of the campaigns, stemming from the lawsuit against GCHQ that established a need for transparency, is asking GCHQ to confirm if the agency illegally collected information about the people who signed a “Did the GCHQ Illegally Spy On You?” petition. So far, 10,000 people have signed up to be told whether their communications or online activity were collected by the UK spy agency when it conducted mass surveillance of the Internet. If a court actually forces GCHQ to confirm whether those individuals were spied on, PI will then ask that all retrieved data be deleted from the database.

“It’s such an important campaign not only because people have the right to know, but it’s going to bring it home to people and politicians that regular, everyday people are caught up in this international scandal,” King says. “You don’t even have to be British to be caught up in it. People all over the world are being tracked in that program.”

Eerke Boiten, a senior lecturer at the interdisciplinary Cyber Security Centre at the University of Kent, says that considering recent legal victories, he can’t write off the effort, even if he would have dismissed it just a year ago.

“We have now finally seen some breakthroughs in transparency in response to Snowden, and the sense that intelligence oversight needs an overhaul is increasing,” he wrote in an email to me. “So although the [British government] will do its best to shore up the GCHQ legal position to ensure it doesn’t need to respond to this, their job will be harder than before.”

“Privacy International have a recent record of pushing the right legal buttons,” he says. “They may win again.”

A GCHQ spokesperson says that the agency will “of course comply with any direction or order” a court might give it, stemming from the campaign.

King is also the head of PI’s research arm– organizing in-depth investigations into national surveillance ecosystems, in tandem with partner groups in countries around the world. The partners hail from places as disparate as Kenya and Mexico. One recently released report features testimonials from people who reported being heavily surveilled in Morocco. Another coming out of Colombia will be more of an “exposé,” with previously unreported details on surveillance in that country, he says.

And then there’s the stuff that King pioneered: the method of sneaking into industry conferences by using a shadow company. He developed the technique Omanovic is using. King can’t go to the conferences undercover anymore because his face is now too well known. When asked why he started sneaking into the shows, he says: “Law enforcement doesn’t like talking about [surveillance]. Governments don’t talk about it. And for the most part our engagement with companies is limited to when we sue them,” he laughs.

When it comes to the surveillance field, you would be hard pressed to find a company that does exactly what it says it does, King tells me. So when he or someone else at PI sets up a fake company, they expect to get about as much scrutiny as the next ambiguous, potentially official organization that lines up behind them.

Collectively, PI has been blacklisted and been led out of a few conferences over the past four years they have been doing this, he estimates.

“If we have to navigate some spooky places to get what we need, then that’s what we’ll do,” he says. Sometimes you have to walk through a dark room to turn on a light. Privacy International sees a world with a lot of dark rooms.

“Being shadowy is acceptable in this world.”
http://fusion.net/story/112390/unvei...any-at-a-time/





Want to See Domestic Spying’s Future? Follow the Drug War
Andy Greenberg

The NSA isn’t the only three-letter agency that’s been quietly collecting Americans’ data on a mind-boggling scale. The country learned this week that the Drug Enforcement Agency spied on all of us first, and with even fewer privacy protections by some measures. But if anyone is surprised that the DEA’s mass surveillance programs have been just as aggressive as the NSA’s, they shouldn’t be. The early targets that signal shifts in America’s domestic surveillance techniques aren’t activists and political dissidents, as some privacy advocates argue—or terrorists, as national security hawks would claim. They’re drug dealers.

The DEA’s newly revealed bulk collection of billions of American phone records on calls to 116 countries preceded the NSA’s similar program by years and may have even helped to inspire it, as reported in USA Today’s story Wednesday. And the program serves as a reminder that most of the legal battles between government surveillance efforts and the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections over the last decades have played out first on the front lines of America’s War on Drugs. Every surveillance test case in recent history, from beepers to cell phones to GPS tracking to drones—and now the feds’ attempts to puncture the bubble of cryptographic anonymity around Dark Web sites like the Silk Road—began with a narcotics investigation.

“If you asked me last week who was doing this [kind of mass surveillance] other than the NSA, the DEA would be my first guess,” says Chris Soghoian, the lead technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “The War on Drugs and the surveillance state are joined at the hip.”

It’s no secret that drug cases overwhelmingly dominate American law enforcement’s use of surveillance techniques. The Department of Justice annually reports to the judiciary how many wiretaps it seeks warrants for, broken down by the type of crime being investigated. In 2013, the last such report, a staggering 88 percent of the 3,576 reported wiretaps were for narcotics. That’s compared to just 132 wiretaps for homicide and assault combined, for instance, and a mere eight for corruption cases.

One reason drug cases dwarf other crimes in terms of law enforcement’s surveillance, Soghoian says, is that narcotics sales require long-term conspiring within criminal organizations. That provides plenty of internal communications to tap compared to a one-off murder or robbery.

But Soghoian also argues that the use of surveillance to bust drug dealers feeds on itself. Cops or DEA agents who take down a narcotics trafficking group often seize millions of dollars in assets. “When agencies bust a drug dealer and get $5 million and a kilo of coke, they keep the money,” Soghoian says. “Surveillance is expensive…In many ways, the drug cases subsidize the surveillance technology used by law enforcement.”

The DEA likely isn't pushing the technological limits of surveillance, but it does push the legal limits of that spying.

That gives drug investigators both the mandate and the incentives to constantly advance their surveillance techniques. To be clear, the DEA and local drug-fighting cops likely aren’t pushing the technological limits of surveillance as much as the NSA, intercepting router shipments to plant bugs, or secretly rewriting the hard drive firmware of their spying targets. But drug-related surveillance, which is far more domestic in its focus, does push the legal limits of that spying. Again and again, says Electronic Frontier Foundation defense attorney Hanni Fakhoury, it’s drug investigations that cross into the realm of unconstitutional search and seizure, and it’s these cases that result in the judicial system setting new legal precedents for Americans’ privacy protections—both for the better and for the worse. “If you go back and look at just about every major Fourth Amendment case in the last 30 years, it’s been a drug case,” says Fakhoury.

Here are just a few of the cases Fakhoury cites from those 30 years of drug investigation precedents:

• US vs. Knotts, 1983: Minnesota cops planted a beeper in a five-gallon can of chloroform—one of the ingredients they believed their suspects intended to use to make methamphetamine—and tracked the device to a secret drug laboratory. The Supreme Court ruled that form of tracking constitutional, so long as it was equivalent to visually tracking a car through the streets. But in a similar case in 1984, United States vs. Karo, found that using a beeper for more extensive tracking violated the fourth amendment.

• US vs. Ciraolo, 1986: Cops used a private plane to spy on a marijuana growing operation in the suspect’s backyard. The Supreme Court ruled that the defendant had no expectation of privacy from aerial observation, a precedent that’s used today to justify warrantless drone surveillance.

• US vs. Kyllo, 2001: Agents from the US Department of Interior used thermal imaging cameras to see heat lamps inside a marijuana grower’s home without a warrant. The Supreme Court ruled that the technique constituted an unconstitutional search.

• US vs. Jones, 2012: FBI agents used a GPS device attached to the underside of a suspected cocaine dealer’s car to track him. Though they had a warrant, the tracking exceeded that warrant’s time limits. The Supreme Court ruled that the warrantless period of tracking constituted an illegal search.

• US vs. Wurie, 2014: Police watched a suspected drug dealer make a sale, arrested him, and seized his cell phone. On the phone they used his contact list to find his home address, and discovered crack-cocaine and marijuana there. The Supreme Court ruled in Wurie’s case and in a simultaneous murder case that police can’t search a phone taken from a suspect at the time of arrest without a warrant.

The DEA's bulk collection of Americans' phone metadata fits squarely into a long history of drug investigators using and abusing their surveillance powers.

Today the same question of where to draw the line against illegal searches has moved to the Dark Web, the collection of sites that use anonymity tools like Tor, I2P, and bitcoin to flummox spies and law enforcement. So far, the investigations that took down bustling Dark Web drug markets like the Silk Road and the Silk Road 2 have just as thoroughly probed the edges of what constitutes a legal search online.

In the investigation of the original Silk Road, the FBI cracked the case when it somehow identified the site’s server in Iceland despite its use of Tor to hide its location. The FBI has never fully explained how it pulled off that trick, merely telling a judge that an agent entered “miscellaneous characters” into a field on the site’s homepage until it revealed its IP address. When asked for more information, prosecutors cagily switched their argument to claim that it doesn’t matter how it identified the Silk Road server since it was in a foreign country. (Never mind that the server contained the information of plenty of Americans.) They also argued that its owner, Ross Ulbricht, never claimed privacy rights to the machine, a tricky Catch-22 given that doing so would have incriminated him. The judge agreed, throwing out any arguments about Fourth Amendment violations.

In the case of the reborn Silk Road 2 drug market that launched a month after the first site’s bust, a combined team of FBI and Europol investigators somehow cut through the anonymity protections of the site, along with dozens of other Tor hidden services, in November of last year. None of those cases have gone to trial, and it’s still a mystery how, or even if, the feds broke Tor. Many suspect that they used a Tor vulnerability that was scheduled to be presented by Carnegie Mellon researchers at the Black Hat security conference last summer, but was later pulled from the conference.

With all those cases in mind, the DEA’s now-defunct bulk collection of Americans’ phone metadata fits squarely into a long and storied history of drug investigators using and abusing their surveillance powers. That doesn’t make privacy advocates like it any better. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Human Rights Watch filed a lawsuit earlier this week to make sure that the program is completely terminated rather than merely hidden or suspended, considering the 20-year secrecy around the DEA’s phone metadata collection.

But given that the DEA’s phone surveillance program stretched back to 1992 with no public oversight, there’s little doubt that drug investigators have since adopted plenty of other stealthy surveillance techniques to stay a step ahead in the War on Drugs. As in any war without an end, there’s always a budget for new weapons, and plenty of foot soldiers ready to use them.
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/want-se...llow-drug-war/





NSA Dreams of Smartphones with “Split” Crypto Keys Protecting User Data

Proposal is part of a tense stand-off between US government and tech industry.
Dan Goodin

National Security Agency officials are considering a range of options to ensure their surveillance efforts aren't stymied by the growing use of encryption, particularly in smartphones. Key among the solutions, according to The Washington Post, might be a requirement that technology companies create a digital key that can open any locked device to obtain text messages or other content, but divide the key into pieces so no one group could use it without the cooperation of other parties.

"I don't want a back door," Adm. Michael S. Rogers, director of the NSA, recently said during a speech at Princeton University, at which he laid out the proposal. "I want a front door. And I want the front door to have multiple locks. Big locks."

The proposal is part of a tense debate resulting from the growing number of companies that endow their hardware and software with strong encryption that when used properly makes it infeasible if not impossible for anyone other than the owner to access the contents. Chief among these companies is Apple, which has enabled such encryption by default in newer iPhones and iPads. On the one hand, national security and law enforcement officials say the trend could seriously hinder criminal and national security investigations. Tech industry representatives, meanwhile, chafe at the thought of backdoors, citing a raft of concerns, including abuse by hackers, government overreach, and harm to US competitiveness.

As reporters Ellen Nakashima and Barton Gellman wrote:

Tech industry officials and privacy advocates take a different view. "I don’t believe that law enforcement has an absolute right to gain access to every way in which two people may choose to communicate," said Marc Zwillinger, an attorney working for tech companies on encryption-related matters and a former Justice Department official. "And I don’t think our Founding Fathers would think so, either. The fact that the Constitution offers a process for obtaining a search warrant where there is probable cause is not support for the notion that it should be illegal to make an unbreakable lock. These are two distinct concepts."

Critics have also raised concerns that any type of portal that gives government officials access to encrypted contents has a strong likelihood of backfiring. They said criminals or spies from hostile countries may exploit the weaknesses to obtain classified or confidential data, possibly on a mass scale. The split-key approach floated by Rogers, for instance, requires a complicated system to allocate the keys, deliver them to each involved party, recombine them when a legitimate court order is issued, and destroy the key once it was used. "Get any part of that wrong and all your guarantees go out the window," Matt Green, a Johns Hopkins University professor and an expert in cryptography, told The Washington Post.

The approach is only one of several options being studied by the White House. One alternative under consideration would have a judge direct a company to set up a mirror account so that law enforcement officials conducting a criminal investigation could read text messages shortly after they are sent. To obtain encrypted photos, the judge could order the company to back up the suspect's data to a server while the phone is turned on and its contents are unencrypted.

White House aides hope to report to the president this month.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ing-user-data/





French Parliament Debates Bill to Give Spies More Power

* Web companies say bill could scare off clients

* Debate three months after Islamists killed 17 in Paris

* Minister says powers needed to protect public

French spies could get more power to bug and track would-be Islamist attackers inside the country and require Internet companies to monitor suspicious behaviour, under a bill to be debated in parliament on Monday.

Web hosting companies say the legislation could frighten away clients. Civil liberties advocates say it lacks adequate privacy protections -- concerns dismissed by the government.

"The bill as it stands is vague, risks abuse and casts the net of surveillance disproportionately wide," said Gauri van Gulik, a deputy director at Amnesty International, urging Paris to rethink the bill before taking a step "towards a surveillance state".

More than three months after 17 people were killed in attacks by three Islamist gunmen in Paris, the government is pushing measures that will allow spy agencies to tap phones and emails without seeking permission from a judge.

Surveillance staff will also be able to bug suspects' flats with microphones and cameras and add "keyloggers" to their computers to track every keystroke.

Speaking to parliament, Prime Minister Manuel Valls pledged France would not gather vast quantities of data under the new law, contrasting it with the Patriot Act the United States introduced after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

"The critics or the posturing that refer to a French Patriot Act or the stench of a police state are outright lies and irresponsible in the context of threat we face," he said.

He said France was now monitoring more than 1,500 Islamists and about 300 people who have returned from fighting with militant groups in Syria and Iraq.

Paris has earmarked about 425 million euros ($448 million) to recruit thousands of extra police, spies and investigators to beef up surveillance and boost national security and intelligence.

Council of Europe human rights commissioner Nils Muznieks, speaking on Arte television on Monday, urged France to take more time and consultation before enacting a law that he said could fall foul of the European Court of Human Rights.

In a column published on April 9, web providers threatened to relocate outside France because the bill would allow intelligence services to place "black boxes" on their infrastructure with algorithms to filter communications.

They would be forced to set up systems to monitor metadata -- not the content of communications -- under the legislation. If specific Internet users were acting suspiciously, the government could then demand access to their personal information.

French web hosts such as the OVH group, which said last December it was looking to invest 400 million euros in its development, say such monitoring would scare customers away.

"The draft bill destroys freedoms, but it is also anti-economic and essentially inefficient for the objective it sets out," read the column signed by OVH and six other Internet firms. ($1 = 0.9492 euros) (Reporting by John Irish; additional reporting by Paul Taylor; Editing by Larry King)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0XA34820150413





Europe’s #1 Hosting Provider Threatens to Leave if Latest French Surveillance Law Passes
Liam Boogar

France’s latest proposed law may just scare off one of its biggest digital champions. After the French Government revealed a proposed law, nearly one year in the works, last month, critics jumped on what they consider to be an overreach of the government’s power without checks & balances. Among the critics, Octave Klaba, Polish-born founder of OVH.com, Europe’s largest hosting service and the 3rd largest in the world, who, in an interview with Les Echos, likened the proposed law to the communism he saw as a child in his home country of Poland. Klaba went so far as to say that, should the law pass, OVH would move its servers outside of France to avoid it.

The Roubaix-based hosting provider may have a reason to worry. While the law could only apply to French-based servers, this would unfairly affect OVH against its competitors (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Dreamhost, etc.), as the law allows for governments to install a ‘black box’ that listens to all communication going in and out of the servers, and logs certain pre-ordained types of communication.

The proposed law is meant to curb terrorism and create the first legal framework for the government to perform surveillance – it’s not as if they aren’t already doing it, so kudos to them for trying to bring it out of the shadows – however, given that their law directly impacts hosting providers, it’s surprising that they would float such an idea when France’s largest hosting provider would be negatively impacted by it.

We could argue the merits of such a surveillance program, but the reality is that France is still thinking about itself as an isolated ecosystem, where the Internet does not know borders and governments. How can France expect a domestic surveillance law to be effective at curbing terrorism when the line between a domestic website and an internationally hosted one is invisible to users, to companies, to everyone?

It’s worth noting that the law is currently up for debate in the National Assembly, and it must also, if approved, pas through the Senate. Other controversial laws, such as the famous 75% tax for millionaires, which was declared unconstitutional after it passed through both Assembly and Senate, went through the same mediatized debate. The 2012 Pigeon movement was a reaction, as well, to a proposed law which was never passed.
http://www.rudebaguette.com/2015/04/...ce-law-passes/





Twitter Moves Non-US Accounts to Ireland Away from the NSA
Mark Wilson

Twitter has updated its privacy policy, creating a two-lane service that treats US and non-US users differently. If you live in the US, your account is controlled by San Francisco-based Twitter Inc, but if you're elsewhere in the world (anywhere else) it's handled by Twitter International Company in Dublin, Ireland. The changes also affect Periscope.

What's the significance of this? Twitter Inc is governed by US law, it is obliged to comply with NSA-driven court requests for data. Data stored in Ireland is not subject to the same obligation. Twitter is not alone in using Dublin as a base for non-US operations; Facebook is another company that has adopted the same tactic. The move could also have implications for how advertising is handled in the future.

Ireland is widely recognized as having the most relaxed privacy laws in Europe, and this is something which is important for any company looking to monetize user data through advertising. While data that is processed in Europe may be beyond the immediate reach of the NSA, the policy change could also be seen as a way of trying to sidestep future legislation which may make it more difficult for US-based companies to share data about European users with advertisers.

The changes kick in on 18 May 2015 and Twitter briefly explains them in a policy update post:

If you live outside the United States, our services are now provided to you by Twitter International Company, our company based in Dublin, Ireland. Twitter International Company will be responsible for handling your account information under Irish privacy and data protection law, which is based on the European Union’s Data Protection Directive.

If you live in the United States, the services will continue to be provided to you by Twitter, Inc., based in San Francisco, California, under United States law.


Of course avoiding the NSA or making advertising easier are not quite how Twitter explains the reason for the change:

As more people around the world use our services, we’ve expanded our operations to improve how we support our users globally.

It is interesting to see that while San Francisco is used to process US data, Dublin is used to process data from users in every other part of the world. Twitter has also made it clear that users are free to sign up for an account using a pseudonym if they want -- take that, real name policy!
http://betanews.com/2015/04/17/twitt...-from-the-nsa/





Justice Dept. Staff May Oppose Comcast-Time Warner Cable Deal: Bloomberg
Jennifer Saba and Malathi Nayak

Staff attorneys at the Justice Department's antitrust division are nearing a recommendation to block the proposed $45 billion merger of Comcast Corp and Time Warner Cable Inc, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for Time Warner Cable questioned the report, saying the company had been working productively with both the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission.

"We’ve had no indication from the DoJ that this is true," the spokesman said.

Bloomberg said that Justice Department attorneys investigating the deal are citing concerns for consumers as they lean against it. Their review could be handed in as soon as next week, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. (bloom.bg/1CUPx9V)

The final decision would be made by senior officials.

Time Warner Cable shares closed down 5.4 percent at $149.61 on the New York Stock Exchange while Comcast shares ended down 2.1 percent at $58.42 on Nasdaq.

A source close to Comcast said that discussions with the DOJ had been positive and that the Federal Communications Commission was still gathering material from companies, making it early for any discussion of conditions for a deal.

The FCC, which as well as the Justice Department is reviewing the deal, earlier this month paused the informal countdown toward its decision as it awaited a court ruling related to how it should handle disclosures of some documents.

The FCC pause would push the conclusion of the regulatory review to the middle of the year, a Comcast executive said in a March blog post.

"There is no basis for a lawsuit to block the transaction," a Comcast spokeswoman said in an emailed statement on Friday, adding that expected benefits to both consumers and businesses from the deal "...have been essentially unchallenged in the record - and all can be achieved without any reduction of competition."

The deal has faced severe scrutiny from several media companies and executives since its initial announcement over a year ago.

On Friday, a coalition of companies, associations and public interest groups sent a letter to FCC Chair Tom Wheeler opposing the merger.

"The combined company would, among other things: control over half of the high-speed residential broadband connections in the United States; dominate pay-TV across the nation; combine even stronger distribution muscle with NBC-Universal’s “must-have” video programing; and control critical advertising and set-topbox inputs," the letter stated.

"... the Commission should reject this merger because it would result in too much power in the hands of one company."

(Reporting by Malathi Nayak and Jennifer Saba; Writing by Bernard Orr; Editing by Leslie Adler)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0N825V20150417





ALEC Threatens To Sue Critics That Point Out It Helps Keep Broadband Uncompetitive
Karl Bode

As you might have read, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been losing some major clients lately, including Google, T-Mobile and Microsoft. Those companies have been quietly distancing themselves from ALEC, after critics have illustrated its ties to legislative assaults on climate change science and meaningful pollution standards. Before Google announced it was leaving the group last fall, chairman Eric Schmidt went so far as to accuse the legislative grist mill of "literally lying" about its role in climate change denial. In a response letter to Google, ALEC proclaimed Google's departure was "based on misinformation from climate activists who intentionally confuse free market policy perspectives for climate change denial."

With T-Mobile, AOL, and Facebook quietly following in Google's footsteps (but not publicizing the reason for their departures), ALEC has apparently decided that its best course of action is to threaten lawsuits against those claiming ALEC denies climate change. ALEC has sent cease and desist letters to a number of critics like Common Cause, the letters directing groups to the ALEC website where the organization insists it's not a opposed to climate change -- it's simply a "market environmentalist" dedicated to the "betterment of human health and well-being."

Apparently climate change isn't the only sensitive topic for ALEC as the outfit tries to stem the flow of client departures. The group has also been sending cease and desist letters to companies like wirelesss MVNO Credo Mobile, which in recent months has been sending its subscribers missives hammering ALEC for its role in fighting community broadband. The small company markets itself as having an activist, pro-consumer edge, and has scored exceptionally well on the EFF's privacy report card.

Credo's been busy pointing out to its subscribers how ALEC's model legislation, clearly visible on ALEC's website, has been used as the framework for roughly twenty state-level protectionist broadband bills nationwide. As we've frequently discussed, these bills are the worst sort of protectionist dreck, shoveled into the legislative bloodstream by the likes of AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and CenturyLink to protect its duopoly power from communities desperate for something better. Credo frames ALEC's participation in these efforts this way in a recent notice to subscribers:

"The American Legislative Exchange Council—a shadowy corporate front group that works to enact discriminatory voter ID laws, weaken gun safety laws and eliminate environmental regulations—is now pressuring state legislatures around the country to ban cities from offering broadband Internet access. ALEC is pushing its anti-municipal broadband agenda through model legislation it has developed, which one municipal broadband advocate described as “the kind of language one would expect to see if the goal is to protect politically powerful cable and telephone company monopolies.” Many perennial funders and members of ALEC, including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner [Cable], stand to gain financially from these state laws because they eliminate the possibility of competition from city-run broadband services."

In its cease and desist letter to Credo, ALEC first proclaims it's a respected think tank, not a lobbying apparatus. It also insists it doesn't "block" municipal broadband, the group simply advocates encumbering towns and cities with "certain steps," should they be interested in building their own broadband:

"We demand that you cease making inaccurate statements regarding ALEC, and immediately remove all false or misleading material from the Working Assets and Credo Action or related websites and action pages within five business days," the letter, dated March 5, reads. "Should you not do so, and/or continue to publish any defamatory statements, we will consider any and all necessary legal action to protect ALEC."

ALEC contends that it does not oppose city broadband but only advocates that certain "steps" be required before a municipality can provide telecom services. Additionally, ALEC takes issue with Credo labeling it as an organization that lobbies state legislatures at all, arguing that it is merely a "think-tank for state-based public policy issues and potential solutions."

How exactly can you claim you don't oppose municipal broadband when you've played a starring role in opposing municipal broadband? Because many of the bills ALEC helps pass don't technically "block" municipal broadband. They are however usually saddled with language by ISP lawyers that effectively does the same thing. For example most of the bills prohibit communities from getting into the broadband business if their market is "served" by an existing provider. They then go on to define "served" to include satellite and cellular connections, while using extremely generous versions of zip code coverage analysis. Similarly ALEC doesn't lobby to pass these bills directly, their incumbent ISPs client do that.

Regardless, Credo Mobile doesn't appear to be too worried about ALEC's threat, sending the organization a response letter illustrating that not only does ALEC's own website document its opposition to municipal broadband, but so have numerous news outlets:

"Not only does ALEC attempt to influence legislative outcomes, it clearly succeeds in doing so. As recounted in a 2011 Bloomberg News article, ALEC's model legislation on municipal broadband was the principal reason why cable companies were able to block Lafayette, Louisiana from offering high speed Internet access to its citizens (editor's note: Lafayette was ultimately able to offer gigabit connections via LUS Fiber, but only after a protracted legal fight against regional incumbents Cox and BellSouth (now AT&T)).

"Under these circumstances, the language used in the statements you challenge -- "working to make sure it never happens" and "pressuring state legislatures" -- is well within the bounds of political discourse in making the point that ALEC's model legislation and positions have the intent and effect of encouraging enactment of state legislation effectively banning cities from offering broadband Internet access."

It's not entirely clear what ALEC hopes to accomplish here, as its role in both climate change and municipal broadband is pretty clearly established by documentable history, news reports, and the legislative process itself. It's kind of like the town drunk, after months of being videotaped punching clowns in the face, becoming foul-mouthed and indignant at the mere mention of the odd number of clown black eyes around town. In fact the behavior is only bringing additional critical attention to ALEC's longstanding role as an organization that's useful to corporations looking to quietly shovel bad legislation through financially compromised state legislatures with the bare minimum of fuss or actual public debate.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...petitive.shtml





New Bill Would Invalidate FCC's Net Neutrality Rules
Grant Gross

A group of Republican lawmakers has introduced a bill that would invalidate the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s recently passed net neutrality rules.

The legislation, introduced by Representative Doug Collins, a Georgia Republican, is called a resolution of disapproval, a move that allows Congress to review new federal regulations from government agencies, using an expedited legislative process.

The resolution is the quickest way to stop what Collins called heavy-handed regulations that will hamper broadband deployment and could increase taxes and fees, he said in a statement. “We’ll all be paying more for less,” he added.

Republican opponents of the FCC’s net neutrality rules are going against strong public support for the regulations, said Matt Wood, policy director at digital rights group Free Press. “Once again, some members of Congress have sided with the phone and cable lobby and against Internet users,” he said in an email.

Under a resolution of disapproval, the Senate, where other bills looking to overturn net neutrality rules are likely to get tied up, is required to act quickly. A resolution of disapproval cannot be amended or be filibustered. Other legislative attempts to overturn the rules would likely face a filibuster by minority Democrats in the Senate, although President Barack Obama would likely veto the resolution if it passes.

Thirteen Republican representatives, including Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Bob Latta of Ohio, co-sponsored Collins’ resolution.

Republicans in the House of Representatives also tried unsuccessfully to overturn the FCC’s 2010 net neutrality rules, using a resolution of disapproval. The Republican-controlled House approved a resolution, but the Senate, then with Democrats in the majority, voted to kill the resolution in November 2011. A U.S. appeals court later threw out a large portion of those 2010 rules.

Collins’ bill came the same day that the FCC published the new rules in the Federal Register, the official publication for U.S. agency rules. The new rules haven’t gone into effect yet; there’s a 60-day waiting period after they appear in the Federal Register.

The new net neutrality rules, approved by the FCC on Feb. 26, would prohibit broadband and mobile carriers from selectively blocking or slowing Web traffic. The rules also reclassify broadband as a regulated, common-carrier service, instead of treating it as a lightly regulated information service, as the FCC has done for the past decade.

Also on Monday, the United States Telecom Association [USTelecom] refiled its lawsuit challenging the rules. USTelecom filed the same lawsuit in late March because of procedural questions about when the trade group was required to file a challenge.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/29094...ity-rules.html





Net Neutrality Rules Formally Published; First Legal Challenge Filed
Jim Puzzanghera

Tough new net neutrality regulations were published in the Federal Register on Monday, triggering an effective date of June 12 and the first formal legal challenge to the controversial online traffic rules.

US Telecom, a trade group whose members include AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., filed a lawsuit Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to stop the rules.

The Federal Communications Commission approved the regulations by a 3-2 vote on Feb. 26.

They change the legal classification of wired and wireless broadband, treating it as a more highly regulated telecommunications service in an attempt to ensure that providers don't discriminate against any legal content flowing through their networks to consumers.

The 400-page order was made public two weeks after the vote as the FCC posted it on the agency's website.

The order's publication in the Federal Register, which generally takes a few weeks after new regulations are adopted, started a 60-day clock on its effective date -- unless a court blocks them.

But FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who pushed for the regulations, has been optimistic they would withstand a legal challenge.

“As Chairman Wheeler has said, we are confident the FCC’s new open Internet rules will be upheld by the courts, ensuring enforceable protections for consumers and innovators online," agency spokeswoman Kim Hart said Monday.

Supporters of the rules, which prohibit Internet service providers from blocking, slowing or selling priority delivery of content to consumers, cheered the approaching effective date.

“The publication of the rules brings us one step closer to having the enforceable net neutrality protections that millions of Americans have called for," said Matt Wood, policy director for Free Press, a digital rights group. "And yet phone and cable companies are still scheming to overturn these freedoms."

The Federal Register publication meant the order formally could be challenged in court -- and it didn't take long.

US Telecom filed suit, arguing the rules are "arbitrary and capricious" and violate federal law.

The group's members support the goals of the regulations to ensure the free flow of legal online content, US Telecom President Walter McCormick said. The suit was filed because the more stringent government oversight that comes with broadband's new regulatory classification will hinder investment in expanded networks and increase costs for users, he said.

"Reclassifying broadband Internet access as a public utility reverses decades of established legal precedent at the FCC and upheld by the Supreme Court," McCormick said. "History has shown that common carrier regulation slows innovation, chills investment, and leads to increased costs on consumers."

US Telecom filed a petition with the court last month as a placeholder for a lawsuit, seeking to preserve the right to sue. The group was concerned that the posting of the rules on the FCC website on March 12 might have triggered a 10-day period to challenge them.

A similar petition was filed Monday after the Federal Register publication, with more detailed arguments to be made in the coming weeks, said Jonathan Banks, US Telecom’s senior vice president for law and policy.

The group also is considering asking the court for a temporary stay in the rules until the case is decided, he said.

Banks expects other suits to be filed against the net neutrality rules in the next few days.

A similar petition was filed last month in the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans by Alamo Broadband Inc., a small Internet service provider based in Elmendorf, Texas. Alamo had not filed a new petition as of Monday afternoon.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...413-story.html





Net Neutrality: Telcos are Misleading Us by Calling it an Apples-Oranges Issue
By an industry expert

One of the major arguments against net neutrality – the principle where telcos and internet service providers are supposed to enable access to all content on an equal footing without favouring one or the other - is that different types of data are obtained at different prices, and, therefore, they cannot all be sold at the same rates. How can apples and oranges be sold at the same rate, goes the argument, when they are acquired at different costs?

The issue has hit the headlines following plans by some telcos like Airtel to offer faster speeds at zero cost to users of some websites (like Flipkart, who will pay on behalf of the user). The critics say this will inevitable throttle smaller rivals who cannot afford to pay the telco for this privilege.

Let us examine the telcos' argument in detail, and also explore how much cost they incur in getting us that 1 GB of data that they charge us Rs 250 (or thereabouts) for.

First, of course, one must understand the key difference between 'heavy' type of data such as video and voice calls, and 'light' type of data, such as texts and messages: there isn't any.

As far as the network is concerned, data is just data - a series of 0’s and 1’s. A telecom network sees all data as a series of 0’s and 1’s - whether it is video, text or graphics. That is, in fact, the key advantage of the Internet - it doesn't care what the data is ultimately going to be assembled into - a picture, a text message or voice.

As a result, the cost of carrying 1 GB of text data and 1 GB of video data on the Internet is exactly the same. In that sense, neutrality is built into the very structure and essence of the Internet.

So, once it's agreed that 1 GB of video does not stress telecom networks more than 1 GB of text messages, there is absolutely no justification for telcos to discriminate on the basis of what these 0’s and 1’s will ultimately be put together into.

But, of course, there is the question of whether different types of data are obtained by these mobile operators at differing prices. In other words, do Airtel and Idea shell out more to 'obtain' 1 GB of Youtube videos versus, says 1 GB of torrent traffic?
This can be the only justification for saying that 'all bits are not created equal', and, therefore, cannot be treated as such.

So we will examine the factual position here. The bits that ISPs serve can be broadly divided into three types:

1) Bits sourced from another Indian ISP (peer) directly
2) Bits sourced from another Indian ISP through the NIXI (India’s national internet exchange), and
3) Bits sourced from outside India

Let us take the third type first, since it's the simplest in terms of pricing and is also the most expensive.

The wholesale price of international connectivity is around Rs 20,000-40,000 per month for 2 Mbps for small, local ISPs. Note that this price is only for small, city-specific ISPs such as cable
operators. The price for Airtel and Idea is much lower. More on that later.

A price of Rs 20,000-40,000 for 2 Mbps bandwidth for a month converts to around Rs 30-60 per GB.

But this is only for small local operators. Most big Indian operators have their own international gateways, and according to industry estimates, their cost of international data transfer would be around Rs 5-10 per GB.

In other words, 1 GB of data travels all the way from a datacentre in the US or Romania to the landing station on Indian sea-shores at a cost of just Rs 5-10.

From the landing station - such as those located in Mumbai and Chennai - the data is taken over by the local or national operator and transported to the cellular tower, from where it is sent wirelessly to your smartphone or dongle.

On your mobile phone, the 1 GB data generates a revenue of Rs 250.
While operators like Airtel, Idea and Vodafone charge Rs 250, there are operators like MTS who offer this data for as little as Rs 83 per GB (including the international transit charge). Anyway, you get the picture - the big operators are far from bleeding to death because of extremely low data tariffs.

The second source of bits is the NIXI - India's National Internet Exchange - a kind of network-of-networks which acts as the national wholesale supplier and exchange platform for data in India.

Here, telcos have to pay Rs 5 per GB for 'net downloads'. Again, the situation is largely similar. You are handed over 1 GB of data to your network-edge at a cost of Rs 5. From there on, you have to carry it to the end customer.

In fact, since the cost of the data is on a 'net' basis (downloads minus uploads), and so operators who have a lot of data centres on their networks may end up paying nothing, or being paid back by NIXI, for their service.

However, this formula applies only to genuine ISPs, and not to datacentres. Youtube is also connected to the NIXI as a datacentre, and it receives no money from, and pays no money to, NIXI for data exchange. In practice, therefore, the wholesale cost of data from NIXI ranges from Rs 0 to Rs 5 per GB. Since the retail price of data is Rs 250 per GB, this too leaves a lot of money on the table for Indian telecom operators.

Now for the last type - data sourced from Peers. Let us understand what 'peer' means. Suppose I'm Airtel, and you're Idea. We create a lot of data that is destined for each others' networks. Now, we can either send all that data via the NIXI, or we can send it directly to each other via interconnect points. This second method is called 'peering'. This is totally voluntary. No one can demand 'peership', unlike in voice telephony, where interconnect is mandatory. But companies do this to avoid the complexity of having to deal with a third party, etc..

And the best part is that this is generally 'free data'. Companies don't bill each other for peered data. This is also typically how big data companies, such as Youtube, exchange data with telecom networks like Airtel. In other words, Youtube gets no money for the data they
give to direct peer telecom networks.

Thus, it can be seen that the argument that data is extremely cheaply priced is false, and that it doesn't matter which type of data you pick - the margins are more than sufficient.

In fact, if they weren't, nothing stops operators from raising data prices to 'sustainable' levels. Nothing, that is, other than the fact that consumers will switch to providers like MTS and Tata

Hence this attempt at supplementing their incomes by charging 'carriage fees' to website owners. However, in this attempt at propping up their profits, the telcos can end up damaging India's future which will depend on the availability of a fair and open Internet. It will skew and irreversibly destroy the biggest enabler of growth for the Indian economy by stifling competition and creating a 'sick' Internet economy dominated by a few corporations.

Paradoxically, it is the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India – a body tasked with the protection of consumer interests - that is cheerleading the destruction of India's competitiveness as a nation in the tech-oriented global economy of the future.

The writer did not wish to be identified
http://www.firstpost.com/business/ne...e-2195984.html





Blow To Internet.org As Indian Internet Companies Begin To Withdraw
Sriram Sharma

A day after Flipkart exited from the Airtel Zero platform, Cleartrip, NDTV, Newshunt and the Times Group announced that they are stepping away from Facebook’s internet.org initiative today.

The Times Group will be pulling out TimesJobs and Maharashtra Times from Internet.org, and has committed to withdraw from internet.org if its direct competitors – India Today, NDTV, IBNLive, NewsHunt, and BBC – also pull out.

NDTV is committed to net neutrality and is therefore exiting, and will not be a part of, Facebook's http://t.co/r3IZLs9qEJ initiative.

— Prannoy Roy (@PrannoyRoyNDTV) April 15, 2015

Prannoy Roy, Co-Founder and Executive Co-Chairperson, NDTV tweeted out that his company is also committed to net neutrality and is therefore exiting from the internet.org initiative.

Launched as an initiative to improve internet access, Internet.org is a partnership the partnership between Facebook and seven mobile phone companies, the initiative has been launched in eight countries including India since August 2013.

Facebook partnered with Reliance Communications to launch the app in India in February, the list of services on internet.org, which provides internet access to a limited portion of the internet for free, included a total of 37 websites or apps other than Facebook.

Cleartrip posted on their blog that they had withdrawn their association with internet.org entirely, saying that it was against their core DNA, and that was impossible to pretend there is no conflict of interest.

Time to draw a line in the sand, Cleartrip is pulling out of http://t.co/S7VKhY4RC7 & standing up for #NetNeutrality http://t.co/JtpCtbK0AT

— Cleartrip (@Cleartrip) April 15, 2015

@Cleartrip "The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall."

— Flipkart (@Flipkart) April 15, 2015

@r0h1n we fully support net neutrality. We withdrew from http://t.co/iZrsXiI5ep earlier this week @Cleartrip @Timesinternet @ndtv

— NewsHunt (@NewsHuntapp) April 15, 2015

Meanwhile, the SaveTheInternet campaign has sent 600990 mails sent to TRAI, the NetNeutrality India handle reported.

.@NewsHuntapp Hello there. Welcome to team #NetNeutrality! @flipkart @ndtv @Cleartrip! pic.twitter.com/tlJW5qKSVT

— Net Neutrality India (@neutrality_in) April 15, 2015

A Times official is quoted as saying that supporting net neutrality creates a fair, level playing field, and the Times Group will lead the drive towards a neutral internet.

Official Statement From Times Internet Corporate Blog

“In the case of the group's properties such as TimesJobs and Maharashtra Times, where its competitors are not on zero-rate platforms, these properties will pull out of internet.org. As for the Times of India itself, the group commits to withdraw from internet.org if its direct competitors - India Today, NDTV, IBNLive, NewsHunt, and BBC - also pull out. The group also encourages its fellow language and English news publishers - Dainik Jagran, Aaj Tak, Amar Ujala, Maalai Malar, Reuters, and Cricinfo - to join the campaign for net neutrality and withdraw from zero rate schemes.”

Official Statement From Cleartrip:

"A few weeks back, Facebook reached out and asked us to participate in the Internet.org initiative with the intention of helping us deliver one of our most affordable products to the more underserved parts of the country. There was no revenue arrangement between us and Internet.org or any of its participants — we were neither paid anything, nor did we pay anything to participate. Additionally we don't make any money out of that product. Since there was absolutely zero money changing hands, we genuinely believed we were contributing to a social cause.

But the recent debate around #NetNeutrality gave us pause to rethink our approach to Internet.org and the idea of large corporations getting involved with picking and choosing who gets access to what and how fast. What started off with providing a simple search service has us now concerned with influencing customer decision-making by forcing options on them, something that is against our core DNA.

So while our original intent was noble, it is impossible to pretend there is no conflict of interest (both real and perceived) in our decision to be a participant in Internet.org. In light of this, Cleartrip has withdrawn our association with and participation in Internet.org entirely.

We believe that the Internet is a great leveller and that freedom of the Internet is critical for innovation. Cleartrip is and always will be a fully committed supporter of #NetNeutrality."

Internet.org’s list of 38 sites includes Facebook, Wikipedia, Bing, 12 news websites excluding cricinfo.com, three job sites (babajobs, Jagran Josh, TimesJobs), and various healthcare, childcare and weather services. Here's the full list of services on Internet.org below.

Aaj Tak: Read news in Hindi
AccuWeather: Get updated weather information
amarujala.com: Read news in Hindi
AP Speaks: Engage with local government
Babajob: Search for jobs
BabyCenter & MAMA: Learn about pregnancy and childcare
BBC News: Read news from around the world
Bing Search: Find information
Cleartrip: Check train and flight schedules & buy tickets
Daily Bhaskar: Read local news
Dictionary.com: Search for meanings of words
ESPN Cricinfo: Get cricket updates
Facebook: Communicate with friends and family
Facts for Life: Find health and hygiene information
Girl Effect: Read articles and tips for girls
HungamaPlay: Listen to music
IBNLive: Read news
iLearn: Learn from Women Entrepreneurs
India Today: Read local news
Internet Basics: Learn about the basics of the Internet
Jagran: Read local news
Jagran Josh: Get education and career information
Maalai Malar: Read news in Tamil
Maharashtra Times: Read news in Marathi
Malaria No More: Learn about malaria
manoramanews.com: Read local news
Messenger: Send messages to friends and family
NDTV: Read news
Newshunt: Read news in English
OLX: Buy and sell products and services
Reliance Astrology: Read your horoscope
Reuters Market Lite: Get farming and crop information
Socialblood: Register to donate blood
Times of India: Read news
TimesJobs: Search for jobs
Translator: Translate words and phrases
Wikipedia: Find information
wikiHow: Find information
http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2015/04...n_7071532.html





Zuckerberg Says Internet.org Is Not Anti-Net Neutrality... But It Is
Mark Wilson

A few days ago Mark Zuckerberg conducted a Q&A on Facebook. Despite tens of thousands of comments, very little of interest came out of the session -- he works 50-60 hours a week, likes Oculus (surprise, surprise), and he stands behind his Internet.org project which is providing internet access to people all over the world, including those in remote and developing locations. As is to be expected from a Q&A session, Zuckerberg also found that he had criticism levelled at him in addition to questions, including criticisms of his beloved Internet.org.

Some people pointed out that even in the US there is still a digital divide, while others complained that Internet.org goes against the principles of net neutrality. This obviously struck a nerve because the Facebook founder felt the need to defend the program and express his support for net neutrality. My colleague Manish Singh wrote about this, but is Zuckerberg right? Can Internet.org and net neutrality really live happily side by side?

On Thursday, Zuckerberg used an article in the Hindustan Times to defend Internet.org. This made sense because the program is currently rolling out to India and it's understandable that he would want to appease his current target audience. Now he has published the very same text as a post on his Facebook page, which is indicative of one of two things. Either Zuckerberg is so keen that the image of Internet.org is not besmirched that he is willing to bring the story to a wider audience before it spirals out of control, or it could be that he was so genuinely hurt or taken aback by the criticism of his baby that he thought he'd use his position to very publicly defend it.

But does it stand up to scrutiny?

There is one difference between the Hindustan Times article and the post on Facebook: the Times article has a headline. While Zuckerberg's Facebook posts takes a little while to get to the point, the article in the Times makes it clear right from the start: "Net neutrality and universal connectivity must co-exist".

It's an interesting idea, but -- at least on the face of it -- the two ideas oppose each other. The principles of net neutrality suggest that all internet traffic should be treated equally and that no company should be able to pay to give its traffic higher priority. Internet.org does not directly contradict these principles, but it does stray into something of a gray area. The idea driving the net neutrality movement is that we should avoid the creation of a two-tier internet where those willing or able to pay are given priority service, or a better service. But for all its good intentions, this is very much what Internet.org is doing.

It is hard to argue against the well-meaning push to bring internet access to areas where it is not currently available, but it is not providing unfettered access to the internet. Zuckerberg says:

To give more people access to the internet, it is useful to offer some service for free. If someone can’t afford to pay for connectivity, it is always better to have some access than none at all.

This is very much a two-tier internet, There's the internet that most people get to use, and the oh-sod-it-that'll-do internet that's available for free. If that's not a two-tier, divided internet, I don’t know what is.

Yes, it's great that people in developing countries are being given the opportunity to access the internet, but let's not pretend that this is an opportunity of equals. Really, if a country or region is being provided with access to some sites and services, why not provide access to everything the internet has to offer. Who decides what is opened up to users of Internet.org? Zuckerberg says:

By partnering with mobile operators and governments in different countries, Internet.org offers free access in local languages to basic internet services in areas like jobs, health, education and messaging.

Why only basic internet services? This is against the idea of net neutrality. Facebook and Internet.org partners are standing as gatekeepers to the internet for people in developing countries. The zero-rating of some services and sites (making them free to certain users) -- while inherently philanthropic in nature -- is absolutely running against the grain of net neutrality. It is not a level playing field, it is not equal access.

Yes, some access is better than no access, but there is no reason that some access shouldn't be expanded to full access. That's equality. That's net neutrality.

And then there is the problem of hardware. Bringing the internet to remote or poor parts of the world is great, but it's not much use if no one -- or only a small percentage -- living in these areas own devices that can be used to get online. But that's a whole different conversation.

And, ultimately, that's what matters. Conversations. People are now talking about not only net neutrality, but also the rights of people to be able to access the internet. People care, and that’s heartwarming.
http://betanews.com/2015/04/17/zucke...ity-but-it-is/





Netflix Will Stop Asking ISPs to Exempt its Videos from Data Caps

Netflix regrets striking cap-exempt deal in Australia.
Jon Brodkin

Netflix says it regrets striking a deal that exempted its videos from data caps imposed by an Internet service provider and will avoid such arrangements in the future.

Netflix has criticized data caps on fixed broadband for years and said that when they are applied, they should be applied equally to all content. But in Australia, where data cap exemption deals are common, the company negotiated with iiNet to exempt Netflix video from the ISPs' caps.

One month later, Netflix said in its quarterly letter to shareholders yesterday that it was a mistake:

Data caps inhibit Internet innovation and are bad for consumers. In Australia, we recently sought to protect our new members from data caps by participating in ISP programs that, while common in Australia, effectively condone discrimination among video services (some capped, some not). We should have avoided that and will avoid it going forward. Fortunately, most fixed-line ISPs are raising or eliminating data caps in line with our belief that ISPs should provide great video for all services in a market and let consumers do the choosing.

We asked Netflix this morning if the iiNet deal is the only one it has struck and whether it will pull out of the deal, but we haven't heard back yet.

UPDATE: Netflix also has a cap exemption deal with Optus in Australia. Netflix also told Ars that it has altered the agreements with iiNet and Optus to free them of any obligation to exempt Netflix traffic from data caps. "We changed the terms of both deals though both companies decided to continue offering unmetered to their customers," Netflix said.

Commenters have also pointed out that BT in the UK offers Netflix without having it count against broadband limits. "Netflix and BT have partnered together and new and existing TV customers can now purchase Netflix from BT," BT says. If you buy Netflix directly from BT, "There are no limits: watch as much as you want." This is only true if you watch Netflix on BT's YouView system. "But [Netflix] will count towards your data allowance if you’re not on Unlimited Broadband and watch Netflix on other devices in the home," BT says.

While BT uses Netflix's content delivery network to improve performance, the ISP is not under any obligation to exempt Netflix data from caps, Netflix said. "If an ISP wants to do that because they think it's a good idea, that's their call," Netflix told Ars. "We haven't asked for special treatment, and where we did in Australia, we corrected it."

Netflix also reaffirmed its support for net neutrality rules passed in the US by the Federal Communications Commission this year. Netflix Chief Financial Officer David Wells said last month that the company hoped the FCC could find a "non-regulated solution" instead of enforcing its stricter Title II authority on broadband service.

In yesterday's letter to shareholders, Netflix said, "We support strong net neutrality across the globe, allowing all consumers to enjoy the Internet access they pay for, without ISPs blocking, throttling, or influencing content in the last mile or at interconnection points. In the US, we have been vocal advocates for, and are pleased with, recent action by the FCC to assure an open and neutral Internet under its Title II authority. In particular, we applaud the FCC for specifically addressing interconnection points. We hope this action serves as an example to regulators around the world looking to strengthen the innovative force of the Internet."
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...rom-data-caps/





EU Telecoms Reform to Address Competition from WhatsApp, Skype
Julia Fioretti

The European Commission will take into account increased competition from cable operators and alternative services such as WhatsApp when it overhauls Europe's telecoms rules next year, a move that will be cheered by the telecoms industry.

A draft seen by Reuters of the Commission's strategy for creating a digital single market says telecom operators compete with "over-the-top" services "without being subject to the same regulatory regime".

"It is necessary to design a fair and future-proof regulatory environment for all services," the document says.

The bloc's telecom firms such as Orange and Deutsche Telekom have long called for lighter-touch regulation, after years of declining revenues and competition from new entrants, to enable them to invest in network upgrades.

Telecom companies point to increased competition from services such as Skype (owned by Microsoft) and online messaging as a reason for easing the regulatory burden.

Considering Skype, or any other "voice-over-IP" application, as a substitute for traditional phone services could lead to those companies being subject to the same obligations as traditional operators, such as offering emergency calls.

The new European executive, which took office in November, has made investment in superfast broadband a priority. But incumbent telecom operators say the current set of rules does not provide incentives to invest in their networks.

They argue they would be forced to give competitors access to those networks, an argument rejected by smaller alternative operators. Yet an evidence document backing up the strategy, also seen by Reuters, states that incumbents "appear to lack incentives to overbuild their own largely depreciated copper network assets."

The Commission will unveil its proposals for an overhaul of the telecoms framework in 2016, the document states. Commission Vice-President Andrus Ansip is expected to unveil his digital single market strategy on May 6.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0N820R20150417





Google's Project Loon Close to Launching Thosands of Balloons
Martyn Williams

Google says it’s Project Loon is close to being able to produce and launch thousands of balloons to provide Internet access from the sky.

Such a number would be required to provide reliable Internet access to users in remote areas that are currently unserved by terrestrial networks, said Mike Cassidy, the Google engineer in charge of the project, in a video posted Friday.

The ambitious project has been underway for a couple of years and involves beaming down LTE cellular signals to handsets on the ground from balloons thousands of feet in the air, well above the altitude that passenger jets fly.

“At first it would take us 3 or 4 days to tape together a balloon,” Cassidy says in the video. “Today, through our own manufacturing facility, the automated systems can get a balloon produced in just a few hours. We’re getting close to the point where we can roll out thousands of balloons.”

Trials are currently underway with Telstra in Australia, Telefonica in Latin America and with Vodafone in New Zealand, where the video appears to have been largely shot. Maps tracking the path of balloons over the country are seen at several points in the video.

At a European conference in March, a Google executive said the balloons were staying aloft for up to 6 months at a time.

At some point they do come down, and Cassidy says the company has developed a system to predict where they will land and to retrieve them.

It has also worked on a reliable launching system.

“In the beginning, it was all we could do to launch one balloon a day. Now with our automated crane system, we can launch dozens of balloons a day for every crane we have,” he said.

Google hasn’t provided any details about what a commercial roll-out of the technology might look like.

In the video, a Vodafone New Zealand representative says that Loon “allows cell phone companies and Internet companies to provide Internet to communities that don’t have it”—an indication that the Loon service will be offered through existing commercial providers rather than direct from Google.

“Anyone with a smartphone anywhere in the world will be able to get Internet access,” said Cassidy.

He added the balloons have also flown in arctic and tropical regions.

“We’re getting close to the point when we can bring the Internet to people around the world,” he said.
http://www.itworld.com/article/29118...-balloons.html





Google Fiber Plans Expansion, then TWC Makes Speeds Six Times Faster

Charlotte customers get big speed boost for same price after Google announcement.
Jon Brodkin

With Google Fiber preparing an expansion into Charlotte, North Carolina, incumbent cable operator Time Warner Cable is trying to hold onto customers by dramatically increasing Internet speeds at no extra charge.

"The Internet transformation will begin this summer and will include speed increases on TWC residential Internet plans at no additional cost, with customers experiencing increases up to six times faster, depending on their current level of Internet service," Time Warner Cable announced last week. "For example, customers who subscribe to Standard, formerly up to 15Mbps, will now receive up to 50Mbps, customers who subscribe to Extreme, formerly up to 30Mbps, will now receive up to 200Mbps; and customers who subscribe to Ultimate, formerly up to 50Mbps, will receive up to 300Mbps, at no extra charge."

Google announced plans to enter Charlotte and a few other metro areas in January and is working with local officials to finalize the network design so that construction can begin.

TWC also announced improvements to its TV service, including 1TB of storage for recorded programs, double the previous amount.

Last year in Austin, Texas, Time Warner Cable upgraded its 100Mbps Internet plan to 300Mbps after Google decided to offer service there.

TWC's "Ultimate" Internet starts at $65 a month and has 50Mbps download speeds and 5Mbps upload. TWC did not say what it will boost upload speeds to. Google Fiber costs $70 per month for gigabit speed (1000Mbps) both upstream and downstream.

TWC is not the only company to boost service in order to fend off a challenge from Google Fiber. "Most of us live in monopoly, or at best duopoly, territory for broadband providers," Consumerist wrote Friday. "But when Google announces plans to expand into a new market, competitors either strive to dive in first, like Comcast in Atlanta, or drop prices to match, like AT&T in Austin and Kansas City."

But it's a different story in cities where incumbents don't have to match Google's $70-per-month pricing. In Cupertino, California, where AT&T just launched gigabit fiber but doesn't have to compete against Google, the service costs $110 a month.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...-times-faster/





Google Who? Oregon Cities Want their Own Fiber Networks

At least a few cities wonder if their own fiber networks wouldn't be better -- or at least more affordable -- than Google Fiber. (Benoit Felten/Creative Commons)
Mike Rogoway

Google Fiber is fast, but a handful of Portland suburbs want to move faster.

Some of the same Oregon cities Google is eyeing for its speedy Internet service are contemplating building their own networks.

Hillsboro, Lake Oswego, Gresham and West Linn are at various stages of assessing how they might commission their own fiber-optic networks, which they hope would upgrade Internet speeds and hold down costs for residents and businesses.

They're following the path of smaller cities across the state that have already built their own networks to boost connection speeds, largely in communities the big companies have overlooked.

Most of Portland's suburbs already have at least two options for broadband service, and might get more if Google Fiber arrives with its gigabit connections - 25 times faster than the minimum broadband threshold.

But at least a few cities wonder if they couldn't do it better - or at least more affordably - than Google Fiber.

"They may be a benign company but they would still be a monopoly," said Lake Oswego city manager Scott Lazenby. "And monopolies charge what they can."

Municipal telecom service is a contentious issue nationally. Big cable TV and Internet companies have pushed legislation in multiple states that would prevent local governments from going into the business themselves.

No such proposals are moving forward in Oregon. The FCC voted in February to invalidate such laws, concluding they are more likely to restrict broadband access than improve it. But telecom companies still oppose local governments competing with private businesses.

"We're supportive of public-private partnerships where tax dollars aren't competing against private investment capital," Comcast said in a written statement. "In general, cities have extensive needs like roads, police, parks and community development, and we think especially in times of fiscal tradeoffs that taxpayer money should be focused on those needs rather than competing with the private sector."

For its part, Google Fiber said the cities' exploration of municipal fiber will have no effect on its ongoing exploration of the Portland market.

"Increasing local choice for super high-speed broadband is a good thing for communities," the company said in a written statement.

In Oregon, municipal telecom has a troubled history dating to Ashland's difficult foray into the market in the late 1990s. The Ashland Fiber Network didn't come close to covering the city's costs and was undercut by Charter Communications' cable TV business. The service still operates but it has split off its TV service.

Sherwood tried a municipal fiber network several years later, but it also generated significant losses.

Now, though, a handful of smaller cities say they're producing better results. Monmouth and Independence have a publicly owned utility, MINET, that offers phone, cable TV and Internet service.

Sandy issued a $7 million, 20-year bond to bury 43 miles of fiber connecting 3,500 homes in the city, 20 miles southeast of downtown Portland. It began offering Internet service last October.

"We realized we're too small for Google to come to us," said SandyNet general manager Joe Knapp.

Budget plans called for signing up a third of the city initially, growing to 50 percent over several years. But Knapp said well over 50 percent of the homes in the city have already come aboard.

SandyNet charges $40 a month for Internet connections of 100 megabits per second, four times faster than the national broadband standard. Comparable service from Comcast in the Portland area is more than $100 a month.

SandyNet also offers gigabit service that matches Google Fiber for $60 a month, $10 less than what Google charges in its first markets. Sandy doesn't offer cable TV service yet, but plans to contract with another company to provide it over the fiber network.

Sandy's network is less than six months old, so it's too soon to know how it will perform over time. But public officials in other Oregon cities say they've noticed its early appeal, and Knapp said that he thinks Sandy's approach could work elsewhere.

"I think it's very doable in larger cities," he said.

Maybe. But larger communities would face a different set of challenges.

Sandy is very small area - "We're practically like a neighborhood in Portland," Knapp said - so it's much less expensive to run fiber to all the homes. And SandyNet has tepid competition from a small cable TV operator called Wave and low-end Internet service from Frontier.

In the Portland area, Comcast, Frontier and CenturyLink have all boosted their Internet speeds in the past year and would surely fight to hold their markets. On Friday, Comcast said it plans to eventually upgrade nearly its entire service territory to gigabit service - and bring 2 gigs to many customers.

Additionally, Google Fiber could decide within the next several weeks whether to serve Portland and five close-in suburbs: Gresham, Tigard, Lake Oswego, Beaverton and Hillsboro.

Portland contemplated building its own fiber network in 2007 but ruled it out after seeing the price tag: nearly half a billion dollars. Portland now estimates that a Google Fiber network - which might not serve the whole city - would cost $300 million.

The city isn't reconsidering that decision, according to Mary Beth Henry, director of Portland's Office of Community Technology. Instead, she said Portland wants to create an open regulatory landscape for CenturyLink and Google Fiber - and, perhaps, others - to bring faster service to Portland.

"We're really focused on laying the groundwork for a robust, competitive landscape here," Henry said.

Smaller cities, though, think they might be able to recruit a private company to build and operate a local network that would be much less costly than building out a big urban footprint. Hillsboro will pay a Colorado company, Uptown Services, $44,000 to study its options.

Lake Oswego hopes to commission a company that would build a network the city would lease to multiple Internet companies - perhaps even Google Fiber. Lazenby, the city manager, says his preliminary estimate is that a Lake Oswego network could be built for a tenth of what Portland fiber would cost.

(Before coming to Lake Oswego, Lazenby was city manager in Sandy, where he helped put together plans for SandyNet's fiber service.)

In Lake Oswego, Lazenby said, the goal is to find a private company that would finance and build the network on the city's behalf. Lake Oswego says it's inquired with a number of different companies, including Portland General Electric.

PGE isn't currently in the telecom business but does own most of the utility poles in town, which could be a conduit for the city's fiber lines. The electric utility says it's studying Lake Oswego's plan; Lake Oswego says it hopes to have proposals in hand from prospective praters.

West Linn and Gresham are at earlier stages, still discussing whether they need their own fiber networks. West Linn plans to appoint a task force to study the possibility. The Gresham City Council's 2015 work plan concludes that high-speed broadband is economically essential, and commits the city to finding a way to bring faster services to Gresham.

"Should market-based approaches be insufficient," the council writes, "the City will evaluate other alternatives such as a City-owned fiber network."

Oregonian/Oregonlive reporter Luke Hammill contributed to this report.
http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-fo...gresham_l.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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